Once again, I agree completely with Johnny_Bravo
Hengeyokai?
And yet, when @Alessan found a picture of another bard in a very similar pose (but without the apple) in post 626, that was deemed acceptable because it was obviously Irish. Apparently showing a black person the same as that white person isn’t acceptable.
But we seem to be talking past each other. To try to unravel this, there seem to be three points which, separately or together, are seen as a potential problem:
1: There’s a race of monkey-people. Given the extensive set of animal-people in D&D, I still have a hard time seeing this as a problem, in itself, absent some indication that the monkey-people are meant to be representative of real-world Africans.
2: Their backstory includes having been enslaved. Now, obviously, this could be problematic, if there’s the implication that their enslavement was a good thing. I don’t think they would have put that implication there, but rather, put it in as a way of villainizing the group who enslaved them, because most folks nowadays know thats slavery is completely villainous. D&D worlds have always been chock-full of lots and lots of villains, because you need someone that the heroes are justified in fighting against. That said, I’m not familiar with all of the details of the backstory, and there certainly could be problematic aspects to it, so I’m not going to particularly argue this point.
That’s in isolation: Combine point 2 with point 1, and yes, I see that there’s a valid argument there: By giving the Hadozee the slavery background, they could be drawing the parallel between the Hadozee and Africans, and I agree that it’s problematic to depict Africans, or a proxy of them, as monkey-like. I think the other side is still arguable, though, because a history of having been enslaved is hardly unique to either the Hadozee in D&D worlds nor to Africans in ours: Plenty of peoples were once enslaved in the past.
3: The image of them is claimed to be very similar to minstrelsy images. This, I still absolutely don’t see: The claimed similarities are that the character is playing a string instrument, the character is dressed in flashy clothes, and the character is doing a lively dance. But all three of those are incredibly common, in that combination, among all peoples we know of. That was why I posted the Hendrix picture. Black people do that, white people do that, and if we ever do meet green people elvish people or cat people or hippo people or monkey people, we’d expect them to do it, too. The fact that minstrels danced merrily and played instruments while wearing flashy clothes wasn’t at all what was offensive about them: What was offensive was that, first, they were pretending to be another race, and second, what they were ascribing that race as being merry about was their enslavement. I don’t see any evidence of that in the Hadozee picture. Unless there’s some other similarities between the Hadozee picture and minstrelsy, but if so, nobody has yet said what those other similarities are.
OK, I don’t know how else to put this (again, outside the Pit) other than:
You’re not required to see. What you should be doing is listening. Because you’re blind to this, and you should be listening to those who aren’t.
Just shutting up and listening, not centering your own interpretations and pushing back so hard because of that.
And not making up such obvious easy-to-refute bullshit like “it’s impossible to avoid racist tropes - all Black bards will look like minstrel players” and “All Black fighters will look like savage brutes” (the refutation of which you’ve failed to address in any way)
It’s not general “lively dance”, it’s the specific pose to specific minstrel art. And it seems you missed where I mentioned skin colour and facial appearance, as well:
Once again, bolder this time - Jimi is NOT CAPERING in that picture (and never did, in any image of him I can find).
This is absolutely not true.
I think we’re more at the return stage, and Chronos is one of the people who never left.
My example was very much of the “exception that proves the rule” variety. Of all the pictures of bards I could find online, only one of showed them dancing, and that one corresponded to a very specific ethnic stereotype (little dancing Irish leprechaun) - just like the image of the Hazodee bard corresponded to a very specific ethnic stereotype.
They left the Irish = drunken leprechaun illustration in the book as “acceptable”??
Typing “bard” into Wikipedia gets you this guy:
It’s a picture I found online. I don’t know if it’s from a book.
But just listening isn’t enough. If the only way to recognize a racist image is to wait until after it’s published and listen for the reactions, then we’ll never be rid of racist images. Sure, they’ll take this image out of this book, but the next time anyone publishes anything with images in it, the artist is just as likely to make the same mistakes as this one did. And they’re only able to take this image out of the book because they happened to pre-release this image before the book itself was published-- Usually, that’s not going to be an option.
So how can one tell, in advance, that an image is going to be perceived as racist? What, specifically, is it about this image that makes it racist?
Page 120 of the Player’s Handbook.
But not listening at all is worse. And you’re not listening at all.
I am listening. I keep on asking “What’s racist about this image?” and listening for the response, and all I keep on hearing is “Just look at it”. Which is not a useful response, no matter how closely I listen to it.
Not if they listened. Seriously, the lessons here are easy:
- Maybe stay away from the “primitive race got enslaved and civilized by superior race” trope.
- Maybe don’t make monkey-based fantasy races while society is still struggling with people who regularly use monkey-based imagery to dehumanize a major segment of the population.
Done and done.
You’ve gotten a lot more than that. You just seem unwilling to accept historical context as a response. More importantly, you also seem unwilling to accept that implicit ideas can be problematic.
Nobody in this thread is saying, I don’t think, that the image is explicitly racist. Nobody is claiming that the artist was chuckling under his breath and using the n-word while he drew it. If anybody is claiming it, I’ve already expressed my own doubt that it was purposeful.
What they are saying is that a Venn diagram of “ways this book has portrayed the hadozee in both words and images” and “ways racists caricature black people for the purpose of dehumanizing them” have waaaaay too much overlap.
The combination. It’s not just a monkey. Not just a monkey with a lute. Not just a dark skinned monkey with a lute. It’s a dark skinned monkey with a lute in a specific pose. It’s either intended as racist or just demonstrated ignorance of racist imagery. Either way it ought to change.
The “leprechaun” dancing gives the impression of engaging in a quick, lively jig that’s part of a formal dance tradition. His head is thrown back with amused joy, and those watching have expressions of delight, and the implication is that he’s a consummate performer wowing the audience. The picture emphasizes his competence at his work.
The hadozee has his teeth bared and his brow furrowed in an expression of ferocity. There’s nothing elegant about his posture. He’s got a goddamned apple in his foot.
As a monkey, his movements and posture are great: he looks like he’s moving as a monkey moves. As a monkey-man, it makes sense. As a monkey-man dancing playing music, it works.
There is, as I said before, a completely different tradition of dark-skinned men moving like monkeys and playing music. It’s the minstrel tradition.
Trying to have the fantasy monkey-man-musician, without reminding people of the minstrel tradition, may be impossible.
I’m a little confused. I thought no official publication of 5e includes the Leprechaun, why is he being brought up?
There was a link to a picture, from the D&D Player’s Handbook, of a leprechaun dancing on a table and playing an oud. The question raised was, is that some sort of offensive stereotype. Also, is it just a random painting for flavor or is it a character with a backstory?
There is an untitled Leprechaun-like image in the Player’s Handbook. As a D&D player, I would assume it to probably be a depiction of a halfling. (My second guess might be that he is a gnome.)
I would assume it is a random image. There aren’t really any characters with backstories in the Player’s Handbook. It isn’t a novel, it’s a resource for you to create your own character with whatever backstory you choose to contrive.
Hmm, looks far more like a Hobbit Halfling to me. I think you would have to squint pretty hard to find offense in that one.
My vote would be to make the Hadozee more bat-like (they already look somewhat bat-like to me), drop any references to them being nicknamed “deck-monkeys” (if that was kept from the 1982 version), and ditch the slave backstory.
Bonus: They can fix the freaky semi-detached patagiums while they are at it! 
Let me ask you explicitly:
You’ve several times intimated that it’s impossible to draw a Black bard without elements of minstrelsy, or that all depictions of Bards regardless of race carry elements of minstrelsy. I, in response, provided examples of both a Black bard, and an official archetypical bard, neither of which, I felt, carried any connotations of minstrelsy.
And your response has been *crickets*. Ditto to other questions I’ve put to you directly, like about the hypothetical rat-people.
So why should I think you’ve been listening at all?
If that’s all you’re hearing, then you’re clearly not listening to anybody who’s responded on the topic in this thread.
I’ve already granted that if they really were depicting the Hadozee as “primitive” and their slavers as “superior”, that’s a big problem that should have been obvious to anyone.
I understand the historical context of minstrelsy, and I understand why minstrelsy is a problem. That’s not the disconnect. The part I don’t understand is how this image is any more evocative of minstrelsy than it is of any other tradition of performance.
In 3rd edition, there was a set of “standard characters” who were representative of the various classes, and most of the art featured one or more of those standard characters, and related to whatever else was on the same page as it (for instance, the entry on a particular spell might have an image on the page of Mialee the wizard casting that spell). In 5th, though, like in editions before 3rd, most of the artwork is just random fantasy artwork depicting scenes that could plausibly come up in a game, and relates neither to the text nor to the other art.