RPGnet Forums

[NerdShamer]

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Why even call them out for equating 'racism in product' with 'racist creator' if you're just going to go on to say that "racism is a game designer's choice and it's not a good choice"? Either you have the freedom to include racism in your art if you feel it will benefit (or because you just feel like saying nigger in print) or racism is always wrong and there is no difference between 'racist art' and 'racist artist'. Oh but we need to discuss this problematic work. What is there to discuss, you've already passed judgement and decided that the only solution is more sensitivity readers and more people with they/them pronouns on staff.

Again, 40K is pretty racist. Lord of the Rings can be structured as racism (if you're the retard who's defending the Orcs). There's plenty of opportunities for racism in DnD. Warcraft was fueled by racism.

Come to think of it, medieval fantasy revolves around racism when you look at it a certain way.

 

[Wallace]

Again, 40K is pretty racist. Lord of the Rings can be structured as racism (if you're the exceptional individual who's defending the Orcs). There's plenty of opportunities for racism in DnD. Warcraft was fueled by racism.

Come to think of it, medieval fantasy revolves around racism when you look at it a certain way.

There's a difference between racism in 21st century America and the "racism" in Tolkien. Hating and fearing orcs simply because they are orcs is a prudent decision in LotR, on account of how orcs are irredeemably evil and would kill you and burn down your home if given the chance. But then, orcs are fundamentally not human, and there's no real world analog of a society like theirs, despite what RPGNet would say.

While there may be an interesting philosophical debate to be had regarding the existence of monsters in fantasy settings and how it correlates to how we treat people who are different from us, RPGNet naturally takes the most heavy-handed approach to this subject imaginable, and declares all other opinions to be morally bankrupt.

 

[NerdShamer]

There's a difference between racism in 21st century America and the "racism" in Tolkien. Hating and fearing orcs simply because they are orcs is a prudent decision in LotR, on account of how orcs are irredeemably evil and would kill you and burn down your home if given the chance. But then, orcs are fundamentally not human, and there's no real world analog of a society like theirs, despite what RPGNet would say.

While there may be an interesting philosophical debate to be had regarding the existence of monsters in fantasy settings and how it correlates to how we treat people who are different from us, RPGNet naturally takes the most heavy-handed approach to this subject imaginable, and declares all other opinions to be morally bankrupt.

I was asking how long it'll take them to outright ban discussing the lore for a lot of stuff. It's essentially a lit fuse, with how the villainous orcs are somehow victims of racism/colonialism (despite the fact that they're doing exactly these things) and all it takes is the mods applying this logic to whatever else that you and friends kill during your biweekly dungeon raids.

 

[Amber the Hedgehog]

There's a difference between racism in 21st century America and the "racism" in Tolkien. Hating and fearing orcs simply because they are orcs is a prudent decision in LotR, on account of how orcs are irredeemably evil and would kill you and burn down your home if given the chance. But then, orcs are fundamentally not human, and there's no real world analog of a society like theirs, despite what RPGNet would say.

While there may be an interesting philosophical debate to be had regarding the existence of monsters in fantasy settings and how it correlates to how we treat people who are different from us, RPGNet naturally takes the most heavy-handed approach to this subject imaginable, and declares all other opinions to be morally bankrupt.

Orcs are corrupted creatures that were build to be evil by the bad guys. Hating them more like hating cult or gang members rather than hating a race of people.

There is however in the background thing that hits more closely to racism. LOTR is pretty clear about the fact elves and drawfs being distrustful and hateful of one another isn't a good thing. It's one of the reasons why the bad guys got so powerful and why they didn't get defeated before. This is most clearly pointed out with Legolas and Gimli. They start as uneasy allies sake of saving the world and it takes along while before they become friends but when they do they are great friends and a powerful team.

 

[Autistic Joe]

Orcs are corrupted creatures that were build to be evil by the bad guys. Hating them more like hating cult or gang members rather than hating a race of people.

There is however in the background thing that hits more closely to racism. LOTR is pretty clear about the fact elves and drawfs being distrustful and hateful of one another isn't a good thing. It's one of the reasons why the bad guys got so powerful and why they didn't get defeated before. This is most clearly pointed out with Legolas and Gimli. They start as uneasy allies sake of saving the world and it takes along while before they become friends but when they do they are great friends and a powerful team.

Yes, I was planning to write exactly this! For all the overwrought drama in recent years about "Orcs are OBVIOUSLY a stand-in for <insert-marginalized-group-here>" the only racism I ever detected in LOTR was between Elves and Dwarves stemming from the events in The Silmarillion. (In fact that was one of my motivations in reading The Sil. the first time, I wanted to know more about the backstory there.)

So yeah, "what the Hedgehog said" - the far more interesting racism story in LOTR is how Legolas and Gimli overcame it and became genuine friends in the end. Well said, my friend.

 

[Airbrushed Van Art]

There’s something deeply cynical in trying to force and mutilate older properties into becoming more “woke” rather than simply being, you know, creative and making up whole new fantasy settings that are sufficiently woke in the first place. Granted, we’re starting to see that now (see Kickstarter campaigns for RPG worlds set in Afro- or Native- futuristic settings, or worlds inhabited solely by lesbians). But we’re seeing so many “stealing from T*lkien fantasy, but wOkE” products that I think that people are too chicken to take a risk and do something new instead of yet another world with elves and dwarves (but black, trans, disabled elves and dwarves).

Similarly, people selling shit with public domain Lovecraft shit, but first insisting that the original author was fucking hitler and problematic (but having no problem making money off of the guy’s work).

 

[Fictional Character]

There’s something deeply cynical in trying to force and mutilate older properties into becoming more “woke” rather than simply being, you know, creative and making up whole new fantasy settings that are sufficiently woke in the first place. Granted, we’re starting to see that now (see Kickstarter campaigns for RPG worlds set in Afro- or Native- futuristic settings, or worlds inhabited solely by lesbians). But we’re seeing so many “stealing from T*lkien fantasy, but wOkE” products that I think that people are too chicken to take a risk and do something new instead of yet another world with elves and dwarves (but black, trans, disabled elves and dwarves).

Similarly, people selling shit with public domain Lovecraft shit, but first insisting that the original author was fucking hitler and problematic (but having no problem making money off of the guy’s work).

We live in an age where there's unprecedented level of access to cultural works of the past, often easily much better than newer works. If you're a talentless or even mildly talented hack who wants to succeed, it isn't enough to create some hackwork people will read or see because there's nothing better available. You have to also smear the competition that's dead and can't defend itself.

 

[Autistic Joe]

A gem from Trouble Tickets - even with 16,777,216 colors to choose from in the RGB space, this idiot just REALLY REALLY needs red for their PBP thread. Apparently orange, purple, blue, brown, etc., are all no good. Lol these people.

 

[Kongo-Müller]

A gem from Trouble Tickets - even with 16,777,216 colors to choose from in the RGB space, this idiot just REALLY REALLY needs red for their PBP thread. Apparently orange, purple, blue, brown, etc., are all no good. Lol these people.

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Put yourself under the roof of retarded mods, have to follow retarded rules. There are still dozens of forums I would use for PbP before I subject myself to the rule of RPG.net mods.

 

[NerdShamer]

Banned for agreeing the wrong way.

 

[Gingervitis]

Banned for agreeing the wrong way.

Nobody hates the left more than the left.

 

[Morethanabitfoolish]

Banned for agreeing the wrong way.

My money said whoever the poster was replying to is one of the mod's chosen. Cleaning their arguments up into something clearer merits a beating.

 

[AnOminous]

This is most clearly pointed out with Legolas and Gimli. They start as uneasy allies sake of saving the world and it takes along while before they become friends but when they do they are great friends and a powerful team.

Obvious image.

But appreciating the difference requires nuance, something absolutely insane fanatics can't do.

 

[Kongo-Müller]

Nobody hates the left more than the left.

Monty Python's observation on the fringe left will never seem dated:

 

[Next Task]

>accuses him of misogyny
>he says he's a fag in the post

This is, of course, absolutely bullshit, most gay men don't hate women, they love their sisters and moms and aunts and nieces and whatever. Its a false accusation to try and get leverage over fags, with very limited success, because that or accusations of racism are the only options they have.

To be fair, gay men can be sexist and misogynist. They're generally not, but they can be.

But to SJW-types like the mods here, and at ResetEra, and at Something Awful, it's not really about being misogynists. It's disagreeing with them. A woman disagrees with them? Internalised misogyny, or they get accused of being a 'pick-me' girl. Black women - and by black, it's inevitably either someone who's mixed-race, like Koala's March from SA, or who is from a well-off, non-projects family, like Nepenthe from RE - and their lickspittles especially can go nuts with accusations of misogynoir, a twofer that gets all white folks and all male PoCs; sexuality isn't even involved. This also colours Asians, Latinos and Jewish people, because BIPOC was invented for a reason and it wasn't to promote unity.

You'll notice, of course, that troons don't get accused of misogyny, because to do so is a TERF dog-whistle or some such nonsense. Also other black women usually get a (public) pass, because in these spaces there's rarely more than one - at least, one that's willing to make it their entire identity, let alone get into a position of insignificant power like unpaid moderator for a lunatic-progressive forum. Undoubtedly, they make sure to keep tight on their fiefdom and prevent any other non-white women reach their level.

RPGNet, I believe, doesn't even have pretend black women as mods, so they have a vacancy - but troons generally aren't that fond of black women either, because they're a challenge for their spot on the oppressive stack and are less inclined to put up with their bullshit. Also, while they'd say it's that women and PoCs aren't welcomed into nerd spaces, simple fact is that fewer black women are interested, in percentage or basic number, in the kind of things these forums were originally created to talk about.

Tl;dr: Gay men aren't really being called out for being misogynist, though some can be. They're being called out for disagreeing by identitarians who have no interest in correctly identifying why someone said something they disagree with, just that they did and must be put in their place. As @JohnDoe points out, there's some women 'activists' who can't stand that they don't have any typical leverage over gay men, and also that their go-to insults about men they disagree with, calling them incels and the like, have no effect on them. Unsurprisingly, they often get quite homophobic in response.

 

[SpaceMovie1992]

There’s something deeply cynical in trying to force and mutilate older properties into becoming more “woke” rather than simply being, you know, creative and making up whole new fantasy settings that are sufficiently woke in the first place.

They try, but they're all fucking awful and completely forgettable. Closest we have to a setting like that with any sort of popular adoption is Pathfinder's Golarion, which is fucking awful and slapped together out of 50 ripped off IPs but at least fairly unique.

 

[Next Task]

Come to think of it, medieval fantasy revolves around racism when you look at it a certain way.

Which is the only way these people look at it, because they don't have the imagination to not apply their own political viewpoints to everything they encounter.

There's a number of reasons that the orcs = blacks = racism shits me so much. One of them is that there's a difference between racism and speciesism; I really enjoyed District 9, but I thought that while there's a clear allegory for apartheid in there, it falls down when the 'oppressed' are giant bug-like creatures that are explicitly alien with no resemblance to humans. It makes me want to ask whether it's racist to be against the aliens from the Alien movies, but I also suspect more than one of the RPGNet mods would say that yes, it is.

Another is that in settings where alignment is a thing, where you can have spells that detect evil, it is possible to determine a sentient creature's morality through magical or divine means. This is where the SJWs really tell on themselves, as has been pointed out time and time again. They're the ones claiming that orcs are coded black, that violent, savage humanoids of another species that are explicitly definable as evil means that something is intended to be seen as stand-ins for black people. They will not ever shut up about how this is some inherent truth, that these are stereotypes that clearly were intended because white men in the past could only be racist and you are following in those racist footsteps if you also treat orcs that way, and cannot accept that them making those assumptions doesn't make them universal truths. If they see an -ism it must exist; they are never wrong, bigotry is everywhere, and if you don't agree it's because you're also a bigot.

So it doesn't matter if orcs are a different species, definitively evil, corrupted beings explicitly created to do the bidding of a dark power involving gods and magic that both can be proven to exist in the setting - to people like this, these small-minded, thin-skinned authoritarians who demand their lack of creativity drag everyone down to their level, it's all basic racism.

Dwarves and elves notoriously not getting along is fine - they're all white, and you can't be racist against white people. But they literally can't see past skin colour and their own presumptions. Like the soft bigotry of lowered expectations, it really does astound me how racist so many of these assholes are, even as they sanctimoniously lecture everyone on how bad we are.

 

[AnOminous]

They're the ones claiming that orcs are coded black, that violent, savage humanoids of another species that are explicitly definable as evil means that something is intended to be seen as stand-ins for black people.

These are the same racists who instantly insist any chimpanzee or ape-based character must be black. If the first thing you think when you see an ape is "black person" maybe you're the racist.

 

[NerdShamer]

A typical day in the life of an RPGnet janny. When, you know, on the rare occasion that they don't ban someone. In fact, outside of the occasional post in whatever interests them, most of them are inactive... Unless they're all hiding in the political subforum.

 

[Starscreams Cape]

There’s something deeply cynical in trying to force and mutilate older properties into becoming more “woke” rather than simply being, you know, creative and making up whole new fantasy settings that are sufficiently woke in the first place. Granted, we’re starting to see that now (see Kickstarter campaigns for RPG worlds set in Afro- or Native- futuristic settings, or worlds inhabited solely by lesbians). But we’re seeing so many “stealing from T*lkien fantasy, but wOkE” products that I think that people are too chicken to take a risk and do something new instead of yet another world with elves and dwarves (but black, trans, disabled elves and dwarves).

Similarly, people selling shit with public domain Lovecraft shit, but first insisting that the original author was fucking hitler and problematic (but having no problem making money off of the guy’s work).

Yes, they're chickens, but also clever. They realize they can't build their ramshackle house on a foundation of sand. Easier to just put a shabby, eyesore addition onto a much sturdier one.