“It causes me great pain to see the original creators taken so carelessly.”
“The screenshotted text is even wilder. It completely slanders the very foundations of D&D and fantasy TTRPGs in general. I don’t know what they were thinking.”
“Unfortunately there is a lot of childless weirdos that are trying to reframe the history of gaming”
“This sort of bashing the original creators of D&D (Gygax and Arneson, #DnD) is disgraceful, but the tender leftists love doing it. Women are all through the MM in positive light: sylphs, dryads, and nymphs. #wotc is driven by trashy activism.”
(about this one above. LOL, you can’t be serious.)
“Incredible! It really is so shocking and incomprehensible that wotc would soil the names of men like Gary Gygax. Their narcissism is like a stench!”
“Grummz, not surprised. Elon Musk however…. Well, I’m glad he noticed. I shouldn’t be surprised though, he is an Alpha Nerd.”
“D&D is toast. Nobody plays fantasy role playing to be a gay dwarf baker. (Not making that up, literally a character depicted in latest material). It’s embarrassing. Pandering to the 1% of population that don’t even play the game. This will end badly for them.”
I guess I’m entitled to an opinion because as a kid D&D was a huge myth for me, and still is and I have great respect for Gygax and Arneson, and lots of my time goes digging into that history of the 70s.
And there’s nothing problematic with the following images shown as “proof”:
The only part I’d disagree is that this type of level commentary is probably ill placed and not suitable for a rulebook, but looking more closely this seems coming from a “making of” other book, where instead it is fully in-topic and well deserved.
I think this amounts to the same brainless way that people have to chop human beings into coarse binary categories of good/evil. That doesn’t have any contact with reality, since human beings are complex, instead. All of us are agglomerates of good and bad things. And even the good and bad of those things isn’t clearly good and bad, but itself an agglomerate of actual cause and effect.
What is the problem of recognizing there are aspects of the cultural world that spawned D&D that were problematic and easily lending themselves to criticism? And why the presence and legitimacy of such criticism would put D&D under a bad light, even?
If anything THE COMMENTS ABOVE condemn the people. Not the RPGs. Even with the (undeniable) sexism, those RPGs are fine. They are a cultural product with its own limits but also qualities. I’m AGAINST the idea that a cultural product HAS to have representation. Because I see cultural products as PARTIAL IN NATURE. So I’m totally fine if a piece of culture, whether it is a movie, a book, comics, or whatever, is sexist, or has a very limited representation. It’s fine. It shows a light on a part of the world, a limited point of view. It is partial by nature. As long of course it doesn’t become ideology. As long the intent isn’t to make partiality the rule.
The Theater of the Mind is a great place to debase and slaughter other people (and ourselves). Reality is not.
I don’t see anything wrong if you read a story of Conan and all the women are enslaved. Why? Because it’s fiction, as long it doesn’t want to be IDEOLOGY. And even when it is because it reflects indirectly an ideology that was absorbed and taken for granted, it can still be appreciated for the entertainment it offers WHILE also lending itself to criticism for those aspects that deserve it. It’s not all one indivisible thing to condemn or celebrate.
Nor I see anything wrong if now RPG spaces are wider, more accessible and more diverse. I don’t see anything wrong to analyze some previous work critically. I don’t see anything wrong if newer works are developed as consequence of that awareness.
Cancel culture, that I do not approve at all, erases the thing. Cancel culture is the very opposite of diversification. But that piece above doesn’t “cancel” anything. It merely reads critically, expanding the scope of what a new product should be. Nor it does anything to the “memory” of Gygax. Why Gygax himself wouldn’t recognize some base misogyny in his old work? I see it more as a consequence of naivety, because those RPGs were largely naive. And generally also quite harmless. They weren’t seized as IDEOLOGIES. They were simple, basic wishful thinking. Entertainment lending itself to some manly superficiality.
If you see all that as an attack to the person and memory of Gygax, well, it only speaks of you and your stupidity (and your actual, confirmed butthurt misogyny).
(also anticipating the criticism: no, I also don’t think that those people in the comments are misogynist BECAUSE they played D&D)