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The real reason survivalist fear gun bans is that the alternate scenario involves exercise.
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Nov 22, 2016 01:24
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Ominous Jazz posted:I think we can all agree that we would abandon our lives and become a strong beefum living on the fringes of civilization in a heartbeat if we were collectively in better shape. No, because there aren't video games out there.
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Nov 22, 2016 01:32
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Countblanc posted:No, because there aren't video games out there. Maybe this explains why survival/crafting games are everywhere these days.
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Nov 22, 2016 01:35
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Ominous Jazz posted:I think we can all agree that we would abandon our lives and become a strong beefum living on the fringes of civilization in a heartbeat if we were collectively in better shape. I, personally, enjoy quilted toilet paper.
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Nov 22, 2016 01:35
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Ominous Jazz posted:I think we can all agree that we would abandon our lives and become a strong beefum living on the fringes of civilization in a heartbeat if we were collectively in better shape. And the beauty is that, even if you want to write about how loving stupid that idea is, you can do it much more easily now that someone popularized that idea in the first place.  Anyways, I agree that Belit is probably ill-conceived as a playable character, and that Howard was very casual about rape in his stories (especially with "the Frost Giant's Daughter"), but I really cannot agree that Conan, especially as he is now, is an affirmation of Aryan supremacy or that it affirms the Trump campaign. I'm really up in the air about the franchise's treatment of women. Compared to race, that's definitely something that has been much harder to modify or change: some writers do it well, and some decidedly do not. And Barack Obama loving loves Conan, if we seriously want to decide which political spectrum has rights to a character that has been re-re-re-imagined by different writers for close to century now.
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Nov 22, 2016 01:36
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Doodmons posted:I, personally, enjoy quilted toilet paper. Cohen the Barbarian posted:"What is it that a man may call the greatest things in life?” – ”Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.”
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Nov 22, 2016 01:45
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Bedlamdan posted:And the beauty is that, even if you want to write about how loving stupid that idea is, you can do it much more easily now that someone popularized that idea in the first place. As a big fan of Howard's conan, and a purchaser of the kickstarted game, I feel like I should weigh in. And I probably shouldn't have to, but I'll preface this by saying I consider myself a feminist and I voted for Clinton. Basically, context matters, and while I'm extremely sympathetic to Hornbeck's complaints, it's plain she doesn't know very much about Howard's Conan or the context in which it was written. Howard wrote Conan after already having published pulp short stories about Solomon Kane, Kull, Bran Mak Morn, and Steve Costigan in the pulp periodicals of his day. He was writing epic fantasy adventures for an audience of teenage and young adult boys and men - that's who was buying those pulps, and that's what he had to write to please the publishers of them. At the time he was writing in the 1930s, the most important existing fantasy fiction was by Edgar Rice Burroughs. John Carter of Mars, and Tarzan, dominated the genre from the early 1920s. As others have mentioned, Howard had an ongoing (and contentious, albeit nominally friendly) exchange by mail with his contemporary and most important influence, H.P. Lovecraft; their debate revolved around what Howard perceived to be the inevitable and ultimate triumph of barbarism over civilization. Howard and Lovecraft admired each others' works and borrowed themes from each other. Today, our fantasy fiction is perhaps more heavily influenced by Tolkien, but The Hobbit was published in the UK in 1937, over a year after Howard's death in June 1936. Howard's influences aside from Lovecraft were the other pulp writers of his day, and the cultural influences a boy growing up in the oil fields of Texas might have. He was living in a nation of segregation, entrenched in the Great Depression, and struggling with the politics of interwar Europe and the rising tide of fascism. So his Conan stories are thematically linked to his life, influences, and the great concerns of the day. Conan is, first and foremost, a male power fantasy, and that should never be dismissed. But he is also, equally, Howard's vehicle for expressing his dismay over the horrors inflicted by "civilized" societies - part of Conan's appeal is that he is an outsider to those societies, living in lawless barbarism that Howard saw as being cleaner, more morally defensible, uncorrupted. Civilizations were conglomerations of burdensome laws, scheming politicians, backstabbing merchants, and institutions easily led to monstrous atrocities. Conan hews his way through those settings, chopping off the heads of sorcerers meddling in unwholesome and disastrous powers, hurling lying cheaters from balconies, and, yes, rescuing quite a few more or less helpless babes from evil men who were abusing them. But let's also be clear about what Conan was not. Howard's Conan was never a rapist. Women often flung themselves at him, but often did not, and Conan is rarely written as pressing himself on a woman who doesn't want him. The one glaring exception is the story Hornbeck referred to, The Frost-Giant's Daughter, although Hornbeck is not quite fairly representing that story. The daughter in question visits the scenes of battle, selecting men delirious from their wounds and teasing and tempting them. It's implied, although not said explicitly, that she is a magical being, and uses her magic to tempt the men away. She takes them to her brothers, who slay the men to serve on the sideboard of their father. Conan defeats them, and the daughter finds herself suddenly unprotected... and Conan, who can't control himself, tries for her. She still gets away, though. What is that story about? Well, it's a retelling/mishmash of some older myths. It's definitely sexist. Conan's actions are supposed to seem justified to the reader, for reasons: he's delirious from cold and exertion, he's under her sexy spell, her intentions for him are evil, etc. Woman-as-evil-temptress is an old and well-trodden theme, even in Howard's time. I don't think it should be apologized for, and I think criticism of Howard on the basis of that one story is legitimate, provided it fairly considers the context. But not all of Conan's women were evil temptresses or just window dressing, and where I think where Hornbeck goes wrong, is the discussion of Belit. Belit appears in a couple of Howard's longer Conan stories. When Conan first encounters her, she's the captain of a pirate ship plundering merchant vessals along the coast of Not-Africa. Her entirely male crew of (black) men is utterly devoted to her; they take her orders without question, even to death. It is taken as a given in this story that while Conan is surprised by her, he never challenges her authority or power on the basis of her gender. Conan is the stand-in for the reader, of course; and yes, she almost immediately throws herself at Conan, because he's just the most burliest and awesome swordsdude she's ever come across, so of course she takes him as her mate. It's also an unstated given that Belit, who is white, would not take a black man of her crew (or otherwise) as her mate... but nobody should be surprised that that is never mentioned, because inter-racial sex - especially between a white woman and a black man - would have been totally unpublisher in 1930s America. Black men were still being actually lynched on the basis of mere allegations of "inappropriate" sexual contact with white women. Similarly, Howard could not have made Belit a black woman and still had him as a love interest for Conan - that would have been slightly less likely to get him killed for printing, but not by much. Belit, though, is unquestionably a powerful female character. Eventually she gets herself killed, due to being too greedy, but she is a pirate, and she is not alone in Howard's stories as someone whose greed gets them killed. Her death is not portrayed as being due to her feminine weakness or anything like that: she just makes a mistake and triggers a trap in a deadly abandoned city that winds up killing almost everyone (although of course Conan escapes... by the skin of his teeth, as always). Belit's stories are intertwined with the presentation of black people in Howard's Conan, and there again, Howard is inconsistent. There are stories in which Conan himself makes casually racist comments - dismissing some black people as obviously not fit to rule, due to their race, for example - but in other stories, Conan makes friends with black people whom he treats respectfully as peers. I don't think this is a deliberate inconsistency, such as Howard trying to say that Conan's views changed with his maturity (the Conan stories were written non-chronologically). Rather, I think Howard himself went back and forth, sometimes just replicating the dominant way that black people in particular, and nonwhite races in general (but less so), were portrayed in contemporary pulp fiction; and sometimes considering that Conan, an egalitarian outsider, has more in common with racial outsiders than not. I don't know for sure, and I'm not aware of anyone who does: I have never come across any documents in which Howard himself discusses race. Certainly growing up and living around Texas oil towns, and being an avid fan of boxing, Howard himself must have associated with some black people... and he had great respect for men who boxed well, which certainly included black people at that time. I'm guessing, though. So was Howard himself a sexist? I think so, but only to the extent that virtually all men of his age were sexist; e.g., he accepted and reproduced in his writing the contemporary understanding of gender roles. He also chose to write in a genre in which male power fantasy dominated. Unsurprisingly, he had no thought to writing fiction intended for girls or women. Howard has not been given much credit for "breaking ground" with characters like Belit - women who were definitely sex interests for the male protagonist (e.g., reader stand-in), but who were also capable and powerful in their own right, including in traditionally male-dominated roles like "pirate captain" and "slayer of monsters." Conan in other stories helps women who then go on to help themselves - in one case, his life depends on the help of a servant girl/slave, whom he later rewards for her assistance, for being the only one in the palace who puts honorable conduct above personal safety or ambition. For the most part, Conan stories are not actually "about" the conquest of one or more women - Conan's bag, again, is his struggle against the corrupted and unworthy powers of civilization. Being a muscly bro who all the ladies just love to death is secondary, and often not that important. Was Howard a racist? Again, I think so, but not especially so, and probably less so than most of his contemporaries. He was inconsistent in his Conan stories. There are examples of Howard bucking the trend and writing nonwhite minority people as being just people, with ordinary people foibles and capabilities. Howard wrote Conan as usually not racist, but sometimes yes, a bit. Based on the Conan stories, I think Howard was a hell of a lot less racist than Lovecraft, who went out of his way to write racist poo poo. What all this boils down to is, I think Hornbeck is mostly right when she levels criticism at Asmodee and to a lesser extent, Monolith, for choosing to make Belit the only playable female character in the base game (the expansions add several more), and for portraying all of the women in the game as scantily clad (although that is faithful to their actual descriptions in the text, the game designers made the decision to do that and have to be held to account for it). The introductory adventure for the game is, indeed, about rescuing an object from a village full of picts, and the object is a woman, but follows the in-game rules of being an object, and that's... indefensible. There's a Conan story it's based on, and in the Conan story, the woman is not an inanimate object. I get that for game mechanics reasons, dealing with a rescued person in some other way would have added complexity, probably making it not a good intro adventure, but too bad. They could also have just made the scenario based on stealing back some actual object, it didn't have to be so closely based on a specific story. On the other hand, Hornbeck is wrong when she claims the picts, as portrayed in the game, are racist caricatures. Their only visual connection to native american tribesmen is the use of body paint, which is not exclusively native american. I think Hornbeck is reaching, there. Howard's Hyboria setting does have a bunch of races in it, and it is the case that the most primitive races in his setting - and that's his word, "primitive" - are the ones living in the blackest jungles of actually-it's-really-definitely-Africa, some of whom he imagined had "reverted" over the span of many eons back to actual animal form (Howard have a very loose grip on how evolution worked, thinking that a race could regress back through savagery to apehood, somehow, given enough time). But the second-most-savage are the Picts, who are no less white than Conan's Cimmerians (and Conan was only nominally "white" - he was, consistently, swarthy-skinned), and - so critically important I'll mention it for at least the third time - Howard himself did not consider "civilized" to be a good or worthy thing. To him, people living "honest" lives as self-sufficient tribesmen were on morally superior ground, compared to both totally-savage cavemen-types and people living in the walled cities of civilization. Overall I think I'm on Hornbeck's side. I bought this game, and so I have to own up to the reasons why I like it - I like Conan, I like the game's mechanics, I love the quality of the game, I think the artwork is quite good. I also think I should acknowledge its problems - most prominently the choices the designers made about the women in the game, and how to present them and feature them in the artwork. I think she's off base on the charges of racism, but I think that's probably forgivable if she's not intimately familiar with the context and content of Howard's Conan fiction. I think we should be on the lookout for racism in our games, though. And ultimately, I think she's likely wrong when she draws a strong link between the 14k people who backed the Conan game kickstarter, and Trump supporters. Trump is much, much worse: he is not a young man in the 1920s and 30s writing pulp fiction, he's the president-elect in a 21st century America. He should know better and act better and has more responsibility to do both. And I suspect that there's not a strong correlation between "bought Conan" and "voted Trump," although I obviously can't prove that at all.
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Nov 22, 2016 03:23
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for years you have been asking "Who is Conan?"
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Nov 22, 2016 03:32
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Nuns with Guns posted:for years you have been asking "Who is Conan?" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HT3cl4GJIDs
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Nov 22, 2016 04:08
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I'm the giant skull on the peak of skull mountain
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Nov 22, 2016 04:19
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Short of wormhole technology that breaks special relativity there's no way of really knowing how someone actually voted, that's kind of the point with American elections. I mean yes, you can ask them, but legally they're under no obligation to answer or answer truthfully. That said, classic Conan was fairly racist, just not as racist as his contemporaries. Of course, Howard also killed himself fairly early on, so we have no idea if things would have changed as time passed and attitudes changed. Unlike Lovecraft, who at times made other racists go "whoa there pal, dial back on that racism a bit"
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Nov 22, 2016 04:31
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Kwyndig posted:Short of wormhole technology that breaks special relativity there's no way of really knowing how someone actually voted, that's kind of the point with American elections. I mean yes, you can ask them, but legally they're under no obligation to answer or answer truthfully. Howard himself was one of those people who was weirded out by how racist Lovecrat was, and Lovecraft himself was like a 1930s era internet troll deliberately trying to provoke people. I remember reading that, Lovecraft being so over the top is what got Howard to reconsider his views on race.
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Nov 22, 2016 04:40
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Bedlamdan posted:Howard himself was one of those people who was weirded out by how racist Lovecrat was, and Lovecraft himself was like a 1930s era internet troll deliberately trying to provoke people. I remember reading that, Lovecraft being so over the top is what got Howard to reconsider his views on race. I think Lovecraft's case was less an attempt at provocation and more genuine mental illness.
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Nov 22, 2016 04:57
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The thing with racism in Conan is that loving everybody in Conan stories is racist. Howard was writing about a humanity so ancient as to be nearly pre-historic, where a city-state was about the upper extent of civilization and 'that guy looks different from us' is more than ample cause to stick a spear in him. The people in Conan are more tribes than nations as we consider them today, and one needs look no further than some cursory glances through the old testament to see historical accounts of how tribal humanity behaved towards other humans who weren't part of their tribe. (Hint: It did not involve a careful appraisal of diversity and the privilege involved.) Likewise, Conan in the context of his setting was practically a wild feminist. Compared to "sack a city, murder all the men and boys, and guess what now the women and girls are your wives, congrats" Conan typically treated women respectfully. As in, like actual people with whom he would have a conversation and listen if they had a plan to escape the dire peril involved in that story. The guy was no saint, no effort was ever made to portray him as having loftier goals than easy money, booze, and whores, but neither was he rolling around with a klan hood on while raping his way through the countryside. The stories are all public domain now, anyone who's curious can simply download them and read for themselves. They're fairly short given the serial nature, so a decent reader should be able to knock them out in a night or two.
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Nov 22, 2016 05:46
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Well if we're going to talk about the weird racial politics of Conan there are always the Stygians. They're categorically as a race evil, and also the whitest of the white people. However they're also depicted as living in Egypt and being the source of various ancient Egyptian wonders, buying into the racist assumptions that ancient Egyptians weren't "really Africans".
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Nov 22, 2016 05:51
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Kwyndig posted:Short of wormhole technology that breaks special relativity there's no way of really knowing how someone actually voted, that's kind of the point with American elections. I mean yes, you can ask them, but legally they're under no obligation to answer or answer truthfully. This last bit I think is key. There are some signs of change in Howard's later stories--more nuance in the depictions of non-whites, and the stronger female characters appear more later on. And then he killed himself at thirty, after his mother died. I think he might have had more to say as time passed, but we'll never know. As far as the boardgame goes, I agree with Leperflesh up there, Asmodee and Monolith made some choices which were not the best possible. They went for the fallacy that you can't market something to men and boys without minimizing and objectifying women, and that certainly isn't true.
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Nov 22, 2016 06:57
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Nuns with Guns posted:for years you have been asking "Who is Conan?" I quite liked the post you're replying to, but this is an excellent slam
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Nov 22, 2016 07:02
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I thought Conan was better than both Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon
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Nov 22, 2016 07:07
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"It makes sense for their character to be racist" is a cop-out argument when the narrative, by-and-large, agrees with their racism. Now, certainly Howard became less racist as time went on. But there definitely was some racism in there. We can say that Howard wasn't terribly racist compared to the time and place he came from, but that doesn't make the racism go away. Like, I'm all for people making Conan games if they want. I'm okay with people making Cthulhu stuff, even though Lovecraft was even more racist. But I think that you have to put a conscious effort into avoiding those racist tropes yourself when you pay homage to them. Whatever excuses they may have had for their racism (time, place, mental illness), they don't apply to Asmodee. The argument isn't "was Howard's racism understandable," the argument should be focused on whether or not Asmodee's product was racist. Now, I can see arguments that it wasn't, but "Howard wasn't that racist for the 30's" isn't one of them. Personally, I'm leaning towards slightly racist, but I'm willing to entertain more arguments like Leperflesh's that I'm being overly sensitive. Mind you, there's absolutely no excuse for the sexism. Goddammit, Asmodee.
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Nov 22, 2016 07:12
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JackMann posted:"It makes sense for their character to be racist" is a cop-out argument when the narrative, by-and-large, agrees with their racism. Now, certainly Howard became less racist as time went on. But there definitely was some racism in there. We can say that Howard wasn't terribly racist compared to the time and place he came from, but that doesn't make the racism go away. Yeah this is kind of where I stand on the matter. It's one thing to talk about a writer's various -isms and how much they were a product of the time, it's another thing for a modern-day company to look to make games based off those writer's works and decide, consciously or not, to embrace the less delightful aspects of the works and/or the writer's own prejudices. In some respects it's similar to the oft-used excuse of "well of course Princess Titanya always wears the traditional chainmail bikini, because she's a liberated woman who does what she wants" even though she's, y'know, a fictional character with no actual agency of her own, everything that's everything comes from the creator's own hands. Howard gets to own Conan, but Asmodee are the ones who own the Conan boardgame and all the decisions that went into it.
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Nov 22, 2016 07:31
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Again, my only real stake in this is arguing against the idea of Conan as a "white power fantasy," whatever mistakes or missteps the board game has made because I haven't even seen it 
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Nov 22, 2016 07:44
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I'll agree that Conan doesn't have to be a white male power fantasy, but the property lends itself to that really easily. I think it's definitely possible to do a nonracist Conan game, or book, or movie. It's just that you need to be aware of those pitfalls and consciously avoid them. I'm well aware that most pulp writers in the 30's weren't necessarily thinking about their works in terms of white power fantasies. It's a reflection of the time and place they were from. I just think that we can and should do better than that.
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Nov 22, 2016 07:52
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Yeah, Conan is a power fantasy, especially once you pile on all the other Conan stuff done by other authors, plus the movies, etc. The sexism is unmistakable and the excuse that is brought out - being faithful to the original author's vision and work - is too thin to hold up. I'm sure plenty of the fans would have howled foul play if the developers had shown Belit as fully dressed or whatever, but those braying idiots are a given and they could and should have done that anyway. And it would also not have been terrible to put one of the women that wound up in the expansions into the core set instead of one of the men, resulting in a balanced party instead of Conan plus two dudes plus Belit the Naked. The racism charge is a lot thinner. As I said in my Galt speech, Howard was surely racist, but less so than his most important peers and decreasingly so over time, and while it feels weird to say he'd be worthy of praise for that... I actually think he might have been. At the very least I don't think it's fair to decry Conan as a racist product. Especially when contrasted with the modern popularity of Tarzan, and Lovecraft's works. The Conan board game could have been reasonably true to Howard's vision and works - which, notably, is all that they had license to - while carefully de-emphasizing the sexism and building a product with more appeal to girls and women. I'm sorry it wasn't... but not sorry enough to sell my copy, because I don't think the product I got crosses the line from "problematic but mostly OK" to "intolerably regressive and actively harms women or the games industry," which is where I'd draw a line. I think it's reasonable for other people to draw the line in a different spot, though, and I feel uncomfortable arguing against someone who had a bigger problem with it than I do.
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Nov 22, 2016 07:57
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Hey, Leperflesh, thanks for the post above. Gave me some context about the original stories I was lacking when it came to interpreting stuff from the Asmodee game.
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Nov 22, 2016 10:26
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Oh jeez is Tarzan ever racist. Every character is some kind of stereotype.
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Nov 22, 2016 16:58
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Ominous Jazz posted:I think we can all agree that we would abandon our lives and become a strong beefum living on the fringes of civilization in a heartbeat if we were collectively in better shape. Oh, men going their own way? Is there some crap pulp series about, I dont know, men's rights? (I bet there are lots of activists for rights of men among Conan fans...)
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Nov 22, 2016 17:36
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Kwyndig posted:Oh jeez is Tarzan ever racist. Every character is some kind of stereotype. Sorry, in this household we only recognize George of the Jungle as the true jungle king  edit: Nancy_Noxious posted:Oh, men going their own way?  Does Magnus, Robot Fighter count? I think it should Ominous Jazz fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Nov 22, 2016 |
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Nov 22, 2016 17:45
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Nancy_Noxious posted:Oh, men going their own way? YOU HAVE COME TO A WORLD CALLED GOR TG relevant because uh… James Desborough? or one of the other assholes who mostly makes games for the alt-right was totally stoked about making a Gor RPG "for the kids".
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Nov 22, 2016 18:52
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canyoneer posted:I thought Conan was better than both Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon Daily Show or GTFO
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Nov 22, 2016 18:59
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canyoneer posted:I thought Conan was better than both Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon He's a detective or something? I never watched much of it, I found the whole deaging premise offputting.
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Nov 22, 2016 19:08
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P.d0t posted:Daily Show or GTFO Trevor Noah took our lovely election and somehow wasn't able to make it funny 
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Nov 22, 2016 19:53
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Bedlamdan posted:Trevor Noah took our lovely election and somehow wasn't able to make it funny 
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Nov 22, 2016 21:47
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This
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Nov 22, 2016 21:48
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Bedlamdan posted:Trevor Noah took our lovely election and somehow wasn't able to make it funny I stopped watching TV back in like February so I wouldn't know, but basically late night TV is 'meh' at best and IMHO Conan was loving tedious, always.
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Nov 22, 2016 22:09
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The setting for Cthulhu poo poo is neither sexist nor racist beyond the general -ism levels of the teens and twenties; horrible things on the edge of the universe and literal fishpeople have no care of skin color, sex, or ancestry, unless the ancestry involves the fishpeople. Lovecraft stuck plenty of racist things in the stories and generally ignored the existence of women entirely, but the whole Mythos concept itself is completely neutral on those matters. The setting for Conan is inherently racist and sexist, because it's some five thousand years ago on an alternate earth. Everyone was an utter rear end in a top hat by modern standards because everyone was scrabbling to survive in a time with the bare minimum civilization and not even one percent of the technology we use to survive. If Howard had written the people in the setting as compassionate and tolerant, it would have been an utter whitewashing of the period and robbed the stories of the whole two-fisted adventure feel that he was going for. Conan punching a hipster in the face for a magic Starbucks cup really doesn't have the same feel to it. The only thing that I recall reading in Conan stories that I felt showed period ignorance from Howard rather than just being true to the setting was the whole 'jungle people devolved into apes' thing. Though in that case I think it's more because there was a whole fetishizing of the 'hidden mysteries of the jungle' going on in the early-mid 1900s than because of a particular beef with Africa on Howard's part. Adventure authors got a lot of paychecks from setting their stuff in the dark continent.
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Nov 22, 2016 22:51
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Yeah I recently (as in, within the last year) went back and re-read the full set of Howard's unedited Conan stories. There's racism in there, but mostly it's the portrayal of the setting. There were one or two places that stood out as uncharacteristic: I don't recall which story, but at one point Conan is chatting with the (white) noble in charge of some fort or something, and basically puts forward - without apparent irony - that it's a good thing there's a white person here to rule all these unruly blacks. And I was like, woah there Conan, what? Because it stood out as uncharacteristic of the character himself - a man who freely associates with anyone of any race and generally treats people according to their competence and trustworthiness without regard to their race or even gender. It's not much to go on but it suggested to me that Howard was either knowingly throwing in a little casual racism with the intent of getting his stories printed by racists, or else he was perhaps struggling himself to reconcile racist attitudes in his society with what he himself felt about the men - many of whom must have been black - that he was surrounded with in his texas oil town boxing ring manly bars hangouts where he spent most of his life. Howard's re-imagining of racial origins for his setting cut across racial lines, and while there were definitely some super-primitive regressions among black africans, he also did that to white peoples, and conversely, had advanced civilizations across most racial lines too. Well, "advanced" for what was possible in his setting: Aquilonians, Hyperboreans, Stygians, etc. I think the point is that Conan wasn't "about" race. I don't think Howard was really thinking much about racial tensions. His focus, and he was pretty blatant about it, was on the apparent folly of civlization, that by organizing and collecting together, people gained power and wealth, but became corrupted and self-defeating simultaneously. Even Conan, who despises the corruption, finds himself driven to claim a crown and rule. It's fair to point out the racism in Conan, I think, as long as you're fair about recognizing the contexts both of the setting and of the writer. I also think it's more than reasonable to request that new content based on the original Conan could emphasize the actually important aspects of the stories, the ones Howard would have cared about, and shift focus away from the socially archaic aspects.
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Nov 22, 2016 23:07
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I think talking about how literal fishpeople don't care about things like ethnicity is missing some sort of point when those fishpeople were in fact a thinly veiled metaphor for the horrors of miscegenation.
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Nov 22, 2016 23:56
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For all of Howard's hatred of civilization, his world-view that we label "the setting" is that the proud aryan race- the Sons of Aryas- is what allowed civilization to manifest in history, and the failures and inherent corruption of civilization around Conan in the Hyborian age was because of a lack of Aryan people. Like most white people of a whiggish bent, Howard subscribed to a progression of civilization and society, but only if it was both led by and composed of the pure white aryan race. His writing is him prescribing that the failures of civilization is caused by a lack of 'true' Aryans, and is very clearly inspired by the writings of scientific racists attempting to justify actions taken by racists. So, like, go forth and co-opt that racist brand for your money or happiness or whatever. Just don't lie to yourself.
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Nov 23, 2016 00:43
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Coincidentally, I was thinking "wasn't Howard the one that wrote that story? The Children of the Night?"
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Nov 23, 2016 00:51
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It's frustrating when people say Lovecraft was more racist than the times, because the times were really goddamn racist. Much other media from that era has been heavily sanitized, but the fact that someone, anyone was free to be as nakedly bigoted as HPL without consequence should speak volumes about the era.
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Nov 23, 2016 00:57
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