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Xiahou Dun posted:You're postulating biological determinism, you goober. Again, I fail to see how 'animal models' have anything to do with a completely fictional construct explicitly created by magic, not by biology or evolution.
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Nov 10, 2021 13:33
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The Artificial Kid posted:Are you saying it's better to have individuals' traits heavily determined by their race, instead of allowing all beings to be "people"? I think it's good to have cultures in your game with completely alien sets of values to the ones experienced. It's bad if it's biological determinism "Elves are genetically incapable of lying!", but I don't see a problem with something like "the culture of the Ashen City (which has a majority elven population) considers showing your true feelings to someone to be sign of deep intimacy and possibly even a marriage proposal".
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Nov 10, 2021 14:45
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Whybird posted:I think it's good to have cultures in your game with completely alien sets of values to the ones experienced. It's bad if it's biological determinism "Elves are genetically incapable of lying!", but I don't see a problem with something like "the culture of the Ashen City (which has a majority elven population) considers showing your true feelings to someone to be sign of deep intimacy and possibly even a marriage proposal". why is one of those good and one of those bad?
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Nov 10, 2021 14:50
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Eeh, I guess "elves are genetically incapable of lying" is a pretty safe one but it opens the door to "orcs are genetically driven to be stupid and warlike and suitable only for killing", and it's easier just to say "make it all societal not biological".
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Nov 10, 2021 14:53
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Whybird posted:Eeh, I guess "elves are genetically incapable of lying" is a pretty safe one but it opens the door to "orcs are genetically driven to be stupid and warlike and suitable only for killing", and it's easier just to say "make it all societal not biological". Neither of those seem inherently bad or good. "their culture is bad" has been used in the real world as much as "they are born bad" to justify horrible things. That stuff gets bad or not depending on if you are writing a fantasy or writing a real world stand in and using it.
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Nov 10, 2021 14:56
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The Artificial Kid posted:Are you saying it's better to have individuals' traits heavily determined by their race, instead of allowing all beings to be "people"? I'm saying that if everyone is "people" you're just looking at short humans and green humans and humans with pointy ears. At that point it's just Star Trek hat planets.
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Nov 10, 2021 15:16
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Archonex posted:Hilariously enough, divine fiat would make far more sense than what i'm seeing. That's kind of what happened, though. If you want the in game history of the Kenders, they and dwarves both come from gnomes....gnomes were once originally humans who worshiped the blacksmith god Reorx, but they got arrogant and thought they were better smiths than he was, and so he punished them by turning them into gnomes. Anyway, this evil god wanted to cause trouble, so he convinced Reorx and this other god to create this magic gem called the Greygem, and then set it loose on the world, and it just started creating these weird magical species and basically just destabilizing everything. These gnomes learned about it and they set off after it, They finally caught up with it, and then started fighting amongst themselves over who should get it, and the Greygem turned some of them into dwarves and some of them into kender, depending on whether the gnome wanted it because they were curious about it or just thought it was valuable and wanted to hang onto it.
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Nov 10, 2021 15:18
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The problem is that D&D races are inextricably linked with real-world peoples, nothing just popped up with no real-world analogue. A dwarf or an orc is not an alien with no recognizable attachment to how cultures and races are treated in the real world. Everything is derived from Tolkien, so for example a dwarf is at core a Jew. Tolkien struggled with whether orcs were truly irredeemable and what that would mean to the overall message of the story if they were. That kind of nuance is largely lost on D&D and its successors. 1) If you say orcs are demons birthed from muck by the will of an evil god, and not actually people 2) but then turn around and say you can be one wouldn't that be fun 3) and then don't really do any homework on what the existence of an evil god means ...You're arriving at a strange intersection between good harmless fun and games about race wars of extermination. This is what WoW has become about, obvious real world analogue races engaged in non-stop race war, united only briefly by missions to assassinate god. Does it matter? These are all just games, right? It's exasperating when everything is political. The stakes and consequences in the moment are low. But as a lens to view stuff in the real world and learn more about it, many of these games are really poor and immature, sometimes with heinous messaging. We also discover that this is not always an accident when we look into who is responsible and their politics.
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Nov 10, 2021 15:40
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D&D dwarfs don't really seem connected to any specific Jewish stereotypes. D&D is the original "dwarfs are fantasy scotland" with all the clans and beards and stuff.
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Nov 10, 2021 15:50
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:D&D dwarfs don't really seem connected to any specific Jewish stereotypes. D&D is the original "dwarfs are fantasy scotland" with all the clans and beards and stuff. Short, heavily-bearded folks (often depicted with prominent noses, even if only so that their faces don't get completely lost in the facial hair) who tend to love gold and treasure are absolutely connected to Jewish stereotypes. Tolkien also based the Dwarvish language in LotR specifically and intentionally on Semitic languages, despite their Norse-derived names (because there's also a lot of Norse mythology dwarves in Tolkien's Dwarves), and explicitly said in one of his letters that the Dwarves were inspired by Jews in the sense of being a people driven from their homeland and living in their own community enclaves within other populations, speaking their own language and keeping their traditional culture alive. And a lot of Tolkien derived fantasy settings lift both of those elements, even if they don't necessarily understand the source of them.
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Nov 10, 2021 16:02
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Sodomy Hussein posted:The problem is that D&D races are inextricably linked with real-world peoples, nothing just popped up with no real-world analogue. We're humans so you're going to get the "boss baby vibes says guy who's only seen boss baby" effect. You can have a rewarding exploration of a concept like kindness by portraying a species or culture with absolutely no concept of kindness, one that simply ascribes no value to it, or even considers it a failing. But, because this is a stupid game whose mythos is authored by committee and a million DMs, someone will introduce "the one kind Drow" and (literally) humanize them into worthlessness as a literary device. The theme evaporates, they now have no value as something distinct from the audience, and all you're left with is "the dark-skinned ones are evil" and goddamnit gently caress.
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Nov 10, 2021 16:05
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GimpInBlack posted:Short, heavily-bearded folks (often depicted with prominent noses, even if only so that their faces don't get completely lost in the facial hair) who tend to love gold and treasure are absolutely connected to Jewish stereotypes. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/513824/pdf To back this up- there was a paper written about it using Tolkiens own words with some entertaining passages like: quote:In the original BBC-interview, the text of which is given by Zak Cramer in Mallorn 44 (2006), Tolkien’s statement is longer. It turns out that Tolkien had added a remark about “a tremendous love of the [End Page 123] artefact, and of course the immense warlike capacity of the Jews, which we tend to forget nowadays.” This was cut from the interview.
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Nov 10, 2021 16:12
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moths posted:We're humans so you're going to get the "boss baby vibes says guy who's only seen boss baby" effect. This is the thing. Are Drow biologically incapable of empathy and kindness, except for the occasional one born with what, to them, is a birth defect? Are they divinely created to be unable to be empathetic or kind? Are they perfectly capable of it, but have it purposefully beaten out of them as part of their upbringing? Are they perfectly capable of it, but conform to societal expectations in cities like Menzzoberanzan to avoid being targeted and punished by the ruiling elite? Are they culturally that way due to external pressures? D&D has always openly stated 'some species, like kobolds, goblins, gnolls, etc, are fundamentally and irrevocably evil, period, full-stop.'
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Nov 10, 2021 16:48
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TheCenturion posted:This is the thing. D&D goes out of its way to avoid thinking about any of it and breeds that contempt for thinking about it into a solid portion of the playerbase.
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Nov 10, 2021 17:09
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Sodomy Hussein posted:The problem is that D&D races are inextricably linked with real-world peoples, nothing just popped up with no real-world analogue. They're really not. Like Tolkien may have been inspired by real-world Jews for dwarves, but that was mainly in things like being a diaspora spread across the world after the loss of their homeland, their naming system, their calendar, and their language having semitic phonemes and structure as well as being from a lineage outside of the languages of man and elf. Those are not the aspects that other fantasy works copied about dwarves. They copied the fact that they live in underground tunnels mining, which has no parallel in any earthly culture because there's no record of humans living underground long-term like that, that's just something that was made up about these fictional creatures in their fictional society. You could make an argument that the way dwarves are greedy could be analogous to negative stereotypes about Jews, except those stereotypes are about Jews being greedy for money because they're bankers, not lusting after raw metal because they're miners and smiths. That's pretty different, and comes more from Norse mythology. And outside of dwarves, the other only other Tolkien race that seems to be inspired directly by anything is Hobbits (who technically by the taxonomy of Lord of the Rings, aren't a separate species like dwarves or elves, they're just a form of short man with the same cosmological fate, so I guess that's more like a real-world "race"). Hobbits are supposed to be like a certain sort of English culture, obsessed with appearances and wrapped up in their own little isolated corner of the world, but then D&D riffed off of that to make Halflings sneaky and rambunctious instead of lazy Englishmen. The Artificial Kid posted:Are you saying it's better to have individuals' traits heavily determined by their race, instead of allowing all beings to be "people"? The base premise of having a separate sentient species that is physically wildly different in more than just appearance basically requires that there be some kind of differences beyond the differences between human groups. Otherwise, the stories would be about just disparate groups of humans (which a number of fantasy stories do go that route). In some ways, the idea of cultures that are inextricably different in big ways can be a way of exploring multiculturalism, what it's like for wildly different peoples to live together or interact, and how one culture's values and way of living may not necessarily be viable for other groups. Although often people just get bogged down into diving into weird stories about how differently these different societies are built without really thinking all that critically about it because a lot of fantasy and sci-fi is just about getting to explore these wildly different places and things. And from there sometimes they end up losing track of things and reinventing racism, but this time with tangible in-world justifications, which can get really weird.
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Nov 10, 2021 17:35
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Sodomy Hussein posted:D&D goes out of its way to avoid thinking about any of it and breeds that contempt for thinking about it into a solid portion of the playerbase. D&D does a bad job talking about it. You'll get a new edition with a new monster manual which says something like "always evil" Then some writer will write an adventure with an interesting npc that doesn't quite jive with that. So the writer mentions that it is not evil in the stat block. Then comes a boxed set about a city or mega dungeon where the writers have pages upon pages explaining why these "always evil" people are not evil. Nuance becomes a function of time and word count. But most players will only ever see the monster manual page and who knows which dm will run that other material.
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Nov 10, 2021 17:51
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Part of that problem comes from a need to tell stories with the moral that our differences are superficial, we're all the same underneath it all. Consider a fictional colony of bug-folk defined by their militant xenophobia, hive structure, and murderous disregard for outsiders. Suppose they learn the true meaning of Christmas. At that point, they're no longer useful for any other kind of story. Now they're just humans who live differently. Worse, humanizing them makes them into a proxy for humans. So turning to what's left, we see that bug-folk are communal, militant, and follow the bug king - with the added baggage of becoming "humans, but different" it's now impossible for them not to read as a racist parody of North Korea or cold war communists. I'd argue that it's important not to humanize your non-human characters.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:10
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At some point D&D is also a game. Like, why do you need to fight the army in chess? Why can't black horse and white horse be friends? D&D is deep into story telling but at some point you need to fight an evil wizard from evil wizard town because it *IS* a boardgame too. Some enemies should be built up with backstory and plot, but it's also fine to have 3-5 encounters a session where some of them are just "I don't know, a ilithid attacks you, why? because they do that and it has fun battle mechanics" Like mario has to jump on the goombas because goombas are enemies. they don't get individual personalities, you just jump on them.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:40
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like mario has to jump on the goombas because goombas are enemies. they don't get individual personalities, you just jump on them. Funnily, Goombas were however the people of the Mushroom kingdom who sided with the Koopa invaders, so their story is in fact political. Also Mario can readily avoid stepping on most enemies and still progress through the game, so SMB makes violence more of a player choice than many RPGs.
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Nov 10, 2021 18:51
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I feel like the best thing that they could have done is use "antagonist" instead of "evil." An explanation that orcs, gnolls, or whatever are only included in the game to oppose the players saves a lot of frustration, and offers a tidy and morally palatable explanation for why we're always fighting them.
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Nov 10, 2021 19:22
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TheCenturion posted:This is the thing. Drow are culturally and religiously pressured into it but the Drizzt books go into it and point out that Drizzt isn't the only Drow who realizes it's hosed up. Not really? A lot of the more recent and not so recent dnd books have given the classic "evil" races a lot more freedom in both how their society works and how they are viewed.
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Nov 10, 2021 19:23
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SlothfulCobra posted:They're really not. Like Tolkien may have been inspired by real-world Jews for dwarves, but that was mainly in things like being a diaspora spread across the world after the loss of their homeland, their naming system, their calendar, and their language having semitic phonemes and structure as well as being from a lineage outside of the languages of man and elf. Those are not the aspects that other fantasy works copied about dwarves. They copied the fact that they live in underground tunnels mining, which has no parallel in any earthly culture because there's no record of humans living underground long-term like that, that's just something that was made up about these fictional creatures in their fictional society. "Tolkien Dwarves aren't Jews later on in other works, just simplified versions of Tolkien Dwarves for brevity" isn't really much of a functional difference, especially when most of these games and stories involving dwarves start coloring them in with Tolkien tropes as soon as what they're doing and how they're doing it comes into play. For example, virtually every dwarf thing involves a semi-secret runic alphabet and some sort of diaspora culture. They are also always war-like in the Tolkien sense and without this they basically cease to be dwarves. "It's just a dwarf, it signifies nothing!" is a pretty tortured way of looking at it.
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Nov 10, 2021 19:35
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Once something enters the antisemitic expanded universe, it can never leave.
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Nov 10, 2021 19:41
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Telsa Cola posted:Drow are culturally and religiously pressured into it but the Drizzt books go into it and point out that Drizzt isn't the only Drow who realizes it's hosed up. The original Drizzt books could be interpreted as any of the possibilities. Drizzt, with his unique lavender eyes, and having his father also unusually kind for his people, hints that it's something heritable. His father, taken in isolation, is the 'do what I must to survive' thing. The entire schooling system, especially the 'gently caress a demon to get your priestess title' points at cultural indoctrination. Pressure from other underdark dangers hints at a siege mentality. Lolth explicitly shows up and says 'yo, you can't let this unique Drizzt dude get away with this poo poo' which triggers an unprecedented invasion of the surface. I can't imagine Drow society is full of hidden renegades if a literal god comes down from on high when one shows up. Any of the concepts would be really interesting to explore, but they can't decide on which one it is.
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Nov 10, 2021 20:00
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TheCenturion posted:The original Drizzt books could be interpreted as any of the possibilities. Drizzt, with his unique lavender eyes, and having his father also unusually kind for his people, hints that it's something heritable. His father, taken in isolation, is the 'do what I must to survive' thing. The entire schooling system, especially the 'gently caress a demon to get your priestess title' points at cultural indoctrination. Pressure from other underdark dangers hints at a siege mentality. Lolth explicitly shows up and says 'yo, you can't let this unique Drizzt dude get away with this poo poo' which triggers an unprecedented invasion of the surface. I can't imagine Drow society is full of hidden renegades if a literal god comes down from on high when one shows up. Don't worry, WotC has already sorted this out, the drow we all knew for decades are just one of three groups who were especially cursed by Lolth to be evil and there are other hidden groups of drow who have been good this entire time! BUY THE NEW TRILOGY NOW TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY MEET DRIZZIT. 
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Nov 10, 2021 20:10
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Arivia posted:Don't worry, WotC has already sorted this out, the drow we all knew for decades are just one of three groups who were especially cursed by Lolth to be evil and there are other hidden groups of drow who have been good this entire time! BUY THE NEW TRILOGY NOW TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY MEET DRIZZIT. You know, I feel bad for Salvatore; he really wants to drop the whole Drizzt line, but he also doesn't want somebody else loving it up. I think the last one I read was Servant of the Shard.
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Nov 10, 2021 20:46
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TheCenturion posted:Again, I fail to see how 'animal models' have anything to do with a completely fictional construct explicitly created by magic, not by biology or evolution. ? TheCenturion posted:Interesting attempt at modeling what actual Garden of Eden style 'innocence' would look like, without actually thinking it through to it's logical conclusion. For example, if Kender have no concept of 'ownership,' how would that affect their sexual relationships? Are all Kender inherently non-monogamous? How do they deal with issues of consent? TheCenturion posted:If you believe anything you see, that you want, is free to take and use as you see fit, how do you see and relate to people you are sexually interested in? You posited that the concept of possession and the concept of monogamy are related for unspecified reasons. I started showing counter examples to illustrate that them being related is at least not the null hypothesis, because we have other examples in the real world of the behaviors of monogamy and ownership. I used animals because they tend to have more sex than rocks or clusters of argon.
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Nov 10, 2021 21:10
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I guess one of the reasons I usually prefer sci-fi over fantasy is that sci-fi more often feels the need to distinguish its own worldbuilding as original even if it copies a bunch of aspects, while so much fantasy gets in a rut of copying other fantasy and struggling to assert the ways in which it's different. Which with role-playing games, sometimes the whole point is to be able to play crude copies of famous works with the serial numbers shaved off, but it's harder with other forms of media. But sometimes it goes circular where fantasy works get born out of somebody's game experiences. Sodomy Hussein posted:"Tolkien Dwarves aren't Jews later on in other works, just simplified versions of Tolkien Dwarves for brevity" isn't really much of a functional difference, especially when most of these games and stories involving dwarves start coloring them in with Tolkien tropes as soon as what they're doing and how they're doing it comes into play. For example, virtually every dwarf thing involves a semi-secret runic alphabet and some sort of diaspora culture. They are also always war-like in the Tolkien sense and without this they basically cease to be dwarves. Tolkien's dwarves aren't warlike, they have actually have a tendency of sitting out the big conflicts. The Dwarven expeditions to the Lonely Mountain and Moria pale in comparison to Gondor's long fight with Mordor, and the wars the Elves got into in earlier ages were literally earth-shattering. Runes may be taken from Tolkien's dwarves, but those are specifically not-Jewish inspired. They're literally anglo-saxon runes that have been mixed around a little. Written Hebrew tends to be more caligraphy rather than patterns that could more easily be engraved in stone.   So from that it sounds like you're saying that later incarnations of dwarves are taking more from the non-semitic aspects of Tolkien's dwarves. I dunno what other works you're talking about where dwarves have become a diaspora, most of the other stuff I've seen them in seems to focus more on them living in their great underground cities.
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Nov 10, 2021 21:10
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SlothfulCobra posted:Runes may be taken from Tolkien's dwarves, but those are specifically not-Jewish inspired. They're literally anglo-saxon runes that have been mixed around a little. Written Hebrew tends to be more caligraphy rather than patterns that could more easily be engraved in stone. Are the runes the Dwarves in Tolkien use even supposed to be Dwarven runes? There are many examples of runes and letters and such in those works, and alot or most of them are Elvish I think. IIRC the Dwarves are very secretive about their language and culture and the names they've got in the Hobbit are the same types of names that Northern Men have, because that's who they are interacting with. And as for the Dwarves not being warlike, there's also the fact that in the Hobbit none of the Thirteen Dwarves that Bilbo travel with are even armed to begin with, except they they have one or two bows for hunting, and later on only Thorin carries a sword.
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Nov 10, 2021 21:17
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Killer robot posted:Aside from Kender there were also the Gully Dwarves, a degenerate subspecies of dwarf that was smaller, incredibly stupid and uncultured, and tended to live in slums, ruins, and garbage dumps. When I last looked at any Dragonlance stuff in detail I was young and not prone to think hard about a lot of implications past them being a dumb comic relief race, but in retrospect it sounds worse than that. Check out the 'concerning boggies' chapter from "Bored of the Rings"
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Nov 10, 2021 21:33
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TheCenturion posted:You know, I feel bad for Salvatore; he really wants to drop the whole Drizzt line, but he also doesn't want somebody else loving it up. It might just be corporate PR bullshit but he said he’s still enjoying them in the same press release/interviews as announced this weird new three drow cultures thing. But I’m pretty sure anyone enjoys writing easy books that make them lots of money E: also probably more on topic for this thread, the drizzt trilogy that follows servant of the shard is really interesting when talking about representation. It’s called the Hunter’s Blades, and it’s about a orc messiah/visionary trying to create a viable, stable orc kingdom near Drizzt’s usual haunts and all the wars and cultural trouble that causes. It’s probably the single best Drizzt trilogy in terms of actually doing something interesting and new. Arivia fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Nov 10, 2021 |
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Nov 10, 2021 21:49
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On the topic of nature vs free will for fantasy races, I'm reminded of Hollow World, part of the Mystara setting for BECMI D&D. As the name implies, it's a massive hollow space inside the planet with its own central sun and a profusion of cultures that absolutely never change or evolve, though it's not impossible for individual people to escape their cultural bounds. For a little background, Mystara is the sort of D&D setting the original Final Fantasy games ripped off of, with airships, technofantasy stuff, a crashed spaceship somewhere, and a current world largely existing in the aftermath of an ancient elven super-civilization that caused a nuclear apocalypse (though the present is more or less healed). Its gods are called Immortals: some of them are inherently otherworldly or cosmological manifestations or things like that, but a great many of them are just ascended mortals of one sort or another. Once you reach the mortal level cap in BECMI, you can do an endgame quest series of ascending to immortality, then even play a new campaign starting as a first level god. Anyway, one of the oldest of those ascended mortals was originally an unusually intelligent dinosaur who uncovered many of the secrets of magic and was eventually shown the path to immortality by one of the existing Immortals. As time passed, he came to celebrate the diversity of life and species, intervening where he could to prevent any he learned of from becoming extinct. Eventually with the help of other like-minded Immortals he expanded an existing mysterious space inside the planet and set it aside as a preserve for any species or culture that was wiped out on the outer world, moving some of the last examples in to place in their own little spaces on the Hollow World. In addition to dinosaurs and other "Lost World" species, the Hollow World is full of long-lost civilizations and the ancestors of the "present" Mystara. The outer world has a lot of common western fantasy stuff: the Roman Empire standin, viking coasts, classic Arabia, woodsy elves, underground dwarves, that sort of thing. It even has "Shadow Elves" who are a little like Drow except they're not particularly evil, just weird underground remnants of that old elven apocalypse. By contrast, the Hollow World has classical Greek civilizations the Roman-types ripped from (both historic city-state era and mythic bronze age heroic era flavors), Ancient Egypt, the surface-dwelling alpine herder dwarves from before they went underground, cavemen, halfling pirates, the stem race of the various goblinoid species, and even a remnant of the decadent high-tech elven civilization with their dangerous devices replaced with harmless magic substitutes that won't work outside of their valleys. Since it was designed as the gods' own wildlife preserve/ cultural museum, there's a lot of powerful divine magic keeping the Hollow World in a static state. It's harder to learn magic in the first place, and a lot of spells related mostly to fast travel, divination, and mind control just don't work in there. Many others, like most destructive spells, work if you learned them on the outer world but none of the natives know it. Most importantly, cultures inside don't change over time. Some are in isolated valleys with little external contact, but even those who contact, trade with, or war with others don't really exchange customs or technologies to any meaningful extent. If you conquer your neighbors they're not going to pick up your ways, or for that matter assimilate their conquerors; as a result, the long-term result of war is typically stalemate. Same thing is true for weapons and armor. Mechanically stone/copper/bronze/iron/steel are equivalent in stats, but people are only really comfortable with the materials/designs native to their culture. For example there's one Mesoamerican flavor culture with bronze age technology: a fighter from there is likely to have a spear or short sword and wear scale mail. They wouldn't feel the urge to "upgrade" to a long-sword or plate mail they found. A high quality or magical spear or suit of scale mail of foreign design might be more interesting, even if it's iron, but before they feel really comfortable using it they'll decorate and customize it to look and feel more like the gear they grew up with. Now, these protections were designed to prevent cultural change, but at the same time people are still individuals and can break free of their culture. Particularly for PCs, reluctance to do so is not just culture, but mechanical penalties. Individuals can go travel in foreign lands and be friendly with others while mostly keeping their ways, but if you break from your culture, take up foreign ways and tools, and that sort of thing you start getting experience penalties and people of your own culture start treating you as anything from a weirdo to an outcast or traitor. You might also lose "racial bonuses" of your culture, like ability bonuses, or else they just stop improving with new levels. Once you go up a few levels outside of your cultural bounds, the XP penalty goes away and you have as much free will as anyone born in the outer world, but the cultural cost becomes permanent. Even if you take up your own ways again, you don''t get the mechanical bonuses back, and your people will all instinctively feel something is wrong about you even they never see you display any foreign traits.
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Nov 11, 2021 00:03
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SlothfulCobra posted:Tolkien's dwarves aren't warlike, they have actually have a tendency of sitting out the big conflicts. The Dwarven expeditions to the Lonely Mountain and Moria pale in comparison to Gondor's long fight with Mordor, and the wars the Elves got into in earlier ages were literally earth-shattering. The question isn't in whether or not any given dwarf is extremely Jewish, it's that all these successor dwarves from other works are reading Tolkien and starting there, even if they cut out the bits that aren't "necessary," and Tolkien dwarves are extremely Jewish through the lens of ancient Jews as Tolkien would understand them as well as linguistically. The modern dwarf is Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off; this is basically inarguable and I have no idea under what rational basis you could determine otherwise. Throughout modern fiction and gaming, if dwarves haven't been turned out of their ancestral lands entirely, they typically occupy only a shadow of their former kingdom, which is now occupied by the boggarts of the setting, and just as in Tolkien fight bitterly to reclaim what was lost. Your claim that Tolkien dwarves are not particularly warlike is also totally wrong, and even The Hobbit ends with them fighting. Throughout LOTR, if they are not fighting alongside the rest of the races, they are blood-feuding with them. Dwarves being relatable to things in the real world and history is what gives their depiction meaning and strength in the popular imagination. There isn't some neo-dwarf out there, irrelevant to culture or people.
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Nov 11, 2021 01:34
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Arivia posted:It might just be corporate PR bullshit but he said he’s still enjoying them in the same press release/interviews as announced this weird new three drow cultures thing. So naturally the writers of the D&D setting made sure to destroy said orc kingdom in practically a footnote in 5E Forgotten Realms. Can't have any interesting changes now, can we? Though my personal favorite quibble with the series (and a rather political issue itself) is it misgendered the hero's magic panther, since in the first book they used male terms (in particular the line about the panther and "his powerful jaws tearing out the monster's groin" kind of stood out when reading it for some reason...) and yet the following books decided Gwenhwyver the panther was in fact female like the name implies. Sure, it was probably just an early editing mistake, but I thought it much more fitting to mentally tag "the Magic Panther of Indeterminate Gender" onto the end of Gwen's name every time they appeared in the rest of the series. Or perhaps the books were more trans inclusive than I thought (might explain the tearing out of an evil male giant's crotch, very symbolic...).
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Nov 11, 2021 08:04
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All of the runic writing tolkien provided us are elven. The dwarves explicitly don’t share their language with outsiders. Because jews.
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Nov 11, 2021 20:39
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MadDogMike posted:Though my personal favorite quibble with the series (and a rather political issue itself) is it misgendered the hero's magic panther, since in the first book they used male terms (in particular the line about the panther and "his powerful jaws tearing out the monster's groin" kind of stood out when reading it for some reason...) and yet the following books decided Gwenhwyver the panther was in fact female like the name implies. Sure, it was probably just an early editing mistake, but I thought it much more fitting to mentally tag "the Magic Panther of Indeterminate Gender" onto the end of Gwen's name every time they appeared in the rest of the series. Or perhaps the books were more trans inclusive than I thought (might explain the tearing out of an evil male giant's crotch, very symbolic...).
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Nov 11, 2021 20:54
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Has anyone ever run into a case of dwarves being depicted as jews, besides Tolkien's footnotes? Every dwarf I've ever run into has been some version of "Beardy McDrunk", "Hammer McSmash," or "Gruff McStone;" those are the stereotypes I associate with dwarves. (How did dwarves become scottish stereotypes?)
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Nov 11, 2021 21:04
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Cobalt-60 posted:Has anyone ever run into a case of dwarves being depicted as jews, besides Tolkien's footnotes? Every dwarf I've ever run into has been some version of "Beardy McDrunk", "Hammer McSmash," or "Gruff McStone;" those are the stereotypes I associate with dwarves. (How did dwarves become scottish stereotypes?) Beards and clans and Scotland being the original home of British underground coal mining.
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Nov 11, 2021 21:14
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Cobalt-60 posted:Has anyone ever run into a case of dwarves being depicted as jews, besides Tolkien's footnotes? Every dwarf I've ever run into has been some version of "Beardy McDrunk", "Hammer McSmash," or "Gruff McStone;" those are the stereotypes I associate with dwarves. (How did dwarves become scottish stereotypes?) Warhammer fantasy dwarves have a gold greed/lust they can fall into and maybe one or two other things. To be honest, the Jewish origins of dwarves seems quite frankly really removed from how they are portrayed currently, or at least in any ways that seem problematic to me. I read an absolute poo poo load of fantasy novels and I really don't think I have found a portrayal of dwarves that I found insulting or problematic as a Jewish reader. The same can't be said for the way more problematic way that orcs and such are fairly obvious stand ins for people of color and indigenous populations. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Nov 11, 2021 |
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Nov 11, 2021 21:16
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Telsa Cola posted:Warhammer fantasy dwarves have a gold greed/lust they can fall into and maybe one or two other things. Even Tolkien's inspirations for dwarves were 80% Norse/German folklore, with just the linguistic cues and diaspora inspired by Jewish people. It's not like how in his fictitious history today's cultures are literal descendants of ancient races of Men; the dwarves stayed dwarves, withdrew underground, and you might see them in the quiet and magical places of the world today. So Tolkien wasn't lying when he said they were the real-world people he most associated with his dwarves, but it's not the bulk of who they are nor is it more prominent in D&D or other Tolkien knockoff dwarves. I mean, it's a direction you can go and get problematic with, but like you said that doesn't seem to happen much while with other fantasy races it happens all the time. Also, Firefox autocorrect wants "dwarves " to be "adwares."
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Nov 11, 2021 21:28
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