An enslaved monkey race that rose up to fling off the chains of their evil Wizard master.. I am paraphrasing, but not by much. Slave race of monkey-like humanoids. That never should have made it past the editor in this day an age.
Nothing is racist about inventing a fantasy race in a fantasy world. One of the reasons we have fantasy and science fiction is it allows us to discuss difficult real world topics in a setting that hopefully avoids the real world biases.
I think what people find racist about this situation is that the scenario is obviously mirroring black slavery (fine, it still needs to be discussed), and that the race the authors chose to stand in for blacks are a racial caricature of blacks (monkeys, real world racist dehumanization as used by real world white supremacists and real world history, generally considered sub-human). End result is you get to discuss slavery and racism of sub-humans, which probably isn't what the creators intended, but the sort of thing we got wrong in the 90s. And probably should be fixed in updates like this if you want to keep your IP and franchise alive and not join the masses of media that 'hasn't aged well'.
If you could replace the fantasy race with a real-world race and not have to change any other thing, it's probably never going to be received well by modern society.
With one notable exception: if it's merely the starting point of a campaign to enact major change (perhaps also if used as a vehicle to display how bad the system really is).
Brigand|3 years ago
Communitivity|3 years ago
stubish|3 years ago
I think what people find racist about this situation is that the scenario is obviously mirroring black slavery (fine, it still needs to be discussed), and that the race the authors chose to stand in for blacks are a racial caricature of blacks (monkeys, real world racist dehumanization as used by real world white supremacists and real world history, generally considered sub-human). End result is you get to discuss slavery and racism of sub-humans, which probably isn't what the creators intended, but the sort of thing we got wrong in the 90s. And probably should be fixed in updates like this if you want to keep your IP and franchise alive and not join the masses of media that 'hasn't aged well'.
falcolas|3 years ago
With one notable exception: if it's merely the starting point of a campaign to enact major change (perhaps also if used as a vehicle to display how bad the system really is).
msoucy|3 years ago
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/23330621/dnd-spelljammer-hadozee-rac...