Gloomhaven to change to address cultural bias
(archive.is)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (29)
sorted by:
I was planning on buying gloomhaven for a long time but apparently Frosthaven (the game) needs to address the colonialism and how races enforce harmful stereotypes.
This people have leftism rotting their brains. And they made the statement after they gathered 12mil on kick starter.
Why are stereotypes bad? Stereotypes, good and bad ones, is what give races an identity, dwarfs are suppose to be pigheaded and stoic and elves gentler and snobbish. Stereotype characters are incredibly useful to try to present a culture of people.
Let me get a gay flamboyant arab to represent United Emirates? Or a black muslim to represent Japan? I assume there must be a black muslim in Japan but that would make for a horrible way to represent Japan.
Sorry for the rant, I just can't take this bullshit in RPGs that make things worse for everyone in order to address an issue that exists only in their heads.
They claim to "love diversity", but they want everything to be the same. One planet, one species, one culture, one government. LITERALLY.
This is really it, they mean "hemogony", and "diversity" is straight up a lie used as cover for it.
Well, yeah. They celebrate a potential future when white people don't exist because everyone is the color of Starbucks coffee.
The fuck of it is, Gloomhaven doesn't have the standard fantasy races anyway other than humans, so you can build your own stereotypes. You've got Quatryls (sorta gnomey), Aesthers (sorta precursory), Vermlings (sorta ratty), Orchids (sorta monky - no, not monke, "like a monk"), Valraths (sorta demony), Savvas (sorta rock-monstery), Inox (sorta barbarian/Klingony), and demons (elementals, they're just elementals - probably why they're not playable).
Except within that always tended to shy away from the obvious. Most of the rock-monster Savvas are elemental mages (and not always earth - a Savvas Icestorm is a water/air expert), except for the outcasts. The horned-and-spade-tailed Valraths aren't very demonic at all beyond looks - hell, the paladin knockoff Sunkeeper is a Valrath.
Frosthaven was supposed to be about an inhospitable outpost being turned into a viable home. I guess that's colonial but it's also your classic man-vs.-the-elements kind of conflict. None of this is a reason to get triggered or hire some "expert" grifter who writes for Extra Credits, damn it.
They only need to add the Whitey race as the True Evul everybody bands against.
With Adorf Drumpf as King Fruher of course.
I didn't read all of his long ass letter.. but the jist was.. saying "all" of this race behaving like "this", should be thought of as incorrect. Which is true.
As well as is even calling them "races" correct? Should it be species? Makes sense.
Simple lore fixes. OK.
The problem I had. Why does it take hiring a freaking race expert, and a long winded public apology full of SJW crap to make what seems like simple changes?
Because it's not about simple changes.
It's about power.
A while back, I came across a book about censorship in text books. Regarding political correctness on the left, they commented that their goal seemed to be to have all photos, illustrations, and written examples depict the exact opposite of what's commonly observed.