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Well, Wizards of the Coast is making Aragorn Black.
This doesn't even make sense storyline wise. What with Aragorn being descended from the kings of Numenor, it's not as if he could be from some distant land. I suppose there is still the possibility that all the Numenoreans are black, but, Arwen's white in the same picture, and she, being the daughter of Elrond, is closely related to the line of the Numenorean kings.
It's clearly for the sake of diversity, but couldn't they just do things in their own intellectual property instead of messing with what belongs to others? There'd be no harm in making up a ton of new Magic characters who just happen to be black, instead of changing already beloved characters from who they are.
But at least, could they have gone with someone who it would not mess with the backstory, like Gandalf, who has no national origin? I suppose that would make the moniker of "The White" a little ironic, but that's still better than the current state, to me, at least.
This significantly decreased the chance that I get cards from that set. I play, (but I don't spend very much on it), but if this is supposed to appeal to a fanbase, whether to get them to start playing, or get them to spend more, it would probably be wise not to alienate them. Why not put your diversity where it won't hurt your bottom line?
Rings of Power had some questionable things racewise (and a whole lot more unquestionably bad things in other domains), but at least it wasn't doing this.
WotC hates white people.. They aren't even being subtle about it.
Imagine if any other group of people was the subject of these tweets.
The Dungeons & Dragons Movie Intentionally Emasculates Its Leading Men
WotC has a full blown culture of hating white men, and wanting to see them miserable. They must be denied anything they enjoy, and all the things they used to enjoy must be ruined. They love watching white men suffering and miserable. They literally could not be any more clear about this.
Stop giving money to people who hate you. They aren't even hiding it anymore.
The thing is... it didn't have to be this way. Bards (from at least 3E onwards, I can't recall if AD&D 2E was where they were badass or not) are inherently funny. You're down there in a dungeon, playing a whistle or something, while everyone else is stabbing things! You don't have to make it "haha men".
Also, isn't there a male paladin in the upcoming movie? I'm pretty sure they're frontliners (except, you know, for Paladins of Murlynd, but I'm pretty sure WotC doesn't really care about Greyhawk anymore).
That... implies that female heroines shouldn't be challenged, which is just bad writing. Even the pulpiest of pulp heroes, such as Solomon Kane or John Carter of Mars, are challenged. All the damn time! Even Aragorn, who's already completed his character arc, is challenged during the events of the Lord of the Rings!
These people live in a world where white males never earn anything. Merit is a myth. Everything is just handed to them. It's privilege the whole way down. It doesn't reconcile with the heroes journey as we know it. I think it's why they write their minority characters which "fix" things the way the imagine white males have it. Arrogant, obnoxious, handed everything, and not challenged in the slightest. They think it's some sort of role reversal. It just shows their bigotry.
This mindset was well-embodied by Mr. Chavez (Todd's Latino adopted father) in BoJack Horseman when he was explaining his harsh parenting style, which had failed to straighten Todd out:
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I'm surprised you didn't connect the dots here and claim they're projecting, because I can imagine they resemble this caricature of privileged white guys more than they realize.
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You know how sometimes some Robin DiAngelo type will ignorantly claim "White people have no culture"? When in reality, they are just totally oblivious, in all the worst ways, to the absolute cornucopia of white culture around them? That all the books written by white people are white culture? And all the movies. And all the music. And all the games. And all the architecture. If it was made by a white person, with whatever magic sauce every person's unique cultural heritage brings to the table, then it's white culture. But to a subset of people, this simply does not exist. How they can not see it is beyond me. But lately I notice people cognitively mutilated in ways Orwell wouldn't have thought up in his wildest dreams. So it is what it is.
Or worse, they view the existence of white culture, or anything at all that white men can enjoy and see themselves represented in and valorized in, as innately harmful to everyone else. And it must be destroyed. I'm sorry, I mean "fixed".
This hypothetical ur-racist is the exact sort of person utterly incapable of perceiving wokeness. It's just normal to them. "Being a decent person". No amount of pointing out their hatreds will make a remote impact on them. It's only wrong to hate people, and white men aren't people. They demonstrate how they've dehumanized white men every time they open their mouth. It's compulsive.
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Like arjin_ferman wrote, we noticed, and there were plenty of fairly high profile fights around it. Possibly the most famous of which is the affair of reproductibly viable worker ants, aka Gamergate, which still gets referenced to this day 9 years later to be blamed for the rise of Trump and the alt-right and fascism and whatnot.
But in terms of how "wokism" became the force it is today, being so ubiquitous and invisible as to be water to a fish by many people (one could also make the analogy to white privilege to white people if one wants to be meta about it), I think one significant factor is the education system being infused with this stuff, and infused for several generations. It's fairly well known that much/all of the academic basis of what we call "wokism" started at least 50 years ago. The famous and influential paper White Privilage: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack was published in 1989, and from what I understand, this wasn't breaking particularly new ground in the "field."
In that half a century plus of this ideology being developed and taught, teachers have been taught to teach this stuff to kids, who in turn have grown up to be teachers who teach more of this stuff to kids. When you're taught only this as the only correct ideology as a kid, then as a teacher you're simply going to be unable to teach the next generation of kids to consider anything else as possibly correct. This process is leaky and imperfect, but at some point it reached critical mass. It also has some very strong defense mechanisms; it hijacks the common youthful impulse to rebel by always positioning itself as the ideology of the weak underdog against the powerful man, and it also has its own explicitly anti-rational/anti-empirical methods of epistemology that places barriers in people's ability even to study other ideologies, much less adopt them.
I think there are other extrinsic forces at play that helped it along as well, such as the fact that this time period was very closely after the US civil rights movement which is generally agreed upon as having been righteous and heroic, but which inevitably left fewer battles to win for people who wanted to follow their heroes. If you're a progressive, you have to progress beyond the prior generations' progressive victories, in order to find any meaning as a progressive. Thus compelling people to create new and improved versions of racial justice, leading to things like denigrating colorblindness in favor of explicit racial profiling. I also think the well known echo chamber effect in social media in the past 15 years played a factor on all sides, but with "wokeness" in particular, the aforementioned anti-rational thinking made its effect even stronger (I would guess similar things happened in traditional religious circles and other conspiracy theory circles, though I would also guess that the former group there wasn't as influenced by social media just due to not using it as much).
All this (and more, I'm sure), and we're seeing the results play out. It was clear to me as early as 2015 that we were seeing a new religion in action, one whose great innovation, in this unusually secular era, was convincing its adherents that it wasn't a faith-based religion at all. I think this is somewhat analogous to Christians (and likely followers of other religions, though Christians are the only ones I've personally encountered) who say that Christianity isn't a religion, unlike those other things like Judaism, Buddhism, or even atheism.
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Of course they noticed, there were several massive ideological fights about it. People tried warning against it, and organized to oppose it.
This is one of the things that opened me to conspiracism. You wouldn't get so many people pretending nothing happened, if this was just a new ideology becoming popular.
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The noted reluctance of social justice advocates to name themselves (and here's a new article from de Boer on the subject, even!) does remind me a little of something like the Mortal Name from Unsong, or how, in Warhammer Fantasy, actually saying the name of any of the Chaos Gods as a Chaos worshipper can get you turned into a mutant, but I suspect the real reason why is something more complex: to admit the boundaries of the group or category you belong to may actually be to surrender the ability to set those boundaries yourself.
Granted, social justice advocates more tend to position themselves as being in the moral spotlight, but I think there is a similar phenomenon here, where they can't let themselves be pigeonholed as being a distinct subset of the left wing. After all, if they organized into their own political party, they'd have to actually fight in elections and such--too risky, perhaps.
I mean, SJ names itself all the time. It's just that the words it uses are words which already mean other things - "moral", "decent", "compassionate", "sane".
I think they've grasped something that even Blair missed; if you don't even have a word for "Ingsoc" separate from the word for "good", it becomes impossible to even utter the crudest of blasphemies "Ingsoc is ungood" in a comprehensible fashion. All you can say is the meaningless "Good is ungood". Yudkowsky, though, did not miss it:
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Any nerd hobbies that you're aware of that haven't succumbed to this? I really liked Magic as a kid and was thinking of trying to get back into it, but after reading that... maybe not.
No. I thought Battletech was immune... and then things got weird there too. Battletech by HBS basically extirpated white people from the region under the reasoning that a millennia of multiculturalism basically fucked the ethnicities we have today out of existence. It'd be fine for another setting, but 4 decades of lore for Battletech really push back against that retcon. It was very much a universe of monocultural colonies, with a few multicultural imperial capitals. Or sometimes worlds with one monoculture of colonist and then a more recent monoculture of colonist from a few hundred years later. They don't get along.
Lately things got so bad Catalyst Game Labs fired a fiction and source book author they've worked with for 30 years for wrong-think. Because the usual people with obvious personality disorders (and pronouns in their twitter bios, but I repeat myself) were crying crocodile tears about his hidden... I honestly can't even keep it straight. Some sort of cryptic lost causism or nazism he was hiding inside the Battletech fiction?
I've found myself retreating to retro PC games and woodworking. They are still very white, and very male, and lack any and all of the senseless, hateful, often self loathing compulsory white male bashing you see in other hobbies. But I'm afraid to get too attached. I feel like I'll blink and suddenly "Woodworking so white" will be a nationally trending hashtag, and suddenly every youtuber I've been watching the last year will have some sort of come to Jesus upload where they make all the politically required mouth sounds about how evil white people are, and how the hobby needs to "change" to become more "diverse and welcoming". And that will establish the new baseline, and every upload I see from then on will have preambles and postambles repeating the new politically required slogans. When all I fucking want is to watch an instructional video about how to assemble the apron, legs and surface of a table. Preferably with mortise and tenon joinery, and with some advice or tips about how to account for wood movement so the whole thing doesn't crack viciously after a few seasons.
I think BattleTech isn't completely lost. Tex of the Black Pants Legion is the closest thing to the face of the current BT fandom, and between him and the rest of the Legion, there's still a contingent of the fandom that leans right-of-left. When the Blaine Lee Pardoe thing went down, Hutz Fandango, one of Tex's editors, went so far as to try reaching out in the comments section of Razorfist's YouTube interview with Pardoe (I can't link this, though, it seems to be privated now).
The HBS game thing is news to me, as someone who played through the main campaign. Like, yes, a lot of characters in that story are dark-skinned, but the Aurigan Reach is also a Periphery nation, AKA literally the boonies as far as the colonized galaxy goes. You still get cameos from notable characters from the lore, and two in particular are still white guys. I haven't tried the more free-form career mode yet, but I'm willing to bet I'll at least find some white guys if I were to journey out to Steiner or Davion space.
I think a novel from the 80's/90's did mention the "great Inner Sphere genetic melting pot" or something like that. There is precedent for multiculturalism, but it can be quite weirder than modern progressives might expect.
Tex is a gift and a gentleman. But he's also chronically depressed and easily bullied. He's been pressured into disavowing other wrong-thinking Battletech content creators before. He likely will again. He'll likely either convert fully, or be bullied out of the fandom.
I dunno, there was that thing from when he talked with Arch. I doubt that made him friendlier to the woke.
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There are lots of RPGs besides D&D. If you still have nostalgia for D&D, the Old School Revolution is a broad community that has produced a ton of retro-clones based on various versions of the original game. (There is some wokeness in the OSR community, but being mostly made up of aging white dudes who played D&D when they were 12, it is, as you might expect, much less pronounced.)
Didn't the knives come out for OSR a few weeks/months ago?
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There are, but the RPG "community" increasing has the uber progressive as default, everyone else is a child devouring witch problem. There are open racist on one side... and open racist of a different valence on the other. The extremes have eaten the middle. You must decide if you hate white people, or hate brown people. Choosing not to choose is like thinking you can not join a gang in prison. You're just gonna get corn holed by both sides.
You know you can get by in prison by being otherwise useful? A friend got by by making snacks rather than joining a gang.
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