Fantasy Racism

"Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy company Hasbro to " burn in hell." Hasbro owns the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game that was critical of some of its creators' old material. "Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash" the "geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons," Musk wrote. The book acknowledged that some earlier iterations of the game relied on racist and sexist stereotypes and included "a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language." After a designer at Wizards said that the company's priority now was responding to "progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense" at those stereotypes, and not to "the ire of the grognards"-a reference to early fans such as Musk-Musk asked, "How much is Hasbro?," suggesting that he might buy the company to impose his vision on it, as he'd done with Twitter."

"D&D was the original role-playing game, a structure that has influenced every kind of genre fiction that followed. The game is more popular than ever, reaching far beyond its original audience of midwestern misfits and bookish nerds. And for some fans, that's a problem. Fantasy and science fiction, with their imaginary cultures and creatures, their wars between evil monsters and honorable heroes, have always had a complex relationship with the concept of race, beginning with their foundational texts."

The fall of Constantinople ended the last living Roman civilization and sent refugees west, helping spark the Renaissance and shaping religious traditions and the modern map of Europe and the Middle East. That historical event inspired creative works that eventually connected to the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards of the Coast released a book acknowledging earlier racist and sexist stereotypes in the game's history, prompting public backlash from some fans and a high-profile response from Elon Musk, who lashed out at Hasbro and suggested buying the company to enforce his preferences.

Read at The Atlantic