Fantasy Racism
November 12, 2025 at 05:30PMIt likely isn’t news to you that Dungeons & Dragons became the world’s most popular tabletop role-playing game while also trafficking in outmoded and problematic concepts around race and gender. It also likely isn’t news to you that Dungeons & Dragons managed to expand and evolve, welcoming a wider audience and becoming more popular than it had ever been. But maybe it is news to you that some people who own the platform formerly known as Twitter seem to have feelings about this. (It was news to me! Don’t forget, though, that news doesn’t have to be surprising to be news.) Anyway, Atlantic writer and unabashed D&D devotee Adam Serwer digs into how fantasy tropes became what they are were, and why a certain breed of gamer seems to cling to them so fiercely.
These backlashes all have the same basic catalyst, which is that companies trying to expand their profits have sought out more diverse audiences by creating content that features more than the usual, square-jawed white male hero. When the damsels who were supposed to be in distress and the members of the races that were supposed to be disposable began to be the protagonists, some fans experienced that as a kind of loss. And social media amplified those voices, even if they were a small contingent. Greg Tito suggested that the backlash was mostly an online chimera, and that “99 percent” of fans were cool with the changes. The 1 percent who weren’t just happened to include, well, the “one percent.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/12/fantasy-racism/
via IFTTT
Watch