The reason this discussion honestly sucks so fucking much isn't even because BG3, and DnD as a whole is jam-packed to the max with racism. That's the super easy convo that is on the surface that no one really needs to have because we've beaten the daylights out of it.
The convo we NEED to be having is around the white gazer's obsession with needing racism in their fantasies 'to teach an important lesson about race' coupled with the convo about PoC that are WotC adjacent (or pretty close) actively and willingly hand-waving the shit away in the quiet hopes and dreams that maybe, one day, they too can work on Critical Role. This is why I have a Cohost. So I'mma try to hit all the main 'questions' that come up in this mess from what I assume are well meaning people who want to understand 'why is the racism in BG3 such a big deal?' Let's start.
"The racism teaches an important lesson!"
No, the fuck it doesn't.
If you need a crash course on How Racism Fucks Everything, you can do so in real life, every day, by simply having more than two PoC friends and supporting/engaging/consuming PoC activist content. There is nothing in BG3 that is being 'displayed' or 'showcased' that hasn't been witnessed or pulled straight from history in real life. Tieflings being called slurs to their face? Ask a Black grandmother what going to school was like for her generation. People claiming they'll kill you in your sleep? Yea, Jewish people just entered the chat and it looks like they've clicked the convenient 'Raises Hand' button. Being called slurs for your clothing? The list goes on and on of things that happen right now, in reality land, that very much 'inspire' the racism that is in DnD and the reason this claim is a massive ass cop out is because players know that.
We know y'all know that.
But these players never do something about things like that in real life. You love to tell your Black friends about how poorly tieflings and orcs are treated (with no care about the parallels to real life so fuck us if it's triggering), and how you destroyed a goblin camp because of it, or you tried to kill that Druid lady, or that you've made it your personal goal to just piss Astarion off as hard as you can....but if we asked you to, in real life, accompany us to a BLM walk, or to challenge that RTO mandate your job is trying to push, or to maybe just keep some bottled water in your car for homeless people, it's 'eeehhhhhhhhhhhn.......'. Y'all need the racism in the game because it allows you to demonstrate how good of a person you could be with no introspection of how it reports on how good of a person in reality you're choosing not to be. You could be this hero. You could make someone's day. You could keep that kid from being hungry, or step in knowing your privilege will protect you from whatever weird ass assailant is trying to touch my hair, or grope an ass, whatever. And even if YOU didn't have the strength to walk up and do it, you could tell someone you know does. Yet you actively choose to do none of the above, just to turn around and boot up BG3 and go 'but at least here I am aware that disliking Drow because of their skin is bad and that they have every right to be angry at how they've been treated for generations!' Bonus bullshit points if you have that thought 10 minutes after commenting on a BIPOC person's thread about how 'when you call us crackers it hurts our feelings, being mean and violent isn't the way :('.
"The racism is deep seeded and part of the lore."
And?
Listen, I spent this past Sunday with my now husband sitting on the floor like a 10 year old building Legos about Sonic the Hedgehog and watching the Venture Bros. Adult Swim just had that joint on and running all day. In the first two seasons, they were throwing around the R word like it was no one's business. Race jokes were being made all over the place. It was honestly hard for the both of us to listen in fully without wincing on occasion. But then I clocked something.
Right around the time they introduced Jonas Venture, Jr, the writing made a conscious effort to course correct. Monarch said the r-word, which lead to a character flashing to Jonas and saying 'bad word, bad word!' and Jonas, mid-speech, just straight up scolding Monarch about how, and I quote, "we don't say those slurs around here!"
It's that fucking easy y'all.
The writers took all of 2 seconds, to start pushing a new narrative of 'hey we found out this is a bad thing to say so we're going to stop saying it' and baked it RIGHT IN to the next season, going 'effective immediately, we aren't saying that shit anymore.' Now there is a convo to be had about ableism and how deep rooted it is, but we won't go there. The point being conveyed here is saying it's been problematic like this for a long time doesn't mean it has to continue being so. Later seasons went even further in just calling shit straight up racist, or making it clear that a character performing bigotry was not a character you were supposed to be fond of. I'm not saying the Venture Bros. is the bastion of Great Writing-it isn't, it still has a lot of problems-but what I am saying is the ability to not write absolutely asinine and offensively wild drivel has to be something of interest. WotC has not ever been interested in such, nor has most of their purchasing fanbase, because most of their purchasing fanbase is in the segment titled The racism teaches an important lesson! up above.
"You need to chill, many are playing this and don't see the problem."
So full transparency: because I knew the game was going to be a racist ass mess, I was on the fence about getting it at all. My husband hasn't seen much of if because he rolled a Gold Dwarf barbarian so everyone talks to him like he's fucking normal. I was gifted a copy of the game from the lovely Wino Minalien and planned on installing it in September when our data cap wasn't in jeopardy from Comcast and their punk asses. Even amongst all this, I still plan on playing, because I'm plenty resilient enough that if someone wants to come sideways at my tiefling (she will be a tiefling) I will casually murder them. 'But Vanessa', you may say, 'that may disrupt quests down the road and gate you from characters' and dear reader, I am 100% confident that if someone out there has the gonads and frankly audacity to create a mod to make Wyll white that there is someone out there working tirelessly to create a mod where you can have all characters and say 'fuck your decision tree.' I'm not worried about it. We did this with Skyrim. It'll be done here too.
But also a lot of the people playing it and additionally reviewing and reporting on it are whiter than paper on snow. Of course they aren't going to report on the racism. In some cases, they likely didn't even fucking clock it. A lot of nonPoC won't clock racist bigotry unless it's the Worst Possible Form Of It-like calling a tiefling a slur to her face, or nuking a camp full of orc kids because they're orcs. Using a tiefling child for experimentation that as a player you can fuck up and she'll still get killed by a snake. They have to see the High Elf call the Drow scum, a blight on elves, a monster, a mistake, and useless clump of cells before they consider going 'hmm, that seems a bit far.'
PoC writers likely aren't writing about it because they fucking don't want to-not because they didn't notice it, but because they value their peace and don't want to be harassed. Gita wrote a piece flat out praising the game and is currently locked on Twitter to prevent the DM spam, but has shared plenty of the email death threats and harassment they've got because of their article that again, I cannot stress enough, praises the game. Instead of asking PoC who are saying 'racism *again*? UGH' to chill out, maybe ask what all these outlets that gave it 10s, a 97 on MetaCritic, and a 'masterpiece' rating everywhere meant when they said 'the writing is phenomenal.' It's easy to scream and yell (rightfully so) at the writers for writing Yet Another Racist Ass Story, but I am asking once again that we collect up OUR OWN and also start yelling at all of the gamers who are more than content to just pretend I Do Not See It.
"Doesn't this ignore the PoC that are fine with it?"
sigh. Ok. This is....complicated.
So you are going to have people like me, who are very PoC, very queer, whatever, who are going to play and enjoy the game for what it is at the core, which is a actually decently put together CRPG where I can legit make a badass looking tiefling that has Black team members is gonna keep that noseless bitch in camp. I can't stand her, she's just pissy to be pissy. I get she's an alien but she's also a LOT. Me enjoying the game does not mean I auto-default to not caring about the issues within the game-like the fact that my tiefling is going to get stares and be called slurs everywhere she goes. I have strong dislikes that I can't be my favorite alignment of actually chaotic good because you ultimately have to Do Some Bad Stuff to keep the game moving and even align with supposed good people (good people who call people slurs to their face, sacrifice children, occasionally eat people, you know your standard good people fare). I originally intended to steer clear of this convo but it didn't sit right with me that when white queers wanted to jump up and go 'hark! this is racist!' it was An Important Topic but the moment Black players got in and started saying 'yknow this feels really not great' it became a problem. A lot of y'all gotta unpack your racism there but that isn't the purpose of this post and I'm not a therapist.
There's a very quick and gross assumption that gets made that if a PoC is not talking about a PoC issue, it means we're neutral and/or we don't care. I've been on the front lines of these topics for a better part of 15 years and your bitch is *le tired*. I don't want to fight all the time. Some days I do want to just log in, grab my tiefling, my fiery tiefling, my angry horned Black dude, and my bad-decisions wizard and just go ham. My birthday celebration was this past weekend and I just wanted to assemble some Legos and go to the gym. But a big reason I am always clear that I don't rock with the TTRPG space Like That is because of topics like this and how dastardly and fucking ugly they become every. fucking. time. Which is why when we get the PoC who cosign this bullshit I get turbo pissed off and things get MORE complicated.
There isn't enough scrutiny (and I will be real, there isn't space for the scrutiny because weaponizing activism is also a problem) around the visible PoC who will gladly shield WotC from 'The Poor Wittle Intwernet Cwiticisms' because like clockwork they either work for WotC, work alongside WotC, or aspire to work with/for WotC. I don't know who needs to tell y'all this, but if Crit Role ain't noticed you by now, they are not GOING to. Watching as PoC fall all over themselves to essentially push the narrative of 'it's always been like this, when will y'all get over it' is UGLY work-those PoC are asking their PEERS to let WotC continue to slide with their assumptions and portrayals of PoC being in the toilet and swirling. And the trade off the PoC collective gets for it is seeing the same 3-5 PoC working on books or being involved with shows that make LITTLE TO NO TANGIBLE CHANGE 'but hey I got a credit so it's progress'-is it though? Is it really progress to keep all of the racism in the book and all the weird ass racially charged traits and conflicts but slap a BW paladin (I think it was a paladin?) on page like, 40 and then put two Black people in the credits? Is it really progress to hire the Black VA who will nod and smile with all the absurdly racist ass lines they have to read without challenging them?
What's even wilder is the exact same PoC know that they will thusly be thrusted up as the Lawfully Good Paladin Shields of Discourse and still do this mess. Even wilder is that the same people will once every blue moon get on their pages and actively....complain about this exact thing. It's not a useful conversation when we can literally scroll your timeline and see that essentially your entire stance on the conversation is 'take the racism out of fantasy settings', then when people point and say 'including WotC' it becomes 'wait no not like that.' Rude as it may be to say, I'd rather this group just no say anything at all. 9/10 they aren't helping and they just muddy shit further. Which brings us to the original question posed of 'doesn't this ignore the PoC that are fine with it?' because reader, the unfortunate best answer I have for you to that is literally 'nuanced isn't a strong enough word, it is literally complicated.'
The main thing for me, personally, is this: if the racism in BG3 is a massive turn off, or you tried and you couldn't handle it, and you wanna talk about it-especially if you're PoC-you absolutely can, should, and I commend you accordingly. I, as I said, very much was lukewarm the moment I realized it was DnD based because I know WotC just does not fucking care at all about attempting to write something non-racist. It's like they're allergic to the idea. But in watching my husband play, I will not deny that it is a very, very fun game and it's given us a game that we can both FINALLY co-op on where I don't want to pop his ass in the mouth for blowing up a barrel that I explicitly said to not fucking blow up. Your thoughts on the topic are super valid and it's a lot to deal with.
If you're not bothered by any of this? Dope! Pulling up to PoC (or anyone, really) and telling them 'oh well it's fine to me?' helps literally no one! You are not a special star child because you are capable of casually ignoring the big issues in the game! Honestly at that point you are fine to just....go forth and enjoy the game! Maybe write about who your favorite crush is and why it's Karlach! Post screencaps of your character being a baddie! There are lots of other avenues in talking about BG3 that you can pursue that doesn't require you to belittle or dismiss other people's very valid concerns and gripes (especially if you aren't impacted by them).
If you're nonPoC I'mma be real, you need to sit this one out. This is decades worth of bullshit and lack of care that people are challenging (yet again) and if you agree, you need to be sharing and boosting the words of the PoC talking about it. Get in their mentions and fend off people who are making their lives hell. Send them some KoFi money. Figure out ways to support them because some people are receiving harassment and death threats (once again) over the very very low bar ask of 'can we have a story where a driving factor isn't racism'.
And really, in 2023, almost 2024, is having a story that doesn't eat sleep and breathe racism that hard of an ask?
There's a lot here that's good but I want to highlight this part under the first cut ("the racism needs to be in the game to teach a lesson") because I don't want it to get buried
Y'all need the racism in the game because it allows you to demonstrate how good of a person you could be with no introspection of how it reports on how good of a person in reality you're choosing not to be.
This really isn't said enough, that a lot of people who view themselves as allies are emotionally stunted and not actually very good at thinking about what their security blankets are and how they relate to them, and the problem is that in order to be a half-decent ally that's the bare minimum as far as I'm concerned
This is not an interesting lesson to teach in the context of this game because "racism is bad" is a basic enough lesson that we expect literal children to be capable of mentally handling it at that level. Obviously that means this is a lesson that does need to be taught in certain contexts, but there's no possible way you can convince me that something this basic is actually a useful lesson to have in a game for adults. I don't know how other people don't feel condescended to, frankly
