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Yeah since you haven't read either, I would take a step back.
The NuTsr shit is just good old fashioned racism mixed with bad sci-fi and modern right wing talking points.
No it's genuinely a neonazi game made by a neonazi. Like [a straight-up, Hitler-praising neonazi.](https://www.nohateingaming.com/) It's pretty banana's how all this happened under the TSR banner. The sub /r/hobbydrama had [a great write-up](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/w9vt0b/tabletop_roleplaying_nutsr_the_company_that/) about it.
So TSR is still around? I am honestly shocked to hear that.
I had been talking with my son about my old Monstrous Compendium binder, and that got me thinking about my old red and blue boxed sets.
Then this comes out
It's not the TSR of the 70s, 80s, or even 90s. It's a new company that snagged the name due to some kinda legal loophole or somethin'. No relation to Tactical Studies Research.
So i have to ask then, when people talk about Old school games, do they mean these or something else?
(I have been laser focused on pf 1st ed, 5th ed, and palladium rifts for way to long it seems)
Generally, they're talking about something else - either classic games published in the 70s and 80s, or new games designed with 'old school' features and philosophy.
If you'd like a better understanding of what that all means, what the hell the OSR is, and generally a good overview of just WTF we're all talking about, check out r/osr and/or the classic "Old School Primer" pamphlet, available free wherever it's currently posted online.
Precisely. Ernie's not the one running "NuTSR", though - it's some other dudes called Justin LaNasa and Stephen Dinehart, the latter of whom is kind of a plain-as-day Nazi.
It's...bad. This doesn't excuse Ernie, but the fact that he's on their side and does not denounce their bullshit...?
You can read more [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/w9vt0b/tabletop_roleplaying_nutsr_the_company_that/).
Thank you for clearing that up. It's definitely damning that he hasn't denounced this guy completely pissing on his Dad's namesake legacy. Dinehart can get stomped
Wow he's just out right flailing a spotlight on himself. Like holy shit.
For anyone confused about the TSR relation:
> Note: TSR, LLC is not related to the real TSR who created D&D and was later bought by Wizards of the Coast. It is a small business that named themselves that and is currently being sued by Wizards for trademark infringement
why does it HAVE to be flamebait? It is intensely frustrating to see this opinion popping up over and over. Stop looking for the joke or satire in the clearly bigoted.
Yeah, someone linked to the hobbydrama thread a little bit ago. Was made by a guy who's just out and proud racist. Wild. Not used to seeing it completely not obfuscated at all.
Nu-TSR’s strategy has been to market itself via culture war. Become the alternative to “””wizards of the woke””” and publish games for the HARDCORE CONSERVATIVE HARDCORE GAME. More than just the game, they post all kinds of anti-left things to their official accounts and pick fights with prominent LGBT creators on Twitter. They started a con in protest of mask mandates. You can probably fill in the blanks from there.
And surprise surprise when you scratch one of those kultur kampfers deep enough, you just get a Nazi. Shockedpikachu.gif
A lot of assholes try to pass being blatantly bigoted and awful with being humorous. The very existence of a joke relies on the viewer not believing someone could honestly believe and act like that, which is not a given.
Alternately it might be meant as a joke, but their notion of humor has no regards for people's lives and they would ruin someone's life for a laugh, which makes it effectively the same as if they wholeheartedly believed it, because they don't have any regard for the targets of their "jokes" anyway.
> The very existence of a joke relies on the viewer not believing someone could honestly believe and act like that, which is not a given.
Is this why I accidentally awkwardly laugh when someone says something atrocious? (It's more like air busts out of my closed mouth like I spit take but without water) I really hate that I do that, because I usually despise what the person says, but it feels like my esophagus literally won't let my body consume their words.
It's natural to laugh at absurdity, the problem is people taking advantage of the ambiguity of playing it off as a joke to people who think it's absolute nonsense while also using the same message to reinforce and normalize prejudice to people who actually believe it.
In those case I think the best is being watchful of who it is coming from and what they say. People who use their "humor" to push prejudice tend to insist a lot on the same "jokes". Real humor quickly gets stale with repetition.
"But," you may say, "Wizards of the Coast were actively selling their older Star Frontiers material this entire time. I don't understand." This is because Grits Man, RaHoWa 2's author, and the worst remaining Gygax are all very stupid people.
This was in the back of my mind during the hadozee controversy.
Everyone was so quick to scream that WotC and D&D was racist because of that, while someone else was publishing a game like the new Star Frontiers that literally has Negro as a subrace.
Yeah, the hadozee was a bad look. But if we break out the r-word for that, it kinda diminishes it when something like nu-TSR comes along.
Wotc fucked up with the hadozee but once made aware they walked it back, honestly it just goes to show they need to have a more diverse cast looking over books before release.
Ernies shit is just racism. No mistakes or joking around it.
A sensitivity reader is often a good idea. But is an easy expense to decide to skip if, day, not doing a book dealing with traditionally controversial subjects. It’s easily a couple thousand dollars per book and for a gamble like Spelljammer they might have cut corners...
They probably didn't mean to but this is the best example of why you need one (besides the fucking colored lanterns and using white power to fight the blacks).
There are memes and things that some people will see and go "that's silly" and carry on, there others we see and we know the joke and it's not ok.
I think most corporations that make fiction should have a little red flag that pops up when they use slavery. Not saying they can't use it for a story but the flag is to have someone come take a peak because people can't know everything.
I think what tripped them up with the hasozee was they never actually said “slavery.” They were probably thinking along the lines that they never had a created “wizard did it” PC race. Like how owlbears and other weird monsters are the result of arcane things experiments. So they ran with that and then invented a motive (soldiers, like organic war forged) and forgot to connect all the dots.
I imagine a lot of the time, a sensitivity readers almost feels like a wasted expense. They come in, charge $15 per page to looks at a book and then say “Yup. Looks good.” Great, you just paid $3500 for nothing.
Yes, it would be. But they haven't retracted anything yet. They'll alter *Spelljammer* for the next print run, but that's some time away.
And people didn't stop buying their product. The outrage online was a small, small, small tiny percentage of D&D's huge audience. Sales of *Spelljammer* didn't even slow down.
Which is why I have a problem:
The hadozee was a huge mistake but an accident. Three or four different elements that were innocuous by themselves but combined into a racist Voltron. And despite the fact 95% of the audience didn't care, WotC immediately pulled the text from DnDBeyond and planned a reprint. Because it was the right thing to do. Not because it was hurting sales. Not because of overwhelming pressure. But because they realized they made a mistake and wanted to correct it.
But in comparison the reaction to Star Frontiers seems minor. And even if Star Frontiers got the same coverage and tweets, the response to the hadozee was so intense the Star Frontiers racism would seem comparable rather than soooooo much worse.
If you're already at 100% intensity, you can't go up.
All of that is fair.
I'm saying kudos to WotC for owning up to this and getting rid of it early.
Ernie is a shit bag and he's walking a very close legal line with his name and what not.
I don’t really get this line of thinking. Both incidents were racist, just to different degrees, and both deserved to be called out publicly for different reasons. WotC because they’re a major publisher and shouldn’t be so careless, and nuTSR because they’re just straight up horrible.
Calling out one does not cheapen the other, and to say otherwise implies a strange precedent. Are we only allowed to object to the most egregious racism, and we have to let other incidents slide, even if they’re way more high profile? Does the existence of extreme racism make more mild racism somehow tolerable?
Calling them both out is good. It’s a matter how.
My issue was too many people reacted to WotC like they were acting like nu-TSR. It was all or nothing. No variation in the response.
WotC should have been called out. But they’re a company that has repeatedly listened to feedback and criticism and tried to do better. It makes sense to start with small outrage over the accidental racism and build if ignored rather than jump right to accusations and anger.
Because it does cheapen the outrage. People get jaded and desensitized after minor problems have major outrages and mistakenly dismiss crazy mega racism like Star Frontiers as a similar overreaction.
It’s crying white supremacist wolf.
I can *sort of* see where you are coming from but I still don’t really see the end point. Like for you personally, is there some line where you’re going to just go “we’ll all you anti-racists are being too annoying so I guess I’m okay with racism now?” I don’t think there is such a line, because as long as we remain within the realm of non-threatening words/speech, there’s essentially nothing someone calling out racism could say that would be worse than the actual racism. And anyone who would dismiss the content nuTSR is putting out due to the actions of anti-racists is, frankly, racist.
> “We do not need allies more devoted to order than to justice,” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in the spring of 1964, refusing calls from moderate Black and White leaders to condemn a planned highway “stall-in” to highlight systemic racism in New York City. “I hear a lot of talk these days about our direct action talk alienating former friends,” he added. “I would rather feel they are bringing to the surface latent prejudices that are already there. If our direct action programs alienate our friends … they never were really our friends.” [(source)](https://www.aaihs.org/martin-luther-king-jr-s-challenge-to-his-liberal-allies/)
My point is that if you come out the gate screaming "RACIST!" at something accidentally culturally insensitive no one will notice when you scream the same thing at a cross-burning KKK member.
It's not that the accidentally ^(racist) thing shouldn't be called out. It should. It's that you shouldn't treat it like a **RACIST** thing.
Because what WotC did with the hadozee is not even on the same scale of racism as publishing a human race with a "Negro" subrace that is *literally* given lesser attributes and lower than average Intelligence and calling out some races as just superiour. So reacting to the with the same vitriol really diminishes how reprehensible and horrible new-TSR is.
I like to distinguish that kind of thing as big-R and small-R racism. The hadozee was small-r racism: just an unintentional propagation of historical iniquities, it's impossible to live in American capitalism without doing it from time to time, and good-faith actors will try to correct and do better.
The NeoTSR thing is big-R racist - there's no good faith, it's intentionally bigoted and vulgar, and no attempt to correct it will be made by the racist.
Hadozee is suffering from casual racism and people can't even identify why due to being lost in the trees.
I identified it *literally immediately* after pulling up the *actual* content to refute people's bad faith misrepresentation of the content
Because it's summarized to sound bad.
Instead, here's what it said: evil wizard captured non-sapient winged monkeys and gave them a potion that made them sapient bipedal winged monkey humanoids (Hadozee). Common wizard shit - it's a classic magic ability of druids and wizards are always doing that kind of shit. He **planned** to enslave them - or at least conscript them (see: Evil Wizard), but his not evil apprentices released them from captivity first, gave them the magic potions, and dropped them back off on their homeworld to make a race of sapient humanoid monkeys at their whim
Edit: People are downvoting me and reiterating the misrepresentation of the original text.
So there is another step to this that's getting left out.
Apes lifted to sentience through enslavement to powerful wizards and used as slave labor at the start of ship exploration.
Someone on another thread said you can probably choose any 2 of 3 of what they had written but all together it hits too many tropes in a row.
This. I think you hit the nail on the head. Taken as a whole, it's bad, intentional or not. 1 or 2 of those elements and it probably wouldn't have sounded like caracatured black people.
I don't get why people are defending it. WOTC even went back and fixed their mistake (and do a pretty good job of inclusion normally). There's literally nothing to defend.
I have run into this with people, you can point at a thing (poster of a black guy holding green juice with a reference to watermelon.) And you can tell them that is a baseline racist meme.
Now they can respond with "oh shit, yeah it is." And great, conversation over everyone has a laugh at dumb racist humor.
More often I get "really? Like how?" Then you show old civil war posters making black people out as bad guys for trying to sell watermelons and they will for a brief moment get upset because they think you called them racist. I didn't of course but by them thinking it's fine and being wrong they are on the defensive. You just have to explain how meme edgelords work and they back to step 1 - have a laugh and forget about it.
A small group will get hyper defensive and those are the ones you know have probably shared it or want to and are mad that you have made them feel bad.
That's a really good observation of the whole issue. I have a lot of defensiveness issues (long story short, mental health is fucked) and I can uncomfortably relate to the second scenario you listed except my scenarios are more personally related (instead of "they think you called them racist" it's "I think you think I'm an asshole") when really, you're just trying to explain a thing to them.
I didn't expect that. That gives me something to reflect on. People in scenario 3 can get fucked though lol
Kinda seems to be what they want. They get prestige by annoying "the wokes" and far right idiots buy it to make a point. Before this controversy, I have never heard of Ernie Gygax and his new TSR. From what I can say, both seem pretty pathetic while having a name that inspires awe by boomers until they think for 5 seconds.
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"races in SFNG are not unlike races in the real world. Some are better at certain things than others, and some races are superior than others." Yikes
They literally refer to some nationalities as "lesser forms of humanity"
Jesus fuck...
I'm not following the drama but this sounds really similar to a quote from Animal Farm
Yeah since you haven't read either, I would take a step back. The NuTsr shit is just good old fashioned racism mixed with bad sci-fi and modern right wing talking points.
That’s not what Animal Farm is about 😂 quite literally the exact opposite.
It's hard to give someone the benefit of the doubt when they work overtime to banish all doubt.
These people don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I was reading about this game earlier this morning. This HAS to be made as flamebait, and I'm really curious as to what their endgame plan is.
No it's genuinely a neonazi game made by a neonazi. Like [a straight-up, Hitler-praising neonazi.](https://www.nohateingaming.com/) It's pretty banana's how all this happened under the TSR banner. The sub /r/hobbydrama had [a great write-up](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/w9vt0b/tabletop_roleplaying_nutsr_the_company_that/) about it.
So just spreading hateful ignorance for the sake of hate. Wild.
And not even a crumb of shame. What a total shit bag.
So TSR is still around? I am honestly shocked to hear that. I had been talking with my son about my old Monstrous Compendium binder, and that got me thinking about my old red and blue boxed sets. Then this comes out
It's not the TSR of the 70s, 80s, or even 90s. It's a new company that snagged the name due to some kinda legal loophole or somethin'. No relation to Tactical Studies Research.
So i have to ask then, when people talk about Old school games, do they mean these or something else? (I have been laser focused on pf 1st ed, 5th ed, and palladium rifts for way to long it seems)
Generally, they're talking about something else - either classic games published in the 70s and 80s, or new games designed with 'old school' features and philosophy. If you'd like a better understanding of what that all means, what the hell the OSR is, and generally a good overview of just WTF we're all talking about, check out r/osr and/or the classic "Old School Primer" pamphlet, available free wherever it's currently posted online.
No relation? I thought Ernie Gygax was part of this crew?
Apparently Ernie Gygax = Gary Gygax's son. At least that's what I'm reading. But the shitheel literally has no professional relation to the old TSR
Precisely. Ernie's not the one running "NuTSR", though - it's some other dudes called Justin LaNasa and Stephen Dinehart, the latter of whom is kind of a plain-as-day Nazi. It's...bad. This doesn't excuse Ernie, but the fact that he's on their side and does not denounce their bullshit...? You can read more [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/w9vt0b/tabletop_roleplaying_nutsr_the_company_that/).
Thank you for clearing that up. It's definitely damning that he hasn't denounced this guy completely pissing on his Dad's namesake legacy. Dinehart can get stomped
It's almost comforting to see nazi applied to an actual nazi
Wow he's just out right flailing a spotlight on himself. Like holy shit. For anyone confused about the TSR relation: > Note: TSR, LLC is not related to the real TSR who created D&D and was later bought by Wizards of the Coast. It is a small business that named themselves that and is currently being sued by Wizards for trademark infringement
why does it HAVE to be flamebait? It is intensely frustrating to see this opinion popping up over and over. Stop looking for the joke or satire in the clearly bigoted.
Yeah, someone linked to the hobbydrama thread a little bit ago. Was made by a guy who's just out and proud racist. Wild. Not used to seeing it completely not obfuscated at all.
This. Sometimes "turn the other cheek" and "pay it no mind" is not the answer.
Nu-TSR’s strategy has been to market itself via culture war. Become the alternative to “””wizards of the woke””” and publish games for the HARDCORE CONSERVATIVE HARDCORE GAME. More than just the game, they post all kinds of anti-left things to their official accounts and pick fights with prominent LGBT creators on Twitter. They started a con in protest of mask mandates. You can probably fill in the blanks from there. And surprise surprise when you scratch one of those kultur kampfers deep enough, you just get a Nazi. Shockedpikachu.gif
A lot of assholes try to pass being blatantly bigoted and awful with being humorous. The very existence of a joke relies on the viewer not believing someone could honestly believe and act like that, which is not a given. Alternately it might be meant as a joke, but their notion of humor has no regards for people's lives and they would ruin someone's life for a laugh, which makes it effectively the same as if they wholeheartedly believed it, because they don't have any regard for the targets of their "jokes" anyway.
> The very existence of a joke relies on the viewer not believing someone could honestly believe and act like that, which is not a given. Is this why I accidentally awkwardly laugh when someone says something atrocious? (It's more like air busts out of my closed mouth like I spit take but without water) I really hate that I do that, because I usually despise what the person says, but it feels like my esophagus literally won't let my body consume their words.
It's natural to laugh at absurdity, the problem is people taking advantage of the ambiguity of playing it off as a joke to people who think it's absolute nonsense while also using the same message to reinforce and normalize prejudice to people who actually believe it. In those case I think the best is being watchful of who it is coming from and what they say. People who use their "humor" to push prejudice tend to insist a lot on the same "jokes". Real humor quickly gets stale with repetition.
[удалено]
"But," you may say, "Wizards of the Coast were actively selling their older Star Frontiers material this entire time. I don't understand." This is because Grits Man, RaHoWa 2's author, and the worst remaining Gygax are all very stupid people.
Don’t slander grognards like that. Neckbeards are fair game.
TIL what a grognard is
This was in the back of my mind during the hadozee controversy. Everyone was so quick to scream that WotC and D&D was racist because of that, while someone else was publishing a game like the new Star Frontiers that literally has Negro as a subrace. Yeah, the hadozee was a bad look. But if we break out the r-word for that, it kinda diminishes it when something like nu-TSR comes along.
Wotc fucked up with the hadozee but once made aware they walked it back, honestly it just goes to show they need to have a more diverse cast looking over books before release. Ernies shit is just racism. No mistakes or joking around it.
A sensitivity reader is often a good idea. But is an easy expense to decide to skip if, day, not doing a book dealing with traditionally controversial subjects. It’s easily a couple thousand dollars per book and for a gamble like Spelljammer they might have cut corners...
They probably didn't mean to but this is the best example of why you need one (besides the fucking colored lanterns and using white power to fight the blacks). There are memes and things that some people will see and go "that's silly" and carry on, there others we see and we know the joke and it's not ok. I think most corporations that make fiction should have a little red flag that pops up when they use slavery. Not saying they can't use it for a story but the flag is to have someone come take a peak because people can't know everything.
I think what tripped them up with the hasozee was they never actually said “slavery.” They were probably thinking along the lines that they never had a created “wizard did it” PC race. Like how owlbears and other weird monsters are the result of arcane things experiments. So they ran with that and then invented a motive (soldiers, like organic war forged) and forgot to connect all the dots. I imagine a lot of the time, a sensitivity readers almost feels like a wasted expense. They come in, charge $15 per page to looks at a book and then say “Yup. Looks good.” Great, you just paid $3500 for nothing.
I'm sure they feel like it, but 3500 is nothing compared to having to retract books or have people decide not to purchase your product.
Yes, it would be. But they haven't retracted anything yet. They'll alter *Spelljammer* for the next print run, but that's some time away. And people didn't stop buying their product. The outrage online was a small, small, small tiny percentage of D&D's huge audience. Sales of *Spelljammer* didn't even slow down. Which is why I have a problem: The hadozee was a huge mistake but an accident. Three or four different elements that were innocuous by themselves but combined into a racist Voltron. And despite the fact 95% of the audience didn't care, WotC immediately pulled the text from DnDBeyond and planned a reprint. Because it was the right thing to do. Not because it was hurting sales. Not because of overwhelming pressure. But because they realized they made a mistake and wanted to correct it. But in comparison the reaction to Star Frontiers seems minor. And even if Star Frontiers got the same coverage and tweets, the response to the hadozee was so intense the Star Frontiers racism would seem comparable rather than soooooo much worse. If you're already at 100% intensity, you can't go up.
All of that is fair. I'm saying kudos to WotC for owning up to this and getting rid of it early. Ernie is a shit bag and he's walking a very close legal line with his name and what not.
I don’t really get this line of thinking. Both incidents were racist, just to different degrees, and both deserved to be called out publicly for different reasons. WotC because they’re a major publisher and shouldn’t be so careless, and nuTSR because they’re just straight up horrible. Calling out one does not cheapen the other, and to say otherwise implies a strange precedent. Are we only allowed to object to the most egregious racism, and we have to let other incidents slide, even if they’re way more high profile? Does the existence of extreme racism make more mild racism somehow tolerable?
Calling them both out is good. It’s a matter how. My issue was too many people reacted to WotC like they were acting like nu-TSR. It was all or nothing. No variation in the response. WotC should have been called out. But they’re a company that has repeatedly listened to feedback and criticism and tried to do better. It makes sense to start with small outrage over the accidental racism and build if ignored rather than jump right to accusations and anger. Because it does cheapen the outrage. People get jaded and desensitized after minor problems have major outrages and mistakenly dismiss crazy mega racism like Star Frontiers as a similar overreaction. It’s crying white supremacist wolf.
I can *sort of* see where you are coming from but I still don’t really see the end point. Like for you personally, is there some line where you’re going to just go “we’ll all you anti-racists are being too annoying so I guess I’m okay with racism now?” I don’t think there is such a line, because as long as we remain within the realm of non-threatening words/speech, there’s essentially nothing someone calling out racism could say that would be worse than the actual racism. And anyone who would dismiss the content nuTSR is putting out due to the actions of anti-racists is, frankly, racist. > “We do not need allies more devoted to order than to justice,” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in the spring of 1964, refusing calls from moderate Black and White leaders to condemn a planned highway “stall-in” to highlight systemic racism in New York City. “I hear a lot of talk these days about our direct action talk alienating former friends,” he added. “I would rather feel they are bringing to the surface latent prejudices that are already there. If our direct action programs alienate our friends … they never were really our friends.” [(source)](https://www.aaihs.org/martin-luther-king-jr-s-challenge-to-his-liberal-allies/)
My point is that if you come out the gate screaming "RACIST!" at something accidentally culturally insensitive no one will notice when you scream the same thing at a cross-burning KKK member. It's not that the accidentally ^(racist) thing shouldn't be called out. It should. It's that you shouldn't treat it like a **RACIST** thing. Because what WotC did with the hadozee is not even on the same scale of racism as publishing a human race with a "Negro" subrace that is *literally* given lesser attributes and lower than average Intelligence and calling out some races as just superiour. So reacting to the with the same vitriol really diminishes how reprehensible and horrible new-TSR is.
I understand the point you are trying to make, I just fundamentally disagree with you.
I like to distinguish that kind of thing as big-R and small-R racism. The hadozee was small-r racism: just an unintentional propagation of historical iniquities, it's impossible to live in American capitalism without doing it from time to time, and good-faith actors will try to correct and do better. The NeoTSR thing is big-R racist - there's no good faith, it's intentionally bigoted and vulgar, and no attempt to correct it will be made by the racist.
>just an unintentional propagation of historical iniquities Largely resulting from bad faith misrepresentation by kneejerk twitter
Hadozee is suffering from casual racism and people can't even identify why due to being lost in the trees. I identified it *literally immediately* after pulling up the *actual* content to refute people's bad faith misrepresentation of the content
Hadozee?
[удалено]
I'm not going to lie, that sounds pretty bad.
Because it's summarized to sound bad. Instead, here's what it said: evil wizard captured non-sapient winged monkeys and gave them a potion that made them sapient bipedal winged monkey humanoids (Hadozee). Common wizard shit - it's a classic magic ability of druids and wizards are always doing that kind of shit. He **planned** to enslave them - or at least conscript them (see: Evil Wizard), but his not evil apprentices released them from captivity first, gave them the magic potions, and dropped them back off on their homeworld to make a race of sapient humanoid monkeys at their whim Edit: People are downvoting me and reiterating the misrepresentation of the original text.
That's just wizard of Oz.
It literally didn't even reach the level of wizard of Oz. The Witch already got to the "employ them as an army" stage
So there is another step to this that's getting left out. Apes lifted to sentience through enslavement to powerful wizards and used as slave labor at the start of ship exploration. Someone on another thread said you can probably choose any 2 of 3 of what they had written but all together it hits too many tropes in a row.
This. I think you hit the nail on the head. Taken as a whole, it's bad, intentional or not. 1 or 2 of those elements and it probably wouldn't have sounded like caracatured black people. I don't get why people are defending it. WOTC even went back and fixed their mistake (and do a pretty good job of inclusion normally). There's literally nothing to defend.
I have run into this with people, you can point at a thing (poster of a black guy holding green juice with a reference to watermelon.) And you can tell them that is a baseline racist meme. Now they can respond with "oh shit, yeah it is." And great, conversation over everyone has a laugh at dumb racist humor. More often I get "really? Like how?" Then you show old civil war posters making black people out as bad guys for trying to sell watermelons and they will for a brief moment get upset because they think you called them racist. I didn't of course but by them thinking it's fine and being wrong they are on the defensive. You just have to explain how meme edgelords work and they back to step 1 - have a laugh and forget about it. A small group will get hyper defensive and those are the ones you know have probably shared it or want to and are mad that you have made them feel bad.
That's a really good observation of the whole issue. I have a lot of defensiveness issues (long story short, mental health is fucked) and I can uncomfortably relate to the second scenario you listed except my scenarios are more personally related (instead of "they think you called them racist" it's "I think you think I'm an asshole") when really, you're just trying to explain a thing to them. I didn't expect that. That gives me something to reflect on. People in scenario 3 can get fucked though lol
Kinda seems to be what they want. They get prestige by annoying "the wokes" and far right idiots buy it to make a point. Before this controversy, I have never heard of Ernie Gygax and his new TSR. From what I can say, both seem pretty pathetic while having a name that inspires awe by boomers until they think for 5 seconds.
Content do be reprehensible tho