"You had me until you decided the Van Richten's Guides were in any way addressing and confronting the more problematic of the inherent cliches in gothic horror."
If it makes you feel any better, if I still had you I would have tossed you back where you came from anyway. And yes, that is indeed the statement I made. Because it is true.
"The same guides that had hags be literally Chaotic Evil from birth, which is why they're all misogynistic stereotypes before they undergo the Change."
Yes, I can still why you might find that objectionable. I do hope you aren't trying to pretend that your lone example somehow makes my general statement that about the guides invalid. There are currently 12 volues to the Van Richten's Guides. Sometimes they succeeded in enriching the setting and expanding the monsters and the world beyond the sterotypes and cliches. Sometimes they failed. For an example for a suceessful abandonment of a cliche that I already gave you, see how the guide to the ancient dead took the mummy antagonist out of egypt, so to speak.
"I would respectfully disagree with that post - it's quite clear from an article on Falkovnia on IGN (
https://www.ign.com/articles/dnd-ravenl ... apocalypse) that 5e Ravenloft is leaning into being a frankly
weird demiplane the more secrets you uncover, and aiming for an eerie, dreamlike feel as a stated design goal - but note that it is cutting the old Hammer Horror adherence free, and I get how that is a bit of a shift."
Completely rewriting domains wholesale and literally replacing one character with another completely different character isn't a bit of a shift. Its a chainsaw being used in place of a scalpel.
"But this?
This is nostalgia goggles something
bad."
Looks more like an attempt to undermine my broad point with one cherry picked example where it wasn't true while ignoring all the times when my statement is applicable, including the example I made in the comment. Nice try, I guess.
"I
like the Guides, but frankly, contempt for, say, the Guide to the Vistani is the kind of opinion that gives me
more faith in the writers, not less. Because the Vistani, when it comes down to it, are based on real people - and not even that far separated from them, as seen by the name of the Kalderesh tasque. To admit that wasn't okay? That it wasn't okay to reduce an entire living country to a background for a single village in the desert it was damn hard to actually
be from?
That's what confronting problematic tropes is. Don't just admit they exist - actually put in the work to improve them in some way."
If the reason you are making this statement is that you want to imply that I am opposed to attempts to clean up the depictions of the Vistani in the material, then I will kindly ask you to stop putting words in my goddamn mouth and stop ignoring what I actually said in the original comment. Although I will fully admit I don't envy anyone the task of doing so- depicting the Vistani in a way that doesn't scream 'Romani' seems like it'd be an uphill battle to me given the overall setting of Barovia. It'd be like someone trying to convince the audience that Har'Akir isn't an egyptian setting.
"Boris Karloff was a good actor, and I loved Imhotep. He was also a very
white actor, playing someone who was from Africa. That's what they mean by Orientalism; to make a character who is supposed to be from a very specific culture and giving us only the perspective of an outsider claiming to be an insider. It wasn't his fault; it was the 1930s, even people who had the best of intentions didn't know any better. But now? From the perspective of a culture that is realizing that many of the common names that we have for the Pesedjet weren't even translations from Egyptian, but Greek (the Scroll of Thoth should really be the Scroll of Khemenu - or Sakhmet, to invoke a goddess who would actually be someone who provides eternal life), making Ankhtepot look like a mummy who actually resembles what an Egyptian would think of as someone imitating a god is the bare minimum of what to do."
I'm well aware of the criticism they were trying to level regarding ethnicity. And as I said, it was a bad criticism that wasn't applicable to Ravenloft, since no description of Ankhtepot has ever implied an ethnicity and every portrait shows him as a walking corpse with any trace of ethnicity lost under rot and bandages. Also, why would they call it anything other than the Book of Thoth? The movies are obviously based off the Ancient Egyptian story "Setne Khamwas and Naneferkaptah", and correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the life granting scroll depicted in that story written by Thoth (or Djehuty, if you prefer) and even referred to as the Book or Scroll of Thoth in the text? Also, can I assume when you say the Pesedjet you are referring to the "main" one that includes Ra, Set, Isis and Osiris...or are you talking about one of the less well known ones such as the Ogdoad you were mentioning a moment ago?
"Oh, and I can't help but notice, when defending Victor Mordenheim's masculinity, you seemed to have missed something: In OG Ravenloft, the darklord of Lamordia was the mad scientist's
monster. That's not just a waste of potential - that's outright ignoring Mary Shelly, the original creator herself. The very fact the darklord is the person who actually holds the blame seems to imply that no, if it's a chainsaw they're using, it's because they're amputating a dead limb and giving the tree more room to grow. In fact, the doctor being a woman might actually be a better Frankenstein stand-in, if you take the theory that the Monster was a metaphor for an unwanted pregnancy and parental abandonment. (Byron was a jerk.)"
Defending the character, not the gender, thank you very much (see previous comment about words and how you need to stop putting them in my goddamned mouth). Also, everything I said about Mordenheim applies to Adam as well- really, you can't have one without the other, as the curse makes abundantly clear. And if they wanted to make a new domain with a new female darklord exploring those ideas you mention, all the best to them. But that's not what they want to do. They want to erase two well established characters and replace them with two new, completely different characters. And I don't believe any reason they have for doing so could not be accomplished while still sparing the already established character from oblivion.
"Frankly, horror has evolved since the 80s and 90s. And thank God for that, even from a horror fan perspective without considering more social awareness of how awful a lot of gothic horror tropes were. We wouldn't have movies like
Get Out (the horror of "positive" racism taken to it logical extension), or
The VVitch (the ability of strictly patriarchal power structures to create their own monsters when anything else seems like a good alternative) if we didn't admit that yes, that kind of horror exists in the real world, and it's scary."
Again, this is entirely true, and again it can be done (hell, has been done!) in the setting without abandoning established concepts that make for a good story in their own right.
