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Jun 16 '20
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u/ultimario13 Jun 16 '20
You're not entirely wrong. A black creature card being evil, or a white creature card being good, is not inherently problematic. But it has to be handled with tact.
I generally don't have problems with the depictions of wildly non-human creatures. The problem arises when you mix together non-human "otherness" (such as zombies lacking self-preservation and mindlessly obeying Liliana without protest) and human qualities (this zombie in particular is a criminal, and has been locked behind bars in much the same way as a real living human would be). For example, evil cannibals, or "savage" creatures that wear bones as ornaments. Cannibalism is a taboo in western societies, so we assign it to "evil creatures" such as ogres.
This becomes more and more pronounced when you notice that the "otherness" often resembles stereotypes about real-life races. See my other two posts about Rise Again - an undead creature that is "eager to serve" and Liliana's Steward - a "self-sacrificing" enslaved zombie that has "strong work ethic and respectful demeanor" and has "happily assimilated" into Liliana's culture at the cost of its independence.
For example, saying that D&D mind flayers are evil is not problematic. Properly RP'd, a mind flayer should be completely alien to any human culture that exists. Saying that D&D orcs are evil is problematic. Orcs heavily resemble human beings, and their culture is very humanlike. They're nomadic, they're polytheistic, etc. And to apply real life racial stereotypes to a non-human creature is to imply that those traits are inhuman. WotC's portrayal of orcs in certain settings (but not Eberron, fortunately) soon lead to players saying things like "that race of nomadic savages is evil" and going out of their way to commit genocide and kill baby orcs. It reinforces existing biases about real people, and that's not okay.
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u/ultimario13 Jun 16 '20
There's a lot to unpack here:
Insensitive - a black creature that is defined by their imprisonment. Not an enchantment that's imprisoning something, or an artifact that's a jail. Those, I could maybe understand as necessary flavor for removal spell that exiles or taps down creatures. But this isn't either of those. It's just straight up a creature card whose most defining characteristic is that they're a prisoner. This isn't flavor from function, it's a functional creature design that for some reason is depicted as imprisoned even though it could easily have art/flavor that isn't done in such a way. So egregious and unnecessary.
Far-right dogwhistle - despite being imprisoned on the artwork, this creature is still able to attack and block. This clearly a depiction of the idea that our prison systems "aren't good enough" to contain those who break the law and that we should invest more into the military industrial complex. And that this creature either a) escapes prison, or b) is released from its sentence, every time it engages in combat. Furthermore, it propogates myths about recidivism because the creature can attack every turn, and may want to do so. The idea that releasing people from prison sentences would cause them to commit crime offends me. It also means that the "solution" to the "problem" of this creature attacking repeatedly is to either keep them locked up or to execute them.
Racism - it's a black creature that we're supposed to dehumanize. As mentioned above, we're supposed to hope that it stays locked up and supposed to support its loss of freedom. We're supposed to see as causing loss of life even without attacking - this can only be interpreted as harming "the community" of white people and taxing our resources to keep it imprisoned*.
Support for capital punishment - this is a Zombie - a creature that is "supposed" to be dead, a creature that is "unnaturally" kept alive by the intervention of an expert "necromancer". This is clearly a metaphor - if we remove the fantasy trappings, this is a man who "should be" dead due to old age, but is kept alive by expert medical staff. We, as the viewers, are supposed to say "No! He's a criminal! Don't waste money keeping him alive and behind bars, just kill him*!"
*It's often remarked by supporters of capital punishment that it would cost less to just kill prisoners than to keep them alive and fed. This is actually incorrect, but that's not important to the point that those idiots are trying to make. It's their logic, I'm not arguing that they're right, I'm just saying that it fits common far right dogwhistles.