Chuck Hardslab!
Sloth BeefBroth.
HE got the reference! :D
I vote for Darth Bubba!
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The Kurghan
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I'm partial to Bob.
How about Smiley?
Hunk McRunfast
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This thread is silly.
If Flea had decided to be an anti-Paladin instead of a kick-ass bassist, that's what he'd look like.
I dub him Flea.
Buck Plankchest.
HAAA!!!!! One of my favorite episodes of mst3k. I miss that show
Smash Lampjaw
Almin Star.
If Flea had decided to be an anti-Paladin instead of a kick-ass bassist, that's what he'd look like.
I dub him Flea.
Very weird how i never thought of that for a moment ever before in my life, but now, BUT NOW Kryzbyn, dear Kryzbyn IT MAKES ABYSSALLY PAINFUL PERFECT SENSE. (I look at a tortured man surrounded by do-gooders and I see Flea in all that get up. Wonder where he put Anthony Keidis....)
"Gene Simmons"?
But I too think "The Khurgan" fits best.
P.S. Cheapy: yes, inestimably silly. And both you and I are in it.
Brock F@#&ing Sampson or Baron Underbheit
Silvio B.
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Rumpelstiltskin
Merkkon Darkblade
Ive seen a pic somewhere of evil seelah
In this very thread no less:
What they should have done is just have Seelah as the Anti-PaladinHmmmm...
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Unseelah
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What they should have done is just have Seelah as the Anti-PaladinBETWEEN TOLKIEN, GYGAX, AND THAT FIEND FOLIO BRIT CONTRIBUTOR WHO GAVE US THE DROW, I'VE HAD IT UP TO HERE WITH THE CRYPTO-RACIST TROPE THAT EQUATES DARK SKIN WITH EVIL!
Whoa. While that is a pretty nasty trope, I... am pretty sure that has nothing to do with the suggestion, and everything to do with the nifty looking picture someone created that shows an alternate version of Seelah?
I mean, I'm pretty sure no one here is suggestion what you're taking as an implication at all. If they are, they should feel ashamed. Otherwise... it's a cool looking picture. I really dug it. Similarly, I dug some of the revised looks of the characters in 3.5 on occasion as well (including some very pale skinned folks sporting evil looks).
Also, at least in Golarion (and in several places in FR I've seen) brown-skinned elves are not evil in the slightest (in fact the brown wild elves of FR are the closest to nature and tend to be the most "good" from what I recall, though I could be wrong). In Golarion, at least, it's only those 'tainted' somehow (seemingly related directly to 'the black blood of Orv and/or Rovagug) that turn into drow (which, truth be told, do not look anything at all like any human ethnicity I've ever seen).
Now, if you're talking about some of the depictions in earlier editions... sure, yeah, okay. I'll bite: that stuff was pretty terri-bad in its implications. But if you accept that it's "dark skin" in any current incarnation of drow that equals evil, you've also got to accept that it's "light hair" for drow that equals evil and that means blondes (which in most human genomes I know of don't go with dark skin).
The 3.5 Blackguard.
Mialee: the evil merc, or summoning demons, take your pick.
Then, of course, there's the Pathfinder evil iconic.
Then, of course, there's the other iconic servant of a good deity (though she sometimes looks more pale than others).
The ethnicity devoted to devils, v. the ethnicity that delivered the world from the age of darkness. The first actually looks really awesome.
So, Laz, I'm pretty sure we're beyond that now in Pathfinder* (though some people obviously aren't, but that's their problem) and I don't think that's actually what's going on. I think they just thought it was a cool picture (which it is). :)
To, Numerian: *ahaem*... would you say you "can't Unseelah" it?! Dohoho!
()
* Which is great! I mean, some of the older stuff was pretty uncomfortable (and terrible). Kind of like how Paizo is awesome with women and other groups! :D
EDIT: twice - once to clarify and add a little and make a tag work, and once to note that I'd edited the first time, because I forgot to on that edit. Whoops!
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@LazarX
Please don't bring your personal baggage into a fun and friendly thread. Not everything in the world is about racism! Just because we tend to see things from a predominatly European viewpoint does not mean that there has not been slavery and racism against ALL peoples of all colors throughout history.
The way I see the take on 'evil' characters appearing darker is more of a literal manifestation of the idea that evil 'desires' the night and darkness to do its dirty work. Stemming from man's much older fear of the night and what lurks out there. Not any racist 'agenda'.
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How about Brick Hardmeat? Eh? Eh?
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This isn't the first time that it's come up. Travis Williams did an excellent editorial on the subject in White Wolf magazine. It's a serious issue because racism and misogyny in general two things we consider as on the decline in our culture are on the rise in gaming overall. I'd like to think that Paizo's authors are a cut above the rest, but Pathfinder doesn't exist in an island. We're not free from the influences that abound in the rest of the gaming medium or in media in general.
Seelah is (and I mean actually is, not just could be or might be) the iconic friggin' paladin.
Nobody at Paizo thinks dark people are bad. If you'd like to think they're a cut above, then good, because they are. Someone made a picture of the iconic paladin going anti-paladin. If Harsk was the iconic paladin (ironically) we wouldn't be having this discussion.
C'mon now!
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BETWEEN TOLKIEN, GYGAX, AND THAT FIEND FOLIO BRIT CONTRIBUTOR WHO GAVE US THE DROW, I'VE HAD IT UP TO HERE WITH THE CRYPTO-RACIST TROPE THAT EQUATES DARK SKIN WITH EVIL!
Not to step on a good rant but Gygax himself 'created' the Drow, they're Dark elves because Svartalfr (Also described as Drow in at least Poul Anderson's Translation of Hrolf Kraki's Saga) were a type of super natural creature in Norse Mythology. Svartalfr translates LITERALLY to Dark Elf, so he made them Dark Skinned Elves...
So your argument is essentially that since the Vikings were slaving murderous bastards who viewed dark skinned races with prejudice, that excuses the the racism of everyone who came afterward.
Vikings were actually fairly tolerant of other races and creeds, being far traveled traders and explorers rather then just raiders. Yes they raided neighbors for gold, goods and slaves, but no more or less then most of there Christian neighbors, they just got a bad rap cause they raided the churches(Where the gold was) rather then offing the peasantry (farmers had little worth taking). You want some real murderous bastards look up some things on The Black Prince written by the French...
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As we've talked about in other threads, Paizo tries to represent people of all physical appearances, orientations, and genders in a variety of different roles, alignments, professions, etc.
There is a lot of inherited RPG baggage (e.g. half-orcs are always the result of rape, the "cursed" girdle of masculinity/femininity, etc.) that can be offensive or exclusionary to some people. (There's some fascinating -- and in some cases, moving -- discussion in the Homosexuality in Golarion thread, for example, about why various occupants of Golarion might not see a belt that changes your gender as "cursed" at all.) In some cases we're all aware of it, and there are conversations going on about whether to retcon it out somehow, whether to find ways to change it and incorporate the change within the evolving world of Pathfinder, whether just not to use it in our materials, etc. In other cases it might be something we run across when we're double-checking a continuity question, or because it gets brought up here on the forums, and so on.
In the case of skin color, as with gender and sexual orientation, we try to make sure that characters with dark skin are represented in a spectrum of ways. In addition to Seelah as a paladin (a class whose inspiration is probably tied most strongly to white Christian male knights) -- a black woman in the most restrictively good role -- there's some stuff in the upcoming Chronicles of the Righteous in which a partially African-inspired, dark-skinned character is the one responsible for discovering and passing on knowledge of angelic magic. Those are two of the most unambiguously virtuous positions I can think of for a character.
I don't think the drow are likely to go away, any more than half-orcs or tieflings or any other standard fantasy race, but I do think a lot of care has been taken to ensure that they don't resemble any Earth ethnicity. We also have blue-skinned, white-skinned, and green-skinned humanoid-looking creatures that are evil -- I'm not sure we should totally write out black, red, yellow, white, etc. skintones for various creatures just because those color terms have been used to describe different real-world peoples. I do believe that saying a particular race or creature is (almost always) evil and always has a particular skin color is something we should be careful about, but that's different from just flat-out not doing it.
That's not to say that there isn't room to improve, or that it's not worth pointing out if you see a trend toward portraying a real-world physical characteristic as automatically evil or good. But I do think Paizo's portrayal of dark-skinned characters is a lot more complex and nuanced than "dark = bad."
But in any case:
The topic of the thread is the name of the iconic antipaladin. Whether there's a trope of "dark skin = bad" that's getting supported or overused in the presentation of the drow (Seelah's not an antipaladin, she's a paladin, so the idea that she somehow supports that trope reads as strange to me), etc. is a topic for a different thread. If you want to talk about dark-skinned characters portrayed as evil in RPGs, and whether that is a trope we should be avoiding, please find or start an appropriate thread for it. Thanks!
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there's some stuff in the upcoming Chronicles of the Righteous in which a partially African-inspired, dark-skinned character is the one responsible for discovering and passing on knowledge of angelic magic.Jatembe! :D
Jatembe?! :D
Perhaps naming him Cav McThighcep?