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[Tack]

Never submitted a quote for consideration in IT's yearbook.
Couldn't remember the one I really wanted. Have now.

"A man chooses."
-Andrew Ryan

[scrdest]

Mind you there was a bad writer who took the lovecraftian gods and tried to make a good versus evil sort of thing...

Yeah, that was massively, massively stupid. The main issue was that writer (Derleth) also happens to have been 99% of the reason the original stories survived. That he attributed his fanfics to Lovecraft a bunch of times... didn't help.

[ChairmanPoo]

I mean, I knew Howard (the author) was racist going in, but I didn't think it'd show this blatantly in the story.

Oh hells yeah, Howard was racist. If you think those first couple stories are bad, just wait until you get to any of the ones set in the far southern Black Kingdoms (south of Stygia, the land where swarthy big-nosed people worship evil snake gods in giant pyramids).

Howard was doing the 'alternate earth history' thing with those stories, and he had some odd ideas about how humans progressed and regressed. He wrote a brief historical overview somewhere about the history of his world pre-Conan, and it's full of various groups of humans developing cultures and civilizations and then being torn apart by wars or other events and devolving back into apes - for example, early groups of humans who moved further and further north, becoming more warlike in the harsh arctic environment and eventually devolving into a species of aggressive heavy-furred ape. And the more advanced and civilized his humans are, the whiter they are. *shrug* 

It's worth noting that Conan himself is from Cimmeria, a gloomy land full of uncivilized and rather violent people, so Howard wasn't necessarily praising high culture and order as the best thing, but damned if he didn't like writing darker folks as evil half-human half-ape monstrosities.

Not quite true. There were plenty of good and intelligent dark skinned characters in Conan. And southern civilizations populated by dark skinned people too. True, most of these civilizations were evil, but thats also true of the northern ones.  The  main difference seems to be that southern civilizations tend to be ruled by evil wizards or cults, and northern ones tend to be decadent and corrupt empires.

[Yoink]

I seem to recall Conan having a bunch of dark-skinned pals in the graphic novel adaptation I read, but then, adaptation.

[Dunamisdeos]

So hey, I posted a story a while back about TOBNOM, HYDRA GOD.

The same fort is still going on, but soon after my last post a dwarf was possessed and made to work the bones of Tobnom into a chest. It has been designated a reliquary.

Also, there are now multiple worshippers of Tobnom in the military. All of them are legendary 20.

Anyway, is there a way to DFhack your fort a new name? I need to name it TOBNOM FORT.

::EDIT::
Also, Conan had lots of non-white buds. In fact he primarily ran with them exclusively until he became king of the white people in Aquilonia.

The only white guy friend I remember at all was that blonde Fabio looking Scottish guy who became a zombie.

[Teneb]

::EDIT::
Also, Conan had lots of non-white buds. In fact he primarily ran with them exclusively until he became king of the white people in Aquilonia.

The only white guy friend I remember at all was that blonde Fabio looking Scottish guy who became a zombie.

Yeah, but in every single case he was the automatic and natural leader. ... and Howard still went out of his way to make them look like primitives, just nice ones.

[Dunamisdeos]

::EDIT::
Also, Conan had lots of non-white buds. In fact he primarily ran with them exclusively until he became king of the white people in Aquilonia.

The only white guy friend I remember at all was that blonde Fabio looking Scottish guy who became a zombie.

Yeah, but in every single case he was the automatic and natural leader. ... and Howard still went out of his way to make them look like primitives, just nice ones.

Conan was the automatic leader of everything he touched. He was Conan. That was like, his superpower. Stygians weren't primitives, they were just ultra-evil. They weren't even all black. Thoth-Amon was totes a white guy in most visual depictions. Kalanthes of Ibis was also quite the refined personage, and he was black.

The only ones I can think of that fit that bill perfectly were the Picts, who were in fact all illiterate black jungle savages.

Also someone mentioned that the more advanced and civilized you got the whiter you got in Conan. You're missing the point of those stories. All of those people who were refined and advanced were usually the actual "barbarians" of the story. There's always some group or person who seems primitive or savage, and then the advanced white people (usually some kind of wizard or mad scientist) prove themselves to be the real evil by the end. Specifically the Hyperboreans were immortal, ultrawhite Michael-Jackson looking folks, and while it seemed like paradise at first it turns out they are an amoral self-righteous pack of bastards by the end.

I ain't saying that the author wasn't racist. I don't know jack about him as a person. But Conan was super not-racist as a character, and always managed to overcome racial differences to succeed.

I did not mean to write this wall of text.

Also I hope this doesn't turn nasty, this is an interesting discussion to me.

[Rolan7]

The only ones I can think of that fit that bill perfectly were the Picts, who were in fact all illiterate black jungle savages.

...Named Picts??
Not sure if intentional irony or lazy name collision.
Thanks for the wall of text, though, sometimes I forget how rich the Conan mythos is.

[TempAcc]

If anything, conan was a fair bit more "progressive" than other comic book heroes of the time. Literally all of his best friends and allies were non-white, and conan was legitimally pissed off when his mongol-eske friend got killed in a battle he also expected to die in, making sure to take revenge in an specially awesome way. Conan himself wasn't stereotypically white either, having black hair and a face that I sometimes saw as more native american than caucasian. They changed the art a bit after the arnold movie in order to make him look more like arnold.

[Dunamisdeos]

The only ones I can think of that fit that bill perfectly were the Picts, who were in fact all illiterate black jungle savages.

...Named Picts??
Not sure if intentional irony or lazy name collision.
Thanks for the wall of text, though, sometimes I forget how rich the Conan mythos is.

Lol, yeah Picts. Anyway they do fit the bill of super stereotypical offensive rage-native, but they sort of fill the niche as a universal bad guy, and not a deliberate example of the ethnicity (IMHO).

http://conan.wikia.com/wiki/Picts

If anything, conan was a fair bit more "progressive" than other comic book heroes of the time. Literally all of his best friends and allies were non-white, and conan was legitimally pissed off when his mongol-eske friend got killed in a battle he also expected to die in, making sure to take revenge in an specially awesome way. Conan himself wasn't stereotypically white either, having black hair and a face that I sometimes saw as more native american than caucasian. They changed the art a bit after the arnold movie in order to make him look more like arnold.

I felt this way, too. It was more subtle about it, but it seemed to be very anti-racism to me.

[TempAcc]

Yea, I mean, old conan was basically this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

After the movie, he became this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Both pretty awesome, but quite different.

[Sergarr]

Apparently SVR (Russian CIA) recruits from my university for a job of "nuclear specialist".

That is something I did not expect to be a thing.

[Kot]

You too can press The Button and cause the nuclear holocuast!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Compare her and Tyrion's solutions to Slaver's Bay.

The sad part is, Tyrion's solution didn't work. Denerys's somehow has.

Dany's previous actions sort of made Tyrion's solution impossible. Had the phase out been offered after conquest in exchange for their allegiance, it probably would have worked. Her immediately freeing the slaves and crucifying hundreds of masters made the rest terrified they'd end up the same way.

Not that the dragon solution would typically work in real life... Deny might be powerful but she lacks one thing in particular... Micromanagement...

Luckily she lives in a fantasy world where no actual issue will befall her. Just made up ones.

You'd be surprised how well proving your capacity for unstoppable mass murder over and over again tends to get people to comply on their own, even without micro.

[Amperzand]

Apparently SVR (Russian CIA) recruits from my university for a job of "nuclear specialist".

That is something I did not expect to be a thing.

That uh, that is interesting.