cryogen wrote: ↑3 years ago
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Whether the art glorifies racism is a completely unrelated topic, imo, from the artist's personal views. There's no duck to look or quack like except the art itself, and I don't see it quacking personally. Willing to be wrong.
Still, whether you want to argue the card itself is meant to be glorifying racism or speaking against it (which I'm done doing at this point), that doesn't excuse a very poor decision by WotC to invoke real life imagery with an extremely negative connotation.
I don't remember you making any arguments about why the art glorifies racism. Can you point me to them? (of course, I mean the art not the artist)
Sorry you experienced a minor inconvenienced because you don't have to deal with systematic racism on a daily basis or think about how the game you love playing is at best so apathetic or at worst glorifying it to the extent that even when confronted with being shown that a card with Klansmen on it, drawn by a neonazi, and assigned a number associated to Nazis, that they STILL refused to take any action to make even the simple change of assigning a new Gatherer ID number?
1) It's a $250 card that I may never be able to sell. That's not a trivial amount of money. If you woke up and found that you'd lost $250 out of nowhere, you'd be within your rights to be pissed.
2) Trivializing problems because they aren't the #1 biggest problem ever is extremely dismissive. There's a huge swath of people that argue "people can't be oppressed by racism today, because segregation was real racism - anyone complaining about racism today is just being a whiner and they should get over it." so maybe be careful with that line of "other people have it worse" reasoning. I think I'm allowed to be bothered that I've lost a significant amount of money without getting trivialized for it, just because "other people have it worse". There are always other people who have it worse, that doesn't make problems go away. Problems are still problems.
3) I guess I'm just rehashing this point, but I don't see how the art itself is glorifying racism, any more than, say, reanimate glorifies necromancy. Willing to be proven wrong.
4) If I got to choose how wotc handled this, personally this is what I think would have been best:
-don't make a big deal about it with an announcement that brings all these cards back into the public consciousness and makes it look like you're trying to score points.
-instead of having a piss-weak "this card is racist so it isn't part of magic" message, how about an apology that actual admits fault instead of just deciding it doesn't exist anymore.
-make a sizeable donation to something that actually matters, so your actual money is on the line.
-improve company culture - of course this could still theoretically happen, but maybe consider at least having a plan to show, so that it doesn't look like you're doing nothing except dicking over a few collectors so you can shirk responsibility for doing something more difficult and meaningful.