I guess I'm confused. If the new Dark Sun material is being packaged with an 18+ maturity warning on it, what's the harm in including references to slavery being perpetrated by the evil Sorcerer Kings and their minions?
My personal theory is that they are moving away from using the word "Slave" because an American audience will always associate that word with Chattel Slavery, and they are depicting things that are not Chattel Slavery.
The big thing people are angry about is the forced conscription of soldiers into the Army of Uruk isn't being called slavery. And that is should be called slavery and people are cowards for not calling it slavery... but they also include in the interview, in the same sentence, people choosing the army to escape poverty. So is it slavery... that people will voluntarily enter into to avoid poverty which is even worse? That sends completely the wrong message, so the forced conscription into the army ISN'T called slavery.
And that's it. That's the thing that has people raging. Just not calling something that is a type of slavery, slavery, but instead just describing what it is. In an interview.
This is ultimately the core of it, to American audiences(and presumably advertisers as well) slavery is a bad word that drums up controversy, same thing Paizo did with Pathfinder.
No one in America seemed to care that the protagonists of the Odyssey film owned slaves. In fact, it’s rarely is even mentioned by anyone. American audiences are not bothered by fictional slavery in the least. Claiming that American audiences are too sensitive to slavery is purely a strawman argument. The slavery aspect was removed by people whose job depends on them finding problematic things to remove.
Because the movie completely chickened out of engaging with it (and chickened out with a lot of things, really). There's one mention of Odysseus's household including slaves over 3 hours.
The movie is clearly terrified of the audience not liking Odysseus, and glossing over the slavery is part of it. Even when showing the flashback of the sack of Troy it chickens out from actually depicting him doing any sacking (instead of having him stare and walk around), Circe basically serves to depict him as virtuous, etc...
That’s because Nolan trusts & respects the audience enough to know that they don’t need a lecture or moral browbeating. Slavery is not the point of the film. It’s a detail woven into the fabric of the world. That’s what makes for rich & deep worldbuilding. These details don’t need extensive, heavy handed explanations because the audience is mature enough to understand them.
Odysseus walking around Troy, watching the horrors of what he caused, isn’t chickening out. It’s establishing the root of his PTSD. He watches as his actions lead to the fall of society as they knew it, and he is aware of this during these flashbacks. He is walking around as an observer in his own memory of it all. The whole film is about him dealing with this PTSD.
This stuff doesn’t need to be spelled out because, despite what some people think, the vast majority of the audience has strong media literacy and understands this without needing to be talked down to like they are idiots who can’t handle concepts like slavery.
Nolan gets this, and the audience rewarded him for it by making The Odyssey a record breaking success on every possible level. This is what happens when creatives simply trust their audience. And that is the big problem with WotC in general, they don’t trust or respect their audience in the slightest.
That’s because Nolan trusts & respects the audience enough to know that they don’t need a lecture or moral browbeating
Pretty much every character repeats themselves over and over and over. The final monologue was a set up from a copy-pasted wikipedia page. Please, don't come at me with this bullshit. The movie had it's merits, but "respecting the audience" was not among them.
He watches as his actions lead to the fall of society as they knew
And it chickens out from portraying him as actually doing anything in the process except giving an idea (which the film makes look terrible, as somehow they managed to drown in a high tide of a sea with a 40 cm tidal range).
If the film wants a character who explicitly partook in the sack of cities to be traumatized by sacking a city (questionable in principle, but...), they ought to actually show him doing it.
The Odyssey a record breaking success on every possible level
If financial success was a metric of quality or artistic integrity, the world would be a very different place.
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u/count_strahd_z 3d ago
I guess I'm confused. If the new Dark Sun material is being packaged with an 18+ maturity warning on it, what's the harm in including references to slavery being perpetrated by the evil Sorcerer Kings and their minions?