Comment by danaris

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Comment by danaris

Part of the problem, as always, is what types of people and activities are defined as "political".

Particularly in an office or other "respectable" setting, you've got people who are white, and people who are political.

You've got people who are straight, and people who are political.

You've got executives who are men, and executives who are political.

And so on.

What and whom one chooses to include in stories, and what ones chooses to leave out—and, perhaps even more importantly, what one includes and leaves out without even thinking about it, are, by their very nature, political.

I'm also reminded of the Dungeons and Dragons group I heard about, whose DM made one very simple change to the published adventure path. The players were going through the towns, and finding them filled with women. The other adventurers were women. The blacksmiths were women. Even the prominent goblins in the dungeon were female! The taverns had a couple of men in them, but apart from that, there were seemingly nearly no men in the entire world. The players were convinced there was something deeply sinister going on.

But all that had happened was that the DM reversed the gender of every NPC written into the adventure. An adventure full of men, that no one would have batted an eye at, suddenly caused shock and suspicion when it had exactly the same percentage of women instead.

So: was the original adventure author "political" for the gender ratio they put into it?

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