The former lead designer of D&D 5e, Mike Mearls has been doing a bit of a vlog tour lately about what he feels are the failings of the system he designed and his opinions regarding the 2024 revamp of said rules. During one stop on that tour, Mearls stated that he believed that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) had decided to eschew the construction of setting in the 2024 revamp in favor of more complicated mechanics because they were concerned about political blow-back.

But of course there was blow-back. There were extensive complaints from the right regarding the visual art throughout the book. The art contained too many black people, too many physically disabled people, too many fat people, too many old people, too many gay looking bards. There was blow-back regarding the exclusion of orcs from the monster manual and there were complaints about “Mexican Orcs.”

I cannot know whether Mearls is correct or incorrect in his analysis of WotC’s motives. But what I can say is that if a person believed they could escape the scrutiny of politicization of pop culture by leaving out any suggestions regarding culture then they didn’t look enough at how the far-right associates with visual art in particular.

Walter Benjamin asserted that a key characteristic of fascism was to aestheticize politics. He asserted the Marxist response should be to politicize aesthetics. Now what Benjamin, an art critic and a political philosopher, meant was that the fascist project looked at politics as an aesthetic project – their political actions were a series of aesthetic gestures – such as trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico or threatening to send the FBI after Hockey referees. Even the most abhorent of fascist acts were largely justified on aesthetic grounds, calling the targets of persecution ugly, subhuman, degenerate.

As a result, the far-right remain very alert to “degeneracy” in art.

It’s very obvious, particularly from the art direction in the Player’s Handbook that WotC wanted to suggest “people like you” play Dungeons and Dragons. A vast variety of body types are displayed in artwork of player characters, in particular, so that any given reader can find someone Like Them in the book.

This works incredibly well. When I was reading through the Player’s Handbook, my daughter, who plays D&D rarely and always an elf druid, looked at the gnome illusionist and said, “That’s me.” This self-recognition is clearly the moment WotC were seeking with their art direction. They want Dungeons and Dragons to be a big tent that lots of different people will buy. But, for the far-right, they will identify these aesthetic others as being “not me” and will prioritize that. Observing the change to orcs from a horde of monsters that can be killed without moral interrogation to “Mexicans” likewise plays into far-right fears in North America regarding the otherness of Latin American people. Right wing preoccupation with being morally disallowed by contemporary culture to deny humanity to the real-world human other is reflected in what they observe as a moral disallowance to deny humanity to the textual, inhuman, other. Unfortunately the only way to square the problem of wanting “this is me” art without upsetting the far-right requires an art director to only include “me” images that would not be treated as othered by the far-right. A book depicting the player character as an interchangeable set of straight, able, white men would not sell as many copies of course, especially not in a set of books that were marketed so much on the quality of the art within them.

As such the exclusion of culture does nothing to actually appease the right-wing commentariat. Nor would any gesture short of complete capitulation to the far-right. I do think that a more likely reason for the exclusion of explicit setting elements (aside from a brief sample setting of Grayhawk in the DMG) is so that they can sell more books later. We know, for instance, that Eberron and Faerûn setting guides are scheduled for release later this year. These cultural / setting elements can be portioned out across these subsequent books, increasing the likelihood that DMs who want to know, “OK but what is elf culture really like” can buy a book for that specific question. “Preorder now on D&D Beyond!” (All I can say is that I hope Ed Greenwood gets a payday for the Faerûn book.)

This sort of DLC mentality isn’t a good thing of course. But I do think it squares the circle of visual art that was guaranteed to offend the far-right with the absence of text that would offend them better than the assumption that everyone just missed what the art directors were getting up to.