Oswald de Andrade caricature by Ramon Muniz, d20 art by James Hodges, hastily put together on Paint by me
The Anthropophagic Manifesto, from about a century ago, proposes that Brazil’s history of “cannibalizing” other cultures is its greatest strength. I would argue this is hardly an unique thing to Brazil, rather, a very common approach to culture from most of the global south, and even beyond.
It contrasts greatly with the usual gringo land protestant view of culture, which separates everything into what comes from us, and therefore, clean, holy and just, and what comes from the other, therefore dirty, unholy, sinful, that should never be touched by the righteous, else they become tainted by it.
We see the friction from these two different world views all the time in TTRPG discourse. I’m not shy about my bias, I eat people, so this whole thing is going to be heavily biased towards an anthropophagic view point. I will go as far as claiming the protestant viewpoint is a tool of oppression, meant to divide minorities, keep them in their place and punish if they ever attempt leaving it.
I could probably write a whole essay about how fucked up it was back when a bunch of randos wrote a Ghibli inspired supplement, and so half of the indie TTRPG space went “culture is owned by blood!!!”. Don’t get me wrong, when someone releases a cash grabbing 5e supplement, you’re all free to talk shit about it, but holy crap, don’t imply the global south needs to bow down and ask permission to ever mess with something Japanese, or worse, imply (or sometimes outright say) that it can only be done if there’s a Japanese person working on it. No, just no, Japanese culture is not especially sacred, none is, draw Ghibli characters fucking each other for all I care, I’m pretty sure Miyazaki would have a nice laugh out of it.
Not to say that the concept of cultural appropriation is simply complete bullshit, it does make sense in some very specific contexts, especially when you’re taking something out of a gravely endangered culture that is under risk of being gone in a couple generations if not actively protected. Miyazaki ain’t that, he is old, rich, and laughing at you, constantly, as he should.
But we’re not here to talk about that today, today we are talking D&D.
Quick note on terminology
By D&D here, I mean D&D as a cultural phenomenon, so it abso-fucking-lutely doesn’t mean D&D 5e in particular, why would it? Y’all fucking weird for having accepted that weird WotC propaganda.
It includes the Black Box, 3e, BECMI, what-have-you, and other forked games that could reasonably be called D&D, colloquially. So things like OSE, Pathfinder 1e, Brazilian games like Old Dragon, and yes, even bloody Tormenta.
Anthropophagy and D&D
It can be argued that D&D culture is inherently anthropophagic to a degree, and always has been. It was always a collage of different cultural influences, even before release, or even written down. As time went on and it became oral tradition, the more true this became.
And true it was here in the global south, where cultural influences were not always the same, or had the same impact. Here in Brazil sword and sorcery wasn’t that hot of a genre, the kind of science fantasy that Vance and his brethren wrote was nearly unheard of. Yet, the 80’s cartoon was released before the game did, becoming our beloved Caverna do Dragão, Tolkien was still strong around general geekdom, and we had our stories and myths to fill in the voids. We could see a part of our syncretic selves in the pantheistic worlds presented to us, the tension of different faiths trying to work together at the same time weren’t unknown, not at all. We to this day insert a tension in our fantasy faiths that still turns some gringo heads, to our amusement. Anime and Tokusatsu showed up here with force decades earlier, and they did it RAW, with no adaptation, as gloriously and explicitly Japanese as they could get, we had no use lying to our children that oniguiris were donuts. They knew other cultures and other peoples existed, they had no reason not to.
And now, we have to put up with you gringos, screaming on every social about how D&D was originally created by one dead racist fuck, and therefore it is tainted, sinful, if we interact with it, we become sinful as well. Bitches, most of our culture was taken from this kind of fuck, those who were not simply racist, but attempted to erase us, to claim we don’t really exist as a people, that we are nothing, own nothing, and therefore deserve nothing. We pried it all from their dead hands, we ate them, we digested them, turned them into something new and call it our own.
Why would it be any different with D&D?
Worse of all, y’all see us here having fun with our caves and our dragons and you have the gall to believe that we are ignorant of it, that you need to lecture us, in our supposed infantile third worlder naiveté, about how dirty, tainted and sinful it is. We couldn’t have possibly found thoughtful and meaningful ways of incorporating that in our culture. Oh no, they sure simply don’t know, those poor blank slate souls, so inferior to our cultured, informed, rational and moral stance on the world.
News flash, we know, we know that 90% of everything that comes from you is garbage, it always has been, that didn’t start in 1974, hasn’t stopped and shows no sign of ever slowing down. we know how to turn waste into compost, we had to if we ought to survive, so we, quite literally, made art out of it.