tending-toward-silence:ayellowbirds: theoutcastrogue:epicdndmemes:A love letter to DnD. Comment here
tending-toward-silence:ayellowbirds: theoutcastrogue:epicdndmemes:A love letter to DnD. Comment here. Reddit thread: “To the children who’s parents participated in the satanic panic of the 80’s/90’s, what are your stories?”. And the PHB photo: It’s honestly hard to express just how endemic this was when i was little. You could not talk about D&D (to say nothing of other RPGs), video games, fantasy fiction, et cetera in a space with strangers because there would inevitably be at least one kid, parent, or Concerned Adult who would give you stern warnings about the danger of it. Even in more liberal and religiously diverse places, there was this huge segment of the population that was convinced there was a real and active danger of being victimized by satanic cults.You can kind of see the nods to it in some media of the time; X-Files touches on it here and there, for example. But if y’all ever wonder why older fans can seem so evasive about our interest… it’s because of this. Even in the southern NY suburbs i grew up in, it wasn’t unheard of to know kids who were suddenly pulled out of social groups, after school activities, any contact with friends at all by parents who wanted to reeducate them and keep them away from the imaginary danger of devil worshipping murder-cults. And everyone knew (but didn’t talk about) at least one kid who got a lot worse than that when their parents caught them having the wrong kind of interests. I grew up on the tail end of this bullshit, but it was still pretty bad in the early 90s at least in the deep south. I’m forever grateful for having a mother who was an old school geek who would have just been happy her quiet and awkward children were expressing interest in social activity even if she wasn’t. She actually lost her close friend of over a decade because said ‘friend’ told her she was leading us to the devil by letting us play tabletop games and read fantasy novels. I’ve rarely seen my mom as mad as she was then. She stood up as tall as 5`5`` could take her, looked that lady straight in the eyes and told her she was a gullible fool and had no right to tell her how to raise her own children. And that was the end of that. Afterwards she took me and my brother out for ice cream and told us we were not to listen to anyone who ever tried to tell us there was anything wrong with our hobbies. -- source link