14 ms·

The 1980s Media Panic over Dungeons and Dragons (2016)

114 points by jedwhite 5y ago

themodelplumber 5y ago
I enjoyed the article, thanks. > They were wearing silken robes in pale, iridescent colors, and every one of them looked just like him. That made me laugh. Other than that it sounded more like a self-hypnosis script overall. I could see people using it to get better rest...maybe even navigate a really hard day. IMO it's OK to involve fantasy that really works on that awkward self-hate/self-love dichotomy. I have been reading some of Palladium Books' RPGs from the era lately. They all have notices disclaiming the occult, loudly proclaiming they are just a game, etc. Personally I was raised by religious fundamentalists who would rather let me buy GDW's Twilight:2000 and dream of nuclear combat than get into the dragon fantasy & magic stuff. And dad was very highly educated...it's weird to think about this now but I guess even Aum Shinrikyo had recruited a bunch of amazing Ph.D.s, doctors, etc. The exception to the rule was if I was trying to get someone to go to church with me. Then I could play their dragon games all I wanted (the 'darkest' among my friends were more into GURPS though). My goal according to my parents was to make them feel accepted, then they'd give it all up and get involved in church! I was later able to leverage this strange missionary-minded satanic-approval into the purchase of a bunch of Led Zeppelin cassette tapes, which warped me forever. TTRPGs are still a lot of fun though. I mean just yesterday I was using [1] again, can hardly believe that amazing resource exists. 1. https://travellermap.com/ https://travellermap.com/
hprotagonist 5y ago
it’s a straight line from this to QAnon. in many cases, it’s the same people.
- sillyquiet 5y ago
  I mean, moral panics are thing across the whole political continuum. Conspiracy theories aren't always based in moral panic, and moral panics aren't always about a conspiracy.
  - spacemanmatt 5y ago
    I am not that well-versed on moral panics. What are examples of moral panics on the "left" (American interpretation) end of the spectrum?
    - atlantas 5y ago
      Free speech. Strangely that has somehow inverted in recent years. It wasn't long ago that censorship was the domain of the right who were in a panic about what's acceptable speech and actively trying to police it.
      - spacemanmatt 5y ago
        I'm not tracking a free speech panic in recent memory. Care to be more specific?
        atlantas 5y ago
        "master branch" and "grandfathered code" and "sanity check" are just a few of the terms suddenly deemed unacceptable. Joe Rogan says dangerous things and must be silenced. Who is a Bernie supporter smeared as alt-right for saying unapproved things. All kinds of campus panics about "unsafe" words and ideas. One example is a professor that said a word that sounds like another word during a lecture. It made some students uncomfortable and the professor was put on immediate leave. People being cancelled for jokes they made a decade ago. It just goes on and on.
        Dracophoenix 5y ago
        >All kinds of campus panics about "unsafe" words and ideas. One example is a professor that said a word that sounds like another word during a lecture. While this is much more common now, it's not new either. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo_incident
- spacemanmatt 5y ago
  Yeah, this is what a witch hunt looks like and they're still at it. Because there are no witches.
  - Lendal 5y ago
    I was never allowed to play D&D back in the 80's. My mom believed witchcraft existed and I was never able to convince her otherwise after a lifetime of arguing and so many psychological strategies. She recently died, taking her ignorance with her to the grave. You can't convince these people. The "marketplace of ideas" is a failure. It doesn't work. Some wounds never heal. Once someone gets some stupid and wrong idea in their brain they will never be free of it. Like lead poisoning, it will never go away.
    - spacemanmatt 5y ago
      Much agreed. The marketplace of ideas is not immune to being treated as a public dump.
      - krapp 5y ago
        I've never understood why people believe the marketplace of ideas is the only marketplace that shouldn't be regulated. We don't allow companies to sell poison and call it medicine under the belief that rational, self-interested consumers will always choose medicine even if the poison is sweeter. Yet we have to allow disinformation and lies to spread like an untreated cancer and just hope that somehow the truth will prevail.
        psyc 5y ago
        Whether something is poison is relatively objective. Whether something is disinformation or lies is often a matter of perspective or too difficult to determine. Furthermore, the control of information is about power and manipulation just as disinfo is, which is a can of worms I'm not prepared to write an essay on right now, and does not exist in your poison analogy.
- brimble 5y ago
  Complete with thinking normal businesses are somehow involved in crazy underground child-sex cults. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic [EDIT] That is, it's a trait shared by the '80s moral panic, and by "Pizza Gate" Qanoners.
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  Absolutely. QAnon is a conspiracy theory singularity, and the very same ideas that were running rampant in the 80s--particularly satantic ritual abuse--are represented in the QAnon movement today.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    The same people, even.
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article, not the panic): The 1980s Media Panic Over Dungeons and Dragons - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11225579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11225579 - March 2016 (130 comments)
rolph 5y ago
i survived it, but correlation is not causation. there is a group of people that had no cool, and were subjected to constant duress, i was shocked going to my first D&D session and seeing all these kids there together. the game didnt cause the dysfunction, it was already present. one of the worst insults one could hear from the cool crowd was along the lines of being: "such a morphadite, that you have to play D&D by yourself" i almost forgot to mention, that was about the time we started spinning vinyl records backward by hand to decrypt the subliminal programming messages, of destruction and damnation
kazinator 5y ago
There is something conspicuously missing in this article that deserves a mention: fantasy themes were also prominently featured in some kinds of heavy metal music (basically, still are), which is something that also raised the ire of conservative parents. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lvs2FzF64o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lvs2FzF64o Also, some times fantasy themes appeared in metal videos, even if the content of the song had nothing to do with it. I believe the bands or their promoters were just playing into this to piss of the parents (even more). For example, Mötley Crüe's video for "Looks That Kill": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wPHxQMgdKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wPHxQMgdKs Mötley Crüe was basically just a party band: more about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, than about any fantasy nonsense. The song "Shout at the Devil" on the same-named album, and the Satanic imagery and whatnot, was almost certainly likewise just to piss of conservative Christian parents.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Mötley Crüe? Soft lads. There was an issue of Warhammer that had a flexi-disc with a thrash metal track: "Blood for the Blood God" by Sabbat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39sAIzrbmk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39sAIzrbmk8 Which is best described as "magnificently unlistenable" [0] I got the flexidisc to play only a couple of times, and mercifully never in the presence of my mother (who was also an RE teacher, though not the one I mention in my other comment) [0] to repurpose a review quote that was on the shrinkwrap cover of Guns by the British indie-prog-punk-marvel, Cardiacs
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    GW must have specifically designed the Warhammer RPG/canon to match the nightmares of religious parents. When we found it, we were done with D&D. Now we had a table to roll on to find out specifically what our critical hit did to the enemy in gory detail.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      Warhammer (and to some extent the Fighting Fantasy universe) was also funnier -- more irreverent, bleaker humour, more provocative. Anyone who was offended by the content was doubly offended by the trolling. While one of my secondary school teachers was telling us we were dabbling with the occult, another (a beloved english teacher) enjoyed the imagination of it and wanted to be taught how to play Chaos Marauders so that he wouldn't lose to his nephew.
sillyquiet 5y ago
This is why D&D was kind of underground where I lived in the rural south as a kid in the 80s and early 90s, and that's on top of of the very severe social stigma associated with it and other 'nerd' activities. At least Trekkies, when outed, weren't accused of Satanism.
andrewstuart 5y ago
Times have certainly changed when the media panic was about D&D instead of war, pandemic, existential environmental change and the future of democracy. Though back then the threat of nuclear war hung over everyone all the time, so maybe not so different.
csdvrx 5y ago
My favorite quote applies again, if you consider games one of the technologies: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Mazes and Monsters is quite the trip down memory lane. I vividly remember being told that my interest in Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, Warhammer and the Warlock and White Dwarf magazines was a gateway to the occult, by my form tutor/RE teacher. Mind you the precise issue of Warlock that provoked that outburst was this one: http://www.fightingfantasycollector.co.uk/Warlock_13.jpg http://www.fightingfantasycollector.co.uk/Warlock_13.jpg Which on reflection is pretty striking. Can't remember if this one or another issue is the one that contained quite a neat, viable Fighting Fantasy tabletop ruleset. Wish I still had these; they were so very British. Edit: it was the issue before, in fact: https://www.fightingfantasycollector.co.uk/Warlock_12.jpg https://www.fightingfantasycollector.co.uk/Warlock_12.jpg
- at-fates-hands 5y ago
  > Mazes and Monsters is quite the trip down memory lane. Ironic that when I was heavy into D&D and drawing the monsters I was seeing in the handbooks, guides and Dragon magazines, my parents didn't care at all - it was just me and my cousins and friends being sociable and using our imaginations. Then we heard about Mazes and Monsters and we all huddled up to watch it and it wasn't at all what we thought it would be. My parents were like, "No more Dungeons and Dragons for you young man!" Thinking I would go crazy like Tom Hanks character did. After some intervening from other friends parents who got them to relax and just let us enjoy the time using our imaginations, they relented. It was a pretty traumatic time to have to hand over my Dungeon Master Guide to my parents, feeling like my whole life was over at 10. Only to have them give it back to me and seeing me jump around like I just won the lottery must have been pretty funny to them. To be young again. . .
LanceH 5y ago
The panic always seemed like a bunch of smug people looking down on others about how "they could lose touch with reality while playing D&D." It was a condescending moral high ground they stood on where they didn't think other people could handle themselves and should be denied the opportunity to do things on their own. You see the same attitude in a lot of "think of the children" restrictions on whatever. Even in discussions about what should be allowed on facebook, some people apparently shouldn't be allowed to be wrong on facebook. I would like to also point out: * We haven't caught all those satanists who were holding ritual sacrifices in the 80's * Apparently now, repressed memories of trauma are staying repressed and we aren't uncovering them as well anymore * We haven't caught those damn clowns in the forest who were stealing children * Vaping apparently hasn't killed everyone who touched one * The prius's out there seem to have stopped accelerating unintentionally
- arbitrage 5y ago
  I played DnD when I was a kid around this time, I remember the satanic panic very well. I thought it sounded so cool, that I thought I was playing the game wrong ... there was far less satan worshipping than I had been led to believe. Since this was before the era of Internet in the home, I went to the library, and the librarian helped me look through the microfiche archives. We tracked down the original reported incidences that were most likely to be referenced by the people driving the panic reporting. I distinctly recall discussing with her "that's it? wow, they're blowing this all way out of proportion." She nodded in agreement.
  - labster 5y ago
    Most of the kewl satanic rules were in the splatbooks, like the dark ritual to lower your THAC0. That’s probably why you missed it. Also, Tomb of Horrors. Pretty sure that’s what inspired the Chick Tract.
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  > The panic always seemed like a bunch of smug people looking down on others This is far far too simplistic a take, and frankly understates what was going on at the time while failing to appreciate the actions and motivations of those involved. The D&D scare was part of the broader satanic panic collective delusion, which you mention here, that led to literal, real-life witch hunts that ruined lives. The Martensville panic in Saskatchewan, Canada, is a perfect example of this: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/fighting-falsehoods-1.5056457/satanic-cult-scandal-that-rocked-a-small-saskatchewan-town-in-92-continues-to-haunt-the-falsely-accused-1.5074956 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/fighting-falsehoods-1.... To this day these exact same hoaxes are found in things like QAnon. Many of the folks who are obsessed with this kind of thing genuinely believe that there's people engaging in satanic ritual abuse. There are folks who get emotionally distraught when they talk about things like pizzagate because they really believe it. Yes, there's no shortage of grifters and so forth. But many folks taken in by this stuff are genuine and well-meaning, and to just paint them all as "smug" not only does those folks a disservice, it fails as a constructive starting point for figuring how to deal with these types of issues.
pessimizer 5y ago
The panic over D&D is the only safe part of the "Satanic Panic" to look back on and laugh about, partially because a basic understanding of the silliness of fantasy role playing games has filtered through the culture since, but mostly because the panic over them didn't hurt very many people. The rest of the Satanic Panic was egged on by the mainstream media, the justice system (especially in the horrific McMartin trial), and local politics and police forces aggressively targeting weird teens. You still can't make a documentary about McMartin that treats it as obviously false, even in retrospect. So many people in authority lent their reputations to a witch hunt. It's very similar to Iraq.
- int_19h 5y ago
  The "repressed memories" crowd is still around, too.
platz 5y ago
I played Heroes Unlimited with a friend who's religious parents let him play the game, but required him to avoid any and all magic mechanics in the game, since magic is in contradiction with religion and God's ultimate power.
- thanhhaimai 5y ago
  I've never encountered this. Just curious, does that mean your friends couldn't read Harry Potter too? Or is there different standards between different forms of media?
- rolph 5y ago
  sounds like your friend could have done fantastic things as a cleric or a paladin
titzer 5y ago
The tragic story of Egbert that seems to have given rise to a lot of the panic left me bothered. He made one suicide attempt by pill but survived, disappearing for a while, and then several months later his second attempt (gunshot to the head) resulted in him being taken to the hospital, where he died 5 days later. Honestly, the fact that they tried to save his life, putting him on life support at the hospital, after he had shot himself in the head was absolutely cruel IMHO.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
I watched a great documentary about D&D... a bunch of kids played it, and one of them got kidnapped,.. then they met this girl with superpowers, and a jock, and something something monsters, other worlds, etc... it was really scary, 1/10, would not recommend playing D&D just because that might happen to you too!
vmception 5y ago
> Egbert hadn’t rolled so well in his suicide attempt in the steam tunnels, and had survived. Okay, thats my kind of writing. But the article does concede that Egbert got a re-roll later.
compuDERP 5y ago
What's the difference between church and D&D? One has a guy with total authority and book of arcane rules which the others must obey lest they suffer. The other one is D&D.
helloworld11 5y ago
cletus 5y ago
Oh I remember this. There's one positive I take from this. A lot of people are understandably upset at, say, the GOP's latest wedge issue: health care for trans children [1]. It's one of many from gay marriage to trans athletes to bathrooms to mask mandates to vaccine mandates to abortion to guns. The positive I take from this is that manufacturing issues like D&D and Satanism is nothing new and despite these continued and deliberate attempts at stoking the fires of a culture war, things have gotten better. White exceptionalism and the lasting echoes of slavery continue to this day, for sure, but it is better. Back in the 1980s people talked openly about how if Black people moved into their neighbourhood it would lower home prices. There was even a Family Ties episode about it [2] (objecting to the irrational fears, to be clear). Here's another positive actually: in the 1980s it kinda sucked to be a nerd. Now at least it's more accepted and the Internet gives lots of people (not just nerds) access to communities and likeminded people that just wasn't possible then. Of course there's a downside: cyberbullying, the envy culture of Instagram (eg hundreds have died taking selfies [3]) and so on but there's a ton of good too. People fall into a trap where they'e nostalgiac for the past. Our memories are selective. This contributes to people getting trapped into the idea that things are simply getting worse. Even if it's true (which I don't believe it is), it doesn't help you to believe that and this kind of pessimism is no way to live. You even see it with people stressing about the threat of nuclear war as a result of the war in Ukraine. To anyone who was alive in the 1980s, this is really old hat. We lived with this threat for literal decades with a much more aggressive Soviet Union. But yes, anti-D&D hysteria. That takes me back. [1]: https://www.vox.com/22360030/trans-kids-health-care-arkansas-explained https://www.vox.com/22360030/trans-kids-health-care-arkansas... [2]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0577277/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0577277/ [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/10/03/more-than-250-people-worldwide-have-died-taking-selfies-study-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/10/0...
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Discrimination against D&D playing has a much different impact than discrimination against trans children. One sucks, the other crushes children ad ruins lives. The sanguine philosophical perspective does nothing for those children.
jaredandrews 5y ago
I remember in the early 2000s there was a similar reaction to Harry Potter. My family attended a rather extreme church at the time. One day the pastor started the sermon with: "We need to talk about Harry Potter". I thought "Ohhh nooooo, here we go". He proceeded to berate the congregation, reminding every one that Harry Potter is a fictional children's book. Witches aren't real. Wizards aren't real. You know who is real? Satan and he's coming for ya, but not thru this fairytale book. Always thought that was pretty funny.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  A family friend told me about ten years ago that she thought Harry Potter had occult elements. I pointed out to her that JK Rowling is a Scottish Episcopalian and compared it with the Narnia story cycle, which is also the work of a Christian. Didn't go down that well. (There is a chain of toy stores in the UK that will not stock anything Harry Potter-related because of this kind of belief.)
  - krapp 5y ago
    Christianity would be so much cooler if they left in more of the esoteric apocryphal texts with wizard battles, mysticism and demon summoning, and cut out Paul's misogynist bullshit.
    - mrjangles 5y ago
      The revelations book fits this description. And we already have a religion that bases itself around it: the Jehovah Witnesses. While your idea sounds cool in theory, in practice the results is a crazy cult which no one in their right mind would want anything to do with.
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        QAnon is rather like this, as other commenters are pointing out; people who believed in or amplified the Satanic Panic are present in the QAnon "faith" too. It compares even more closely to Millerism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism ... in that a series of prophecies has been made and not come true, and like the Millerites, Q believers have experienced a great disappointment and branched off into other further-splintering schools of belief around Covid vaccinations and The Great Reset.
at_a_remove 5y ago
Occasionally, I found out that friends' kids are getting into D&D of some stripe. Fortunately, I bought a handful of those "Dark Dungeons" Chick tracts and slide one in with every manual I buy them.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  The D&D Chick tract is a great cultural artifact. I was into D&D during that era and thought that particular Chick tract was hilarious, probably more for the number of girls who were playing the game than anything else. The gender balance in D&D now is much more equal than it was in the 80s. That Chick tract alone was enough to make me know to put no weight in any other one that got placed under our car's windshield wiper.
sonofhans 5y ago
I experienced this first-hand. In the 80s I want to a Christian high school in Ohio[0] (funnily enough, I was classmates with Brian Warner aka Marilyn Manson). We had chapel once a week with some visiting preacher/lecturer. Several of them railed very explicitly against D&D. One told us that at the Dungeons and Dragons “factory,” there was a witch’s hut in the forest nearby. Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan. There was a series of books some of us read, young adult fiction (can’t recall or find the title), where some of the characters played D&D, lost their minds due to the devil’s curse, and died in awful ways. I played anyway, of course, just not with friends from school. 0. https://www.heritagechristianschool.org/ https://www.heritagechristianschool.org/
- davidw 5y ago
  > Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan. I am envisioning a scenario where the game starts to get popular quickly and McKinsey is called in to help scale up the satan dedications, because the witch is low on bandwidth.
  - sonofhans 5y ago
    That’s a great image. I can almost see the brochure selling it to middle managers. It reminds me of this Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland novel — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O. They posit time-traveling witches as a service in the context of a tech startup. It’s a fun idea, but not a great book; middle-of-the-road even for Stephenson’s later work.
    - davidw 5y ago
      I enjoyed the first one, but was unhappy with it not really being wrapped up.
- gspetr 5y ago
  >Brian Warner aka Marilyn Manson That's a cool anecdote, he seems like a very resilient character from that era. I'm very surprised he hasn't been canceled[0] though, considering he had many relationships that would not pass the #metoo test and literally used the N-word in his songs. [0] Not that I would necessarily wish that on him, it's just that him having a career is fascinating in the same sense a dinosaur who somehow survived an extinction event would be.
blipvert 5y ago
I had always been (pretty much) a straight-A student up until the point at which my (increasingly conservative, Christian) confiscated some D&D alike books which I had bought with my own money around the age of 14. It broke our relationship, I’ve never achieved what I could have done (although I’m OK by most measures) because I lost all motivation and we communicate occasionally, acrimoniously once every decade or so. Really I don’t give a f*k about them any more. I just don’t understand why people put such unnecessary barriers between themselves and their children. It’s just a sodding book.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "I just don’t understand why people put such unnecessary barriers between themselves and their children" Good intentions, clouded by fear.
YATA0 5y ago
There are tons of parallels between the media and moral panic over DnD/Satanism and the media and moral panic over Whiteness/BLM/White supremacy. I truly believe we'll look back at the age of wokeism the same way we look back at other moral panics.
- mmastrac 5y ago
  I'm sorry, but that seems like a major stretch. This seems like you're just trying to fan some flames.
  - YATA0 5y ago
    Not a stretch at all. The origin story of these panics have major parallels: A DnD game gone wrong, which lead to a man killing himself since he lost touch with reality. A Black teenager gunned down in the street by a racist White cop after running away and holding his hands up. Both of these stories are absolute fiction. The former had a history of suicidal thoughts and substance abuse. The latter assaulted a police officer and tried to wrestle his gun away just minutes after he committed strong armed robbery of a corner store.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      Hm. It seems you have missed (intentionally?) some bits of history, like holocaust, apartheid and slavery.
      - YATA0 5y ago
        You replied to the wrong thread.
        hutzlibu 5y ago
        Don't think so. You made it sound like the base of the whole BLM movement was a fake incident, while racism is still very real, which is the real base. While on the other hand D&D had nothing to do with satanism or occultism.
paulette449 5y ago
High school in Ireland, 1983 or 1984. A few of us started an after school D&D club. The school allowed us to use a classroom. It was great until a parent complained that we were "devil worshipping". The vice principal was very apologetic but said the school had to shut it down.
photochemsyn 5y ago
Here's another good article on the phenomenon. I think the underlying theme is more about the fact that 'worlds of the imagination' is a tricky subject for religious evangelists of any stripe. https://wearethemutants.com/2016/10/25/jack-chick-was-right-how-dungeons-dragons-made-me-an-occultist/ https://wearethemutants.com/2016/10/25/jack-chick-was-right-...
unhammer 5y ago
Nothing captures the feeling of DnD better than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Alewives#Dungeons_and_Dragons_sketch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Alewives#Dungeons_and_Dra... (still available in various versions on youtube, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kgx2b1sIRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kgx2b1sIRs )
AniseAbyss 5y ago
As an atheist from a post religious society I always found it amusing the gods in D&D unarguably exist. D&D is propaganda making religion look cool.
jl6 5y ago
Widespread recognition of the phenomenon of the moral panic has spawned the "moral panic panic", where legitimate concerns about the safeguarding of children have been swept aside as "just a moral panic", combined with the mockingly sarcastic use of the Simpsons quote "won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!" Yes, we know there aren't really gangs of pedo-satanists out there. Yes, we know it's manipulative to use children as an excuse to push an ideology. But knowing these things breeds complacency - as if no concern at all is necessary. Vulnerable people do still face the prospect of real harms every day, and it is still worth defending them, regardless of whether previous attempts at defence have been overwrought.
jscipione 5y ago
There is not a single mention of the Finders Cult or the Satanic Panic in the article so it's worthless.
davesque 5y ago
Always makes me think of the Dead Alewives parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kgx2b1sIRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kgx2b1sIRs
aaron695 5y ago
animal531 5y ago
My favourite anecdote about this has to do when locally they started printing the halal icon on the packets of potato chips (in the early 80's). I was only about 8 years old at the time, but my mom and aunt started freaking out about it. It was only after I had a good laugh that I told them what it meant.

114 points by jedwhite 5y ago

I enjoyed the article, thanks. > They were wearing silken robes in pale, iridescent colors, and every one of them looked just like him. That made me laugh. Other than that it sounded more like a self-hypnosis script overall. I could see people using it to get better rest...maybe even navigate a really hard day. IMO it's OK to involve fantasy that really works on that awkward self-hate/self-love dichotomy. I have been reading some of Palladium Books' RPGs from the era lately. They all have notices disclaiming the occult, loudly proclaiming they are just a game, etc. Personally I was raised by religious fundamentalists who would rather let me buy GDW's Twilight:2000 and dream of nuclear combat than get into the dragon fantasy & magic stuff. And dad was very highly educated...it's weird to think about this now but I guess even Aum Shinrikyo had recruited a bunch of amazing Ph.D.s, doctors, etc. The exception to the rule was if I was trying to get someone to go to church with me. Then I could play their dragon games all I wanted (the 'darkest' among my friends were more into GURPS though). My goal according to my parents was to make them feel accepted, then they'd give it all up and get involved in church! I was later able to leverage this strange missionary-minded satanic-approval into the purchase of a bunch of Led Zeppelin cassette tapes, which warped me forever. TTRPGs are still a lot of fun though. I mean just yesterday I was using [1] again, can hardly believe that amazing resource exists. 1. https://travellermap.com/ https://travellermap.com/

hprotagonist 5y ago

it’s a straight line from this to QAnon. in many cases, it’s the same people.

sillyquiet 5y ago
I mean, moral panics are thing across the whole political continuum. Conspiracy theories aren't always based in moral panic, and moral panics aren't always about a conspiracy.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago
  I am not that well-versed on moral panics. What are examples of moral panics on the "left" (American interpretation) end of the spectrum?
  - atlantas 5y ago
    Free speech. Strangely that has somehow inverted in recent years. It wasn't long ago that censorship was the domain of the right who were in a panic about what's acceptable speech and actively trying to police it.
    - spacemanmatt 5y ago
      I'm not tracking a free speech panic in recent memory. Care to be more specific?
      - atlantas 5y ago
        "master branch" and "grandfathered code" and "sanity check" are just a few of the terms suddenly deemed unacceptable. Joe Rogan says dangerous things and must be silenced. Who is a Bernie supporter smeared as alt-right for saying unapproved things. All kinds of campus panics about "unsafe" words and ideas. One example is a professor that said a word that sounds like another word during a lecture. It made some students uncomfortable and the professor was put on immediate leave. People being cancelled for jokes they made a decade ago. It just goes on and on.
        Dracophoenix 5y ago
        >All kinds of campus panics about "unsafe" words and ideas. One example is a professor that said a word that sounds like another word during a lecture. While this is much more common now, it's not new either. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo_incident
spacemanmatt 5y ago
Yeah, this is what a witch hunt looks like and they're still at it. Because there are no witches.
- Lendal 5y ago
  I was never allowed to play D&D back in the 80's. My mom believed witchcraft existed and I was never able to convince her otherwise after a lifetime of arguing and so many psychological strategies. She recently died, taking her ignorance with her to the grave. You can't convince these people. The "marketplace of ideas" is a failure. It doesn't work. Some wounds never heal. Once someone gets some stupid and wrong idea in their brain they will never be free of it. Like lead poisoning, it will never go away.
  - spacemanmatt 5y ago
    Much agreed. The marketplace of ideas is not immune to being treated as a public dump.
    - krapp 5y ago
      I've never understood why people believe the marketplace of ideas is the only marketplace that shouldn't be regulated. We don't allow companies to sell poison and call it medicine under the belief that rational, self-interested consumers will always choose medicine even if the poison is sweeter. Yet we have to allow disinformation and lies to spread like an untreated cancer and just hope that somehow the truth will prevail.
      - psyc 5y ago
        Whether something is poison is relatively objective. Whether something is disinformation or lies is often a matter of perspective or too difficult to determine. Furthermore, the control of information is about power and manipulation just as disinfo is, which is a can of worms I'm not prepared to write an essay on right now, and does not exist in your poison analogy.
brimble 5y ago
Complete with thinking normal businesses are somehow involved in crazy underground child-sex cults. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic [EDIT] That is, it's a trait shared by the '80s moral panic, and by "Pizza Gate" Qanoners.
BaseballPhysics 5y ago
Absolutely. QAnon is a conspiracy theory singularity, and the very same ideas that were running rampant in the 80s--particularly satantic ritual abuse--are represented in the QAnon movement today.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  The same people, even.

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article, not the panic): The 1980s Media Panic Over Dungeons and Dragons - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11225579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11225579 - March 2016 (130 comments)

rolph 5y ago

i survived it, but correlation is not causation. there is a group of people that had no cool, and were subjected to constant duress, i was shocked going to my first D&D session and seeing all these kids there together. the game didnt cause the dysfunction, it was already present. one of the worst insults one could hear from the cool crowd was along the lines of being: "such a morphadite, that you have to play D&D by yourself" i almost forgot to mention, that was about the time we started spinning vinyl records backward by hand to decrypt the subliminal programming messages, of destruction and damnation

kazinator 5y ago

There is something conspicuously missing in this article that deserves a mention: fantasy themes were also prominently featured in some kinds of heavy metal music (basically, still are), which is something that also raised the ire of conservative parents. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lvs2FzF64o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lvs2FzF64o Also, some times fantasy themes appeared in metal videos, even if the content of the song had nothing to do with it. I believe the bands or their promoters were just playing into this to piss of the parents (even more). For example, Mötley Crüe's video for "Looks That Kill": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wPHxQMgdKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wPHxQMgdKs Mötley Crüe was basically just a party band: more about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, than about any fantasy nonsense. The song "Shout at the Devil" on the same-named album, and the Satanic imagery and whatnot, was almost certainly likewise just to piss of conservative Christian parents.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Mötley Crüe? Soft lads. There was an issue of Warhammer that had a flexi-disc with a thrash metal track: "Blood for the Blood God" by Sabbat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39sAIzrbmk8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39sAIzrbmk8 Which is best described as "magnificently unlistenable" [0] I got the flexidisc to play only a couple of times, and mercifully never in the presence of my mother (who was also an RE teacher, though not the one I mention in my other comment) [0] to repurpose a review quote that was on the shrinkwrap cover of Guns by the British indie-prog-punk-marvel, Cardiacs
- pessimizer 5y ago
  GW must have specifically designed the Warhammer RPG/canon to match the nightmares of religious parents. When we found it, we were done with D&D. Now we had a table to roll on to find out specifically what our critical hit did to the enemy in gory detail.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    Warhammer (and to some extent the Fighting Fantasy universe) was also funnier -- more irreverent, bleaker humour, more provocative. Anyone who was offended by the content was doubly offended by the trolling. While one of my secondary school teachers was telling us we were dabbling with the occult, another (a beloved english teacher) enjoyed the imagination of it and wanted to be taught how to play Chaos Marauders so that he wouldn't lose to his nephew.

sillyquiet 5y ago

This is why D&D was kind of underground where I lived in the rural south as a kid in the 80s and early 90s, and that's on top of of the very severe social stigma associated with it and other 'nerd' activities. At least Trekkies, when outed, weren't accused of Satanism.

andrewstuart 5y ago

Times have certainly changed when the media panic was about D&D instead of war, pandemic, existential environmental change and the future of democracy. Though back then the threat of nuclear war hung over everyone all the time, so maybe not so different.

csdvrx 5y ago

My favorite quote applies again, if you consider games one of the technologies: “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

Mazes and Monsters is quite the trip down memory lane. I vividly remember being told that my interest in Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, Warhammer and the Warlock and White Dwarf magazines was a gateway to the occult, by my form tutor/RE teacher. Mind you the precise issue of Warlock that provoked that outburst was this one: http://www.fightingfantasycollector.co.uk/Warlock_13.jpg http://www.fightingfantasycollector.co.uk/Warlock_13.jpg Which on reflection is pretty striking. Can't remember if this one or another issue is the one that contained quite a neat, viable Fighting Fantasy tabletop ruleset. Wish I still had these; they were so very British. Edit: it was the issue before, in fact: https://www.fightingfantasycollector.co.uk/Warlock_12.jpg https://www.fightingfantasycollector.co.uk/Warlock_12.jpg

at-fates-hands 5y ago
> Mazes and Monsters is quite the trip down memory lane. Ironic that when I was heavy into D&D and drawing the monsters I was seeing in the handbooks, guides and Dragon magazines, my parents didn't care at all - it was just me and my cousins and friends being sociable and using our imaginations. Then we heard about Mazes and Monsters and we all huddled up to watch it and it wasn't at all what we thought it would be. My parents were like, "No more Dungeons and Dragons for you young man!" Thinking I would go crazy like Tom Hanks character did. After some intervening from other friends parents who got them to relax and just let us enjoy the time using our imaginations, they relented. It was a pretty traumatic time to have to hand over my Dungeon Master Guide to my parents, feeling like my whole life was over at 10. Only to have them give it back to me and seeing me jump around like I just won the lottery must have been pretty funny to them. To be young again. . .

LanceH 5y ago

The panic always seemed like a bunch of smug people looking down on others about how "they could lose touch with reality while playing D&D." It was a condescending moral high ground they stood on where they didn't think other people could handle themselves and should be denied the opportunity to do things on their own. You see the same attitude in a lot of "think of the children" restrictions on whatever. Even in discussions about what should be allowed on facebook, some people apparently shouldn't be allowed to be wrong on facebook. I would like to also point out: * We haven't caught all those satanists who were holding ritual sacrifices in the 80's * Apparently now, repressed memories of trauma are staying repressed and we aren't uncovering them as well anymore * We haven't caught those damn clowns in the forest who were stealing children * Vaping apparently hasn't killed everyone who touched one * The prius's out there seem to have stopped accelerating unintentionally

arbitrage 5y ago
I played DnD when I was a kid around this time, I remember the satanic panic very well. I thought it sounded so cool, that I thought I was playing the game wrong ... there was far less satan worshipping than I had been led to believe. Since this was before the era of Internet in the home, I went to the library, and the librarian helped me look through the microfiche archives. We tracked down the original reported incidences that were most likely to be referenced by the people driving the panic reporting. I distinctly recall discussing with her "that's it? wow, they're blowing this all way out of proportion." She nodded in agreement.
- labster 5y ago
  Most of the kewl satanic rules were in the splatbooks, like the dark ritual to lower your THAC0. That’s probably why you missed it. Also, Tomb of Horrors. Pretty sure that’s what inspired the Chick Tract.
BaseballPhysics 5y ago
> The panic always seemed like a bunch of smug people looking down on others This is far far too simplistic a take, and frankly understates what was going on at the time while failing to appreciate the actions and motivations of those involved. The D&D scare was part of the broader satanic panic collective delusion, which you mention here, that led to literal, real-life witch hunts that ruined lives. The Martensville panic in Saskatchewan, Canada, is a perfect example of this: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/fighting-falsehoods-1.5056457/satanic-cult-scandal-that-rocked-a-small-saskatchewan-town-in-92-continues-to-haunt-the-falsely-accused-1.5074956 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/fighting-falsehoods-1.... To this day these exact same hoaxes are found in things like QAnon. Many of the folks who are obsessed with this kind of thing genuinely believe that there's people engaging in satanic ritual abuse. There are folks who get emotionally distraught when they talk about things like pizzagate because they really believe it. Yes, there's no shortage of grifters and so forth. But many folks taken in by this stuff are genuine and well-meaning, and to just paint them all as "smug" not only does those folks a disservice, it fails as a constructive starting point for figuring how to deal with these types of issues.

pessimizer 5y ago

The panic over D&D is the only safe part of the "Satanic Panic" to look back on and laugh about, partially because a basic understanding of the silliness of fantasy role playing games has filtered through the culture since, but mostly because the panic over them didn't hurt very many people. The rest of the Satanic Panic was egged on by the mainstream media, the justice system (especially in the horrific McMartin trial), and local politics and police forces aggressively targeting weird teens. You still can't make a documentary about McMartin that treats it as obviously false, even in retrospect. So many people in authority lent their reputations to a witch hunt. It's very similar to Iraq.

int_19h 5y ago
The "repressed memories" crowd is still around, too.

platz 5y ago

I played Heroes Unlimited with a friend who's religious parents let him play the game, but required him to avoid any and all magic mechanics in the game, since magic is in contradiction with religion and God's ultimate power.

thanhhaimai 5y ago
I've never encountered this. Just curious, does that mean your friends couldn't read Harry Potter too? Or is there different standards between different forms of media?
rolph 5y ago
sounds like your friend could have done fantastic things as a cleric or a paladin

titzer 5y ago

The tragic story of Egbert that seems to have given rise to a lot of the panic left me bothered. He made one suicide attempt by pill but survived, disappearing for a while, and then several months later his second attempt (gunshot to the head) resulted in him being taken to the hospital, where he died 5 days later. Honestly, the fact that they tried to save his life, putting him on life support at the hospital, after he had shot himself in the head was absolutely cruel IMHO.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

I watched a great documentary about D&D... a bunch of kids played it, and one of them got kidnapped,.. then they met this girl with superpowers, and a jock, and something something monsters, other worlds, etc... it was really scary, 1/10, would not recommend playing D&D just because that might happen to you too!

vmception 5y ago

> Egbert hadn’t rolled so well in his suicide attempt in the steam tunnels, and had survived. Okay, thats my kind of writing. But the article does concede that Egbert got a re-roll later.

compuDERP 5y ago

What's the difference between church and D&D? One has a guy with total authority and book of arcane rules which the others must obey lest they suffer. The other one is D&D.

helloworld11 5y ago

cletus 5y ago

Oh I remember this. There's one positive I take from this. A lot of people are understandably upset at, say, the GOP's latest wedge issue: health care for trans children [1]. It's one of many from gay marriage to trans athletes to bathrooms to mask mandates to vaccine mandates to abortion to guns. The positive I take from this is that manufacturing issues like D&D and Satanism is nothing new and despite these continued and deliberate attempts at stoking the fires of a culture war, things have gotten better. White exceptionalism and the lasting echoes of slavery continue to this day, for sure, but it is better. Back in the 1980s people talked openly about how if Black people moved into their neighbourhood it would lower home prices. There was even a Family Ties episode about it [2] (objecting to the irrational fears, to be clear). Here's another positive actually: in the 1980s it kinda sucked to be a nerd. Now at least it's more accepted and the Internet gives lots of people (not just nerds) access to communities and likeminded people that just wasn't possible then. Of course there's a downside: cyberbullying, the envy culture of Instagram (eg hundreds have died taking selfies [3]) and so on but there's a ton of good too. People fall into a trap where they'e nostalgiac for the past. Our memories are selective. This contributes to people getting trapped into the idea that things are simply getting worse. Even if it's true (which I don't believe it is), it doesn't help you to believe that and this kind of pessimism is no way to live. You even see it with people stressing about the threat of nuclear war as a result of the war in Ukraine. To anyone who was alive in the 1980s, this is really old hat. We lived with this threat for literal decades with a much more aggressive Soviet Union. But yes, anti-D&D hysteria. That takes me back. [1]: https://www.vox.com/22360030/trans-kids-health-care-arkansas-explained https://www.vox.com/22360030/trans-kids-health-care-arkansas... [2]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0577277/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0577277/ [3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/10/03/more-than-250-people-worldwide-have-died-taking-selfies-study-finds/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/10/0...

wolverine876 5y ago
Discrimination against D&D playing has a much different impact than discrimination against trans children. One sucks, the other crushes children ad ruins lives. The sanguine philosophical perspective does nothing for those children.

jaredandrews 5y ago

I remember in the early 2000s there was a similar reaction to Harry Potter. My family attended a rather extreme church at the time. One day the pastor started the sermon with: "We need to talk about Harry Potter". I thought "Ohhh nooooo, here we go". He proceeded to berate the congregation, reminding every one that Harry Potter is a fictional children's book. Witches aren't real. Wizards aren't real. You know who is real? Satan and he's coming for ya, but not thru this fairytale book. Always thought that was pretty funny.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
A family friend told me about ten years ago that she thought Harry Potter had occult elements. I pointed out to her that JK Rowling is a Scottish Episcopalian and compared it with the Narnia story cycle, which is also the work of a Christian. Didn't go down that well. (There is a chain of toy stores in the UK that will not stock anything Harry Potter-related because of this kind of belief.)
- krapp 5y ago
  Christianity would be so much cooler if they left in more of the esoteric apocryphal texts with wizard battles, mysticism and demon summoning, and cut out Paul's misogynist bullshit.
  - mrjangles 5y ago
    The revelations book fits this description. And we already have a religion that bases itself around it: the Jehovah Witnesses. While your idea sounds cool in theory, in practice the results is a crazy cult which no one in their right mind would want anything to do with.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      QAnon is rather like this, as other commenters are pointing out; people who believed in or amplified the Satanic Panic are present in the QAnon "faith" too. It compares even more closely to Millerism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism ... in that a series of prophecies has been made and not come true, and like the Millerites, Q believers have experienced a great disappointment and branched off into other further-splintering schools of belief around Covid vaccinations and The Great Reset.

at_a_remove 5y ago

Occasionally, I found out that friends' kids are getting into D&D of some stripe. Fortunately, I bought a handful of those "Dark Dungeons" Chick tracts and slide one in with every manual I buy them.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
The D&D Chick tract is a great cultural artifact. I was into D&D during that era and thought that particular Chick tract was hilarious, probably more for the number of girls who were playing the game than anything else. The gender balance in D&D now is much more equal than it was in the 80s. That Chick tract alone was enough to make me know to put no weight in any other one that got placed under our car's windshield wiper.

sonofhans 5y ago

I experienced this first-hand. In the 80s I want to a Christian high school in Ohio[0] (funnily enough, I was classmates with Brian Warner aka Marilyn Manson). We had chapel once a week with some visiting preacher/lecturer. Several of them railed very explicitly against D&D. One told us that at the Dungeons and Dragons “factory,” there was a witch’s hut in the forest nearby. Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan. There was a series of books some of us read, young adult fiction (can’t recall or find the title), where some of the characters played D&D, lost their minds due to the devil’s curse, and died in awful ways. I played anyway, of course, just not with friends from school. 0. https://www.heritagechristianschool.org/ https://www.heritagechristianschool.org/

davidw 5y ago
> Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan. I am envisioning a scenario where the game starts to get popular quickly and McKinsey is called in to help scale up the satan dedications, because the witch is low on bandwidth.
- sonofhans 5y ago
  That’s a great image. I can almost see the brochure selling it to middle managers. It reminds me of this Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland novel — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O. They posit time-traveling witches as a service in the context of a tech startup. It’s a fun idea, but not a great book; middle-of-the-road even for Stephenson’s later work.
  - davidw 5y ago
    I enjoyed the first one, but was unhappy with it not really being wrapped up.
gspetr 5y ago
>Brian Warner aka Marilyn Manson That's a cool anecdote, he seems like a very resilient character from that era. I'm very surprised he hasn't been canceled[0] though, considering he had many relationships that would not pass the #metoo test and literally used the N-word in his songs. [0] Not that I would necessarily wish that on him, it's just that him having a career is fascinating in the same sense a dinosaur who somehow survived an extinction event would be.

blipvert 5y ago

I had always been (pretty much) a straight-A student up until the point at which my (increasingly conservative, Christian) confiscated some D&D alike books which I had bought with my own money around the age of 14. It broke our relationship, I’ve never achieved what I could have done (although I’m OK by most measures) because I lost all motivation and we communicate occasionally, acrimoniously once every decade or so. Really I don’t give a f*k about them any more. I just don’t understand why people put such unnecessary barriers between themselves and their children. It’s just a sodding book.

hutzlibu 5y ago
"I just don’t understand why people put such unnecessary barriers between themselves and their children" Good intentions, clouded by fear.

YATA0 5y ago

There are tons of parallels between the media and moral panic over DnD/Satanism and the media and moral panic over Whiteness/BLM/White supremacy. I truly believe we'll look back at the age of wokeism the same way we look back at other moral panics.

mmastrac 5y ago
I'm sorry, but that seems like a major stretch. This seems like you're just trying to fan some flames.
- YATA0 5y ago
  Not a stretch at all. The origin story of these panics have major parallels: A DnD game gone wrong, which lead to a man killing himself since he lost touch with reality. A Black teenager gunned down in the street by a racist White cop after running away and holding his hands up. Both of these stories are absolute fiction. The former had a history of suicidal thoughts and substance abuse. The latter assaulted a police officer and tried to wrestle his gun away just minutes after he committed strong armed robbery of a corner store.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    Hm. It seems you have missed (intentionally?) some bits of history, like holocaust, apartheid and slavery.
    - YATA0 5y ago
      You replied to the wrong thread.
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        Don't think so. You made it sound like the base of the whole BLM movement was a fake incident, while racism is still very real, which is the real base. While on the other hand D&D had nothing to do with satanism or occultism.

paulette449 5y ago

High school in Ireland, 1983 or 1984. A few of us started an after school D&D club. The school allowed us to use a classroom. It was great until a parent complained that we were "devil worshipping". The vice principal was very apologetic but said the school had to shut it down.

photochemsyn 5y ago

Here's another good article on the phenomenon. I think the underlying theme is more about the fact that 'worlds of the imagination' is a tricky subject for religious evangelists of any stripe. https://wearethemutants.com/2016/10/25/jack-chick-was-right-how-dungeons-dragons-made-me-an-occultist/ https://wearethemutants.com/2016/10/25/jack-chick-was-right-...

unhammer 5y ago

Nothing captures the feeling of DnD better than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Alewives#Dungeons_and_Dragons_sketch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Alewives#Dungeons_and_Dra... (still available in various versions on youtube, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kgx2b1sIRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kgx2b1sIRs )

AniseAbyss 5y ago

As an atheist from a post religious society I always found it amusing the gods in D&D unarguably exist. D&D is propaganda making religion look cool.

jl6 5y ago

Widespread recognition of the phenomenon of the moral panic has spawned the "moral panic panic", where legitimate concerns about the safeguarding of children have been swept aside as "just a moral panic", combined with the mockingly sarcastic use of the Simpsons quote "won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!" Yes, we know there aren't really gangs of pedo-satanists out there. Yes, we know it's manipulative to use children as an excuse to push an ideology. But knowing these things breeds complacency - as if no concern at all is necessary. Vulnerable people do still face the prospect of real harms every day, and it is still worth defending them, regardless of whether previous attempts at defence have been overwrought.

jscipione 5y ago

There is not a single mention of the Finders Cult or the Satanic Panic in the article so it's worthless.

davesque 5y ago

Always makes me think of the Dead Alewives parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kgx2b1sIRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kgx2b1sIRs

aaron695 5y ago

animal531 5y ago

My favourite anecdote about this has to do when locally they started printing the halal icon on the packets of potato chips (in the early 80's). I was only about 8 years old at the time, but my mom and aunt started freaking out about it. It was only after I had a good laugh that I told them what it meant.