When I was a teen the D&D satanic panic was in full swing.
I often had game books with me, and got the obvious response for it.
Most of it was yelling or being told I'm going to hell, but this was adults yelling and screaming in a 14 or 15 year old's face.
I only got attacked - I think three times. Once throwing rocks and a baseball bat, once an adult punching me at a Waffle House (got told I was always welcome by the staff though), and my pastor hitting me and kicking me out of church.
All this to say - they didn't take the books, they didn't destroy or deface the books. They attacked me. Because it's never about the books (or phones, or rap), it's always about the in-group's hatred of the out-group. The panics are just those with power (for D&D it was the christian right movement; for social media it's the techbros & right wing politicians) making that in-group hate flare up to bolster their control and importance.
Ya'know, abuser and narcissist shit.
Same here, 80's man, the fucking 80's. Luckily we had a friend with a house that was unoccupied by others or parents so we had free run of the place, D&D started Friday after school and ended Sunday night (with some #RockyHorror for breaks!). School was weird though, 83' wasn't so bad, but by '87 when Geraldo did his thing on TV we heard from friends that D&D books were forbidden in our school.
At least we got #MazesAndMonsters out of it!
@ironcladlou
I'd say something like "its water under the bridge" but I burned the bridge and stayed warm by it's fire, so I'm doing much better.
Solidarity and sympathy, I know how aggressively hateful evangelicals can be when they think they'll have no consequences.
@mason @Kalshann the Satanic Panic started, at least visibly, in California and then spread through basically the world through the 80s, 90s, and early 00s.
It *technically* never ended, it just got a lot quieter as the vast majority of accusations and cases, and the pseudoscience behind a lot of it, were disproven.
@TheSunnyOne @Kalshann Oh, I'm aware of it, and I've enjoyed the Chick Tracts take on Dungeons and Dragons. I just never encountered that in Massachusetts. There was even a Dungeons and Dragons Club somewhere in either middle school or junior high. It was pretty well accepted where I was, and I never caught any grief for playing it, starting in the late 70s.
If anyone missed out:
https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=0046
You can't really blame them. Check out what they do for roleplaying themselves and you'll see why they're easily spooked. From Estus Pirkle:
@mason @TheSunnyOne
The whole thing was national - new reports, hell I remember being voluntold to attend a 'intervention' by southern baptists that had people doing confessionals about their D&D experiences (and straight up lying about 'feeling the devil' as they fought gobilns or whatever).
It probably missed the more secular or even less right-wing religious areas, honestly. It occasionally gets a minor revival when some mega-church remembers it'll let them abuse kids.
@Kalshann
I was playing D&D back then, too. Didn't have a problem until the early '80s, when the woman who was in charge of our college campus grille band us from playing D&D (actually it was "Call of Cthulhu", but she didn't know the difference) in the back room at the restaurant.
She was the head of a small local cult of, I kid you not, snake handlers. Fortunately The campus administration told her she had grotesquely exceeded her authority, so we continued playing our games.
I also helped the Committee To Defend Role-playing Games (or whatever it was called), by sending them a videotape I had made of Pat Robertson claiming that role-playing games were all cases of demonic possession, and showing a bunch of teenagers burning their role-playing books.
@Quasit
Yeah, Pentecostals are sometimes... odd. The more insular churches can be very narrow minded, but the more outgoing ones are really progressive. Never understood why.
CoC not being recognized is kinda a tell isn't it?
Christian: "This is of satan!" [points at picture]
Player: "Um no, this is Nyarlathotep, much worse!"
@Kalshann I was too young for all that, but I did have my youth pastor take my Fangoria magazines and he'd always ask me: "Is this pleasing to God?"
I wish I'd had the balls back then to say: "If God were real they could tell me personally."
Kalshann
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