Today my son and I saw BeetleJuice BeetleJuice in the cinema.
There was a trailer before the movie started for an upcoming movie called Wicked. It is a prequel to the Wizard of Oz. It features a black actress playing a green-skinned witch, the very same one Dorothy of Cansas famously drops a house on and liberates Oz from the witches tyranny.
Anticipating they're going to give it the Maleficent treatment where we see the evil witch betrayed and turn to vengeance, sympathising with her and understanding why she turned to evil, I am going to avoid watching Wicked the same way I avoided watching Maleficent.
What did make me laugh is how the movie relates to Wizards of the Coast virtue signalling when they released a public statement a few years ago that "Orcs (green-skins) are no longer to be treated as monsters because it is racism and it might upset black people."
To which the Afro-American community replied, "What are you idiots talking about?"
And to which the general gaming community said, "Nobody in the entire history of Dungeons&Dragons nor the wider roleplaying industry has ever before likened Orcs to black people, or even considered that. Please quit your jobs and stop telling us what to do in our own games anyway. Orcs have historically been savage children-eating rapist monsters for at least a thousand years of Human history in the real world. It is a part of European history which only went into mythology after we managed to kill them all off. The most famous of them is called Grendel."
To which Wizards of the Coast replied, "Not in the future of D&D they're not. They are now friendly."
To which the community replied; "That' the final nail in the coffin of D&D, we are all collectively going to start playing other roleplaying games and also the earlier editions of D&D from before WotC and Hasbro took over copyright for the franchise."
Which then happened.
I am almost certain that someone in Hollywood with an awareness of the recent history of WotC killing off D&D by being so politically correct they managed to offend just about everybody, has decided to fund Wicked starring a black woman dressed as a green skinned evil witch, simply to say FUCK YOU WIZARDS OF THE COAST in very large letters. I am also certain WotC probably are not going to put two and two together to recognise that.