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Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman sue Wizards of the Coast after it abandons new Dragonlance trilogy


C.T. Phipps

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59 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

Even if they ultimately lost, this could drag in court for a couple of years. And coming out on top after a legal battle, would the authors be interested in actually writing the series then? Probably not.

Like minority shareholders getting it up the ass, they are trying to make themselves enough of a nuisance so that WotC and Hasbro consider this too much of an annoyance and decide that it's easier to go along and let them write and publish the books. They could then cancel everything else under which they're not under contractual obligation.

Or, which can sometimes happen, especially if Hasbro's legal department gets involved, they could simply try to bleed the authors dry with countless procedures that could keep them in court for years. Then, at some point when they realize that it would cost them too much to continue to fight, Weis and Hickman might just abandon the lawsuit.

Let's hope for the former and not the latter. . . :/

I suspect the trilogy is already written.

As for the Habro legal department, the thing is that it will cost them more money in the long run than it would just to settle as those high priced lawyers aren't cheap themselves. Bleeding Margaret Weis and Hickman dry may be possible but it's in all likelihood that their lawyers would want a piece of this themselves.

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1 hour ago, Werthead said:

WotC's grasp of legal affairs has been seriously off-beam for a few years now. I wouldn't be surprised if they just flat-out lost. The terms of the contract seem pretty cut and dried and don't include "cancellation because WotC are terrified someone might call them names on Twitter."

I suspect things will go quiet on this and there'll be a (substantial) behind-the-scenes settlement.

So wait... that's what all this is about?  Some sort of cancel culture clash???  That's why Hickman is talking about taking a strong stand a la Sturm Brightblade????  What a bunch of hogwash.

Also, can't lie... I did get a little misty eyed reading the account of the Purple Heart winner taking inspiration from Sturm and without any obvious next book on the horizon for me, I'm really tempted to run over to my mom's and dig out my copy of the Annotated Chronicles.  Can't say my copy has been to Afghanistan or below the ocean, but they were much loved in my younger days.

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32 minutes ago, C.T. Phipps said:

I suspect the trilogy is already written.

As for the Habro legal department, the thing is that it will cost them more money in the long run than it would just to settle as those high priced lawyers aren't cheap themselves. Bleeding Margaret Weis and Hickman dry may be possible but it's in all likelihood that their lawyers would want a piece of this themselves.

As a Law grad, I can tell you that big corporate entities do this all the time to avoid creating a precedent that becomes jurisprudence. They have legal budgets that amount to millions of dollars. Weis and Hickman don't.

If the trilogy is already written or close to it, it would be in everyone's best interest to just go ahead and publish it. It would settle the matter and the "bad" publicity generated by this annoucement would actually be a good thing.

Everything depends on whether or not Hasbro/WotC want to play hardball.

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1 hour ago, C.T. Phipps said:

I suspect the trilogy is already written.

Polygon's article says basically the first two books were written. (At least drafts were turned in)

Quote

According to documents filed in a United States District Court on Oct. 16, Hickman and Weis allege that in 2017 they were approached by Wizards to write a new series of novels. A licensing agreement was negotiated by both parties. There was also an additional publishing agreement with Del Rey Books, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group. One complete manuscript, titled Dragons of Deceit, was completed and approved while the draft for a second book — provisionally titled Dragons of Fate — was also completed.

 

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14 hours ago, Rhom said:

So wait... that's what all this is about?  Some sort of cancel culture clash???  That's why Hickman is talking about taking a strong stand a la Sturm Brightblade????  What a bunch of hogwash.

Also, can't lie... I did get a little misty eyed reading the account of the Purple Heart winner taking inspiration from Sturm and without any obvious next book on the horizon for me, I'm really tempted to run over to my mom's and dig out my copy of the Annotated Chronicles.  Can't say my copy has been to Afghanistan or below the ocean, but they were much loved in my younger days.

WotC has been having a time of it. They have several unrepentant arseholes/misogynists working for them (one of them even published a dodgy-as-fuck Lolita fanfic novel in 2003), all of whom are still there and one of whom was working with Weis and Hickman as an editor. They've so far refused to get rid of any of them. Then there's also a lot of disrespect going on, such as one of the guys in charge of the D&D line saying he doesn't consider any of the novels or previous material to be canon and they're going to do what the fuck they want with the settings and characters because no one will care. That got rolled back pretty quickly (but is a sign of why they were happy to get rid of the publishing department, because they don't want to deal with new additions to the canon).

They also had a black staffmember who quit and released a public statement outlining how work from black members of staff and freelancers was rejected or minimised on spurious grounds. There's been some pushback on that from other writers of colour working for WotC claiming that was dissatisfaction from one member of staff who had an axe to grind because his work wasn't good enough, but there's also been some support for his position.

Then WotC got a shit-ton of complaints because of a Ravenloft adventure module which had stereotypical portrayals of a Romany-like group. They rewrote the module and re-released it to some praise. That seems fine.

Then WotC got themselves in a mess because they announced they were reworking some of the D&D races to remove the implication that some races are always evil, evil the time. That got bemusing because people have been doing this for decades (Salvatore's whole thing about having a "good dark elf", for example, and good, honourable orc characters have been showing up in the fiction for decades) but WotC decided to make an absolutely massive song and dance about it which probably did more harm than good.

They also had issues with Magic: The Gathering cards, including one that had white supremacy and racist connotations.

Absolutely nothing about any of this has anything to do with DragonlanceDragonlance has always been pretty progressive (certainly up there with Forgotten Realms with its canonically-gay-NPCs-in-the-nineties attitude) but WotC got it into their head that everything published before 2000 is automatically problematic, they just don't understand why, and everything has to be changed. Weis and Hickman even carried out some rewrites to iron over some areas that may have been perceived as problematic but WotC then said, "We don't want to deal with this, fuck it." Which of course has created a furore a hundred times worse than if they'd done nothing and just let the books come out.

Completely barking mad.

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  • 2 weeks later...

"

DragonlanceDragonlance has always been pretty progressive"

Uh.... not exactly. Dragonlance has always had a whole bunch of well... issues. The fact that Gully Dwarfs are a thing, for instance. The issues it has had has been different from the FR (which has tended towards "aging hippie skeeviness", but also with the positive bits comes from an aging hippie mindset) but it's there. 

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I don’t even remember what a gully dwarf is. Googled it. Looks like a race of dumb, diminutive, cowardly dwarves. Had a novel featuring them in 1996. Is there really a big controversy over this? Was this race a thing in the first couple of trilogies?

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23 minutes ago, unJon said:

I don’t even remember what a gully dwarf is. Googled it. Looks like a race of dumb, diminutive, cowardly dwarves. Had a novel featuring them in 1996. Is there really a big controversy over this? Was this race a thing in the first couple of trilogies?

You don’t remember Bupu and her big magic?  The way Raistlin treated her was one of the few signs of empathy he showed. 

I never would have thought of them as problematic, but I guess looking back they are essentially a race that is entirely mentally disabled and inbred and are treated as a nuisance. :dunno: 

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3 hours ago, Rhom said:

You don’t remember Bupu and her big magic?  The way Raistlin treated her was one of the few signs of empathy he showed. 

I never would have thought of them as problematic, but I guess looking back they are essentially a race that is entirely mentally disabled and inbred and are treated as a nuisance. :dunno: 

Ah. I had no memory of her but just read the wiki. Thanks!

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On 11/1/2020 at 11:38 PM, Galactus said:

Uh.... not exactly. Dragonlance has always had a whole bunch of well... issues. The fact that Gully Dwarfs are a thing, for instance. The issues it has had has been different from the FR (which has tended towards "aging hippie skeeviness", but also with the positive bits comes from an aging hippie mindset) but it's there. 

I should have added "relatively." DL has a ton of issues by modern standards but compared to most mid-1980s fantasy, it was reasonably forward-thinking, especially in terms of the treatment of female characters and complicating its depiction of its races as it went along to remove the more stereotypical issues (not until later on though).

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On 11/10/2020 at 2:33 PM, Werthead said:

I should have added "relatively." DL has a ton of issues by modern standards but compared to most mid-1980s fantasy, it was reasonably forward-thinking, especially in terms of the treatment of female characters and complicating its depiction of its races as it went along to remove the more stereotypical issues (not until later on though).

Depends on what you compare it to, I guess? Compared to the other D&D settings I tended to rate Dragonlance as one of the most.... traditional? In a bad way? Of the settings. (admittedly: Don't know mcuh about Greyhawk or Mystara) FR had the fact that Greenwood was a horny hippie, which created some ahem... issues, but just like Chris Claremont on the X-men (another person who tended to let his personal fetishes get into his writing...) it also meant a lot of space for LGBT and women characters. Planescape was pretty explicitly trying to be Relevant in that 90's White-Wolf aping way, Spelljammer... Okay, Spelljammer was just silly. (and unfortunately got some of the cringier bits of DL glommed on to it) 

There's Kara-Tur/Oriental Adventures which was uh... not good, and Al-Qadim (which was) and Maztica (which wasn't) for the "real world analogue FR subsettings"?

 

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I was on the Dragonlance subreddit a couple weeks back reading some discussion on this. Most of the talk didn’t revolve around Gully Dwarves or inherently evil races.  Seemed like most of it was concerning Goldmoon as the great white savior.  The blue eyed/blonde haired princess/priestess from a tribe of dark skinned Native American analogues.

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4 minutes ago, Rhom said:

I was on the Dragonlance subreddit a couple weeks back reading some discussion on this. Most of the talk didn’t revolve around Gully Dwarves or inherently evil races.  Seemed like most of it was concerning Goldmoon as the great white savior.  The blue eyed/blonde haired princess/priestess from a tribe of dark skinned Native American analogues.

Fair

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On 11/18/2020 at 12:54 AM, Rhom said:

I was on the Dragonlance subreddit a couple weeks back reading some discussion on this. Most of the talk didn’t revolve around Gully Dwarves or inherently evil races.  Seemed like most of it was concerning Goldmoon as the great white savior.  The blue eyed/blonde haired princess/priestess from a tribe of dark skinned Native American analogues.

Ouch, yes, in retrospect that is true! I never thought of that but I see it now that it's been pointed out.

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On 10/19/2020 at 5:16 PM, Werthead said:

I'm not surprised Weis and Hickman are furious. It sounds like WotC had some kind of meltdown after all their recent controversies with perceived racist caricatures in the Ravenloft material and their decision to stop making "evil-only" races. It even sounds like they asked Weis and Hickman to tweak a few things, they did so, then WotC said screw it and cancelled the trilogy anyway.

Particularly grating as Dragonlance was very progressive in its day: multiple female protagonists and antagonists, a general lack of chainmail bikinis, and the "evil" races had numerous individual good members (particularly goblins and draconians). They also treated other traditionally evil races very differently, like ogres who are generally the still-honourable remnants of a much greater, higher civilisation in previous ages.

Yes, I particularly remember their take on "evil forces" with the Knights of Takhisis which I still think was a brilliant mastering and inversion of the "evil defeats itself" trope.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Wizards of the Coast also being sued by Gale Force Nine Games for breach of contract.

Wizards/Hasbro and Disney both seem to be acting highly irrationally recently. Just breaking contracts and see what happens? Well, they get sued, that's what happens. Bizarre behaviour.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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