Day 17 D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop: First time you heard that D&D was somehow evil

I think the first time I encountered the idea that D&D was "evil" was the infamous book, Mazes and Monsters, or possibly the less infamous, but similar book, Hobgoblin. I didn't run into either of these books until I was in college, after I had been playing for several years. (I somehow have avoided seeing the movie adaptation of Mazes and Monsters.) After I read those two books I began listening to the experiences of other gamers, and found out that the idea that D&D was "harmful" or "evil" was something that a lot of them had run afoul of at one point or another. This was new to me. When we started playing in high school, (and we actually played at school), we experienced none of this. People who thought it was weird, yes. People who thought it was evil, no. I think there was so little awareness of the hobby in the population at large, that it just didn't register on any level, for good or bad reasons.