Illustrations in questions and answers—legit or not?

Question

This question about repeated images in various editions of the Dungeon Master's Guide has this answer that's good (and probably right) but that would be vastly improved were it to include the actual illustrations. Usually, I'm a begging-for-forgiveness-is-better-than-asking-for-permission dude, but it's my question not my answer, and I didn't want to suggest to the answer's writer to include the illustrations without making sure first that their inclusion is okay.

In short, for the purposes of critique, comparison, or review, is including illustrations in a question or answer acceptable?

Answer 1

Yes, but

Your stipulations as to the use of the material in positing this question essentially leads to you asking if the use of images specifically permitted as Fair Use is permitted by site policy. It should be, since we already allow the use of copyrighted material under Fair Use in other, non-image, contexts, and (as you have pointed out) other stacks already do this with images, thus indicating that there isn't a stack policy against it.

We already use copyrighted material via a Fair Use justification when we quote from copyrighted works, especially when those quotes contain stuff beyond game-mechanical information. For example, see this answer as to items used by Gord the rogue, my answer to the question about owlbear sounds, and this answer addressing floating gelatinous cubes.

However

The default image-hosting stuff uses Imgur. Imgur doesn't allow any material except material you can grant Creative Commons licensing to. So, you can't use Imgur (and thus can't use the normal image hosting methods). You can, however, link to an externally hosted image file (but not through the imgur hosting method).