this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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I think maybe I'm ignorant, but it seems like all this discourse around evil races came up only when this movie was released and it compared orcs to minorities. Like people never associated minorities in real life with fantasy monsters. The closest thing I can think of is True Blood having vampires be an allegory of LGBTQ+ people at a time when gay marriage wasn't legal.
Maybe I'm out of touch and there have always been racist connotations that continued after Tolkien. It just seems like those connotations stopped with The Hobbit and only recently were revived with Harry Potter and then Bright.
I mean, X-Men was originally black people, and then more recently queer people. Fantasy maybe a bit more "innocent" about it until JK came along and did all the tropes, but they were still there.
Nah I can remember people rightfully pointing out prior to 2017 that the only race of dark skinned elves being by default evil in dnd was kinda weird, among other such things. Idk if that’s just when it collided with the discourse culture of the internet but people were arguing about that stuff in forums and on reddit subs since I’ve been into dnd which goes back to at least 2012 or so.
I feel like it’s just part of the long slow culture shift and more and more poc voices being in rpg/fantasy communities
I hate the evil races thing, it's very much not necessary. I can understand monsters like a mindflayer and a beholder, because they would have a completely different sense of morality, but intelligent humanoid races, that live in contact with one another (at least sort of), yeah, you're telling me that they are all inherently evil? Yeah, I don't like that. Also, fuck alignment, it's ridiculously simple and doesn't bring anything cool to the game, besides maybe a few memes
Ah yeah, that's a good point. I was never into those settings where Dark Elves were literally dark skinned (I've never played D&D). That's probably why I didn't notice.
I mean I think the biggest issue with it is the concept of “evil races” themselves echoes racist bioessentialist race science that has and continues to harm minorities. Drows are an example but virtually all fantasy is downwind of tolkien and is an inherent part of the genre that is pretty consistently critiqued by POC fans.