It’s slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, it’s going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.
Honestly I’m so used to deconstructions of the basic good races vs. evil races dichotomy that when I joined my first long form DnD campaign about a year ago, I ended up having a chat about it with our DM where he had to explain to me that the orcs were intended to be an obviously “we are evil, we are the enemy, you are supposed to fight and kill us” type of enemy. There’s been some more nuance since then, but even since we’ve moved to the next campaign with new characters, mine is once again the “wait, maybe we should listen hear out the chaotic evil demonic minions and find out why they suddenly decided to try and invade our lands” type of character.
Alignment-locked races (or classes for that matter) are just stupid. It’s probably the thing I hated about D&D the most and getting rid of alignment altogether was one of our house rules. I’m actually really happy Baldur’s Gate 3 did that, because suddenly a whole bunch of players realized how you can easily work around those restrictions.
It’s so much more fun when you travel to, say, the Abyss and don’t operate under the pretense that everything you meet there is chaotic evil by default and that you could maybe even meet a morally complex demon. Even more fun in a Planescape campaign.
Also, it probably helped kneecap the popularity of Tolkien-style “Always Chaotic Evil” (TV Tropes page) races/species, by virtue of making the racialised elements much more difficult to ignore.
As TV Tropes’ analysis page notes, however, there are a fair few ways to make Evil Minionstm without throwing any racial baggage into the mix - ways that have let the base trope survive the change in political climate, even as its original version fell out of favour.
It’s slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, it’s going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.
Honestly I’m so used to deconstructions of the basic good races vs. evil races dichotomy that when I joined my first long form DnD campaign about a year ago, I ended up having a chat about it with our DM where he had to explain to me that the orcs were intended to be an obviously “we are evil, we are the enemy, you are supposed to fight and kill us” type of enemy. There’s been some more nuance since then, but even since we’ve moved to the next campaign with new characters, mine is once again the “wait, maybe we should listen hear out the chaotic evil demonic minions and find out why they suddenly decided to try and invade our lands” type of character.
Alignment-locked races (or classes for that matter) are just stupid. It’s probably the thing I hated about D&D the most and getting rid of alignment altogether was one of our house rules. I’m actually really happy Baldur’s Gate 3 did that, because suddenly a whole bunch of players realized how you can easily work around those restrictions.
It’s so much more fun when you travel to, say, the Abyss and don’t operate under the pretense that everything you meet there is chaotic evil by default and that you could maybe even meet a morally complex demon. Even more fun in a Planescape campaign.
/off-topic rant
I used to find it amusing how many black metal bands were ‘Tolkien inspired’, it is a lot less funny now. (but hey, at least they are not NSBM)
Also, it probably helped kneecap the popularity of Tolkien-style “Always Chaotic Evil” (TV Tropes page) races/species, by virtue of making the racialised elements much more difficult to ignore.
As TV Tropes’ analysis page notes, however, there are a fair few ways to make Evil Minionstm without throwing any racial baggage into the mix - ways that have let the base trope survive the change in political climate, even as its original version fell out of favour.