I am sorry if this is something basic that has been discussed to death before but I feel like I need to get this out of my system before I ruin friendships by wishing centuries of humiliation on people for the way they play pretend.
I had a casual chat with a friend and fellow GM about our current campaigns and worldbuilding. At some point beast races come up and I mention I like gnolls and give a few short details about their society in my setting. In response I get an explanation that he can’t have this kind of characterization because of Goebbles level bullshittery about how beastmen are inherently savage and destructive and basically a swarm of pests that has to be put down. And how this is necessary in order to address the moral issues of what to do with beastmen non-combatants. Essentially giving players moral license to commit genocide and still be considered “good” in-universe.
It felt so fucking unreal seeing how normally chill people can almost reproduce word for word the vile shit that Zionists are using right fucking now as a justification for mass murder and not have a single moment of “oh shit wait wtf am I saying”. I had to step away from the keyboard and calm down. I hate how concept of “sapient creatures that are completely and irredeemably evil and are specifically designed to be slaughtered” is seen as something completely normal and even expected. Gygax was a piece of shit genocide enthusiast who deserves to rot in hell and it’s high time that we move on from colonial plunder sims with dragons and obligatory others that exist only to be killed and looted.
You are building an imaginary world and there are no limits. The genre is literally called imagination. There is no excuse for consciously designing entire species that are designated for slaughter and reproducing some of the vilest ideologies ever thought up by humans as a pillar of your worldbuilding.
That’s it I guess. That’s the rant. Thanks for reading. I am doing my best trying to give positive portrayals of non-human societies in my games and also trying to get my friends to play other games that aren’t built from around breaking into others’ homes to kill them and take their stuff.
Kinda hard to not think about the fact that all the “races” in western fantasy are clearly based off of existing human groups according to the admission of Tolkien himself. He literally modelled the language of the Orcs on Turkish ffs.
Evlish is celtic, dwarvish is hebrew. Yes the gold hoarding race is jewish. SIGH. The good men are from the west and the bad ones are from the east. At least he made gondorians mediterranean.
One I’ve been keeping in the ol’ back pocket for a hat trick monster inclusive party and late addition to the players is having the latecomer be from far away (bonus points if they’re a weeb doing some weeb shit) and have opposite monster prejudices from the party and their world.
dramatically swishes kimono “why are you massacring peaceful kobolds? You should be killing this disgusting goblin trash” points at party’s shaman
You know if goblin slayer wasn’t made by Japan I would’ve sworn that the goblins were some thinly veiled racial caricature of the Japanese.
some Korean rpg’s going to give all the goblins toothbrush mustaches and give them names like “yoshida goblinjima” any day now.
It is weird that goblin slayer is actually kinda good about it. The goblins seem to be exactly that. Chimpanzees with some fantasy elements. Which to be clear, chimpanzees do seem to be a purely evil race. Adding obligate brood paracitism to them like some wasps have is reasonably realistic. Overall the effect is too tryhard and grimdark. If the direction was like 20% begtter they could have something like alien where they had something intresting to add to the discource. They handle it way better than most media though so it’s weird.
The goblins can talk, make tools, domesticate animals. They even have a religion ffs. they’re a sentient sapient race. They literally kill the baby goblins in that show and depict sparing literal babies as a foolish choice. Also chimpanzees aren’t “evil”, everything bad that chimpanzees do humans also do.
Maybe it was from the light novels. They can’t talk. They are like chimpanzees with mosquito elements. There isn’t a real life thing it is an analogy to because it is fantasy. Kinda like how the Xmen are supposed to represent something, but no one can shoot lazers so they actually don’t. If we accept that the writer was a terrible nerd that lacks social understanding, which is not a hard thing, the rest of what it does is intresting with the idea of extending natural evil onto the human scale. Like Alien, they are obviously intelegant. They are just inimicable to life as we understand it. Watch a video of chimpanzees hunting monkey, it is terrifying. Depending on the adaptation of thr work goblins either represent cosmic horror or liberalism