ttrpg

TTRPG writers need to learn the lesson that video games learned in the 90s: the universally-acknowledged acceptable target of unlimited violence is the nazis. The D&D shorthand for this are the mortal worshippers of demons and evil gods (there's usually at least one obvious fascist god of tyranny or something), characters that are consciously choosing to side with unfathomable cosmic evil because they'll personally get some small benefit.

We already have a group of semi-intelligent four-limbed upright-walking baddies you can mindlessly slaughter, they're called undead. Works great too because the undead masses generally don't have free will. Replace undead with robots for a sci-fi setting.
If you're killing and plundering sapient (is that the right word?) creatures for no good reason, you're the baddies.

It's incredibly disturbing. Beyond the moral aspect: it's fucking lazy. It's like running a modern setting and everywhere you go there's ninjas to fight, and none of them have names or faces. Rather than making a world where different factions have different motivations, or this culture is superstitious about X because this thing happened a long time ago, it's just "the enemy race is here, eradicate them." Bland, repetitive campaign.

Well if inherently evil races aren't real, how do you explain white people?

This and also the way "Bandits" are used as generically evil People You Can Always Kill

The race trope in D&D was inherited from Tolkein's racializations in his LOTR. To preface, I don't care for the work nor for the author. LOTR was way before my time and I never vibed with the weird insistence from the r/fantasy crowd that I need to "like" it to get their "fantasy fan starter pack."

Tolkien was a massive racist POS for the racializing and racial coding in his works. Orcs are, by his own admission, inspired by 19th and 20th European racial caricatures of Asian and African peoples. He sees no problem with characterizing them all as canonically irredeemable and the definition of "evil," this coming from a clown who apparently professed to be a "Roman Catholic," who should then know then the importance of the Christian redemption doctrine. He himself later admitted it was problematic that he antithetically made the orcs irredeemably evil when the LOTR is supposed to be a Christianity referenced work... but then did nothing about it.

Fantasy today portrays goblins and orcs and trolls and whatever races as inherently vile, down to even their physical appearance. This is a racial characterization that has absolutely no material basis in reality other than in the racist caricatures of every non Anglo-American race during Tolkein's time which he directly lifted from in his work. Seeing a non-white person back then produced the same conditioned revulsion that fantasy today makes people feel about those "monster" races.

It's very interesting that fantasy, starting with Tolkein in the mid 20th century, rather than casting off the racist tradition of racial caricaturization that authors could no longer get away with applying to real world peoples as an outdated and monstrous way of perceiving "other" peoples, simply continued it within the confines of "fictionalized" races (which conveniently have a massive spoonful of real world racial coding embedded, as Tolkein admitted).

All this would have just been a simple rant on a problematic media tradition if it isn't now being reverse applied onto real world designated enemy groups, like how Russians are now being called "orcs." Fantasy through this trope has basically preserved through fictionalized cryo-statis, the conviction that an entire race can be genocided so long as they look "monstrous" and act "pure evil" used at the height of 19th and 20th century settler-colonial imperialism.

Without exaggeration, I'd argue it has contributed to how easy it has been for regimes like Israel and their Western apologists to resurrect the "shut your brain off, the entire population is inherently monstrous and worth exterminating" mentality, embedded particularly in the younger generations through media consumption of the fantasy genre, by invoking atrocity propaganda (similar to how "evil" races always have the inciting incident in the first chapter/episode where they do "the bad thing" to justify their subsequent extermination by the "hero" protagonists) to justify the Palestinian genocide.

I say this loving Baldur's Gate 3, but it was super disturbing to me that all the goblins are treated as straight up evil to the point where you're allowed to kill goblin children without consequence.