Thoughts on Orcs:

My first characters were almost always orcs, or half-orcs. I was too big for my skin, didn't get people, and (I now know) wasn't wired like them. My brain didn't work like theirs. I felt like I was cosplaying normalcy.

Pariah half-orcs spoke to me. Still do./

The first book I remember is an audio-book of The Two Towers. I can track the exact moment I became a conscious consumer of stories - it's when Sting glows blue on the banks of the river, just before Boromir buys it.

So this shit is baked in to me. I come by it honestly. /

The first character I remember playing was Toshk Longwalker, a half-orc Monk of Fharlanghn, who dipped druid and wound up being the patron diety in my world of scrubland, fenns, marshes,

and outcasts.

For me that's what orcs were. They were me. That was good, & enough./

At the same time, though, my favorite poet growing up was Kipling.

My favorite author was Orson Scott Card, then I found Lovecraft.

And y'all, if you're gonna love those things, you HAVE TO understand the problems with them. The work, and the author, separately and together./

Tolkien was a product of his time. He was famously opposed to Nazis, as the exchange with the German publishers for LotR shows, and he was by all accounts a mild and affable fellow.

aaaaaaand he also made races in his work explicitly linked to real-world ones. /

He both a) had a deep respect for the Jewish people, and b) Bought in to the myths of his time and station about them.

Dwarves, with Semitic names, with a Semitic language he built, make amazing works but destroyed their homeland by their innate greed and are now in disapora. /

The rest of the races in LotR have similar ties to real-world cultures. The Orcs are explicitly asiatic, drawing on the history of Steppe "barbarians" riding down out of central Asia to destroy "civilization" every so often.

Much like the "Turk" and the "Hun" he fought in WWI./

When people like Gary Gygax cribbed JRR to make D&D, they didn't even copy the full personhood of the races involved - Tolkien put more work into Dwarves alone than I'd say most of us put into our whole worlds.

These people, making the media we love, were not always great. /

CW: Racism, Genocide

This is Colonel John “the butcher” Chivington, perpetrator of the Sand Creek Massacre.

“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians. Kill and scalp all, big and little, nits make lice.”

(Credit to @LakotaMan1 for the picture and quote). /

He is arguing that you must kill the babies in particular, because if you don't, they'll grow up to be adults who you have to fight.

This man is someone that Gary Gygax holds up as a paladin. As explicitly lawful good. / https://twitter.com/FreyjaErlings/status/1180544774723571712

So. Given that.

The idea that races in the fantasy world might stand in for races in the real world, combined with a mindset that committing a war of genocide against "savage" dwellers in the "wilderness" is a good thing, combined with the Murder Tourist approach to gaming...

We've been struggling with the race essentialism in TTRPGS for my entire life. We all become aware of it in different ways, at different times, if at all.

But it's there. Someone pointing to a racist trope and saying "Y'all, that's a racist trope," is not being racist. /

I try, in my world, to make every "race" complete. I try explicitly and intentionally not to link them to specific real-world races.

I'm still working through it. I think I may drop traditional fantasy races entirely, go back to my (Nordic) people's pre-Tolkien folklore. /

If you're new to the conversation, please consider listening - particularly to marginalized creators who've been in the #TTRPG space for a while.

Consider doing that BEFORE dropping your hot takes on how the people mentioning the problem are the real racists. /

I'd recommend following:

@20arabiaRPG
@Swordsfall1
The whole cast of @DiceyAmazons
@Noirenigma
@cypheroftyr
@GabeJamesGames
@POCGamer
@pocttrpgs
@ElWarius

Not b/c they're gonna necessarily agree with me or endorse my points here, but b/c they're people who would know. /

(And also, just in general, because they make some really cool stuff.)

That's it for me. Go and listen. /end

(PS - I didn't say it explicitly, but just because it seems obvious; a core problem with a lot of fantasy media is that it's part of the same settler colonial mindset that Chivington up there is the result of and poster boy for, maybe that's a little more bullshit to consider.)

Addendum - all of this. https://twitter.com/Lammergeared/status/1254456754697646091