There are antisemitic iterations of the goblin! There are also antisemitic iterations of basically everything in European folklore, because if there was one thing people in Europe loved it was hating Jews! But those arenât definitive and the problem there didnât originate with the invention of the goblinâwhich was an evolution of other existing fairy myths, overlaps with them, and isnât nearly as distinct, differentiated, or universally codified as people seem to think. It originated with people hating Jews, and using pre-existing stories and myths to express that hatred. Most of the time, though, they just wrote about Jews, because they didnât need a secret magical creature code to be terrible to us. They could just do that!
The way that people on this website are obsessed with a single, âoriginalâ version of a story, which can then be deemed morally acceptable or unacceptable, goes fundamentally against the way folklore is created, propagated, modified, and used to fit different locations at different times. There isnât a single âproblematicâ goblin canon you can point to! They arenât defined that simply! And no, A Certain Popular Fantasy Series doesnât count!
By focusing on the goblin as the problematic thing, and not the stories about Jews that the antisemitic goblin mythsâwhich are rarer than people seem to thinkâdraw off of, the Discourse⢠focuses on a single pass/fail signifier of wokeness instead of actually educating people on the complex narratives that have built different iterations of antisemitism over the centuries. It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, not how folklore works. Learn about blood libel, learn about the myth of the Protocols, learn about how antisemitism uses Jews as the powerful other to justify other forms of prejudice and oppression, and donât write stories about money-obsessed people with hooked noses. Goblins themselves donât factor into that as anything other than a footnote. Â
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