Terriblog

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

I’ve read up on why (in the original dnd manual kobolds looked like weird lizard dog people and afterwards some creators focused more on the lizard aspects while others focused more on the dog aspect, which resulted in some creators depicting them as any random animal they like) but in folklore kobolds are literally just the German version of gnomes, or the Scandinavian nisse/tomte.

They are both small and dress like the peasant class of their respective countries, they both have the ability to transform into animals and inanimate objects, though they tend to change back pretty quickly suggesting they don’t have the “stamina” to keep the illusion up for long, they act as house helpers and protectors but will turn nasty if disrespected sometimes going so far as to burn the whole house down, and they also work on ships both as helpers and bad omens. The ship thing overlaps so much that if you look up ship kobold or ship gnome (skibsnisse) you get the same pictures.

The only big difference I could find is that folklore kobolds are also known to work in mines, though I wouldn’t be surprised if you get some mine nisse/tomte in Norway or Sweden that I just haven’t come across yet. The Danish nisse variant is also known to have a wide variety of jobs like farmer, church helper, scribe and miller.

My general impression is that folklore kobolds are sliiightly meaner gnomes but not by much, so while I’d never tell fantasy kobold fans to change anything about their beloved creature, if I were ever to make a fantasy world I’d depict them as the bad boy relative of the nisses who are very close knit with humans, even living with them, while kobolts prefer more unsavory or unrefined humans and naturally encountering dwarfs more often in the mines, and have tomtes live in nature with more close relations to wild animals but still relatively close to humans and put them all under the species of gnome.

And then artists and writers had to flesh these stat blocks out and distinguish them in the lore, leading to an explosion of fantasy creatures that were more than the original "magical little folk" or "brutish minion." One interesting example is the gnoll, which began as a vaguely defined monster "gnole" in a Dunsany short story. The name was justified as some sort of gnome/troll hybrid, before writers used it for demon-worshipping hyenafolk.

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