Fifty Shades of Denim

i would still argue that fantasy racism is a real issue. it's just not the "oh no, this character doesn't like elves!" thing. (especially because elves are very often white-coded!)

i'm not sure if this was on your blog or someone else's, but a few weeks back there was a post about a game called "don't kill them all". already a bad start. to be VERY brief about it - a half-elf, half-Orc girl (who is heavily coded to be mixed - for instance, she has locs in her hairstyle) who is raised by elves comes to the land of her Orc side of the family (heavily Black-coded, which is why i'm capitalizing Orc) and has to basically "civilize" them, because they are "blinded by their constant destructive urges". the game centers around sending the Orcs on missions and "managing" them in order to not have them all max out their "rage meters" (by taking damage, losing resources, etc). if you fail the level, well, "Orcs don't die, they rage!" they stomp their feet, akin to a young child throwing a tantrum, and scream to "kill them all!" if you win the level, you get a "progress report" with lines such as "good work, not killing and breaking everything!"

for fuck's sake, the website's tagline for the game is "a turn-based strategy and base-building game in which you teach Orcs to feel".

i don't seriously think i need to explain why this is racist as hell, right? especially because the company developing the game (in Quebec) has zero Black employees on staff, as far as i can tell through the staff picture in their press kit.

Orcs/Orks more generally are often Black-coded and are simultaneously depicted as "brutes" and "evil". even as far back as their origins, in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings works and letters, Orcs were described in incredibly racist terms. one of Tolkien's "dilemmas" was that he allowed the Orcs to speak and to discern good from evil - therefore, it was now unclear whether slaughtering them was permissible. Orcs in D&D are similarly eyebrow-raising at best with "boosted Intimidation and reduced Intelligence stats".

so yeah - fantasy racism is real. just not the one people think.

and it's on creators of fantasy worlds and races to take care that their Black-coded races aren't perpetuating racist stereotypes.

I actually disabled reblogs on that post ages ago because I felt like people were focusing too hard on one specific game and one specific dev team when really this is a problem in basically any fantasy universe where race is a thing. Don't Kill Them All is *especially* racist (which, I mean, it's Quebec, what are you going to expect?), but it's built on stereotypes and jokes and memes that we all allow to persist. They thought it was fine because a lot of ostensibly leftist fantasy nerds also think it's fine.

You know what's a perennial Tumblr darling? Baldur's Gate 3. Half-orcs don't just have the inherent intimidation modifier; their heads also constantly lean forward, giving them a pseudo-hunchback, so that they're always looking down scarily at everything. There are no recruitable half-orcs; one of the few significant half-orc characters is working with the comically evil Kethric and has cornrows. The game loves to discuss how racism and xenophobia is affecting refugees - like the white-coded tiefling refugees you meet from the first act onward - but it also treats all goblins, bugbears and ogres as universally cruel and primitive and gross, to the point where treating them all as equally disposable is the correct option. The only one you can really negotiate with is an ogre who happened to eat a magical item that makes him 'intelligent' and 'civilized'. Oh, and the drow, whom you can try to negotiate with and even potentially recruit because she's a white woman of normal height with a skin condition. You can't kill tiefling children; you *can* kill goblin children and beloved bear-fucker Halsin will murder two of them for the crime of being annoying to an animal. The line between how the game treats the 'civilized' vs 'uncivilized' races is stark and vicious. Game of the fucking year. Hundreds and hundreds of people on this site cooing over Astarion or Karlach.

(Not even getting into how the game and fandom treat the only recruitable non-white character)

I watched Orc City become a meme off of how dehumanizing and poorly-written the opening sequence of a fantasy book was - only for those making fun of it to start coming up with jokes even more dehumanizing.