I use fantasy races in my D&D games to basically thwart the idea of fantasy races as they're intended. That is, every "race-based" psychological trait that a given race must have MUST be either cultural or completely nonexistent.

Like my fantasy Orcs (hey orcs are trending that's why this thread is a thing) might have a well known fascist barbarian culture somewhere, but I also had an orc druid who befriended the party, and orc explorers who let the players sleep in their tent one night.

Importantly as well, while there may be no truth to the claims made about various races, society in the world absolutely treats these claims like they're real. Drow are not inherently evil, even as the society that they were born out of did an inherently evil thing to make them

(that being eugenics). Orcs are not inherently evil. Elves aren't even inherently snobbish, that's just emergent from their long lives and insular culture. But the world's humans really treat drow and orcs as inherently evil and disgusting and elves as snobbish.

I'm not 100% sure this is the best way to handle these issues. My fantasy races are also treated as different species or subspecies compared to Homo homo (what we would call Homo sapiens) There are in fact, gameplay-wise, specific physical traits which separate the fantasy races.

But real races don't work like that. Races in the real world are not "real" in any meaningful physiological or genetic sense, it's purely sociological and harmful. You have to be careful when handling these kinds of things because allegory DOESN'T WORK.

So you have to be careful to tell stories based upon what you think would be realistic, drawing from the mundane racism of the real world, if fantasy races actually existed. You can't tell an allegorical story for the oppression of orcs as a story about the oppression of real ppl

you have to tell a story about the oppression of orcs that stands on its own. Because orcs really ARE different from humans, in a way black people and white people never have been.

Same with aliens. Star Trek's Cherons work well because it's the aliens oppressing each other as a way to allegory racism. But when humans oppress aliens in a fictional allegory for white oppression of people of color, then you have a problem. Because aliens really ARE different.

But it's still useful and interesting to tell a story of aliens or fantasy races being oppressed, it's just important not to do it with the explicit goal of being a race allegory

I dunno if any of this made sense or went anywhere but that's my (white dude who maybe doesn't have any right to have an opinion on this stuff) thoughts RE: orcs are trending.