I know I retweeted this once without comment, but now I’m retweeting it again /with/ comment because this thread is a really good stepping off point to really asking yourself what the hell is baked into DnD’s setting as a whole because it doesn’t start OR stop w/ the orcs https://twitter.com/effinvictus/status/1254441041211600896

Someone in the replies to the thread pointed out Eberron’s jungle drow, but honestly drow as a whole have some Shit to unpack as a fantasy race, between the fantasy dark skinned elves usually worshipping an evil religion to “reverse sexism”

Like with damn near every DnD race there’s /so much/ to unpack with each of them, from a Doylist perspective, and what it says about the writers’ views and the like as you look into each one

I’ve put a lot of thought into this topic because I’ve got my own homebrewed setting, where I focus a LOT on applying intersectionality to different aspects of the races present...

...because using what’s present in DnD’s canonical worldbuilding is just not an acceptable option for me and it’s not an acceptable option for my players.

Like I believe Eberron takes half a step in the right direction by stating that you shouldn’t assume all of X is Y-alignment because that’s not how the setting works. I would like it, and other fantasy settings, to take more steps to mayhaps Git Gud

Another highlight of this thread that I WISH I could figure out how to quote retweet on mobile is the point about how there are things that the fanbase as a whole accepts and things that they refuse to, which plays into a lot of race and gender things as a whole

I had this as a reoccuring problem when running my homebrew setting with a group of people that I wasn’t 100% comfortable with. A player consistently pushed military power fantasies onto things that were not militaristic in nature.

First with a Found Family Eco-Anarchist faction, and then again with a den of bugbears. And it deserves a chance to really examine why he thought that both of these family situations, one of choice and one of blood, had to be militaristic in nature

Because I asked myself first and foremost of what I had done to give this portrayal. And there were things I personally did wrong in the portrayal that led that player to fall into an easy fantasy trope assumption that all rebellions /must/ be militaristic in nature

But given how much fantasy is in-grained with “Evil Empire vs plucky small democratic army”, I have always wondered how much of it was just previous media training that player to have that sort of perspective especially in terms of how often that story is used to prop up military

image in the eye of the public. Both of the factions I listed previously are families, formed through different means, standing up against an empire because they choose not to sit on the sidelines and hope things don’t happen to them, that they happen to other people instead.

You can enjoy media with bad history to it. Nobody’s saying that you can’t play orcs or drow or bugbears or any of the other races DnD and fantasy as a whole have used as bad fantasy-stand-ins. But you need to question things that are attached to them...

...and what mindset those things /can/ train you for.