this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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It's slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, it's going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.
Also, it probably helped kneecap the popularity of Tolkien-style "Always Chaotic Evil" (TV Tropes page) races/species, by virtue of making the racialised elements much more difficult to ignore.
As TV Tropes' analysis page notes, however, there are a fair few ways to make Evil Minions^tm^ without throwing any racial baggage into the mix - ways that have let the base trope survive the change in political climate, even as its original version fell out of favour.