Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
And to drag all this painfully back over to dwarves - they embody a number of human attitudes from our world too, like fondness for tradition, drink, industry, discipline, martial pursuits, and craftsmanship. There are, again, a lot of humans both in- and out-of-universe who find those things relatable, and thus make friends with dwarves easily (for the former) or quickly grok their deal and get immersed in the fantasy world (the latter.) And there are plenty that find them overly rigid or insufficiently artistic too, giving rise to meaningful conflict. If that makes them a "rubber forehead human" to some people and thus insufficiently alien or appealing, well, I'd put the folks who think that in the "missed the point of literature" bucket the Giant mentioned in the quote above.
The dismissal of "petty escapism" as without value is a place where I must strongly disagree with the Giant.

Sometimes, though, people need a stronger differential point for their locus to help explore things or to attract them to the story. Like being a intelligent bug or amoeba. I love dwarves because of the artistic expression through functional craftsmanship, for instance, but others may prefer an ethereal sense of grace that they wish to emulate in their participatory fiction...so they only want to play doofy pointy eared ponces.

- M