Fantasy Tropes/Cliches that Annoy You

[Bohandas]

The thing is, in most fantasy settings, orcs are NOT explicitly created by an evil god to kill exterminate humanity.

Except the part about targeting humanity specifically that describes orcs in the majority of D&D settings as well as Middle Earth

[Bohandas]

What gets me, though, is the idea that it is imperative that this myriad of biologically distinct species must have identical psychologies. When you consider it through the lens of world-building rather than attempting to identify racism in all things, it actually rather strains credulity that a dozen or more different biological species, whether they developed through evolution or were created by a grab bag of ideologically motivated deities, should all have identical inherent mental characteristics

Yes! This 1000 times this!

[Amaril]

I'd say the big thing with Orcs, Drow, and the like (specifically in D&D) is that they embody certain traits that cause people in the real world to go, "Huh, those traits are also used to describe certain living people based on demographic. You're kind of playing on that when you use those traits for these explicitly-designated evil species/races." I mean, in 5E, which is generally fairly good about this concept, you still have Drow and Orcs described as "humanoid", where Demons and Devils are fiends and things like Mind Flayers are aberrations. The latter three creatures are also completely alien to real world humans, or life in general.

I like to think of it as adjacent to the idea of the uncanny valley. You look at a Drow or Orc and you can see, even beyond just the physical characteristics, some amount of various parts of humanity in them and the fluff reinforces that to a certain extent. With Devils and Demons, you get a lot less of that, because they are inhuman through and through. At least, when we're talking specifically about D&D and when they do a good job portraying it.

Other Fantasy settings are better or worse about how they handle this. And for the record I actually consider D&D's transgressions to be fairly minor, though my homebrew settings usually portray orcs and goblinoids as more complex creatures than the default.

But that's an arbitrary distinction. The argument for always evil "races" in fantasy being racist hinges on the premise that fantasy "races", which are almost always presented as something more like species, are allegories for different human racial and cultural groups in the real world, and it's therefore not right to paint some of them as always evil. Now, that's an argument I generally agree with--I do think fantasy is always an allegory for reality to at least some extent--but if you're equating different fictional species to different real-world racial groups, you have to make this equivalence for all sapient species in the story. To say "orcs and drow are allegories for real-world races, but lizardfolk aren't" when lizardfolk are just as sapient as orcs and drow is to draw an arbitrary line between "sufficiently humanlike" and "insufficiently humanlike". And that line could be anywhere, really. What if your setting's lizardfolk happen to have human-shaped heads with flat faces? What if your setting's drow have tails? Where does humanlike end and other begin?

The alternative is to make an argument something like "it's racist to call drow in particular always evil, because they have dark skin, which is a specific trait that's unjustly maligned in real people, but having a race with green skin and making them always evil is fine, because there are no real humans with green skin". But this introduces all kinds of other problems--what if your drow are blue, like they are in many settings? Who decides what particular signifiers are okay to ascribe to always evil races and what ones aren't? And that's a line of thought that seems to me like it would lead to some places we really wouldn't be happy with.

The thing is, in most fantasy settings, orcs are NOT explicitly created by an evil god to kill exterminate humanity. Or, if they are, it's a minor background detail, and they're played as basically just Humans But Always Evil.

Consider the following paragraph

"The Galta are a savage, brutish people. They're strength is matched only by their cruelty. Unwilling to build a civilization of their own, they come to steal the fruits of ours, cutting down innocent farmers and valiant knights alike."

Are the Galta Monster Manual standard Orcs, or just a culture of evil barbarian Humans? It could honestly go either way, but if they're Orcs, and the presentation is that all Orcs are Inherently evil, you've got a problem, because Orcs are basically just a race\culture of Humans, and so it's an easy jump to "Some races\cultures of Humans are inherently evil"

Demons, Mind Flayers, heck even Lizardfolk become less problematic because they're more Alien, so it's harder to make that jump, especially if, like Mind Flayers, the evil things they do are things that a human COULDN'T do.

Orcs come to your house, attack you, and take your stuff. From there, one can say "Huh, Some groups of People want nothing but to come to my house, attack me, and take my stuff".

Mind Flayers turn your friends into thralls with their psychic powers, then have their thralls kidnap you so they can eat your brains. You can't really make that jump without entering crazy conspiracy theory territory, or seeing it as an allegory for reality television.

In many fantasy worlds, there are humans who can use magic to do all that stuff you ascribe to mind flayers. In some of these worlds, these humans are born with such abilities, through no choice of their own. This can be read as a fairly direct allegory for any kind of natural talent or gift in real-world humans, and how it should be treated by society. I'm just saying, I don't understand how you can make this judgment of "orcs and drow can be allegories for real groups of people, but mind flayers and demons can't". The distinction seems really arbitrary.

My solution is:
kill human bandits and not care. its their decision to be jerks who try and rob from people by force, this is not a modern society where people end up in fair jails where your taken care of to an extent. I mean lets face it, considering medieval justice, killing the bandits might be the merciful option rather than letting them face whatever torture they get in a dungeon and I don't the mean the adventuring kind. As well whatever gruesome form of execution the nobles came up with to entertain themselves and the commoners, the guillotine was considered a step up for being so humane by executing the person so quickly, cleanly and painlessly in comparison. when was that invented? the French Revolution.

I'm an adventurer out in the wilderness with more power than most people ever get in their lives, I don't have the luxury of always following the law when survival is on the line, and if someone's first response of seeing someone after so long out in the wilderness is to attack me, thats their fault not mine. while if innocent people are in danger like in a caravan of merchants who just sell stuff, its a combat situation, you either suck it up and kill the attackers before they kill the people that are defenseless and didn't do anything wrong or your not much of an adventurer at all.

because if an adventurer is needed, that generally means proper authorities can't do anything about it. no need for inherent evils, because its a lawless, wild place I'm in where people who choose to be evil inhabit to take advantage of people anyways. You either get smart and judge people by their actions and take precautions or your dead. given the genre, you'll never find a shortage of people willing to do evil anyways. I may be against chaotic evil races, but don't mistake that for softness. Adventuring is not for soft people.

But it seems to me that if you're making a world where people are meant to consider the moral implications of things like killing orcs because they're orcs, you're also asking people to consider the moral implications of killing bandits because they're bandits. Most bandits don't follow that path just because they're greedy and sadistic--they do it because they have no other way to survive. In a world taking cues from medieval Earth, as most fantasy does, can you really blame them? Their society probably has little to no safety net in place for people who lose their livelihoods--how else are they supposed to go on?

I'm not suggesting all adventurers should be total pacifists who never commit violence even when it could save lives. That would be silly. But in the kind of world that prompts these discussions about fantasy races, I would think it appropriate to have some reflection after a battle with a group of bandits on whether the party did the right thing in cutting them down, and whether they really deserved such a fate. Which isn't really conducive to the kind of game some people want always-evil races for, the sort of beer-and-pretzels game where you get to kick in doors and kill monsters without having to think about whether it might be wrong. Now, I myself will pretty much always prefer the former type of game over the latter, and I'm willing to consider that if the latter always relies on racist assumptions, then it might be wrong to indulge in it in any form; I just want to really make sure that assertion is based on sound logic before I start making it.

Well less on the mind flayer and more on the demons but supernatural creatures in my campaigns have much less of a option in the matter. Mystic energy isn't quite so neutral in my worlds and most creatures born from it have much less of an option in how they proceed. Think more like vampires (in some settings) or robots than truly free willed beings. In the unlikely event that one does change it results in either the creatures death or a rebirth. Much like in Dragonlance if a chromatic dragon undergoes a personality shift to good they literally change species into a metallic dragon.

On the mind flayer front are you going to lay down and die? It's not forced to attack you, it only has to do that if it wants to survive. You're not forced to kill it, you only have to do that if you want to survive.

Think of a setting like Middle-Earth, where orcs are pretty much always evil because they're being magically mind-controlled to some extent by Morgoth or Sauron (feel free to correct me if my Middle Earth-fu is weak). They're not acting on their own free will to do evil, but being forced. Is this portrayal racist? How active and continuous does the control have to be before it stops being racist to portray a species this way? What if, rather than continuous telepathic control, a world featured orcs who were genetically engineered by an evil god with an irresistible instinct to kill humans. They are otherwise fully sapient, but this urge is hard-coded into their genes by this creator. That sounds to me like something people would call racist (I'm inclined to say so myself), but how is it meaningfully different? They didn't choose to be made the way they are.

What I'm trying to say is, if you believe it's possible to have a species in fantasy that are fully sapient people, but then give them these irresistible tendencies they can't overcome...why is it okay to ascribe this nature to demons, but not orcs? Or, if your demons are essentially robots programmed to do evil, why can't you have orcs that are the same way? Is it something to do with demons being "obviously supernatural" and orcs being "obviously a natural species"? Because, like I suggested in my previous replies, that seems like an arbitrary distinction to me. What about a world where orcs are just a type of demon? They look exactly like orcs in any other story, they behave the same, but they're formed of embodied evil from hell?

With mind flayers, no, you're not going to lie down and die, but neither can you say "it's in the wrong for attacking me, I'm right to kill it" and call it that, no further reflection needed. In that situation, it seems to me that neither the mind flayer nor the adventurer is any more in the right than the other; and in a story that promotes this kind of moral reflection, I would expect some from whichever side survived the fight, however necessary it might have been.

[Max_Killjoy]

What gets me, though, is the idea that it is imperative that this myriad of biologically distinct species must have identical psychologies. When you consider it through the lens of world-building rather than attempting to identify racism in all things, it actually rather strains credulity that a dozen or more different biological species, whether they developed through evolution or were created by a grab bag of ideologically motivated deities, should all have identical inherent mental characteristics (including patterns of behavior that we subjectively ascribe to morality) and capabilities. Certainly, it is not the case that all cursorial animals run at the same speed, or in the same way. Indeed, it is rarely even questioned that the physical characteristics of the different fantasy races should be different. I think most people who aren't married to certain gamist stat generation methods would find the idea laughable that the halfling and kobold should be of the same physique as the dwarf or orc. But certain people find it far more likely that all these minds should work the same way and at the same capacity.

Excellent point.

When (in the fantasy setting my working on) I say certain species have certain predispositions that differ from humans, it's because they're biologically different, and this is approached purely from a worldbuilding perspective. The Tirzuk are obligate carnivores and neurologically react to being around too many of their own species packed in too tightly. This has effects on their culture and behavior and thinking.

But I still consider each Tirzuk to be an individual -- Tirzuk aren't human, but they are people. And they have variations on their culture depending on where you encounter them, their culture is not monolithic or identical to their "race". The big split is between those who still rely mainly on hunting, and those who rely mainly on herding.

[Lord Raziere]

But it seems to me that if you're making a world where people are meant to consider the moral implications of things like killing orcs because they're orcs, you're also asking people to consider the moral implications of killing bandits because they're bandits. Most bandits don't follow that path just because they're greedy and sadistic--they do it because they have no other way to survive. In a world taking cues from medieval Earth, as most fantasy does, can you really blame them? Their society probably has little to no safety net in place for people who lose their livelihoods--how else are they supposed to go on?

I'm not suggesting all adventurers should be total pacifists who never commit violence even when it could save lives. That would be silly. But in the kind of world that prompts these discussions about fantasy races, I would think it appropriate to have some reflection after a battle with a group of bandits on whether the group did the right thing in cutting them down, and whether they really deserved such a fate. Which isn't really conducive to the kind of game some people want always-evil races for, the sort of beer-and-pretzels game where you get to kick in doors and kill monsters without having to think about whether it might be wrong. Now, I myself will pretty much always prefer the former type of game over the latter, and I'm willing to consider that if the latter always relies on racist assumptions, then it might be wrong to indulge in it in any form; I just want to really make sure that assertion is based on sound logic before I start making it.

Don't lump me in with beer and pretzels. My roleplaying doesn't fall into some prescribed style. I don't want arbitrary morality lessons, but neither do I want racism portrayed positively, is that so hard to understand? To me, the only world I've known is one where racism is wrong, told to me since I was a kid. I'm not curious to explore beyond that, because all the options to do that, sound horrible to me. "races are just that alien" just sounds like an excuse to not understand other cultures given that the person to make that sort of Cthulhu trope was Lovecraft, who was really racist. P-Zombie orcs are just ridiculous because P-Zombies are a ridiculous argument in the first place, "race of super-soldiers" is about as convincing as all the examples in fiction where creating a super-soldier is created and rebels, like, immediately. seriously many super-soldiers tend to not work out for evil people making them. and so on. I don't need excuses to fight evil- I just fight it, because it is right.

I reflect on these things at my own pace. having fun is what comes first, I like the khornate sort of fun, even if I don't want to be racist while doing so. I know its weird, I'm reflective enough to not want racism to be portrayed positively, but not thoughtful enough to go further than that. But I don't really care whether anyone thinks this is inconsistent, hypocritical, stupid or anything, because thats what I want to have fun with. I need no other justification.

[Amaril]

Don't lump me in with beer and pretzels.

Not at all my intention, and I'm sorry if I came across as doing so.

My roleplaying doesn't fall into some prescribed style. I don't want arbitrary morality lessons, but neither do I want racism portrayed positively, is that so hard to understand? To me, the only world I've known is one where racism is wrong, told to me since I was a kid. I'm not curious to explore beyond that, because all the options to do that, sound horrible to me. "races are just that alien" just sounds like an excuse to not understand other cultures given that the person to make that sort of Cthulhu trope was Lovecraft, who was really racist. P-Zombie orcs are just ridiculous because P-Zombies are a ridiculous argument in the first place, "race of super-soldiers" is about as convincing as all the examples in fiction where creating a super-soldier is created and rebels, like, immediately. seriously many super-soldiers tend to not work out for evil people making them. and so on. I don't need excuses to fight evil- I just fight it, because it is right.

I reflect on these things at my own pace. having fun is what comes first, I like the khornate sort of fun, even if I don't want to be racist while doing so. I know its weird, I'm reflective enough to not want racism to be portrayed positively, but not thoughtful enough to go further than that. But I don't really care whether anyone thinks this is inconsistent, hypocritical, stupid or anything, because thats what I want to have fun with. I need no other justification.

That answers my question, and I think it's a perfectly valid stance, as long as you recognize that you're picking somewhere to draw a line. My question was just one of tone--I tend to have a hard time not taking the tone either all one way or all the other, where either you're supposed to think critically about any application of violence and whether it's just, or you're not supposed to think about it at all. Trouble for me is, fiction that asks you to go the latter way while committing violence against humans almost always makes me uncomfortable. I admit, I usually have an easier time when it's some fantastical other species, whether demons, aliens, or, yes, orcs (though I can't really think of many orc examples I've actually played recently, and I do suspect that kind of tone would bother me more these days than it used to).

[Segev]

I think that's a side-effect of the whole "Race as Culture" thing.

We view the real world as a bunch of different Cultures and Subcultures. Americans, Canadians, Mexicans, ect.

When people build a Fantasy World, they imagine it it much the same way, as a collection of Cultures. However, they then tie some of those cultures to specific Races, which then leads us to the whole "Biologically predetermined Traits" thing. The different Races are a stand-in for different Cultures (Not necessarily real world ones), which leads to things that make sense as Cultural traits being presented as indistinguishable from Biological traits.

There is one Dwarven Culture, let's call it "Kaz". The people of Kaz care about Mining and Craftsmanship. 99% of Dwarves are from Kaz, and 99% of Kaz's long-term population are Dwarves.
Which traits are Kazian (Cultural) and which traits are Dwarven (Biological) therefore become all but indistinguishable.

The way to solve this is to either have multiple Dwarven cultures (And don't label them as different subraces, like Hill Dwarves vs Mountain Dwarves), or to have a Multiracial society. There are lots of Humans and Gnomes living in Kaz, who ALSO care about Craftsmanship and Mining. There are a lot of Dwarves who live outside Kaz, and they don't care about Mining at all.

I think it goes a bit further than that. We have Planets of Hats in sci-fi for the same reason. Coming up with an alien race (or a demihumanoid one) and one culture for it is enough to tell most stories that will involve meeting that race. Coming up with a half-dozen cultures (still a gross underrepresentation of what probably exists!) is a lot of work for something that you'll expose only one or two members of to the audience. And then, when later works expand on it, you've just got the one established culture treated as monolithic, so it becomes such.

[Scripten]

I reject in its entirety the notion that what we take in with our senses is fundamentally disconnected from what's really going on. For starters, the survival burden of bad information would consign any species with such senses to the dustbin of evolutionary failure.

Boy I'm glad that we can see the ultraviolet spectrum, then. Otherwise we'd all be dead!

But my point is that postmodernism is philosophical and concerned with disseminating art and critique, not science. Science backs it up, in a way, because we can measure just how disconnected our senses are from reality, but rejection of postmodernism as a movement has nothing to do with the fact that we can't perceive reality perfectly.

You can "reject" that all you want, but you're still wrong.

I reject in its entirety the notion that we cannot observe things (quantum scale aside) without affecting them.

Good for you. But you're incorrect, again. There are plenty of things that we cannot observe without affecting. For example, digging up fossils results in exposing them, causing them to degrade over time. Likewise, taking samples for chemical analysis requires, well, taking the samples. Even just being within sensing distance of certain animals will change their behavior. We just recently saw how chimpanzee groups would change their behavior based on whether or not we had humans observing them in the area regardless of whether or not anyone realized the chimps had noticed the scientists.

And note I didn't say everything nor to what extent, so Segev's addition, while useful as an aside, doesn't really speak to the point.

[Max_Killjoy]

Boy I'm glad that we can see the ultraviolet spectrum, then. Otherwise we'd all be dead!

But my point is that postmodernism is philosophical and concerned with disseminating art and critique, not science. Science backs it up, in a way, because we can measure just how disconnected our senses are from reality, but rejection of postmodernism as a movement has nothing to do with the fact that we can't perceive reality perfectly.

Objectively, it existed before we had any idea it was there, or could detect it. Eventually, we developed tools for detecting, then measuring, and finally imaging (translated into a visible image) the UV portion of the spectrum.

Furthermore, our inability to perceive UV directly is in no way an implication or proof that our ability to perceive the part of the spectrum we can perceive is as uselessly or hopelessly subjective as some here are asserting.

"Perfectly" is a strawman -- I did not claim and I have not seen anyone else claim that we have perfect perception.

My assertion was that our senses must be at least good enough at not providing us with false information that they've helped us, and our ancestors going back through the epochs, survive to this point. Our ancestors' eyes told them "deep hole here, bear over there, this is the kind of berry I know is poisonous by shape and color", and that was all close enough to reality that they at least lived long enough to have offspring who in turn survived etc.

And that strawman is the basis of a false dichotomy, in which our inability to perfectly perceive everything is presented as "proof" that we can perceive nothing objectively, that our entire perception of the world is a subjective mess, and that reality is unknowable.


Postmodernists comment on science all the time, and many social sciences departments are dominated by postmodernist thinking. Postmodernists as a whole have long asserted that ALL science is a "social construct", that there is no objective realty or fact to uncover, and that all "realities" are socially constructed and equally valid.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Postmo...mon_criticisms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critic..._postmodernism
https://www.allaboutworldview.org/po...rn-science.htm
https://www.quackwatch.org/01Quacker...s/reality.html
http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/n...c-truisms.html

I can keep providing links until that point is thoroughly made, if necessary.

I've even heard a postmodernist professor of philosophy refer to mathematics as a "culturally imperialist Western social construct".

[Lemmy]

There are a couple angles to consider.

First, is that of somebody who already views the world in terms of racial stereotype. A fantastical world with always-evil races reflects and reinforces their existing viewpoint: that some groups of people are inherently inferior/evil. It's not a matter of them being unable to separate the fantasy world from reality so much as it is them not realizing that "Always Evil Races" is something that's supposed to be Fantastical.

Consider Chickens
You're not an expert in Chickens, but you know a bit about them. They can't fly, people raise them for eggs, meat, and feathers, and they'll eat grain.
If you see a fantasy world where chickens can't fly, eat grain, and are raised for eggs, meat, and feathers, that will reinforce your pre-existing notions of what a Chicken is, just the same as if somebody told you some things about Chickens. You can be aware that THESE chickens exist in a fantasy world, but they're following the same rules as real-world chickens.

If you're already predisposed to seeing racial/cultural groups as inherently different, with some being inherently immoral or inferior, and you see a world where that is reflected back to you, they just call certain groups of people Orcs or Goblins, then yes, that will reinforce that viewpoint about how the world works.

And it's not just hardcore racists who would be vulnerable to this. Racism, especially in the form of stereotype, is pretty deeply ingrained into Western society and culture. Evil Orcs won't make anybody a racist by themselves, but they will reinforce a viewpoint that "Some People are Inherently Evil, and it's Right to Kill Them", that you could be picking up from Television, the internet, or your racist uncle over thanksgiving. I don't think D&D has been churning out a generation of bigots or anything, but it could reinforce an existing viewpoint.

The other angle is a player who is uncomfortable with the idea of an "Always-Evil" Race. They're down for fighting Orcs, but they need a solid reason beyond "They're Orcs".
If a player spends a decent amount of time in their life thinking about how Racists are Wrong, then they probably won't enjoy playing in a fantasy world where The Racists are Right.

Dragons=Cool
Wizards=Cool
"Some People are genetically predisposed to evil, a genocide would make the world a better place"=Not Cool.

See... The problem with this line of thought is that it assumes people are stupid. That they can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality...

Even my 3 years old niece knows that just because there's a race of evil insectoid ponies in MLP, that doesn't mean there's such a thing IRL.

IME, the only people having difficulty separating fantasy from reality are, ironically, the ones most eager to accuse others of racism and bigotry.

There are zero similarities between black people (or even stereotypes of black people) and the most common depiction of drows... And yet the accusers insist that it's racism.

Someone who sees "dark skin and evil" and equals that to any real world ethnicity is far, far more likely to be racist than an author (or audience) who just sees an evil race with dark skin.

This idea that someone or something is racist because someone else assumes it is sounds like a poorly veiled attempt to virtue-signal by accusing others.

[Segev]

This idea that someone or something is racist because someone else assumes it is sounds like a poorly veiled attempt to virtue-signal by accusing others.

And that is why people object to it being done. Nobody likes being called a witch so that somebody else can cozy up to the inquisition. Especially if it's not true, but any effort to say otherwise by a means other than acknowledging that the inquisition has a right to give everybody an anal exam is seen as proof of witchcraft.

[Bohandas]

That's not what postmodernism means nor is Cosi's post anything more than a statement of fact. Unless you claim to have access to omnipotence? Reality without the filter of interpretation or senses requires it.

That's not omnipotence. That's either omniscience or omnividence.

Also, directly experiencing something isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. It's arguable yhat we directly experience the workings of our own brains, but people didn't even know what the brain did until they started studying them from the outside.

[2D8HP]

My thoughts on "always evil races", recently I read an essay that refered to someone as an "orcish reality-TV star", and since that person doesn't have tusks or greenish-grey skin, I was pretty sure the author meant personality traits!

I'm partial to the "Evil Elves" Fair Folk trope.

I combine the worst stereotypes of the French and Russian Nobility of the "Ancien Regime" with the savage kidnapping "Indians" of old westerns, and some of the 19th century accounts of the Comanche that were listed in "Empire of the Summer Moon" (I do disguise it though I don't want anyone consciously thinking of real peoples because that's not as scary).

I am trying to make them "figures of evil", not of sympathy

They have vampire-like hypnotic powers and vulnerability to iron.

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.

Pratchett did have one Elf in his last book The Shepard's Crown

Spoiler

Show

Learn empathy and goodness before she is killed by other Elves

so I don't rule out good Elves, but I haven't used them (PC's may be half-Elves, half-Orcs, or regular humans, but any completely non-human ancestry is distant).
..
Some ideas were discussed in the Rules for Non Tolkienish Elves? thread.

Mostly my Elves ares just bleached Drow because I find this:



.scarier than this:



Yes I am making use of the
Evil Albino,

and the

Beauty Is Bad tropes, but I'm not aware of any consciously anti-pasty and attractive agenda on my part, it's just the story that my imagination tends to!

Please don't require me to have token good Elves/Fey!

[Bohandas]

Thinking about it, is it really even okay to kill something like a mind flayer? I mean, yeah, they have to eat sapient beings to survive, but that's not something they chose--it wasn't their decision to be born a mind flayer. When you kill one, you're killing a fellow sapient being that's been forced to attack you by circumstances beyond its control. Should that really be guilt-free?

(I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I'm genuinely curious to hear people's thoughts on these questions.)

It's them or you. Plus they also make use of institutionalized slavery, so they're bad on that count as well.

[icefractal]

Re: Perception of objective reality:
Anyone who thinks that they are or can be a perfectly rational actor, or that they are consciously aware of everything that influences their thoughts/memories/perceptions, needs to read up a bit more on neuroscience. This has been pretty well studied, although of course everyone likes to think they're the one exception.

Actually, the degree to which the conscious mind is merely one part of the process, and retroactively justifies decisions made by the subconscious, is a fascinating topic, but a bit of a tangent for this thread.

[Max_Killjoy]

Re: Perception of objective reality:
Anyone who thinks that they are or can be a perfectly rational actor, or that they are consciously aware of everything that influences their thoughts/memories/perceptions, needs to read up a bit more on neuroscience. This has been pretty well studied, although of course everyone likes to think they're the one exception.

Actually, the degree to which the conscious mind is merely one part of the process, and retroactively justifies decisions made by the subconscious, is a fascinating topic, but a bit of a tangent for this thread.

Yeah... even if it's one of those things that gets oversold and sensationalized in TED Talks and the like.

I'm not arguing that humans are perfectly rational or objective, just against the blinked ivory tower notion that we're each living in our own little subjective irrational prison with no hope of parsing objetive reality, and that our senses are so disconnected from reality that we might as well be in a total delusion.

[Potato_Priest]

Thinking about it, is it really even okay to kill something like a mind flayer? I mean, yeah, they have to eat sapient beings to survive, but that's not something they chose--it wasn't their decision to be born a mind flayer. When you kill one, you're killing a fellow sapient being that's been forced to attack you by circumstances beyond its control. Should that really be guilt-free?

Hell yeah, for several reasons.

A)They may be forced to kill us to survive, but that also means that we're forced to kill them to survive, so no ethical crisis there. When two creatures have to either kill one another or die, for whatever reasons (assuming it was neither party's fault) I don't see why there should be guilt either way. Its just the way it is. I don't think it would be wrong to kill and eat a deer to survive, and nor is it ethically wrong for a wolf to kill and eat me to survive. Its just what we do, what we have to do, and there's not really any good or bad about it.
B)They don't look anything at all like me (and in fact have disgusting creepy tentacle faces) so I don't feel a whole lot of sympathy for them.
C)They're going to kill me or someone I care about. I need to protect these people, and mind flayers can't really be persuaded to stand down, so violence or flight are the only options. Very often, violence is the only option.

I'm also not being sarcastic or anything. These are my thoughts on whether I would kill a mind flayer that was coming after me or someone I knew without guilt, and the answer, for these reasons, is yes.

[Amaril]

Hell yeah, for several reasons.

A)They may be forced to kill us to survive, but that also means that we're forced to kill them to survive, so no ethical crisis there. When two creatures have to either kill one another or die, for whatever reasons (assuming it was neither party's fault) I don't see why there should be guilt either way. Its just the way it is. I don't think it would be wrong to kill and eat a deer to survive, and nor is it ethically wrong for a wolf to kill and eat me to survive. Its just what we do, what we have to do, and there's not really any good or bad about it.
B)They don't look anything at all like me (and in fact have disgusting creepy tentacle faces) so I don't feel a whole lot of sympathy for them.
C)They're going to kill me or someone I care about. I need to protect these people, and mind flayers can't really be persuaded to stand down, so violence or flight are the only options. Very often, violence is the only option.

I'm also not being sarcastic or anything. These are my thoughts on whether I would kill a mind flayer that was coming after me or someone I knew without guilt, and the answer, for these reasons, is yes.

I absolutely agree, and would 100% do the same. It's just that, like I was saying to Raziere, this comes back to the tone of the story/game in question. If I sit down to a game that asks me to consider questions like "is it okay to kill orcs just because most orcs we know are a threat to us", then I'll be approaching that game with a mindset that would also prompt me to wonder things like "is it okay to kill mind flayers when they need to eat us to survive". Now, in one or both of those cases, the answer may well be yes, but whether these kinds of questions are asked in the first place has a huge impact on the tone of the game. In some games, we don't even want to wonder whether the killing is right, we just want to do it. And for me personally, as soon as you move beyond that point even a little bit, you immediately open up all application of violence to question. So, to say it's okay to have a dumb fun violence game about killing demons, but not one about killing orcs, seems arbitrary to me, at least if you portray demons as capable of speech and complex reasoning and other humanlike behaviors. And yes, for me, that kind of questioning might extend to mind flayers too, if the story puts me in such a mind.

[Segev]

Re: Perception of objective reality:
Anyone who thinks that they are or can be a perfectly rational actor, or that they are consciously aware of everything that influences their thoughts/memories/perceptions, needs to read up a bit more on neuroscience. This has been pretty well studied, although of course everyone likes to think they're the one exception.

Actually, the degree to which the conscious mind is merely one part of the process, and retroactively justifies decisions made by the subconscious, is a fascinating topic, but a bit of a tangent for this thread.

Nowhere did I, nor anybody else that I saw, claim that my (nor humans' in general) senses nor perceptions were infallible. What I claimed was that it is possible to gain sufficient objective knowledge about things to tell truth from falsehood.

We do not live in a subjective world. No matter how much I claim the water is comfortably cool while somebody is telling me it's boiling and will scald the skin from my body, only one of us will be proven right when I jump in. (If either of us; obviously it could be comfortably warm, painful-but-not-scaldingly-hot, or uncomfortably cold, too.) The "comfortable" bit is moderately subjective, provided it's not causing damage, but even that has boundaries that objective observation can set.

If a person is anorexic, they don't become fat just because they think they are. They are growing skinnier and skinnier and might be causing serious harm to themselves through malnutrition and starvation. Their subjective belief about their body mass and appearance is objectively incorrect, and can be independently verified from multiple observations and observers.

Just because I can't tell you at a glance that an anorexic person weighs 80 lbs. doesn't mean I can't tell he's "dangerously underweight" via simple observation.

You don't need perfect observation and total information to make objective calculations about the world. And the world doesn't change just because somebody else calculates something different than you did. One or both of you made a mistake when that happens. (Even if that mistake was assuming you both measured the same thing.)

[Satinavian]

I am surprised with all the Lizardmen mentions.

D&D Lizardmen of various kind seem to be neutral, not evil. They are still strange and often hostile, but in any conflict between humans and Lizardmen there is no default good side.
Lizardmen are like i like most of my fantasy non-Human species/races.
If we look beyond D&D most other depictions of Lizardfolk are also not actually evil. It is more likely to encounter Lizardmen as a "good" race with a surprising amount of noble sagage tropes than to encounter them as evil.

To use Lizardmen as justification for why Orcs being evil is ok seems strange.



The Devils/Demons and stuff that i do accept as always evil are that because they are personification of evil concepts and have thus next to no free will. A stance i also like to extend to gods who become more of a personification of their aspects and thus a power of nature.

[VoxRationis]

I am surprised with all the Lizardmen mentions.

D&D Lizardmen of various kind seem to be neutral, not evil. They are still strange and often hostile, but in any conflict between humans and Lizardmen there is no default good side.
Lizardmen are like i like most of my fantasy non-Human species/races.
If we look beyond D&D most other depictions of Lizardfolk are also not actually evil. It is more likely to encounter Lizardmen as a "good" race with a surprising amount of noble sagage tropes than to encounter them as evil.

To use Lizardmen as justification for why Orcs being evil is ok seems strange.

They're listed as neutral, but they're often found as default antagonists in swampy terrain, and their descriptions make it clear that their mindsets are very different from those of people from most, if not all, human cultures. In particular, it's this last part that I'm referencing. Whether we can call the mindsets "evil" or not is beside the point, and the term tends to poison the well a bit. At its core, lizardfolk stand as an example of a race identified as inherently different, mentally, from humans, and it is much rarer to see objections to that, compared with orcs and drow.

[Arbane]

I really get angry at names with around 5 friggin apostrophes in a name. I get that you are trying to make the name sound fantastical and interesting, but all you are doing is making my eyes hurt.

"New decree: All apostrophes in fantasy names are pronounced 'boing'." - Evil Overlady Issendai

[Bohandas]

re. direct experience etc etc etc.

HERE FOLLOWS SOME PSYCHO-METAPHYSICS.
If you are not hot for philosophy, best just to skip it.

The Aneristic Principle is that of APPARENT ORDER; the Eristic Principle is that of APPARENT DISORDER. Both order and disorder are man made concepts and are artificial divisions of PURE CHAOS, which is a level deeper that is the level of distinction making.

With our concept making apparatus called "mind" we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about- reality are mistakenly labeled "reality" and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see "reality" differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper that is the level of concept.

We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids.

A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle.

Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.

DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.

The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.

The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.

Reality is the original Rorschach.

Verily! So much for all that.

https://hyperdiscordia.church/psycho_metaphysics.html

[Guizonde]

I really get angry at names with around 5 friggin apostrophes in a name. I get that you are trying to make the name sound fantastical and interesting, but all you are doing is making my eyes hurt.

correct me if i'm wrong, but i thought that in common naming conventions that actually use apostrophes and hyphens that they were a grammatical indicator of how to pronounce the preceding letters? think the singer youssou n'dour has got to have the n sound in front to pronounce his last name. another example is the way catalans spell "estel-le". it's not "estel lé", it's "estel" because of catalan grammar making double l's sound like "y". i just looked it up, and here is the rule. according to wikipedia, it's pretty antiquated practice. but going to catalonia on a semi-regular basis it's still present in shop fronts and menus.

this makes me all the more confused when people come up with b'r'ian mcsch'lub just for kicks. it's absolutely unpronounceable!

[Satinavian]

They're listed as neutral, but they're often found as default antagonists in swampy terrain, and their descriptions make it clear that their mindsets are very different from those of people from most, if not all, human cultures. In particular, it's this last part that I'm referencing. Whether we can call the mindsets "evil" or not is beside the point, and the term tends to poison the well a bit. At its core, lizardfolk stand as an example of a race identified as inherently different, mentally, from humans, and it is much rarer to see objections to that, compared with orcs and drow.

I really disagree. Most gaming groups i know would really have at least as much problems killing Lizardmen as killing orc, drow or humans for that matter without any good reason. "Different" doesn't mean "More Ok to kill".

[Knaight]

correct me if i'm wrong, but i thought that in common naming conventions that actually use apostrophes and hyphens that they were a grammatical indicator of how to pronounce the preceding letters? think the singer youssou n'dour has got to have the n sound in front to pronounce his last name. another example is the way catalans spell "estel-le". it's not "estel lé", it's "estel" because of catalan grammar making double l's sound like "y". i just looked it up, and here is the rule. according to wikipedia, it's pretty antiquated practice. but going to catalonia on a semi-regular basis it's still present in shop fronts and menus.

They get used in a few ways. Sometimes it's part of a transliteration scheme (Wade-Giles comes to mind, although Pinyin is just better), often for clicks, glottal stops, or other linguistic features that don't have an English standard because English doesn't use them (though technically the glottal stop is part of spoken English in some accents).

[Cosi]

Here's one thing. A lot of the time, when this conversation happens, people make the point "well, if you want an inherently evil group of enemies for players to fight and kill without having to think or feel bad, just use demons or something". My question is, how is that any different?

Generally, because some level of thought is put into why demons are always evil. Orcs are just evil "because evil", which is fundamentally unsatisfying. Demons are evil because they embody specific evil concepts. Killing a dude who happens to be a thief is very different from killing the abstract embodiment of theft. Also, Demons don't have a normal human-ish lifecycle with children and non-combatants, which allows you to avoid a lot of the things that makes painting all orcs as evil so uncomfortable. There might be Orcish fur trappers or craftsmen for you to negotiate or trade with, but every single demon is interested in doing evil for evil's sake from the moment it's created to the moment it's destroyed.

Thinking about it, is it really even okay to kill something like a mind flayer? I mean, yeah, they have to eat sapient beings to survive, but that's not something they chose--it wasn't their decision to be born a mind flayer. When you kill one, you're killing a fellow sapient being that's been forced to attack you by circumstances beyond its control. Should that really be guilt-free?

I suppose it depends on complicated ethical questions. I think it would be reasonable to say that the behavior that is ethically required of a mind flayer is to allow itself to starve to death, and that every mind flayer is necessarily a murderer if they fail to do so. Whether that justifies killing them is a separate question, as not everyone believes that murderers deserve the death penalty, though the fact that imprisoning a mind flayer would also kill them unless you killed other people for them complicates the issue. Also, players are often engaged in conflicts between mind flayers and some other group (for example "the mind flayers are raiding us for slaves"), and that case seems roughly analogous to war, which is a case where more people would considering killing justified.

Postmodernism strikes again.

I think you're confusing "things that make you wrong" with "buzzwords that you hate for no good reason". The actual term for "your sense data is filtered" is (as has been pointed out) neuroscience.

Even if my ability to perceive objective reality is imperfect, I can make up for poor resolution with repeated tests. The notion that objective reality cannot be meaningfully measured and observed is a waste of time, because if that's true, then how do I know you're even typing at me, and why should I care that you're on this forum?

I didn't say that it can't be measured. I said that what you have is a model. And that model is necessarily imperfect. That's why we didn't solve all scientific problems as soon as we started doing science.

We want the best performance we can get. That should be all we want, at the point where we're bothering to test for anything like "admission" or "hiring" or whatnot.

And how do we know our test has captured everything important? Maybe there's a value to cultural background that isn't captured in direct measures of academic success. We ask for all sorts of subjective factors when doing hiring or admissions. It seems to me that the burden is on you do demonstrate that the unique experiences of someone who is gay, or trans, or hispanic might not be of commensurate value to the unique experiences of someone who plays lacross, or wrote a particularly good essay, or plays the trombone.

I reject in its entirety the notion that what we take in with our senses is fundamentally disconnected from what's really going on. For starters, the survival burden of bad information would consign any species with such senses to the dustbin of evolutionary failure.

This is, of course, false. Evolution favors perception that filters for fitness over perception that filters for reality. Evolution cares about exactly one thing -- making more of you. If you can warp away from reality and towards successfully producing more children, evolution will do that. Every time.

I reject in its entirety the notion that we cannot observe things (quantum scale aside) without affecting them.

It doesn't matter whether you effect "things" because you have no access to "things" (well, perhaps philosophical or mathematical things, but the subjectivity of those of those should be obvious to anyone with a grounding in either field). You have access to "models of things", and those models are changed when you observe things because that is what observing things means. That's what science is -- the process of changing our models of things.

Postmodernists comment on science all the time, and many social sciences departments are dominated by postmodernist thinking. Postmodernists as a whole have long asserted that ALL science is a "social construct", that there is no objective realty or fact to uncover, and that all "realities" are socially constructed and equally valid.

I notice you managed to avoid linking to postmodernists actually saying those things. Also, I notice you've pivoted away from "literature has an objective meaning determined by the author" to "reality has an objective meaning". I'll admit to facilitating that shift to some degree, but I really don't see how this resolves the claims you've made about racism in fiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critic..._postmodernism

Holy crap, it has a Wikipedia article listing criticisms of it? Well, better pack it up -- nothing that has been criticized ever turned out to be true.

[Max_Killjoy]

I think you're confusing "things that make you wrong" with "buzzwords that you hate for no good reason". The actual term for "your sense data is filtered" is (as has been pointed out) neuroscience.

Already addressed in detail earlier.

The blinkered notion that everyone has their own constructed subjective reality and that there is no objective reality is at the HEART of postmodernism.

This is, of course, false. Evolution favors perception that filters for fitness over perception that filters for reality. Evolution cares about exactly one thing -- making more of you. If you can warp away from reality and towards successfully producing more children, evolution will do that. Every time.

Creatures that get false data from their senses don't survive make more of themselves. There is a limit to how much "not reality" senses can show before they get the creature killed.

And linking to a TED Talk... used to be interesting stuff before it became the home of pop-science BS.

It doesn't matter whether you effect "things" because you have no access to "things" (well, perhaps philosophical or mathematical things, but the subjectivity of those of those should be obvious to anyone with a grounding in either field). You have access to "models of things", and those models are changed when you observe things because that is what observing things means. That's what science is -- the process of changing our models of things.

I am currently sitting in a chair.

It is not a "model" of the chair that is holding me up.

I notice you managed to avoid linking to postmodernists actually saying those things.

I did in fact link to multiple definitions and descriptions of postmodernism making it quite clear that they believe those things.

When I get back later I'll wade into the idiotic mire of postmodernist BS and find some examples. In the meantime, look into the Sokal affair.

Also, I notice you've pivoted away from "literature has an objective meaning determined by the author" to "reality has an objective meaning". I'll admit to facilitating that shift to some degree, but I really don't see how this resolves the claims you've made about racism in fiction.

Go back, pay attention to the discussion instead of looking to score internet points, and you'll notice that I'm not the one who brought up this idiocy about reality being subjective.

Of course, I suspect you're well aware of that.

[Cosi]

Creatures that get false data from their senses don't survive make more of themselves. There is a limit to how much "not reality" senses can show before they get the creature killed.

Of course, you clearly know more about that limit and how to correct for the direction of error than a neuroscientist.

And linking to a TED Talk... used to be interesting stuff before it became the home of pop-science BS.

So it was good until an unspecified time when you started disagreeing with it. Definitely a reasonable position.

It is not a "model" of the chair that is holding me up.

No, it is a model of the system that you perceive as "being held up". I'm not saying that the actual reality is that you aren't sitting, or that you're dead, or that it's terribly far from your perception. I'm saying that they're different, and that means you can't objectively know how the system behaves. You can have expectations about it's behavior, and they can be quite good, but they are not objective. Consider, for example, the story of the blind men and the elephant. None of the blind men are wrong -- the elephant has all the traits they ascribe to it -- but neither are any of them right -- for it also has other traits. Their models are incomplete, and necessarily so because they rely on sense data, filtered by everything from the underlying biology to their ability to linguistically describe their perceptions.

[Frozen_Feet]

Cosi: you understand that neuroscience is founded on scientific monism, right?