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People really don't like it when you point out the foundation of fantasy involves some deeply racist roots, huh? But put black people in your fantasy movies/shows and the same people will start frothing at their mouth about how it ruins the original image an author had of their books. I'm looking at you, LotR fans.

For this example: Endless casts of blond, blue eyed white people who barely look different from one another save a wig change and they war against an army of "devolved" evil versions of themselves that are coincidentally dark or literally tar skinned, or evil kohl-wearing elephant riders. None of those individuals have any agency outside of being controlled by their big evil god. Gotta kill them all dead because they are sooo evil, they can never be redeemed. Permanently marked.

I love LotR, but Tolkien was a product of his times (in which many people were racist, idk why that has to be explained, it was the 30s and 40s) and even writes comparing the orcs to Monguls with a critical irony given that he himself was a soldier of a violent colonial power. There were definitely individuals around him during that time people who believed themselves an entirely seperate race and used similar justifications to what he writes as reason to war and exterminate said people. Just as he's finishing the hobbit book, it is the end of WW2. The Germans used the same reasons and justifications against their victims.

No racism, remnants of historical events, or old fashioned ideas could be baked in or projected onto fantasy stories at all, of course. 🙄 not even when they're directly writing about them.

Especially not when in modern times they do correct the errors of excluding black/brown people from these narratives and (white) people loose their minds and try to give every reason why black people "don't make sense" in this world. You see the same thing happen with Blood Elves, or any other majority white group that gets an ounce of color added later on because black people were painfully overlooked.

If for something to be racist the author had to explicitly say "yes, I'm being racist/writing black people like this", that would be pretty dumb. Racists like the be more subtle than that because otherwise well meaning folks start to get antsy and upset that you would say such things.

Easier to get them on your side with troves of pretty elves and fantasies. They're much happier to indulge in those thoughts/behaviors then because everything can be "reasoned" away.

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Dear Mr. American Bimbo,

white supremacists have been using the illusory threat of brown/black people as cannibals and actors of extreme violence to justify their own violence for centuries--despite being themselves more likely to cannibalize, murder or rape. It is not a coincidence that our fantasy races (even consider the use of the word race in this context, cmon, you have a brain--you should use it) use the same justifications against more "savage" or "primitive" peoples--there is much leftover in these fantasies that comes from the history of our world. You can deny it if you want but it doesn't change it.

And for sure, saying someone needs something "beaten" into them is an interesting way to get your point across. Nothing suspiciously violent or revealing there at all.

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