I think it's the uncritical gygaxian race stuff and the fantasy races of dwarf, elf, halfling, troll, ogre, orc, goblin etc. Some people on cohost have tried to rehabilitate it but so far there are lines that have not been backed down from and I am therefore not convinced. It's just this way that race works out that really conflicts with what I have read about race over the course of my education. So many people see it as a necessary component to an enjoyable medieval fantasy work and like I love a fantastic version of a person but I am so sour on the prospect of receiving various ethno-national communities as a natural formation of peoples and not like, the product of a political project. Or to have a kind of population level physical trait assume that people want to exploit that. Here are three things that adopting that trope doesn't account for:
- People don't agree with every ideal in their culture
- People may agree with values emphasized within their culture but actively act against them
- There is more variation within populations than between them.
And like, if an author wants to include these fantasy beings as a race or species I am not going to engage unless they actually recognize what that means outside of providing something fantastic or resonant to the internal experience of the character. It is wrong to sanitize the gygaxian/tolkien model of fantasy race and treat it like it's distinct from our world's racism.
