What is it about the character that drives people to hate him so?
A) It's trendy. We are automata, mindlessly trudging forward with our torches and pitchforks, because someone told us that it was kewl to hate on Drizzt, and, being socially clueless, we wouldn't have any idea what to hate on our own without being led along by the nose.
B) He's the Wolverine of AD&D, and if you've ever run a superhero game and had a player tell you that he wanted to play Wolverine, 'but with lazors for claws!1!', you'll understand the feeling of shame that falls upon a DM who is asked by a player if he can play 'a Drow Elf, but good, and with two swords! That are on fire! He's like a pirate *that's secretly a ninja!*'
C) Drow were pretty darn sexy and cool and evocative. Drizzt isn't a bad character, but he's changed the face of a *powerful* and iconic brand. 'Old-school' gamers feel another tiny fragment of the shriveled husks that are their dead souls peel off and spiral into the Abyss when they hear a novel-enthusiast gush about good Eilistraee or that cool lonely misunderstood guy who spends half of every novel explaining to a magic panther named after King Arthur's wife how all alone and misunderstood he is, despite having entire cities worth of people who celebrate and break out the beer and hawt wimmin when he shows up.
Not that he seems to really like beer or hawt wimmin...
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
D) R.A. Salvatore decided to change the spelling of Lolth to Lloth, and the chaotic evil demon-worshipping dark elves of Greyhawk into a fanatically uber-lawful highly-stratified and caste-centric society worshipping a crazy tyrant of a greater goddess who makes *Bane* look like an easy-going and lenient sort of fellow (particularly in the novels, where the average Banite Zhentarim behaves *vastly* less lawfully than the average priestess of Lloth).
E) Drow themselves were the ultimate joykiller 'bitter DMs revenge' encounter in AD&D. They all had magic items, that dissolved in the hands of PCs. They all had two-weapon fighting. They all had spell-like abilities that blinded the party, and didn't affect them. They all had poison weapons that were darn near impossible to resist. They all had magic resistance, and waved their private parts at the party's impotent Magic-Users. Being unreasonable and reactionary, we try to forget how much they freaking *sucked*, and have romanticized them into something glorious and iconic, so that any change at all, to make them *less* deliberately cruel and unfair (like not having magic items that rot in sunlight) or losing some of their resistance to magic is denounced as messing with a golden age that never truly existed.
F) 2nd edition, Hall of Heroes, where Drizzt was a Fighter/Ranger with a bunch of Thief abilities and the ability to kill people that was dropped from the Assassin class that no longer existed in the game. Drow, naturally, couldn't be half of that stuff, but Drizzt didn't care. Once is fine, an exceptional heroic figure and all, not like those limited fools that you get to play, 'cause he's all specialer than you, but it became an epidemic, with Drow being presented as Chaotic Evil Cleric/Psionicists or whatever and it became more and more obvious that Drizzt wasn't a kewl exception who was more special than any player character could ever be, but was in fact a symptom of a special new disease sweeping the Realms that caused all DMNPCs to utterly ignore the rules and be universally cooler and better than any player character. Some of us played the game so that *our* characters could be the heroes, but found that the pesky rules prevented us from playing Cleric/Fighter/Magic-User/Thief/Psionicist Rakshasa.
Still, we persevered, until novel-reading fans came along and said, 'Oh, I'm going to play a Spellfire Wielding Faerie Dragon Princess' and we said, 'No, that's kind of against the rules, how about a Gnome Illusionist' and they pouted and said, 'But Drizzt...' and we realized that it wasn't *Drizzt* who was evil, he was merely being used as an excuse to justify an insidious evil that only continued with each new novel and supplement, an evil called 'Hi, I'm a professional game designer / best-selling author, and
I can't be bothered to learn the rules to this stupid game, so why should you?
G) Drizzt ran over my wife and eloped with my dog.
H) Dark Elves at my baby.
I) Your reason here.
