Remathilis
Legend
I think it's important to say WotC was trying to do with Volo's the age-old trick of justifying its premise: killing things and taking their stuff. It's been the concern of D&D since its inception that monsters (as the game defines them) are usually the antagonists there to challenge the PCs and serve rarely little purpose beyond that.
Comparing it to videogames for example, the reason Mario stomps Koopas and Goombas is because they are the bad guys trying to stop the player from winning the game. Nobody talks about how Mario crushes goombas without mercy or why goombas are trying to stop Mario or not-all-goombas are evil, we accept in a video game there isn't room for nuance and move on. (Although, that seems to be changing as well, as there appears to be some subtle pushback to video games using monstrous races exclusively for villains too, and if Mario games had anything resembling cohesive worldbuilding at this point, it'd be fair to question why Mario stomps koopas into pits in one game and goes golfing or go-karting with them the next).
D&D has wrestled with that issue since kobold babies were found in the Caves of Chaos, and WotC when working on the lore of 5e had basically two choices: simplify morality in D&D by creating two cosmic teams (good guy PCs vs bad guy monsters) and justify why the bad guys were always bad, or create a muddy world of gray morality where any creature is capable of complex moral thought and the lines of good and evil are blurry. It's obvious which one they opted for, and that they bet on the wrong horse.
To be fair, they were in a place where the majority of RPGs were at the time. Pathfinder, for example, spent plenty of ink on why goblins were cruel, savage beasts who hate dogs (!), reading (!!) and horses (!!!) just to justify attacking them on site. WotC used much of the MM and Volo to likewise justify why an orc is nearly always a monster, but an elf isn't. They spend a large chunk of Volo for example to justify differences between orcs, goblinoids, gnolls and kobolds by giving them different justifications for being universally antagonists. They wanted to create a clean narrative where you didn't have to, on a base level, worry about if killing orcs was morally justified. You just picked a monster from the Monster Manual, plopped them down and let your PCs fight them. It's fun and if someone asked, the DM shrugged and said, "orcs are the spawn of an evil god, they can't help being evil."
At some point though, the majority's opinion on this changed. (I feel that streaming games, and the new eyeballs on game with an eye toward narrative and inclusion, raised said scrutiny up to its current levels). And Paizo and WotC and even Critical Role were caught flat-footed by the scope of the changes that are being called for. (Paizo maybe less-so, they seemed more in tune with the currents while designing PF2e, but even then, there are some legacy blunders they opted to leave in that still look bad in hindsight). So WotC is trying to backpedal away from its "justify monsters with cosmic evil" approach, much like how Paizo has had to address this with its monsters and cultures (such as the notion of slavery in future products) or how Matt Mercer is going to have to backpedal on the Curse of Strife in future Exandria works.
In short, what has been acceptable is rapidly changing, enough so that products that are less than a decade old are eligible for the content warnings. And I don't feel the changes are done yet. We may be looking back in 5-6 years and say how 2021 WotC books didn't go far enough in distancing themselves from problematic legacy tropes. They only constant is change.
Comparing it to videogames for example, the reason Mario stomps Koopas and Goombas is because they are the bad guys trying to stop the player from winning the game. Nobody talks about how Mario crushes goombas without mercy or why goombas are trying to stop Mario or not-all-goombas are evil, we accept in a video game there isn't room for nuance and move on. (Although, that seems to be changing as well, as there appears to be some subtle pushback to video games using monstrous races exclusively for villains too, and if Mario games had anything resembling cohesive worldbuilding at this point, it'd be fair to question why Mario stomps koopas into pits in one game and goes golfing or go-karting with them the next).
D&D has wrestled with that issue since kobold babies were found in the Caves of Chaos, and WotC when working on the lore of 5e had basically two choices: simplify morality in D&D by creating two cosmic teams (good guy PCs vs bad guy monsters) and justify why the bad guys were always bad, or create a muddy world of gray morality where any creature is capable of complex moral thought and the lines of good and evil are blurry. It's obvious which one they opted for, and that they bet on the wrong horse.
To be fair, they were in a place where the majority of RPGs were at the time. Pathfinder, for example, spent plenty of ink on why goblins were cruel, savage beasts who hate dogs (!), reading (!!) and horses (!!!) just to justify attacking them on site. WotC used much of the MM and Volo to likewise justify why an orc is nearly always a monster, but an elf isn't. They spend a large chunk of Volo for example to justify differences between orcs, goblinoids, gnolls and kobolds by giving them different justifications for being universally antagonists. They wanted to create a clean narrative where you didn't have to, on a base level, worry about if killing orcs was morally justified. You just picked a monster from the Monster Manual, plopped them down and let your PCs fight them. It's fun and if someone asked, the DM shrugged and said, "orcs are the spawn of an evil god, they can't help being evil."
At some point though, the majority's opinion on this changed. (I feel that streaming games, and the new eyeballs on game with an eye toward narrative and inclusion, raised said scrutiny up to its current levels). And Paizo and WotC and even Critical Role were caught flat-footed by the scope of the changes that are being called for. (Paizo maybe less-so, they seemed more in tune with the currents while designing PF2e, but even then, there are some legacy blunders they opted to leave in that still look bad in hindsight). So WotC is trying to backpedal away from its "justify monsters with cosmic evil" approach, much like how Paizo has had to address this with its monsters and cultures (such as the notion of slavery in future products) or how Matt Mercer is going to have to backpedal on the Curse of Strife in future Exandria works.
In short, what has been acceptable is rapidly changing, enough so that products that are less than a decade old are eligible for the content warnings. And I don't feel the changes are done yet. We may be looking back in 5-6 years and say how 2021 WotC books didn't go far enough in distancing themselves from problematic legacy tropes. They only constant is change.
