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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9724659" data-attributes="member: 18">Also what even is evil in this context - like, if you're really assigning some "biological evil" to a species, what exactly is that "evil"?Like, look a predators IRL - big cats, wolves, etc. - they have a biological imperative to hunt, to kill, yet most of the time when they interact with humans (even in the wild) it's without doing that (usually instead they avoid us), and if we interact with them a lot, they're generally pretty cuddly even if sometimes lose it and decide to eat somebody. Even Tigers, one of the greatest, most stunningly dangerous animals nature has ever created, more dangerous, I suspect, pound-for-pound than any dinosaur ever was, are basically capable of being pretty friendly if you are kind to them and keep them fed and so on. Yeah you have to be careful, but that's because they're not sapient.The "evil", if there is one, is specific - the urge to hunt and kill (which interestingly I'm not sure humans inherently possess, we are good predators but the desire to hunt and kill seems to acculturated rather than inherent, but that's a separate discussion, though perhaps relevant here).Why is it instead with these "bad" races we just get this generic pile of "bad motivations"? (Which often seem to map closely to generic piles of "bad motivations" assigned by racists to human ethnicities hmmm). I think a lot of it comes down the idiocy of alignments, which don't map to... well... anything real or even really to fiction particularly effectively. Because early D&D featured a lot of lazy half-considered "Race X is alignment Y" stuff (which was often near-immediately counterpointed by some member of that race which wasn't that alignment, something that tends to get lost in the mix), people think you "need" races which are "just evil" or w/e, and you really don't.If you want a species to have something dangerous or bad about them "biologically" or "inherently", maybe just think about what exactly that would be? Like, do your orcs have a profound, instinctive desire to burn down wooden buildings? Or pull down any structure above 10' tall or something? Presumably as sapient beings, they're capable of overcoming this, in the way humans don't just punch, kick or bite every human who annoys them. Even if it's a divine curse or something, why not make it highly specific rather than vague, nonsensical "evil"? And if a species really is sapient, they can, pretty much definitionally, overcome that urge.</blockquote>

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