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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9409036" data-attributes="member: 7045072">As James Brown once said "GODDOG!"The idea of "science" and "race" in the same room as each other makes me a pretty queasy. Because history.Now kindred, folk, lineage, culture etc - it's all equally fine...But ... the core assumption of fantasy "races" is going to be near impossible to shake - and that assumption is that distinctive groups of people (the dodge of fantasy being not-people who are people like) have compelling distinctive differences that are universally shared among them. This is just part of modern fantasy and it's an inheritance from the culture of the eras modern fantasy was formed in.  RPGs (and Tolkien based fantasy generally) compound this by transforming mythical creatures or peoples like dwarves and elves into something knowable and person-like.  When you make an "elf" a character with an inner life and da culture rather then something alien and fantastic (e.g. Rumpelstiltskin has no interior life, he's basically a plot device) it will create comparisons to real world people, and these will almost inevitably be based on ethnic stereotypes about real world people.So to some extent the problem of fantasy race is a baked in issue with modern fantasy and it's something that should leave one perhaps feeling a bit unbalanced, maybe giving a bit of side eye... much like the glorification of violence in fantasy.  If you have physically and culturally distinct "not people", your fiction will have racialized others, monocultural stereotypes, and biodeterminism to some degree no matter what label one uses.When we bring modern conceptions of scientific taxonomy (which is not science so much as it is an ordering system that allows science) or inheritance and genetics it gets awfully close to sounding like ideas out of the 1920's very, very quickly.</blockquote>

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