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The Gygaxian Origins of Drow and Some Thought on their Depiction As Villians
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8026220" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>Yes exactly - as the Foglio cartoon says, "A matriarchy as envisioned by the recently divorced". There's a whole strand of deeply unfunny 1970s and 1980s "comedy", often involving divorce, which basically boils down to women being horrible evil monsters who live to torture men, and despite being comedy it clearly represented genuine (and horrifying) views from some men, especially of a certain age. And the Drow seem to be a very literal embodiment of that.</p><p></p><p>The lack of matriarchies in D&D is a bit weird, honestly, given they weren't exactly uncommon in fantasy more generally, and tended to lean hippy-ish.</p><p></p><p>I think what makes them so deeply problematic is that, whilst the original idea was just a bit lame and OTT (not in a good way, either), it's sort of rolled along and picked up a lot of other<em> really</em> unfortunate ideas with it. Clearly the matriarchy thing comes from the spider worship and the one thing a lot of people know about spiders is that in some species (they probably think "all" but w/e) the female is larger than the male, and may eat them after mating. So you have that, which isn't an auspicious start, but I guess is a thing, then you get the notion of cruelty added (which definitely has misogynistic roots, given the era and the strong association of cruelty with women at the time - men who were cruel to men were often portrayed or coded as effete or homosexual in 1970s and 1980s media), and then that extends into actual BDSM. And that's without even addressing the racial coding angles and the "urban" angle mentioned.</p><p></p><p>What always got me though was that clearly Gygax and others read Moorcock, who had incredibly evil elves in the Melniboneans, who were pale-skinned, so the decision to go with this bizarre coal-black skin (especially given people were still using that kind of make-up for minstrel shows and so on back then in the US) was a really weird one. Warhammer, very sensibly, despite clearly deriving Dark Elves from a mixture of D&D and Moorcock, went with a Moorcockian appearance (not that they didn't have some wacky racism of their own, but they managed to get rid of most of it by the late 1990s).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8026220, member: 18"] Yes exactly - as the Foglio cartoon says, "A matriarchy as envisioned by the recently divorced". There's a whole strand of deeply unfunny 1970s and 1980s "comedy", often involving divorce, which basically boils down to women being horrible evil monsters who live to torture men, and despite being comedy it clearly represented genuine (and horrifying) views from some men, especially of a certain age. And the Drow seem to be a very literal embodiment of that. The lack of matriarchies in D&D is a bit weird, honestly, given they weren't exactly uncommon in fantasy more generally, and tended to lean hippy-ish. I think what makes them so deeply problematic is that, whilst the original idea was just a bit lame and OTT (not in a good way, either), it's sort of rolled along and picked up a lot of other[I] really[/I] unfortunate ideas with it. Clearly the matriarchy thing comes from the spider worship and the one thing a lot of people know about spiders is that in some species (they probably think "all" but w/e) the female is larger than the male, and may eat them after mating. So you have that, which isn't an auspicious start, but I guess is a thing, then you get the notion of cruelty added (which definitely has misogynistic roots, given the era and the strong association of cruelty with women at the time - men who were cruel to men were often portrayed or coded as effete or homosexual in 1970s and 1980s media), and then that extends into actual BDSM. And that's without even addressing the racial coding angles and the "urban" angle mentioned. What always got me though was that clearly Gygax and others read Moorcock, who had incredibly evil elves in the Melniboneans, who were pale-skinned, so the decision to go with this bizarre coal-black skin (especially given people were still using that kind of make-up for minstrel shows and so on back then in the US) was a really weird one. Warhammer, very sensibly, despite clearly deriving Dark Elves from a mixture of D&D and Moorcock, went with a Moorcockian appearance (not that they didn't have some wacky racism of their own, but they managed to get rid of most of it by the late 1990s). [/QUOTE]
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