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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 8185220" data-attributes="member: 7025508">I have found the representation of races in D&D to be highly problematic at least since the third edition and I am very sympathetic to the issue. Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that if depicting biological essentialism is inherently problematic, then fantasy races simply cannot exist. And perhaps they shouldn't?We live in the world where there is only one sapient species, the humans (other great apes and cetaceans might disagree with that statement though.) In a fantasy world this is not the case. If we see fantasy races as analogous to human ethnicities, depicting any non-cosmetic biological group-wide differences is highly problematic. However, if we do not do that, then differnt sapiens species cannot truly exist, as very definition of differnt species relies exactly on such differences. Halflings, ogres, aarakochas and sahuagins are not just differnt human ethnicities, they are differnt species, some of which are much larger than others, some of which can fly and some of which can breathe under water. But then we come to the thermian argument, if the bio-essential language reminds people of similar language incorrectly used of real life ethnic groups does it really matter that this language is actually correctly applied within the confines of the fiction? To a lot of people probably not. But then again if we cannot say that differnt fantasy species are actually biologically differnt from each other then they cannot exist...  <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♀️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2640.png" title="Woman shrugging    :woman_shrugging:" data-shortname=":woman_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />I think people should stop to think what actually is the purpose of having these different races in the first place.</blockquote>

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