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What new jargon do you want to replace "Race"?
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<blockquote data-quote="glass" data-source="post: 8856453" data-attributes="member: 12251"><p>Oh wow. I had not heard about that one, so I just DDGed up an article on it (or rather on its removal/banning along with half a dozen others). The article itself was fine, but the comments....</p><p></p><p></p><p>Ilithids are an interesting case. If the had to eat the brains of sapient beings to survive, then you could make an argument that their doing so was not evil. OTOH, if they are trying to eat <em>your </em>brain, then using lethal force to prevent that is pretty well justified, regardless of their alignment. Of course, in several versions of D&D* they do not need to eat sapient brains; they can survive just fine on non-sapient brains and/or weird moss. They eat sapients because the like the taste, which I think we can agree is pretty evil. Any ilithids out there who do not do so would not be evil, and would be less likely to come into contact with the PCs.</p><p></p><p>Of course, that is all watsonian, so none of it would matter if depictions of them leaned into real-life racist tropes. But they are different enough from both actual real people and racist depiction thereof that "they're a totally different species" becomes actually meaningful rather than an excuse or a fig leaf.</p><p></p><p>The question then becomes "how different is different enough?" For me, orcs and drow are on one side of the line and ilithids and daemons are on the other, and I do not consider that "hypocritical".</p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: 10px">(* Not sure what if anything 5e has said on the matter.)</span></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="glass, post: 8856453, member: 12251"] Oh wow. I had not heard about that one, so I just DDGed up an article on it (or rather on its removal/banning along with half a dozen others). The article itself was fine, but the comments.... Ilithids are an interesting case. If the had to eat the brains of sapient beings to survive, then you could make an argument that their doing so was not evil. OTOH, if they are trying to eat [I]your [/I]brain, then using lethal force to prevent that is pretty well justified, regardless of their alignment. Of course, in several versions of D&D* they do not need to eat sapient brains; they can survive just fine on non-sapient brains and/or weird moss. They eat sapients because the like the taste, which I think we can agree is pretty evil. Any ilithids out there who do not do so would not be evil, and would be less likely to come into contact with the PCs. Of course, that is all watsonian, so none of it would matter if depictions of them leaned into real-life racist tropes. But they are different enough from both actual real people and racist depiction thereof that "they're a totally different species" becomes actually meaningful rather than an excuse or a fig leaf. The question then becomes "how different is different enough?" For me, orcs and drow are on one side of the line and ilithids and daemons are on the other, and I do not consider that "hypocritical". [SIZE=2](* Not sure what if anything 5e has said on the matter.)[/SIZE] [/QUOTE]
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