EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
I think here you are going to run into other (infuriating) trends in the TTRPG zeitgeist. That is, for D&D players, there is an extremely anachronistic, wildly unrealistic perception of what "Medieval" Europe was like. This is not solely the fans' fault; Western culture has been mashing up literally over a thousand years of its own (mytho)history for centuries, and that pattern got started during that millennium-plus period (e.g. Arthurian romances mixing 12th-century French concepts of courtly love with 14th-century armor and 6th-century mythohistorical events.) The Muslim, Chinese, Hindu/Indian, and Japanese equivalents do quite a bit of this as well (like how many Japanese works will have katanas show up in early medieval Japan, sometimes a thousand years before actual katanas were developed), so such anachronistic mishmashing is commonplace.
The problem is, D&D-alike players have very specific expectations. It needs to be super purely Europe ONLY, even though trade with the East long predated the Renaissance and cultural exchange with Islamic countries, in both North Africa and the Middle East, was a huge deal (e.g. that's why many classical Greek and Latin works survived to be read today.) It must have a very specific level of technological development which never existed in our world: armor technology must be highly advanced, e.g. Renaissance level (ca. 15th-16th century) so you can have shiny, filigreed full plate armor, but weapon technology must be no older than about 13th century, as cannons are rare at best and guns are completely absent. Telescopes exist, but are extremely rare and expensive and astronomy is bare ones at best. Ship-building and general oceanic stuff borders on the Age of Sail, with rum-running pirates, even though that's (arguably) later than Renaissance--but trade and diplomacy is, if anything, pre-Crusades, meaning a gap of something like five hundred years on things that should be closely interrelated. Oh, and ethnic intermixing and travel must be absolutely nonexistent, to the point that seeing a dragonborn should be immediate cause for torches-and-pitchforks in anything other than bustling cities (and even there, rampant and virulent racism is the norm.) As you've noted, there's a bizarre opposition to clockwork, despite mechanical clocks dating back to the 14th century.
All of which is to say: you are not wrong to want things to look more like, y'know, actual late-Medieval/early-Renaissance sociocultural, historical, economic, and technological patterns....but you're almost certainly asking for something that won't happen soon, if at all. That's something that will take another 10-30 years at best. We're seeing the tiniest inklings of the initial flowering of shifts on this front, what with video games and (to a lesser but still real extent) books/movies/etc. that blend more steampunk/magitech/clockwork into "traditional" fantasy, but it's an incredibly slow process.
I mean, I didn't say "zero impact," and I avoided saying that for a reason, though I admit "they aren't going to have an impact" was imprecise on my part. There's not literally actually zero impact. But the impact is too light, too narrow, too niche to make a dent, particularly in the face of things like World of Warcraft, where literally hundreds of millions of people have at least been affected by it in some way, and easily 30 million individual people have actually played it at some point. It was big enough to get references in things like South Park. Likewise, Final Fantasy XIV is becoming a juggernaut (much to my delight, as I'm a fan), and it features more-or-less halfling-gnome-dwarf characters (lalafell), though they aren't culturally hegemonic so it's hard to compare them to most D&D characters/ancestries.
Well, again, I didn't say (or at least didn't mean to say) "hasn't had ANY impact," using your emphasis. But MHA has been out, what, eight years? And that's counting the manga, not just the (much more widely-known) anime, which debuted in 2016. Will MHA have an impact on the superhero genre? Probably! Has it affected how other superhero stories are told in the last five years or so? No, I don't really think it has. And that's what I'm saying. These stories you talk about, the ones written in the past 20 years or so, have not yet changed the zeitgeist of gnomes. That doesn't mean they CANNOT EVER do so. But they have not yet done so. As long as it remains true that they haven't yet done so, you're going to be sailing into that headwind.
I mean, I imagine many of those students wouldn't even know who Gary Gygax is. But unlike the gnome fiction examples you've given above (which, I'll note, I wasn't the one who asked for those examples, so...there's no contradiction in my argument here), Gygax's work has quite demonstrably had an ENORMOUS impact on culture.
We can, however, tease out an important distinction here. Dungeons and Dragons got (officially) started in 1974. It had a pretty damn meteoric rise to popularity, given the film Mazes and Monsters came out only eight years later. But the real, serious, sweeping impact--impact of the form "fiction has changed as a result of this work"--took much longer, a decade or more, as the video game industry was invaded by folks who had grown up playing D&D.
Now, obviously, this lies on a spectrum. D&D was, as stated, meteoric, and I would put things like Harry Potter and Avatar: the Last Airbender closer to D&D's end of the spectrum, things that had a rapid and pervasive impact on their medium (for better or worse.) Other works have a more middling or slower (but still enormous) impact, e.g. Lord of the Rings was very popular, but it took a decade or more for the major imitators to come along, and Tolkien's long shadow on the genre wasn't really obvious until the 70s, despite the first work (The Hobbit) being written in 1937. Similarly, Dragonriders of Pern, which began in the late 60s and pretty much single-handedly invented the idea of dragons as noble steeds rather than enemies to fight or aloof allies to befriend, was relatively limited in its "affecting fantasy fiction at large" impact until the arrival of things like Dragonlance, which pretty clearly took leaves from it, and now fiction about riding dragons (or similar mythic beasts) is a staple. I'd also throw Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia in this camp--its impact on fantasy fiction was a much slower burn, despite the books being quite popular.
Then there are small works, which can still have a major impact over a longer span of time, but which don't really reinvent the wheel or have a meteoric rise. One of my favorite authors, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, would absolutely fall into this category. I adored her Green-Sky Trilogy books as a child (Below the Root actually got me in trouble with my mom as a young teen, because she caught me reading it in the living room at 2 am on a school night.) But...they haven't really had a huge impact on fantasy fiction. Nobody thinks of grunspreking when they think of psychic powers, nor wissenberries when they think of psychoactive drugs. Nobody calls telekinesis "kiniporting," and references to "shubas" are pretty much nonexistent. Its impact has been minimal, though I suppose you could argue that the trend toward embracing pacifist solutions in video games could at least have drawn inspiration from Snyder's work and, in specific, her very early embrace of video games as a way to express a canonical part of a story.
MHA strikes me as one of the middle-of-the-road things; it is popular and widely-known, enough that it's very likely to have an impact, but that impact will be a slower burn, something that takes time to grow. It stands a good chance of becoming the first true "response" to the overall shounen genre, going all the way back to Dragon Ball, the archetypal shounen manga/anime. It so inherently deals with the consequences and implications of classic shounen storytelling, without being merely deconstructive in the process, celebrating the good and critiquing the flaws. That's a recipe for long-term impact. But you're not going to see what OSP's Red calls "soft boi" anime suddenly take the world by storm--this is an effect that will play out over the course of the next decade or so.
Many of the works you've cited have, as you've said, a rather smaller audience than MHA. I'd even hazard to guess they have a smaller audience than Below the Root did. That, again, doesn't mean they "don't exist" or have ABSOLUTELY no impact whatsoever. But the lower their exposure, the smaller their impact. The more niche they are, the smaller their impact. More or less, all the factors that could be working against your examples, are. That's again not a knock against them, they could easily grow in impact over time, but they're unlikely to change the world in short order for several reasons, the most important being that they're small pushes going against a very strong opposing push.
I have emphasized World of Warcraft several times, and that's very specifically because it creates an ENORMOUS pressure on the social perception of....basically everything in it. Minotaurs never really had Native American symbolism prior to the Warcraft franchise, having been a purely Greek concept, and now that link is deeply embedded purely because of the Tauren. Warcraft is probably single-handedly responsible for the "heroic orc shaman" archetype, and although it has rather fallen down on this front over WoW's lifetime, it was actually borderline subversive with some of its other racial depictions, e.g. the Night Elves are clearly rehabilitated drow (dark-skinned, nocturnal, matriarchal society of intensely magical elves, very specifically ruled by the almost-entirely-female priestly caste who revere a goddess, with significant portions of their society living underground and males frequently segregated away from females...etc.)
WoW is both huge and impactful; the things it's done and the stories it's told will (for better and for worse) continue to affect fantasy fiction for decades to come. And one of those things is gnomes that are mostly comic relief characters whose works explode in their faces. I've seen gnomish warlocks who lose control over their demonic servants, gnomish engineers who lose control over their explosive devices (usually getting the Looney Tunes-style "ash-covered face" treatment), gnomish alchemists who lose control over their magical concoctions and turn weird colors or explode or whatever, etc. There are some serious gnome characters even in WoW (although she's technically a bronze dragon, Chromie takes the form of a gnome when going incognito, and she's entirely serious as a character.) But the overall pattern is pretty clearly "gnomes are comedy relief."
Unfortunately, overall patterns and flattened, Flanderized, simplistic versions tend to be what filters into the overall cultural perception of things when it comes to races/classes/ancestries/etc. Zuko and Iroh (and, to a certain extent, Azula) are loved for their nuance and poignant stories, but the Fire Nation is painted with a painfully broad brush despite Book 3: Fire going way out of its way to emphasize that the Fire Nation is an incredibly complex social structure riddled with differences and individuality despite its fascist overlords' efforts to stamp such behavior out. Gimli is "a proud, princely warrior" (as Red from OSP put it), articulate and prideful, and unfortunately very little like the Stereotypical Scottish Miner/Engineer Drunkard Dwarf (wrapped in brown paper, one each) we usually get in fiction today. There are changes on this front, the Dragon Age games, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and stuff like the (also smaller-scale) The First Dwarf King novel are pushing things in new directions. Fiction is not, and has never been, a static thing. But it takes either a lot of small pushes, or a sustained small push over a long span of time, to counter the prevailing, often totally un-nuanced, conditions.
Edit: This, incidentally, is part of why I think halflings and gnomes make sense to be merged into a single, more diverse group. Halflings are almost never portrayed in a comedy-relief type light, instead being inspired mostly by Bilbo and Samwise (despite the occasionally comedic behavior of Merry and Pippin, especially as emphasized in the films, though IMO those were few enough and sufficiently counterbalanced against VERY serious/dramatic moments such that the two come across as light-hearted rather than as merely present to be the source and/or butt of jokes.) That is, either country squires or salt-of-the-earth types. Adding in some pastoralism and forestry, plus the gnomish eccentricity, emphasis on expertise, deep-dwelling stuff, and overtly magical stuff, and you have a group that comes across as adapting to the local ecology and embracing subtler, more nuanced magic, sometimes skillfully, sometimes clumsily. That then leaves open specifically their ridiculous luck; these "gnomelings" get up to some foolish or dangerous shenanigans, but somehow manage to pull them off (or at least survive the attempt) despite the odds. That just feels more cohesive to me than trying to keep the two totally unrelated to one another.
You could, of course, merge dwarves in as well and make them short....but IMO 4-5 "lineages" (or whatever you wish to call them) within a single "ancestry" is a pretty hard limit, going too far beyond that makes it harder to keep the differences straight. Hence why I prefer to keep dwarves distinct. It also doesn't hurt that forest gnomes and lightfoot halflings feel rather resonant, same for ghostwise halflings and svirfneblin. (And lotusden halflings from Critical Role's Exandria setting are straight-up "forest halflings," soooo...)
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