Lately, we’ve seen DnD and Pathfinder move away from some of the more blatant signifiers, like renaming “race” into “species” and “ancestry,” and in the case of Pathfinder, having systems in place to mix ancestries in a character build. DnD has decoupled good and evil from species, and pathfinder has done away with good and evil entirely ( keeping a vestige of it present for things like demons and angels).
Race is almost alwys tied to a language and a culture, with, say, kobolds having the same certain cultural signifiers all over the world. To an extent, this makes semse because different peoples in these games can have different physical abilities, or have different origins entirely, which would naturally lead to them developing along different lines – If one people can breathe underwater and another was born from a volcano by a specific god’s decree, that would inform how these cultures behave.
Is it possible to have a fantasy along these lines with a materialist underpinning, or is this very idea of inborn powers anathema to that sort of approach?
I struggled with this as a writer because I had, for decades, wanted to write a fantasy epic, yet after becoming a communist it became extremely obvious to me that nearly all, if not all fantasy and science fiction is reactionary. The genre itself is the problem, because it basically functions as a way for white guys to escape from real world problems (i.e., the world’s teeming masses are getting stronger and cannot be stopped).
Even relatively leftwing SFF (Star Trek, Star Wars) is so often unclear about where it stands, politically, that it appeals to reactionaries. One has to dig to realize that Luke is supposed to be with the Viet Cong; Star Trek is basically Horatio Hornblower in space, and spends maybe a total of five minutes (across hundreds of hours of TV and cinema) talking about about socialism (except for DS9). Just a few days ago I told a coworker who liked Episode One that it might be the most racist movie ever made; he had no idea about the Gungans being caricatures of Jamaicans, the Neimoidians being Japanese caricatures, and Watto being a caricature of basically every different race that lives around the Mediterranean, although to my coworker’s credit he didn’t argue with me when I told him. A small amount of less-famous SFF is a little clearer about where it stands; liberals like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, but fascists don’t (as far as I know).
I needed to figure out if there would be fantasy races in my trilogy, and I decided pretty quickly that there wouldn’t be. I would throw in some interesting monsters, but that would be it. As for fantasy powers, they would be like Crouching Tiger, but democratized. Anyone who wanted to could learn them, and to avoid the liberal obsession with individualism, they would be based largely on solidarity (with the bad guys using magic like vampires—in order to prey on people).
Fantasy races basically function (as the amazing Graeber quote ITT shows) as an excuse for people to be racist. Tolkien’s orcs are basically the Nazi vision of African oriental working class Judeo-Bolsheviks. The Eye of Sauron is Big Brother / the Panopticon / the superego. Rather than in a caricatured form of Europe, my fantasy trilogy would take place in a real historical place (11th century Byzantium) with real historical groups of people (Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Jews, Persians, Assyrians, Arabs, Laz, Georgians, Varangians, Normans, Venetians, and more!) fighting over land many of them have inhabited for centuries if not millennia. This would get sticky and complicated, but I would do my best to do justice to these different groups and keep them human (not idealized) but also entertaining. I wouldn’t clothe them in head crests like Star Trek does (much as I love Star Trek) so that I could turn them into easy caricatures and then make fun of them.
That project is finished, and I’m currently posting it chapter-by-chapter here. Eventually it’ll be released in paper / ebook form. I’ve been thinking a lot about releasing it on hexbear to see if anyone likes it (there is a chapter midway through the first book that involves throwing landlords out of their mansions, and two main characters are trans, so there’s a lot of hexbear bait, basically).
I’m currently writing a StarCraft fan-fiction, but with all the names and a number of concepts changed, and the racism that is inherent to SFF has come up once again, because StarCraft is fundamentally about three races with inherent strengths and weaknesses battling each other in the Korprulu Sector (the word means something like “bridge” in Turkish). If you look carefully at the OG StarCraft storyline, there is so much weird liberal fascist shit it is fucking unreal (the trope about the revolutionary leader betraying his own followers, the communist-like Zerg only being interested in slavery, genocide, and eugenics (the infested marine is literally a brainwashed suicide bomber), the Protoss basically fighting for landback on Aiur but never really having the strength to pull it off even though they’re supposed to be super advanced and powerful, every cinematic involving Terrans basically being about white dudes with southern accents getting brutally killed, and on and on and on…).
All of this ultimately comes down to a dialectical contradiction: everything is similar yet different at the same time.
Including the alien who:
Is introduced in the movie and, when asked if he is intelligent and he replies with “I can talk”, the white saviours respond saying that just because you can talk doesn’t mean that you are intelligent.
Whose life is saved and who then swears to become the white saviours’ slave.
Whose language is only missing the word “Massa”, because that would be a little too on the nose although it wouldn’t be out of place whatsoever.
I’d argue that he’s a caticaturised European Jew:
Big, hooked nose ✅
Scruffy facial hair ✅
Happy merchant grasping hands ✅
Slimy businessman ✅
No scruples ✅
Always trying to profiteer from other people’s needs ✅
Wears a small hat on his head ✅
Covetous ✅
Responsible for slavery and debt-bondage of people ✅
don’t forget the fact they blame a child slave for being angry that their mom died on a planet where they lived their life as a slave (and then write him as killing children because he has to be a bad guy)
also said mom dies at the hands of a really racist conception of “savage” indigneous peoples