numb3r_5ev3n (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2023-04-02 09:51 pm
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2023-04-02 09:51 pm
Politics of Forgotten Realms I: The Elves.
OK, here goes.
One thing I was curious about in the anticipatory run-up to the Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves film was if, or how, they were going to depict the Drow if they showed up. The "Always Chaotic Evil (Except For a Few Exceptions) Elves in Blackface" issue has been a long-running problem. The fact that their defining physical characteristics are, as some have characterized it, "like a high fantasy magical equivalent of the Curse Of Ham" is not lost on a lot of people.
There are players who take the opposite viewpoint - basically, that people who feel that this is problematic are being oversensitive SJW killjoys; and that for the whole D&D dynamic to work, there have to be inhuman soulless, evil-just-for-the-sake-of-being-evil bad guys to squish without having to think about nuance or politics. But I just find that boring. Heck, even the more jingoistic aspects of Warhammer 40k are more complex than that.
"But why do you have to make everything political?" They whinge. Well, because:
Everything. You can't get away from it.
Of course you can just play a silly fun campaign without referring to any of the heavy stuff. Most groups do, I think. But it's all already there - in the novels and modules and sourcebooks and the hearts and minds of the respective authors and the people at TSR/WOTC/Hasbro who wrote them over the decades. The politics are already baked in.
And if you want to squish enemies for the sake of squishing enemies, there's plenty of undead, automatons, and jellies/oozes to choose from: and not even those are without baggage (see also: Zombies.)
So, anyway - the Drow. The race that made me ask, "what kind of Dominatrix Fetish/Mommy Issues did Gary Gygax have, anyway? Which upset fans I know who actually are SJWs otherwise, but yeah.
The current leaders of Drow society in the game world are presented as the kind of Dominatrix Misandrist Straw Feminists that live rent-free in the nightmares (and probably the sex fantasies) of people like Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Paul Joseph Watson, and Gamergaters everywhere.
The Drow goddess Lolth is basically a high fantasy version of Lilith from Middle Eastern folklore. She is depicted as having rebelled against the Seldarine (the pantheon of Elven gods) for wanting to be co-equal with her then-husband Corellon Larethian, the chief Elven god. She did a lot of stuff beyond that to upset people, but her gripe with the non-Drow Elves and their gods really started there. She is by no means a feminist icon - more like if "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" was a demigoddess. She is the toxic "bad mother" archetype, expressed in a game that most people start playing in their teens.
R.A. Salvatore is the author who is perhaps best known for putting Lolth and the Drow Elves "on the map" so to speak. His books started out as a sword-and-sorcery romp with The Crystal Shard (maybe the first Dungeons and Dragons novel I was ever aware of, and probably the first one I actually read) and introduced Drow Elf hero Drizzt Do'Urden. This series of books quickly turned into a meditation on what it's like to grow up inthe American south a society where your earliest experiences informed by toxic, oppressive, theocratic nationalism, in which vilification of "The Other" and acts of performative cruelty are encouraged as social bonding and a coping mechanism. As we can see, R.A. Salvatore's books have a lot to teach us about how "political" things can get.
If he existed today in the real world, Drizzt Do'Urden would likely be a breadtuber making videos about how he was deradicalized, adopted a cat, escaped from the racist/antisemetic evangelical small town where he grew up, and embraced atheism or converted to Wicca.
Which brings me to another weird aspect of Forgotten Realms Elf politics: The racists who want a conservative theocratic hierarchical ethnostate - which is most of the Lolth-worshipping Drow and a good-sized chunk of the Sun Elf population - are the darker-skinned subraces; with Drow formerly being depicted as the aforementioned "Elves In Blackface" and the Sun or Gold Elves being depicted as golden-brown or bronze-skinned (like the Sun Villager elves in Elfquest, kind of. Or their Elder Scrolls equivalent, the Altmer.)
There's a huge faction of Sun Elves who resent the fact that the current rulers of the Elven people are the pale-skinned but more cosmopolitan and liberal Moon Elves. Seriously, there are canonically a lot of Sun Elves who don't accept the legitimacy of the ruling Moon Elven clan (the Moonflower Clan) simply because they are Moon Elves. Most Sun Elves consider Moon Elves to be beneath them in the social hierarchy, to the point that the very idea of a Moon Elf ruling family is an affront to the natural order.
This may seem dumb and abstract. But, weird fantasy racism aside - to anyone who lived through the Obama administration, that type of bigotry feels very close and familiar.
See what I mean about everything being political?
On the other hand, those of us who objected to Donald Trump did so because he's basically the real world equivalent of Hugh Grant's character from the new movie.
("Is Jarnathan going to be on the panel?")
But anyway: part of the issue, and the reason for the whole "Fall Of The Drow" in the Forgotten Realms in the first place is the fact that the Sun and Moon Elves are outsiders, refugees who portaled to planet Toril from the Faerie realm thousands of years ago to escape some kind of calamity. (Which is the reason why "Faerie" is used by the Dark Elves as a slur to refer to Sun and Moon Elves.)
The pre-Drow Dark Elves and Wood Elves were indigenous to Toril, and were immediately considered "lesser" by the incoming Sun Elves, who also already considered the Moon Elves to be "lesser" and in many cases still do ("Grey Elf" is a slur on par with the N Bomb when employed by Sun Elves against Moon Elves.)
The pre-Drow Dark Elves are inconsistently depicted as always having had black skin, white hair, and red eyes, or having been more-or-less physically identical to the brown-skinned, dark-haired Wood Elves - because the Realms books are written by a bunch of different authors and they never got that part of the story straight between them all.
The Sun Elves (under the influence of the devil Malkizid) immediately embarked on a campaign of colonization of the Dark Elves and Wood Elves, and the Dark Elves (who were increasingly falling under the demonic influences of Lolth and Wendonai) fought back. This kicked off the Crown Wars.
The Sun Elven Vyshaan Clan, rulers of the Aryvandaar Empire, did a 9/11 times 100 against the Dark Elven/Wood Elven nation of Miyeritar, killing everyone therewho didn't survive by morphing into the Sharn and causing it to become a poisoned, barren wasteland literally overnight. The remaining Dark Elves' reaction was apparently so extreme (you know: invading the wrong country, that kind of thing) that they were immediately censured by everyone whose opinion mattered, and depending on which version of the story you believe, they were either cursed and driven underground, or they sold their souls to Lolth en masse and went underground of their own volition, and were known thereafter as the Drow.
Right away, some things about this narrative jump out at me:
- This narrative is obviously being told by the victorious Sun and Moon elves, because the Dark Elves were framed as the bad guys who were literally cursed by the gods for fighting back against a genocidal attack that obliterated an entire country. A magical nuke, if you will. The area that used to be Miyeritar was still a blasted, empty wasteland until just a hundred years ago or so in game time, when the Archwizards Khelben Arunsun (RIP, you were a real Bro) and Ualair the Silent ritually sacrificed themselves to revitalize the land.
- Were the Dark Elves and Wood Elves basically the same race before this happened? Like, the Wood Elves stayed Wood Elves because they were the ones who didn't make demonic pacts in order to fight fire with fire?
(The depiction of Wood Elves in the Dungeons & Dragons, Honor Among Thieves movie is awesome, by the way - and if there isn't an "Emerald Enclave Ambience" video on Youtube in a month or so, I'll be disappointed.)
But the takeaway here is 1. the Dark Elves were indigenous defenders against an invading colonizing force, and 2. they were the ones who were literally demonized and driven underground for defending themselves. 3. They became an oppresive hyper-conservative isolationist, nationalist theocracy as a result. The Wood Elves who remained on the surface and who stayed faithful to the Elven gods retreated to the High Forest or the Forest of Tethyr or to Aglarond, where they still live today.
The question here is not how you make Drow less problematic, because there is nothing about this narrative that could not be construed as problematic in some way. But again, everything is political.
Capcom got around the "Elves in Blackface" issue back in 1995 with their D&D arcade games, by making the Drow purple.
Behold Tel'Arin and his crotch-skull accessory (modesty skull?)
Yes, I know those are technically Shadow Elves from Mystara, but it's a tactic that has been used more recently in one of the latest games involving Drizzt:
UPDATE, Dec 2024: And later, various shades of purple, blue, or grey, like Minthara and other Drow in the instant classic Baldur's Gate 3:
I don't know. How much of the above historical narrative is really "true" ingame is up to the discretion of the individual DM. But it's something that's always bothered me, to the point where I've been thinking of a few subversions which may or may not be the subject of a future post.
Current Mood:
One thing I was curious about in the anticipatory run-up to the Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves film was if, or how, they were going to depict the Drow if they showed up. The "Always Chaotic Evil (Except For a Few Exceptions) Elves in Blackface" issue has been a long-running problem. The fact that their defining physical characteristics are, as some have characterized it, "like a high fantasy magical equivalent of the Curse Of Ham" is not lost on a lot of people.
There are players who take the opposite viewpoint - basically, that people who feel that this is problematic are being oversensitive SJW killjoys; and that for the whole D&D dynamic to work, there have to be inhuman soulless, evil-just-for-the-sake-of-being-evil bad guys to squish without having to think about nuance or politics. But I just find that boring. Heck, even the more jingoistic aspects of Warhammer 40k are more complex than that.
"But why do you have to make everything political?" They whinge. Well, because:
Everything is political.
Everything. You can't get away from it.
Of course you can just play a silly fun campaign without referring to any of the heavy stuff. Most groups do, I think. But it's all already there - in the novels and modules and sourcebooks and the hearts and minds of the respective authors and the people at TSR/WOTC/Hasbro who wrote them over the decades. The politics are already baked in.
And if you want to squish enemies for the sake of squishing enemies, there's plenty of undead, automatons, and jellies/oozes to choose from: and not even those are without baggage (see also: Zombies.)
So, anyway - the Drow. The race that made me ask, "what kind of Dominatrix Fetish/Mommy Issues did Gary Gygax have, anyway? Which upset fans I know who actually are SJWs otherwise, but yeah.
The current leaders of Drow society in the game world are presented as the kind of Dominatrix Misandrist Straw Feminists that live rent-free in the nightmares (and probably the sex fantasies) of people like Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Paul Joseph Watson, and Gamergaters everywhere.
The Drow goddess Lolth is basically a high fantasy version of Lilith from Middle Eastern folklore. She is depicted as having rebelled against the Seldarine (the pantheon of Elven gods) for wanting to be co-equal with her then-husband Corellon Larethian, the chief Elven god. She did a lot of stuff beyond that to upset people, but her gripe with the non-Drow Elves and their gods really started there. She is by no means a feminist icon - more like if "Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss" was a demigoddess. She is the toxic "bad mother" archetype, expressed in a game that most people start playing in their teens.
R.A. Salvatore is the author who is perhaps best known for putting Lolth and the Drow Elves "on the map" so to speak. His books started out as a sword-and-sorcery romp with The Crystal Shard (maybe the first Dungeons and Dragons novel I was ever aware of, and probably the first one I actually read) and introduced Drow Elf hero Drizzt Do'Urden. This series of books quickly turned into a meditation on what it's like to grow up in
If he existed today in the real world, Drizzt Do'Urden would likely be a breadtuber making videos about how he was deradicalized, adopted a cat, escaped from the racist/antisemetic evangelical small town where he grew up, and embraced atheism or converted to Wicca.
Which brings me to another weird aspect of Forgotten Realms Elf politics: The racists who want a conservative theocratic hierarchical ethnostate - which is most of the Lolth-worshipping Drow and a good-sized chunk of the Sun Elf population - are the darker-skinned subraces; with Drow formerly being depicted as the aforementioned "Elves In Blackface" and the Sun or Gold Elves being depicted as golden-brown or bronze-skinned (like the Sun Villager elves in Elfquest, kind of. Or their Elder Scrolls equivalent, the Altmer.)
There's a huge faction of Sun Elves who resent the fact that the current rulers of the Elven people are the pale-skinned but more cosmopolitan and liberal Moon Elves. Seriously, there are canonically a lot of Sun Elves who don't accept the legitimacy of the ruling Moon Elven clan (the Moonflower Clan) simply because they are Moon Elves. Most Sun Elves consider Moon Elves to be beneath them in the social hierarchy, to the point that the very idea of a Moon Elf ruling family is an affront to the natural order.
This may seem dumb and abstract. But, weird fantasy racism aside - to anyone who lived through the Obama administration, that type of bigotry feels very close and familiar.
See what I mean about everything being political?
On the other hand, those of us who objected to Donald Trump did so because he's basically the real world equivalent of Hugh Grant's character from the new movie.
("Is Jarnathan going to be on the panel?")
But anyway: part of the issue, and the reason for the whole "Fall Of The Drow" in the Forgotten Realms in the first place is the fact that the Sun and Moon Elves are outsiders, refugees who portaled to planet Toril from the Faerie realm thousands of years ago to escape some kind of calamity. (Which is the reason why "Faerie" is used by the Dark Elves as a slur to refer to Sun and Moon Elves.)
The pre-Drow Dark Elves and Wood Elves were indigenous to Toril, and were immediately considered "lesser" by the incoming Sun Elves, who also already considered the Moon Elves to be "lesser" and in many cases still do ("Grey Elf" is a slur on par with the N Bomb when employed by Sun Elves against Moon Elves.)
The pre-Drow Dark Elves are inconsistently depicted as always having had black skin, white hair, and red eyes, or having been more-or-less physically identical to the brown-skinned, dark-haired Wood Elves - because the Realms books are written by a bunch of different authors and they never got that part of the story straight between them all.
The Sun Elves (under the influence of the devil Malkizid) immediately embarked on a campaign of colonization of the Dark Elves and Wood Elves, and the Dark Elves (who were increasingly falling under the demonic influences of Lolth and Wendonai) fought back. This kicked off the Crown Wars.
The Sun Elven Vyshaan Clan, rulers of the Aryvandaar Empire, did a 9/11 times 100 against the Dark Elven/Wood Elven nation of Miyeritar, killing everyone there
Right away, some things about this narrative jump out at me:
- This narrative is obviously being told by the victorious Sun and Moon elves, because the Dark Elves were framed as the bad guys who were literally cursed by the gods for fighting back against a genocidal attack that obliterated an entire country. A magical nuke, if you will. The area that used to be Miyeritar was still a blasted, empty wasteland until just a hundred years ago or so in game time, when the Archwizards Khelben Arunsun (RIP, you were a real Bro) and Ualair the Silent ritually sacrificed themselves to revitalize the land.
- Were the Dark Elves and Wood Elves basically the same race before this happened? Like, the Wood Elves stayed Wood Elves because they were the ones who didn't make demonic pacts in order to fight fire with fire?
(The depiction of Wood Elves in the Dungeons & Dragons, Honor Among Thieves movie is awesome, by the way - and if there isn't an "Emerald Enclave Ambience" video on Youtube in a month or so, I'll be disappointed.)
But the takeaway here is 1. the Dark Elves were indigenous defenders against an invading colonizing force, and 2. they were the ones who were literally demonized and driven underground for defending themselves. 3. They became an oppresive hyper-conservative isolationist, nationalist theocracy as a result. The Wood Elves who remained on the surface and who stayed faithful to the Elven gods retreated to the High Forest or the Forest of Tethyr or to Aglarond, where they still live today.
The question here is not how you make Drow less problematic, because there is nothing about this narrative that could not be construed as problematic in some way. But again, everything is political.
Capcom got around the "Elves in Blackface" issue back in 1995 with their D&D arcade games, by making the Drow purple.
Behold Tel'Arin and his crotch-skull accessory (modesty skull?)
Yes, I know those are technically Shadow Elves from Mystara, but it's a tactic that has been used more recently in one of the latest games involving Drizzt:
UPDATE, Dec 2024: And later, various shades of purple, blue, or grey, like Minthara and other Drow in the instant classic Baldur's Gate 3:
I don't know. How much of the above historical narrative is really "true" ingame is up to the discretion of the individual DM. But it's something that's always bothered me, to the point where I've been thinking of a few subversions which may or may not be the subject of a future post.
Current Mood:
no subject