Only it isnt.
Tolkien is afterall not the final arbiter of fantasy and while his personal cahtolic leanings certainly remind me of modern ideological leanings which are basically just as religious, what we need to understand is that some things are created with one purpose or another.
Tolkien was a christian, christians did afterall try to convert imaginary dog headed people in india.
That doesnt mean that you cannot have any dehumanized Evil Races that specifically are a stand in of a NON EMPHATIC threat.
They could stand for a natural desaster or they could, much like the Orcs in LOTR in many ways did, stand for an ideology, rather than the people belieivng in the ideology.
TL;DR while youre correct, youre also not making much of a point in the debate to be had.
WOTC arent very christian are they. And by their own religion, they are just, ironically, pushing negative stereotypes from fantasy races unto minorities.
By the logic that "If theres a negative stereotype associated with a fantasy race that also was at some point attributed to a human ethnic group, those two things must be connected"
That of course is bullshit.
But thats where this entire debate stems from and why i think WOTC approach is not only wrongheaded but actually wrong by their own standards.
Okay, that was a bit all over the place. I’m not sure why you think I’m suggesting Tolkien was an arbiter of what fantasy should be. I was saying that if the creator of fantasy orcs was himself wrestling with the idea and the implications of an evil race, WotC are not out of bounds asking the same questions.
Your whole premise is a bit of a red hearing. Orcs and Drow in Forgotten Realms lore are not metaphors for some existential threat and they never have been. They originally were just mooks in the monster manual to be killed. The setting is more complex now. WotC, looking back, have decided that the way they described these races as “monstrous and evil” is reminiscent of the way real life ethnic groups were dehumanized. That isn’t pushing any negative stereotypes on anybody. It is WotC realizing a parity in their IP with something they don’t want to be associated with. Your objections all seem to me a great big ado about nothing.
