Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Racist Tropes on Drow STOP IT

Gygax created the Drow, so it's not exactly totally on RA Salvatore if certain tropes are baked in from that source material or from Tolkien (who Gygax was cribbing) Probably the Maeglin and Eöl stuff in the Silmarillion, since they were kinda proto-Drow I guess? Or from even older sources in iceberg folklore, since I'm sure those are all over the place.

There are also the illustrators who visualized the Drow, and who gave them much of their look that we think of from the 80s. They probably have some responsibility.

I'm sure they could hire Salvatore to write some new material if they really wanted to. Or just incorporate some stuff from his latest book? They could also hire Helen Young as an editor I guess, since she's clearly hit the books on this one and must have played Dragon Age. She might sign on? They're both white though, so I don't know. Maybe it would be better to just, you know, hire more black writers and artists and developers instead? I mean that's the simplest path forward.

Clearly Salvatore would prefer to reinvent the Drow archetype so that its not so inherently evil or dark by having more varied factions within it. He seems to like the idea that Drizzt gave people a black hero to identify with in D&D. But from what he says about it, it seems clear that wasn't his initial plan or intention for the character. I think he was just taking his cues from his fantasy idols, and didn't really think about it. I don't imagine he thought all that much about the blackness when he was writing that stuff. He was probably writing about what he knows, which one imagines is mainly white dude from Boston type stuff. But who knows?

Maybe they will hire Idris Elba to play Drizzt in a movie or something? And just seal the deal.

It just seems like a problematic approach to make the Drow as monolithic or explicitly racial like that though. I mean do they really want to go that way, and say 'yeah, that's what the Drow were all along' ? Because that's what the implication would seem to be with a recasting. They'd have a lot of ground to make up to salvage anything really going that route. They don't want to to do that, they just want to even it out some I'd bet. Rather than starting from the premise that the Drow were coded black folks in D&D, I suppose they could also just make the most evil faction of the Drow even more explicitly white looking than they already are. That's probably what they'll do. I mean the Drow are probably the whitest looking race in D&D for everything other than their skintone already. In most illustrations anyway. I mean they don't appear particularly black, if you're just looking at what's in front of you half the time in the books. And they have been steadily making the Drow more light skinned and blue and purple and gray than black as time goes on. There are exceptions to the visual like the cover to old book/SSI gold box game "Pools of Darkness." That illustration by Fred Fields does make the drow look pretty black. But also pretty badass. So that's a toss up.

But I think like blackheifer said, that they are easier to read more like fascist europeans than black folks. The spider thing is maybe a rip from Anansi, but Arachne has been around for a while too, so I can see it going either way on that one.

I don't know, it all seems pretty fraught. I'm not sure what they should do.

D&D will almost certainly remove the word 'race' from 6th edition altogether.

Here just for the philology fans... another from etymonline.

race (n.2)

[people of common descent] 1560s, "people descended from a common ancestor, class of persons allied by common ancestry," from French race, earlier razza "race, breed, lineage, family" (16c.), possibly from Italian razza, which is of unknown origin (cognate with Spanish raza, Portugueseraça). Etymologists say it has no connection with Latin radix "root," though they admit this might have influenced the "tribe, nation" sense, and race was a 15c. form of radix in Middle English (via Old French räiz, räis). Klein suggests the words derive from Arabic ra's "head, beginning, origin" (compare Hebrew rosh).

Original senses in English included "wines with characteristic flavor" (1520), "group of people with common occupation" (c. 1500), and "generation" (1540s). The meaning developed via the sense of "tribe, nation, or people regarded as of common stock" to "an ethnical stock, one of the great divisions of mankind having in common certain physical peculiarities" by 1774 (though as OED points out, even among anthropologists there never has been an accepted classification of these). In 19c. also "a group regarded as forming a distinctive ethnic stock" (German, Greeks, etc.).

For the drow, they should have just called them elves, since that's what they are. And simply get rid of the skin color stuff and just move away from whatever seems particularly sketchy like that. It's not really necessary for them to have onyx skin tones, and that does seem to be the main hang up. If that aspect was removed, much of the issue probably goes away, at least on the surface read.

Just to pour a little more gasoline on the flames though, the Drow are probably way more problematic for the Anti-Matriarchy or chauvinist tropes than they are for the racist ones. It's basically got the same things going on there with the inversions but even more extreme. But that's a whole 'nother thread probably, and this one is already exhausting lol.

They could also completely reinvent Lolth I guess, and give her a motivation that makes sense beyond wanton cruelty. They could do something with the web of Chaos, and the web of order. Show the drow as a split thing, but give the spider queen something more elegant and deep to work with than we typically get. Spiders are crazy creatures, terrifying and beautiful. There are ways I can think of the Drow that don't require the stark irredeemable villainy in toto, even on that side.

The idea of Drow druids is also worth mining out. Where the roots go deep. Drow don't need to be Evil per se, but they could definitely have reasons to take a different tact with the surface and surface elves for reasons of ancient hostility. The Drow Matriarchy is potentially the coolest thing Faerun has going for it, with the ancient houses and feuds. They could spin it many new ways, I don't mind them mixing it up some.