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

The biggest issue I see is with people, who imagine racism, and other "popular issues" where there is none.
You try to make up issues, and divide people.

I tell you a real problem: around 9.5 Million people die yearly from hunger... now let that number sink in.
I'll help you a bit, just to get the scale of that number: if you started counting right now, it would take you 2 whole years, to count to 9.5 million
While you count to 10, already 12 people starved to death on this world.

Now, you see, THAT is a problem. How about trying to fix that, before fighting imaginary daemons?

I think what I am getting at is I do NOT see the Drow as ever representing any POC (people of color) group. I would argue that the Drow don't represent ANY race - or if they do they represent a subset of Caucasians. From my observations and reading they seem to represent Neo-fascism and Nazism with some modifications to make it a little less obvious to some.

They have flipped the standard Nazi, and Italian neo-fascist movements gender roles to create a society that is female-dominated.

Lolth can be seen as a totalitarian dictator composite of several figures.

Additional proofs:
-The Drow practice eugenics and racial engineering with the goal being superficial beauty markers that dictate social class and give advantage against others.
-Economic and social participation is sanctioned by the church.
-Duty, elevation and conquest are central to the Drow which is lifted straight from La dottrina del fascismo (The Doctrine of Facism)
-Drow society rejects the individual and individualism.
-The Drow routinely mutilate, torture, murder and enslave those they consider enemies of the state and unacceptable lesser races.

Again, this is just my analysis - other people may come to different conclusions but I don't think I am wrong. A lot of people point to Drizzt having black skin as the only proof needed, but Drow in general have a range of skin colors from whitish purple (Viconia and Minthara) all the way to dark purple. The Drow as POC assertion feels like a superficial analysis based only on a subset of skin colors and nothing else.

So given this very strong possibility.

If the Drow do indeed represent Neo-fascism how does that reflect on the actions of R. A. Salvatore?

Please no one else respond to this nonsense. Its the same as saying "no one should ever discuss anything else ever because X is a worse problem"

This person is just saying "I don't have anything to contribute so I guess I will try to derail the conversation"

Ohh, I do have something to add...
Stop making up issue, when there is none.

That is my point.

Why does a fictional society need to represent anything?


The whole idea of eugenics came up long before Fascism. Traces of it can be found with the spartans, Morus, Bacon... reaching a height in the late 19th and early 20th century. La dottrina del fascismo was published in 1932.
The church determining social and economic participation also predates fascism and was at its height of influence long before fascism. This is especially true for german fascism which soon left the style of fascism imagined in italy.
Duty and conquest in the name of god can be traced back at least to the rashidun caliphate or the crusades. I am no specialist for scythian, mongol and aztec history but I wouldn't be surprised to find similar concepts there.
A rejection of individualism and subservience to the state/community is on clear display in various greek poleis of the classical period. It reappears in various societies throughout history with examples reaching from monastic military orders to fascist regimes.
Slavery is an ancient global phenomenon. Over time it appeared in japan (from the yamato period onward), Ancient Rome, the Umayad Caliphate and the arab slave trade, the european colonies, the Ottoman Empire, the aztecs...

I can see the parallels between drow society and fascism of a clerical sort but I wouldn't call it true. It is an interpretation of a fictional society. What is important is to think about such parallels and various alternatives and thus develop a better understanding of the concepts. I can't read the mind of the authors responsible for creating the drow. And even if they all had the same in mind their creation can be interpreted in various ways.
Drow society combines various cultural extremes found in reality but that does not mean that it must represent one particular ideology or race. It is not a definitive representation of one ethnicity or one ideology and as such cannot be taken to be racist towards one group or aimed at one ideology. It stands on its own as part of a fictional universe. That is where it belongs.

I tend to view the LLoth-sworn drow as less fascist and more anarchic, by which I mean comic-book anarchy... Mad-Max: Beyond Thunderdome stuff. Very Strong-Woman oriented, take what you can, keep it if you can. They're not very organized, at all, and they don't really make a strong, concentrated effort to expand their power. They occasionally make raids on other cultures for slaves and resources, but that's it. They're absolutely horrible, but they're all so selfish and disorganized that there's little to no cohesion to them for the post part.

Hobgoblin default culture, as dominated by Maglubiyet worship, feels more fascist in nature.

I think if Vhaerun drow were to establish a power base rather than be diffuse throughout the setting, then they'd probably go either fascist or corporatist... which isn't that big a difference, honestly.

Regarding RA Salvatore, I think he's making an effort to address an issue that he didn't see when he was younger and that's respectable.

I think we are making some confusion here.
Tolkien never denied that his story "had a message" (or more than one, really). He just refused two specific claims: that it was meant as a Christian allegory or a as an attempt to draw a direct parallel with World War 2.
he also said more than once that he never tried to draw any parallel with the real world and he personally wasn't a fan of the approach of "telling X to actually talk about Y".
That of course doesn't mean that there isn't a "a moral" (or again, more than one) intertwined in its narrative. Then again it's basically impossible to write any work of fiction that tries to express ANY idea without at least a part of it being implicitly "a moral message" (or being interpretable as one).

But that's not even what I was talking about.
I was explicitly referring to how a lot of modern revisionists love to downplay his writings as "lacking in moral nuance" (which is possibly questionable in general) given the fact that "good and evil" were easy to tell apart.
Now, aside for the fact that in its stories the "good" faction was in fact extremely fractured and often "its own worst enemy", the point I was making is that this Manichean division was NOT the result of a lack of insight from his part, nor naivety, and that he explicitly commented more than once about how he deliberately went for that specific vibe in an attempt to mirror these... I'm not sure what's the proper English term for what I'm pointing at, let's call them "classic myths" and "knighly sagas".

Tolkien also specifically countered the idea that orcs were iredeemable. His statement was close to "if they were truly iredeemable they wouldn't exist" or something like that. Been a while since I saw the particular letter in question. He did not like people using his writing to push racist ideas, and apparently regretted making the orcs later in life.

You're right. That is exactly the statements I was thinking of and I was thinking of his statements distancing himself from C.S. Lewis and your interpretation of his words is more nuanced than mine.

So we agree that Tolkien had a moral message and that his moral view is actually quite nuanced. The belief in inherent good and evil does not mean than one's analysis is simpler.

The irony that people like our good historian want to make every battle into a battle over Manichean reduction but they themselves commit the sin of reductionism by transforming nuanced accounts into cartoons versions of Manicheanism.

Just wanted some plain D&D pasta. Like what I had as a kid. Checked the Internet for that simple recipe. But...something is off. Added some butter. Still felt wrong. So I added some tomatoe sauce. Not yet.... Top it with cheese and some garlic seasoning. Nope. More salt and pepper...Almost there...then tobasco and mayonnaise, completely ruined the pasta.
I think Im racist but who knows.

I'm surprised this this thread is still going, more that some of it is actually interesting.
I think we have two camps, people who think fantasy races are stand-ins for human stereotype and behavior generalization, and people who see them as distinct races that are fundamentally different from the real world experience. And to be fair they've been both before.

I think the root of this discussion comes from how we have a term 'race' that has two meanings, race in an scientific sense and race in an anthropological sense. Race for a long time was a cultural construct, but with the development of the living sciences, they got mixed together, working backwards every culture was a possible reflection of an inherent biological difference. There is no such thing.

But the problem for D&D is, there is such a thing. Humans, Dwarfs, Elves, Goblins and Orcs are actually difference races. This can make people uncomfortable because for some people a story has value only as far as it intersects with the real world. There are no races in the real world, so Dwarfs Elves Orcs etc. are only useful in the story as ways of talking about humanity. So every Dwarf is an allegory about greed, or tradition, every Elf an idealized representation of what a culture considers virtue, and Orcs the opposite. In D&D there are races that don't average a 10 intelligence, they are inherently less intelligent than a human, so for people who view every race as just an allegory for the real world, than what is being said here?

The other facet about this is Alignment, races have inherent tendencies towards good and evil, for the same people who view a story as only a commentary on the their own experience, then this means that people are born good or evil by virtue of their race. But while the question of morality is something we've spent a lot of time and ink throughout history, for the post-modern recontextualizing of D&D the conversation tends to over look or downplay a few things. D&D's setting ranges from faux Middle Ages, to faux Renaissance, but whatever the technology level, it's pretty firmly a picaresque of pre-Enlightenment Europe (and 19th Century Europe's view of 18th Century Asia) furthermore there can never be a Rights of Man revolution in Faerun because there is no veil between our understanding of the divine, the Gods exist, they smite the nonbeliever and they have a moral compass; you can be an atheist in Faerun by not following a god, you can be an antitheist by resenting their power, but you cannot be agnostic. I don't think Evolution is a thing in D&D either, so inherent behavioral norms will not be a result of, nor impact the development of a species.

I'm not someone who looks to fiction to better understand the world, if that happens all the better, I do go into fiction looking for interesting ideas. And possibly learn something about myself.

Not entirely true!

The "racial tensions" we have in our real world are guided & supported by the richest of the rich people.
To pit the lower classes in each country against each other, even in the guise of the support of certain groups!
And it is really boring & annoying how people do not catch on.

While in fact other and more deadly problems exist around the globe.
But nobody cares as long as they do not involve themself in some way.
And even if, many will still not care.
As long as the fridge will still contain something to devour.

We live in faithless countrys in which people idenfity as all kinds of religious stuff.
When in fact they care about nothing, do not plan to better the world, or bring Humanity closer to god - and just want to consum, consum, consum and be comfortable.


Sh°° now I've made myself depressed.
Just realized that in fact you were right.
Nothing we say or do will be a big influence.

Even if true problems are adressed or not. Since we cannot move the masses. Only media & news senders can.
And they talk about racism of course. =)
About racism and to take a dubious syringe.

Remember when you could just make an enemy for players to fight/scheme/kill without feeling guilty over? Utterly horrible people with no redeeming qualities? With no actual intentional comparisons to an actual people? When someone looking at it didn't go "Hey, that reminds me of X people, so because I immediately liken them to X, that means it's racist and the creators were racist, because I clearly can't be racist immediately associating this with real people!"?

I miss those days.

@ArmouredHedgehog:
Study i saw was not about hungry babies, it was experiments around playing and giving or not giving playthings to the other babies.
As i said theres several studies. And all try to checkup with different kind of experiments if altruistic behavior is what you are born with.

You have to ask Mr. Salvatore himself and confront him with your ideas.
I do assume he will answer respectivly, to satisfy or not, your way of thinking about his need to change what he sees fit to make his books less a template.
He explained enough in the article why.
If somthings missing in that explanation it could be possible that the author of the Article changed something or didnt wrote everything down in the article which was in the interview.
Quite possible.

I see the need for several peopel in the forum to express their thoughts about racism and tropes and all around it.
i dont judge, but can see that sometimes thinking goes way beyond the idea of that what Mr. Salvatore is saying and which should stay as suggestion to prevent possible Text Problems when BG3 releases.
I want BG3 to succeed and im pretty sure it will. But im also since reading this article aware how our language changes and which changes profit society to be a better place to live in.
By just change how we speak and write.

Some people really go into the META Discussion about Gods and Games and all which it can entail for this game.
But as said not judging, try to envision what Mr. Salvatore wants people to make understand.
Thats all about the suggestion from my site.

I like philosphical debates and theres so many to debate, but it will not really help Mr. Salvatores changes or us when its only about checking up in BG3 Dialogs to avoid language as racist tropes etc.
Getting heatet up about personal opinions wont change anything about what Mr. Salvatore trys to make everyone to understand.
Lets have a better BG3 on release instead by just recheck its Dialog.
That easy.

I think this whole thing is honestly focusing on the wrong race if it's gonna even be a topic. Focusing on the drow just because they have darker skin tones, even though their goddess and most of the culture is all about being evil? It's like someone just saw a picture of a drow, heard they were typically evil, and went "THAT'S RACIST!" without bothering to hear any of the lore or anything behind it. How about the tieflings? The tieflings are literally just like any other person except they look different, they aren't predisposed to either good or evil, and typically the ones who turn to evil do so only because all of society is constantly expecting them to turn out evil just so they can say "I told you so". But instead of pointing out the very real racism the tieflings face that is much more like what we have in the real world, where people are racist against others simply because of how they look, they just went with the race that typically has dark skin which seems rather racist on it's own if you ask me. They singled out the race with darker skin, heard they were evil, and screamed racism, all while overlooking the race that actually has the closest ties to real world racism just because they look like devils instead of simply being dark skinned. The drow are literally raised to be evil by their own culture and their actual goddess, while the tieflings are simply born with horns, tails, and different skin colors and no predisposition to any alignment aside from what everyone basically tries to force down their throats that they "have evil in their blood" basically.

I agree that, if the goal of D&D writers is to make social commentary on racism, tieflings would be a much better comparison. As you say, tieflings are a much closer analogue to real world "races" than the drow: basically only a visual difference and they grow up in the same society as humans. Stories about drow would be better at exploring themes like: overcoming growing up in authoritative & ruthless societies, breaking away from tradition, overcoming nurtured learning. However, the potential problem with drow is implicit racism, not intentional analogies used to make a point. Tieflings by themselves don't obviously reflect a certain real-world ethnic group, while the drow trait of dark skin (they were originally called "Black Elves" o.O) has an obvious real world analogy.

It doesn't really matter that there's an in-universe explanation - nurture via Lolth's influence - for drow being evil. The whole point is that the race in D&D distinguished from their base-race (elves) by their dark skin was created to be all mostly evil. Is this just a coincidence? Or was there implicit racism in the creation of drow, equating dark skin with being evil? And how does this reinforce racism in today's society, if at all? If the answers to the latter two questions are "yes" and/or "a lot," then there's a problem.

Imagine if all D&D humans with brown skin were a majority evil society, whereas all the more fair-skinned humans were not evil. No matter the reason given, even it was because of their god, that'd still be concerning at best.

tl;dr: Tieflings facing racism is a good analogy for real world racism, but this is a separate issue from whether or not drow being evil is problematic.

Excellent summary of Tolkien’s views and I agree with them all from what I have read about him and his disdain for allegory. I would add two things. 1) it was Beowulf specifically that inspired Tolkien’s desire to create a fantastical mythos, since that was what he studied, and 2) anyone who claims LOTR lacked moral nuance completely ignored Faramir’s dialogue and characterization (especially as it contrasts to his father and brother). Faramir was a hint at what humans would be in the coming age…nuanced, complex, and empathetic. Ie, the best of modern man at the end of the age of heroes, etc.

People assume Bombadil was either Tolkien himself or God (despite Tolkien always claiming his tale was Beren’s). But for me…Faramir was the true outlier in that tale. A creature of this world, not that one, and the closest Tolkien came to moralizing in his tales.

That is my take, at any rate.


And on topic…err….not every fantastical tale is an allegory for the real world. In fact…”fantasy” is an art form that, at its best, absolutely is not that. That in my mind distinguishes “fantasy” from “fiction”.

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.

It's true the first images of the Drow I remember were very much '80s. I more closely associate them with Mötley Crüe or David Bowie, based on the pretty terrible art of that era. So why aren't they bringing up how they can be a way of queer-bashing. They're also a matriarchal society that treats males as less than, so why aren't they seen as an anti-feminist allegory. They also exist in a oppressive theocracy, so why not a screed on fundamentalist Christians or Islamophobia? You can write stories about all these things using the Drow, but don't treat them as real. The Drow will take on any trait the creator wants them to have, and by making this an issue you create the antecedent.

Essentially I view this as creating the problem at the same time as 'solving' it.

Again, it's ok to treat fantasy as separate from reality.