So I wanted to jump back to a question I proposed initially. The Article discusses how - after a backlash - Salvatore decided to do the right thing and add in additional material showing that the Drow were not inherently evil.
So if the Drow deserve this sort of re-write, why not Orcs, or Goblins? Is there an underlying factor that would favor one of these groups over the other two?
Is it just because the Drow are so popular?
Drizzt is his breakthrough Character, which might explain why hes talking bout new books with those other Drow Races to show what actual studies in real world came up with.
People who read books identify themselves in the reading process with characters. And as Drizzt is the most important one and is black, you can guess why its about Drow.
Thats why other Races are not in the Talk, but we can assume its the same for other races and Drow is our example Race
To start with:
Theres allready several Studies about Human babies behavior.
The general consensus learned by those experiments in the studie is that Human babies are born altruistic no matter what skin color and everything later in behavior is learned or copied.
With that in mind its totally possible to imply that Mr. Salvatore learned about those studies and wants to reflect this in his new books.
Kickstarted maybe by his Fanletters from people who are not so happy that even Drizzt has changed to be a good person all other Drows are seen inherently evil.
And him (Fan) beeing a human, with how do i say this "colored, black skin tone" (like Drows are described), his experience in life is that f.e. black colored humans have suffered a lot
and prejudices against black people arent gone from this world yet, makes him sad.
When you have all this in mind, then its natural to change your wordin to prevent an easy excuse.
That just because of color you can use racist tropes on all people of that color.
Mr. Salvatore "grew" and as he had influenced/inspired a lot of us Fantasy/Scifi fans its good to take responsibility as an author.
Future books from Mr. Salvatore will still inspire, but they will surely less inspire you to learn how to make racist tropes just by having read his books.
Which never where books to be misused for learning racism. They where books with good characters and story and all what happened to write about for a story.
But in that time when those books where written, our Society and language / wording was not ready yet to be an important part of leaving behind prejudices, racism, etc you name it.
Language changes and with that how we perceive it and our world around us.
It changes howe we bring up our children and how they will learn to be more conscious about what they say.
Every generation can be a little better.
Everything starts with our words and how we use them.
