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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Yeah, I hate this kind of reaching. It's what leads Pathfinder and WotC to replace "race" with "ancestry" and "species."

The ancient Greeks likes to make up tribes of far off people like the amazons, the centaurs, the cynocephali, the Laestrygonians - and while they probably did reflect anxienties and bigotries by the Greeks against people in the world, I think this kind of imagination is an important part of human storytelling. Sure, the real secret of these non-human races is that they're all humans, but emphasizing one aspect or another of humanity.

But they still let us tell interesting stories about broad ideologies. Doctor Who wouldn't be the same without omnicidal Daleks, or assimilationist Cybermen. Those two alien species aren't "really" non-human aliens. Much of sci-fi and fantasy is not trying to do genuinely speculative "what if there was an alien species that differed from humanity in major way X", but instead presenting an allegorical reflection of humanity to criticize some tendency in humanity. It's like Black Mirror - several of the episodes are just our world, but with aspect X taken to some crazy extreme to make the faults of our current system more striking.

It's silly to pretend that the goblins in Harry Potter are or always were anti-Semitic. The best argument you could say on this front is that folkloric goblins might have some atavistic anit-Semitic traits, which Rowling unthinkingly reproduced. That doesn't mean that any story where the goblins rise up against oppressive wizard kind is automatically anti-Semitic.