say more about Black drow please!
I love you for asking this but also oh BOY, so—
we all know the drow have been wronged from the jump because their very foundation is built upon some blatantly racist ideas that are unfortunately not uncommon in fantasy. The association of dark skin = evil, the mass exodus of the drow after Araushnee/Lolth's own exile into the dreadful Underdark, the stripping of certain qualities to make them seem like a lesser version of surface elves (aka the Real Elves) — like the inability to reverie meaning that they wouldn't be reincarnated like other elves, etc. IIRC some things may have been retconned to a certain degree, but either way it's awful stuff and in my opinion you can't just stick a bandaid on it when these ideas are built into the very concept of the drow.
and it's not a surprise that someone like me might find the parallels between how they were treated by the writers AND within the universe itself vs how Black people are treated irl. in a weird way it's endeared me to them, which is why I like to view them through this lens.
for me, this sort of analysis has always been centered on Eilistraee and her followers specifically, mainly because I have an OC that is a half-drow Eilistraeean cleric. The amount of lore I've absorbed on Eilistraeeans is a bit ridiculous and yet in all that time spent reading, I've never seen someone approach Eilistraee's ideology as being flawed from the angle I'm about to describe, which I found strange.
much of the messaging of Eilistraee/the Church states that their goal is to redeem the drow, as though it is somehow their fault that long ago, Lolth decided to turn against Correllon — that is the penance they must pay.
still, Eilistraee believes that the drow deserve to take their place on the surface again, and the best way to do this is through acts of kindness and selflessness. by helping others, ("they were to be always kind, even to those who showed rudeness, and to aid others in acts of kindness"), by feeding and protecting everyone in need, by singing and dancing and bringing enough joy, they could somehow convince the world that despised them that they were people who deserved the benefit of the doubt, that they deserved to be treated by the quality of their character and not some preconceived notion that their race was intrinsically evil.
which is *literally* just Respectability Politics and the myth of Black excellence. HELLO
anyway I could go on about this forever but the point is that this has always been the way I like to engage with the drow & specifically with Eilistraee because I find it more interesting than whatever else is going on. 😬
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