I originally thought finding opinionated articles on this topic would be pretty difficult but as it turns out, a lot of people have a lot to say about racism in the fantasy genre. I definitely was not expecting to find full-out essays on this topic.The first article I looked at was How Fantasy Games Deal with Race which can be found here.
This article talks about one of the most popular series on the market in the fantasy genre, The Elder Scrolls. If you’ve played any sort of fantasy game, you’ve at least heard of this series. Throughout the article the author, Dennis Jansen, talks about how race is utilized in this series, and how the different races interact. Jansen makes an interesting point saying that, “With many developers insisting that their games are not political in any way, and with recent games desperately trying to say as little as possible about their subject matter, many critics find that there is once again a need to stress this point.”
Games need to own up to the politics they discuss whether they admit their games are political or not. Jansen believes the Elder Scrolls series needs to do the same regarding race.
Instead of distinguishing races through social/cultural links, they are distinguished using biological links. So, races in games like Oblivion have bonus attributes added to their stats. To delve more into the main topic of this article, they use the game Skyrim to really describe how your character interacts throughout the game. In this game, you can pick from a number of races such as; Nord, Imperial, Khajiit, Breton, Dark/High/Wood Elf and Argonian.
Another important point the article brought up was regarding the interesting interactions you can have in the game.“My grey skin did not even prevent me from joining the Stormcloak rebellion, despite the fact that this rebellion was led by the Jarl (leader) of the aforementioned city of Windhelm and was for a significant part driven by xenophobia and anti-Elf racism.” You get a clear look of the way society is set up in the game, but do not experience that racism themselves.
The other article I looked at was, Race: The Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre which can be accessed here.
This article talks about issues stemming from Tolkien’s work, The Lord of the Rings and how its inherent racism has led to works inspired by it to also have that inherent racism.
As the article progresses, it talks about how Dungeons and Dragons was inspired by the series, and how it incorporates that inherent racism. In this game, you can encounter racism with the existence of the dark elves (or drow). This race adds to the notion that fantasy races with black or darker skins are inherently evil. They even mention how the inspiration for the dark elves came from an actual black actress, and how that makes the issue even more pressing. As they drive their point about dark elves and how they are racist, they include a video of a man cosplaying as a dark elf, and how similar it looks to blackface. I personally do not believe it counts as black face since there is no comical depiction of an African American, but I can see why others may view it as such.
The end of the article is a call-to-action to other contemporary writers to create more works of fantasy that include people of color, and push away from the toxic norms that plague the fantasy genre.
These two articles are vastly different. The former seems to be more analytical and professional while the latter seems to be more opinionated and like a blogger wrote it. Although these two articles have similar topics, the way they go about explaining them is vastly different. These articles are quite useful for exploring others’ opinions and it has taught me a lot about how some people may view the fantasy genre as something inherently racist since the days of Tolkien.
