My pet peeve about Forgotten Realms' Drow lore is that despite being told that Drow Society is this super restrictive, matriarchal society with reversed gender roles, we are rarely shown Drow househusbands. In fact, most of the named male Drow characters are portrayed as either career soldiers or arcane spellcasters. This is explained by saying that drow society, as it revolves around the worship of Lolth, regards arcane spellcasting as far inferior to divine spellcasting of clerics, and that while only women are allowed to have high-ranking positions in their armies like the generals and the lieutenants, the grunts and the footsoldiers are mostly composed of men.
My problem with that is..... One, you can't claim that you're reversing the gender dynamic in your fantasy setting and have what's considered to be "a man's work (derogatory)" in said setting be wizardry and the military, two jobs whose real-world counterparts (academia and the military) are *also* considered "a man's job (complimentary)" and are highly male-dominated fields in the real world, come on.
And two, how has this supposedly super-strict matriarchy sustained itself for so long? We've got this class of abused, oppressed, and very rightfully disgruntled gender, many of whom are a. combat-trained and has to vastly outnumber their female superiors, due to how the whole "military hierarchy" thing works, or b. can shoot fireballs and blow up stuff with their minds. Meanwhile, the Drow women mostly stick to religion and politics and lounging about in boudoirs in fantasy dominatrix gear. So what's stopping the men from staging a rebellion? Not to belittle the power that religion and politics hold in a pseudo-feudalistic medieval pastiche society, but I always assumed the reason the church and the crown was so powerful in medieval Europe was because they controlled the military!*
(*don't quote me on this, I'm not a history major)
Look, I don't mind depictions of fantasy bigotry in fiction (I quite enjoy them actually!), and it's possible to reverse the oppressed and the privileged class in a fictional society so that's opposite from real life in a way that it still poses pertinent questions about real-world oppression in our real-world society (e.g. Egalia's Daughters) , but I don't think Forgotten Realms quite manages to do that. If anything, it's weirdly reminiscent of that "feminists don't *actually* want to work jobs, they just want the men to do all the work for them and for women to reap ALL the benefits" antifeminist rhetoric ☹️
(To be clear, I'm not saying that Ed Greenwood and R.A. Salvatorre are misogynists, just that they either were confused about how sexism actually operates in the real world, or that they had some unexamined biases and hangups surrounding feminism that they perhaps failed to address.)
I don't mind fantasy bigotry in my fiction, but I want my fantasy bigotry to be realistic or at least believable, y'know?
