My one hot take on the goblin thing
Matt Mercer is a very smart man and a very smart and considerate storyteller, and...I mean god this is gonna sound pretentious, and really I hate to just make broad assumptions about strangers, but I can’t really help but assume he hasn’t put a ton of thought into the symbolism behind using orcs, goblins and the like as an innately evil, chaotic threat outside of and opposed to the forces of good and civilization. Maybe he has! But!
Well. Innately evil races are a trope rooted in European mythology and folklore and enshrined in Tolkien and reiterated in nearly all of the high fantasy RPGs and stories that take Tolkien as a jumping-off point, so I can understand taking it as tradition, an unremarkable and useful fantasy staple like the farmboy hero and the old wizard mentor.
The thing is, like a lot of tropes from times gone by, the idea of innately evil races (mindless hordes, creatures that are sentient yet well within any hero’s right to kill indiscriminantly) is rooted in a lot of the ugliest parts of human nature. Orca and goblins reflect a savage Other, a people who don’t count as people because they are different, and therefore the enemy. They codify and embody all of the horrible things people for all of history have said about Other people in order to justify killing them, enslaving them, driving them off: that they are naturally, inherently, more violent, more stupid, more evil, less sapient than Real People.
This isn’t an issue (as Matt seems to think it is) of drawing a one-to-one correlation between orcs/goblins/drow and specific minority populations; throughout history the Other (the Savage, the Marauder, the Horde, the Uncivilized Threat) has been Jewish, Native American, Latino, Eastern European, Black, Arab, Berber, Romani, Chinese...or even just Those Scary People from up north or down south or the other tribe or WHATEVER.
As long as there has been human conflict there has been a drive to dehumanize other people, to turn them into a monstrous threat lurking just beyond Civilization. This drive has fueled the cruelest and ugliest and most unforgivable acts of human history, but it’s also embedded itself in our storytelling traditions so much that these tropes seem natural.
The thing is, we’re at a point where we are re-evaluating and reshaping these storytelling traditions, and for the most part Matt Mercer and the CR cast have been an admirable force for change. I don’t at all think any of this comes from conscious racism on any of their part; I’m not accusing them of that and I don’t think most fans are. I’d just really like to see what would happen if they gave this one some thought and put their extremely powerful storytelling brains to the task of exploring it critically in this campaign.
(And in a way they are, especially with Fjord. I keep thinking back to his interactions with Bo the Breaker in the first few episodes and being excited for where his story takes us)
