I think dnd took until like this year to properly update drow and orcs or something? Like fantasy as a whole has a hard time shaking off this idea of evil races.
The elder scrolls approach to these guys from the beginning though has been that their cultures are just really different from the other cultures around them.
Like you can hang out in orc strongholds in Skyrim and spend the whole game around dark elves in Morrowind and they’re just regular people that have kind of extreme cultural norms. Dark elves are kind of rude to you when they first meet you but like in the way certain cultures are rude to outsiders at first until they get to know them. Orcs are rough around the edges but they’re smart and have a proud culture and if you can hold your own in a fight they’ll respect you.
And you see these people can blend pretty well into other societies. They join faiths their ancestors didn’t practice, they have jobs that people of their race wouldn’t stereotypically have, they have opinions about what other people assume about them, they have their own wrong assumptions about other cultures.
There’s this understanding somewhere in these games that people are shaped by their cultures but you also can’t predict how an individual will behave based on the culture that they came from. And I like that.
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