I am sorry if this is something basic that has been discussed to death before but I feel like I need to get this out of my system before I ruin friendships by wishing centuries of humiliation on people for the way they play pretend.
I had a casual chat with a friend and fellow GM about our current campaigns and worldbuilding. At some point beast races come up and I mention I like gnolls and give a few short details about their society in my setting. In response I get an explanation that he can't have this kind of characterization because of Goebbles level bullshittery about how beastmen are inherently savage and destructive and basically a swarm of pests that has to be put down. And how this is necessary in order to address the moral issues of what to do with beastmen non-combatants. Essentially giving players moral license to commit genocide and still be considered "good" in-universe.
It felt so fucking unreal seeing how normally chill people can almost reproduce word for word the vile shit that Zionists are using right fucking now as a justification for mass murder and not have a single moment of "oh shit wait wtf am I saying". I had to step away from the keyboard and calm down. I hate how concept of "sapient creatures that are completely and irredeemably evil and are specifically designed to be slaughtered" is seen as something completely normal and even expected. Gygax was a piece of shit genocide enthusiast who deserves to rot in hell and it's high time that we move on from colonial plunder sims with dragons and obligatory others that exist only to be killed and looted.
You are building an imaginary world and there are no limits. The genre is literally called imagination. There is no excuse for consciously designing entire species that are designated for slaughter and reproducing some of the vilest ideologies ever thought up by humans as a pillar of your worldbuilding.
That's it I guess. That's the rant. Thanks for reading. I am doing my best trying to give positive portrayals of non-human societies in my games and also trying to get my friends to play other games that aren't built from around breaking into others' homes to kill them and take their stuff.
I mean you yourself just said Tolkien did have a problem with his making Orcs irredeemable. His earlier work was much less Catholic, and so the orcs are just created by evil to be evil. However once he starts aligning things to his religious beliefs he struggles with that. He cannot have evil create, only corrupt, but if the orcs are corrupted then they mustn't be killed indiscriminately.
Like he never resolved the dilemma, but the very fact that he struggled with it and DID do something about it, changing the origin multiple times means he....well wasn't ok with it and DID something about it. Something unsatisfying for sure, but it is just silly to treat his back and forth on the matter as "doing nothing about it". It wasn't like he wrote another full book that could've fixed things, he just had his appendices.
Like he should'nt be praised for realizing the obviously bad shit with that, but it is such a weird way to put it. He literally did see it as a problem, and did something about it. He was racist sure, but his Roman Catholicism DID cause him to reconsider the Orcs. Again shouldn't throw a parade for him over that, but it hardly makes him a "clown who professed to be a Roman Catholic" when you just admitted his faith is why he reconsidered the matter.
My issue is that I view the legacy of past works from a consequentialist perspective and see things this way: every public figure has two sides to them. Tolkein, the private man, may have had a genuine crisis of faith with what he produced and some of his writings suggest something to this like. Tolkein the author however, never expressed any substantive reservations in his canonical publications to correct his original portrayal of the orcs as categorically evil and irredeemable. This is his public side and the legacy that we are left to contend with, as it is the only one which the general population would see through his published works. Through this, the fantasy standard of "evil" races which he popularized (and basically created, frankly) for posterity, and the consequences of that legacy, is an absolutely vile outcome of a so-called "Christian" referenced work and his pretensions to such does make him "clownish."
There's an endless amount of written mental masturbation by "Tolkein scholars" how poor Tolkein was "so confused" and "so conflicted" with how his worldbuilding ended up conflicting chiefly with Christian redemption doctrine through his racial characterizations. There's an entire natopedia page on his so-called "moral dilemma." If you're interested in engaging with the topic on his own terms as he presents them, you may check that out, though I've read all of it, I personally have no interest in assessing him on that sort of register.
Crucially, neither did he ever consider it problematic that he drew inspiration for the orcs from European caricatures of African and Asian peoples- in fact, through his entire moral dilemma, he never once considered why he needed to make them, in his own words, "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned (a.k.a. yellow and brown skin), with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." This compounds the "dilemma" as he explicitly admits to race coding the orcs.
The bottom line is that no one forced him to write things that were antithetical to his professed faith other than himself and his partial self realization of this being expressed through private musings rather than being made plain and explicit in revisions of his work or canonical publications that made explicit a corrective to the portrayal is not a mark in his favor. The latter was a path he could have chosen if so inclined, if the dilemma was really as serious to him as Tolkein scholars, with an agenda of rehabilitating him for the modern age, allege him to have felt.
The best thing to do was simply not write such problematic material, and it's always important to keep in mind that there were contemporaneous writers and people in every age ever who thought differently to whatever "dominant" local prejudice, contrary to the belief of the "man of their time" cultural relativism fetishist crowd. Especially by the mid 20th century, where there was no shortage of people even enclosed in the confines of the perpetually chauvinist terf island of imperialist Britain that did not view portrayals of the "other" in such a Manichean perspective as Tolkein did.
The second best course would have been to issue a corrective, either through a sequel or outright revision. On this front, Charles Dickens wrote problematic works with countless prejudical tropes. For one of them at least, the characterization of the greedy antagonistic Fa#in as an explicit Jewish caricature eventually gave him pause either through personal reflection or reportedly through lobbying by a Jewish acquaintance. He later revised his work to remove every reference to Fa#in as a Jew.
Tolkein did not choose to do that. He was clearly too much in love with what he created (more unfavorably said, I'd say he frankly liked the smell of his own flatulence too much) to revise his canonical works. Instead, he tried to bend Christian doctrine to fit his own pre-established problematic worldbuilding rather than tear down and adjust what he developed to re-align with his faith. These are the half-assed "contradictions" that Tolkein scholars attribute to his latter renditions on the etiology of the orcs.
TL;DR, Tolkein is a clown because he rejected any substantive praxis of his faith onto his works. Instead, he tried to have his cake and eat it too, calling his work Christian-based when he refused to allow Christian doctrine to alter what he already wrote. To put it crudely, he sharted on a plate, and upon realizing his mistake, he decided to sprinkle some parsley on top rather than remove the plate and sanitize it. This self conceit is why I have no patience for engaging with his contradictions on his own terms and why I don't hold reservations for viewing him as I do.
However, I recognize his work is a permanent fixture on contemporary literature and his tropes are now standards of the fantasy genre. I have no issue with people who are fans of his work and would personally prefer to accomodate his (half-baked, in my view) expressions of his "dilemma" in more a favorable light than I do. Yet, I would never pretend to see him through such lens personally.