Why is it whenever I try to find any info out about this game I find posts full of edgy "haha I killed that, are U mad?" assholes and borderline "race realists"?
Ffs I just wanted to find a post that would help me avoid killing Kobolds and the one posts I find asking the question is full of edgelords bragging about how they love to kill "vermin" races and gays.
This is what you get when you make a fantasy world were certain races are born evil, it attracts all the racist freaks that want to live out their genocide fantasies.
It's killing my fun for this game.
What's wild is that Drizz't appeared in the Icewind Dale books back in 1988, making it canon that in D&D you aren't born with a certain alignment just because of your race, but some people still cling to this outdated idea thirty-seven years later.
Authors have explored the idea but it's not really a feature of D&D unfortunately, especially with the mechanics reinforcing it constantly. There's just the occasional Good member of an Evil species rather than species not being inherently good or evil.
I'm glad Paizo killed that sacred cow, I just wish it hadn't taken until the remaster.
It was always really inconsistent. Some authors treated Alignment as "just kinda your vibe", some as "a combination of cultural factors and divine meddling", and some as "intrinsic cosmic morals", some both but for different things (humans vs Outsiders, etc). Negative Energy and undead as being an Eeeeevil Spookyforce or Basically Just Radiation.
That kind of unaddressed inconsistency fuelled, and still fuels, endless repeats of the "Is Necromancy evil? What if my skeletons are used as agricultural robots to allow for a higher standard of living?", where everyone talks past each other based on what part of the texts they read and settings they play in.
Yeah I blame WOTC for keeping the alignment system around through third ed. Even in the 2000s when I learned the game most people thought of alignment as more of an annoyance than something worthwhile.
I get why they kept it in 3rd with them wanting to keep and expand on the lore in order to keep and expand on TSR's player base, but they scrapped nearly everything for 4th ed and still kept it around for no good reason. You're right though, even in 3rd it mainly existed in order to trick paladins into falling.
Drizzt is not a good example; the Drow are still explicitly evil in those books and Drizzt hates them and acknowledges that they're evil. Fantasy is unfortunately terrible for this, but there is a book that's not only fantastic, but it's based in a setting that reverberates the sentiment of monsters not being inherently evil: 'Queen of stone' set in the Eberron setting by Keith Baker, the setting's creator.
Annoyingly it's now available in kindle form; when I searched for it about...ten years ago? There was no digital version of the book at that time.
The main character is a bodyguard sent with a diplomat to a major diplomatic event in the lands of Droaam (a land of monsters; medusas, minotaurs, gnolls, ogres, hags, etc.) and the races there are portrayed very normally; I recall reading an essay by (Keith Baker?) where he explained how in his setting the only inherently evil races are demonic beings (who are made of the evil stuff in the abyss; they are not formed from human souls) or the creatures from the dream realm whose mentality is utterly alien to human thinking who went on to create illithids and other similar creatures. Goblins in Eberron in the ancient times had an extremely advanced empire but were defeated by the numerous barbarian human tribes and eventually their civilization collapsed and now live in poverty in human cities instead.
Unfortunately even though Eberron has much going for it.....I'm not a steampunk/entire-cities-are-made-of-artifice/airships guy. I like my fantasy settings basic.
Im trying to work out if Anime has always been like this, or if this is a new trend I'm only now clocking onto as it parallels my increasing awareness of the far-right?
Japan is national socialist. They have socialist vibes which is what attracts us. They are also fash as hell. It's hard to say how much of that fash shit we imposed on them though
Japan is a very conservative country, so the media there skews very conservative. A lot of anime does focus on "inherently evil" villains, but there's also some good stuff.
The most low effort slop invariably will just reflect the general cultural attitudes of the people, because the creator doesn't care enough to think about it or try to challenge it. And anime is an industry with a massive slop problem.
No BuT ThEy WeRe AtYPiCaL