Sometimes goblins are depicted as tech experts, usually with steampunk or clockwork.

But I think you're analysis is dead on with the classic dnd orc/goblin.

I think uncritically absorbing 'heroic' cowboys versus 'savage' natives is most of it. I'd also look at the Mongol invasion of Europe in the 1200s; they only got to Eastern Europe, but that terrified the rest of Europe and was heavily mythologized. That's a case of an extremely foreign culture (besides just being from far away, nomads and agrarians are just wildly different), with no apparent technology (because agrarian Europe thinks technology = forges), suddenly being a huge threat, from seemingly nowhere (actually like a couple days' ride into the steppe, but that might as well be the moon).

So Europeans have this internalized idea that low-tech nomadic hordes are this massive peer-level threat. Which then gets projected onto the plains Indians in pop culture.

You can see an example of this conflation in practice, in George R R Martin's works. He says:

The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of a number of steppe and plains cultures... Mongols and Huns, certainly, but also Alans, Sioux, Cheyenne, and various other Amerindian tribes.

GRRM is talking complete shit here; he doesn't know anything about any of these cultures. But it shows the idea of an equivalency in the minds of western fantasy writers.

Any accurate depiction of medieval societies living in such close proximity to orcs and goblins would require that the medieval society is a foreign one, where they’re the ones who are basically a pox on the orcs and goblins rather than the other way around as it’s portrayed. Orcs and goblins are always shown to be a constant threat to human societies, when in reality the inverse would be more realistic. There’s never any depictions of humans encroaching on and terrorizing orcs and goblins but the other way is always what’s presented, and that never made any sense.

The Elder Scrolls setting has a history of Orcs (and sometimes their Goblin allies) regularly getting betrayed, invaded, besieged, and their ancestral capitol being razed by Bretons, Redguards, and other "human" races, only for Orsinium to be rebuilt generations later for another invasion to tear it down again. It's close to that.

https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Orsinium

Will die on the hill screaming “inherent racial alignment sucks, inherent racial mental scores suck, I don’t care if it’s always been this way I don’t want way-too-close-to-home race essentialism in my fantasy!”

The ttrpg medium since it’s inception has been suffused with this thanks to, as you mention, Gygax and his ilk. I’ve gotten sick of explaining that “Orc dumb and evil but strong” is way way way too close to shit I’ve had spouted at me in real life for me to enjoy settings that use the trope without the barest critical analysis.

I actually really appreciate that more recent editions of Pathfinder and DnD have moved away from this, much to the chagrin of hundreds of grognards

Edit: actually I think race essentialism and stereotyping are fine setting and plot elements if they’re actually examined - it is absolutely great fuel for interesting stories and conflicts if the setting doesn’t treat it as universal truth, rather than the products of systems within the setting

Gary Gygax was a latter-day phrenologist (biological determinist), a deeply racist guy who borrowed heavily from Tolkien and Tolkien clones and took their mostly inoffensive material and made it super racist.

When I was a teenager I read a bunch of the RA Salvatore Forgotten Realms novels. The whole idea behind those books is "what if a drow wasn't ontologically evil." About a dozen books into that series the same treatment is given to orcs. Unfortunately, my hazy recollection of the "orcs are actually misunderstood" books is that they veered into a whole host of other culturally insensitive tropes.

I have seen 3 posters here say lotr orcs are more technologically advanced than humans and I don't think that's really true when their industrialization is clearly being guided by Saruman and Sauron. It's not like there's a depiction of an independent orc society with similar development without their influences.

~~native~~ actual Americans

Why are you doing this? Don't do this. Plenty of indigenous people don't like "American". Native and actual is weird distinction to make, especially when you're calling the "actual" people by a foreign name.

Use conventional terms or be specific or whatever, but don't do this cute shit.

World of Warcraft goblins are more technologically advanced, they drive cars and helicopters and shit

:jesus-christ:

It's pretty undeniable that fantasy has a lot of problematic and racist roots. Ofc there's been a long time since Gygax was actually involved in D&D and the game has changed a lot since then, but it's still difficult to know how to deal with this stuff. Like there's a lot of ways to go wrong in trying to reclaim a problematic depiction, and it might be better to move away from it altogether.

Like D&D is very much geared towards combat. You have tons of combat abilities, that's what the classes are balanced around, and that's where the system contains the most complexity. But it's also a storytelling game, and a group game. So you need something to be fighting that the whole group agrees needs to die. You have this dynamic where the players want something to kill because that's what their abilities are for, and so the DM needs to engineer situations where violence is the clear solution. And that can often mean dehumanization and "Always Chaotic Evil" depictions, or it can mean cartoonish villains who want to destroy the world for no real reason. That's not to say it's inevitable, but it's kind of the direction that the rules pull you towards.

Anyway fuck Gary Gygax that shit about Chivington is horrible.

a colonial interpretation doesn't map perfectly on all fantasy settings. just as often it's 'hill people' which can be encoded with similar antipathies or even ethnic tensions, but is an ancient relationship the 'civilized' people might lack a 'manifest destiny' to go and subjugate that group. the historical basis would be like, the Welsh or Basque in Europe, Bedouin around the medditerrean---who were eventually subjugated and had colonialism done on them but generally after the stereotypical medieval setting

and like there isn't a technological disparity with 'hill people', just poverty or political disorganization. a welsh shepard going to Paris in 1300 wouldn't see any fundamentally unfamiliar technology, but perhaps a staggering abundance of it in one place

They're what medieval miners imagined were making all those weird noises underground. For whatever reason, mines emit all sorts of sounds and you can't tell what's making them or where they're coming from. I've heard some tapes from down there and it's creepy AF.

Oh, Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, that one.

The secret to understanding the Gygaxian mode of thought is not the Wild West. It's the Wild East. Used to be, western culture's frontier was in the east, in the marches, basically around modern-day Poland and Lithuania and so. The "Drang Nach Osten", the drive to the east, was the original civilizing crusade. They would build military forts, attract settlers, make productive farms out of wildland, and so on. Out of the east came civilization's greatest threats: Atilla the Hun, Ghengis Khan, and a thousand other, forgotten invasions. If civilization could expand far enough, it could eliminate these threats by occupying their land. Gygax the medievalist was obviously familiar with these tropes (which, to his credit, are still to this day unknown to most Americans - but Europeans know them innately).

Joke was on the Europeans, though. Asia extended further east than anyone ever thought possible. The North American continent, however, was not so large and the madlads actually did it.

Oh boy this topic again.

You hit the nail on the head pretty much.. The problem started with Tolkein (who, to at least give the benefit of the doubt, was a product of his time)- this is what happens when you frame the cannon fodder grunts that your heroic band of heroes need to mow down as ontologically evil, because you're trying to tell a simplified good vs evil narrative, but then just happen to give them dark skin and features similar to a Jim Crow caricature. Intentional or not, racists will latch on to this depiction to reaffirm their own views.

You can try and reclaim the depiction the way that Warcraft did (although that kinda opens up it's own can of worms, the Noble Savage is probably just as pernicious a trope), but realistically the easiest way to dispense with the racism is to abandon the concept of a sentient being being ontologically evil at birth, which as I understand it the new editions of DnD do (to give scant credit where it's due).

Bonus round: Remember when David Ayer made a movie about fantasy races that was the single most clumsy allegory for real race relations?

engage with other fantasy outside of everything inspired by forgotten realms and tolkien