I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to “I’m an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race”. And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don’t know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.
I can see the arguments against the concept of evil races. It’s intimately linked with real-world racism about “wrong” groups that “deserve” to be colonized or genocided. Writing the fictional world as being populated by distinct groups that have conflicting cultural motivations is more interesting than “this group is bad because they are bad.”
But… what about demons/devils?
It’s interesting, so many cultures have demons or evil spirits. And sometimes those evil spirits can be turned to good, but not usually.
I think DND mirroring culture in this way is still mostly OK, whereas culture has thankfully mostly moved on from races being good or evil.
For demons and devils, that usually goes straight into supernatural, as they’re not really a race, but physical manifestations of evil energies.
At tables I’ve played and run in the past, ‘Outsiders’ (fiends, fey, celestials, etc.) embody the epitome of an ideal or motive taken to its logical extreme, for better or worse.
Take Zariel for example.
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Just because they’re evil doesn’t mean they’re always doing something bad.