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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47488
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I completely agree that Tolkien’s racial hierarchies haven’t aged well. “That’s just Elf propaganda, and actually the Orcs are the exact opposite!” has become a cliché in and of itself.

Here are a couple of things High Fantasy traditionally did that you probably want to avoid. Whether or not you consider them “problematic,” they’re definitely cliché and not all that interesting. Some of the examples I’ll give, I’ll say up front, didn’t exactly focus on their world-building.

- Some races (meaning Fantasy races) are superior, either in all respects like Tolkien’s Elves, or at different things.
- Others are so inferior that they get no moral consideration, and can be genocided without remorse. If they have any positive traits at all, it’s to make them scarier.
- This maps to physical traits of humans in the real world in unfortunate ways.
- This is innate and inherited. A human with exotic blood is special and better.
- Conflict is more-or-less racial: all the Elves are on one side, and all the Orcs are being manipulated by ther Dark Lord.
- Each race is somewhere between stereotypical and one-dimensional. If there are any exceptions, we’re often reminded that one is not like the others. There are often entire societies that are missing important social and economic roles (like in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where entire races have no wizards) because that whole race is all the same.
- A race is represented by one character, whose abilities and distinguishing features are attributed to his race. (Like in _The Legion of Super-Heroes_, where originally every member was defined by their one superpower and from a planet where everyone had the same power.)

So just don’t do any of that. If you’ve got a party that’s got one Elf and one Dwarf in it, for example, you can make them important to the story as individuals, without attributing whatever talents they have to their ethnicity.

You also discuss giving some ethnic groups in the setting dark skin. It’s realistic that people living in the tropics of your world would have dark skin. If one group of people looks like Europeans and another looks like Africans, readers are going to take them as representing those real-world groups. So you don’t want to make one of them like Tolkien’s Haradrim, “swarthy” colonized barbaric bad guys. Completely reversing all of the stereotypes is also a cliché, but one alternative I haven’t seen as often is to have the people look different from any real-world ethnic group. There aren’t any real-world stereotypes about blue or green hair.

Original score: 3