A Mixed Bag of Mixed Races To my mind, there is no better example of the unconscious and, likely, unintentional racism of the fantasy genre than the various iterations of the concept of “mixed races.” The idea of races in fantasy is problematic enough on its own and steeped in the cultural mindset of the early 1900s, but an argument could be made that this conceptualization of fantasy races has become more nuanced over time, allowing for good and evil to exist within each of them. This same argument for nuance however cannot be made for the mixed fantasy races. Starting where virtually all fantasy tropes originate, the idea of mixed races in fantasy first reared its head in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Considering Tolkien’s love for elves, it is no surprise that there should be kids born from the union of elves and humans, though to my memory there are no specifically named half-elven children in his works, only couplings of elves and humans. Yet it is only these races that are...
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