Goblins should be silly little guys that don't give a fuck. Sucks that some shitty writers have turned them into an anti-semetic caricature.
I like silly little guys.
I want a fantasy thing where the goblin is the hero. Let goblins win for once.
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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It's kind of sad that Goblin Slayer is basically the logical conclusion of the attitude most fantasy takes toward Goblins.
Norman Spinrad pointed this out in 1972 when he wrote The Iron Dream and that should've been the end of the conversation (the dude's weird anti-USSR brainworms aside)
I'd kind of like to see an anime adaptation of Iron Dream for obvious reasons, but at the same time it would also be an inconceivably bad idea for obvious reasons.
Goblin Slayer already exists
I did mention GS in another comment, but the point here I guess is the pseudo-metatextual element (the authorship of the work, which itself should probably be part of the story at least in like a prologue/epilogue fashion) hitting you over the head with "this is an evil fantasy born of racist ideology" rather than "this is cool and edgy like the Punisher but with SV that we totally dislike".
Yeah, I get you. I just thought it was funny (in a fucked up way) how much Goblin Slayer is an unironic version of the text-within-a-text of The Iron Dream.
I agree, I was more just trying to think through what would or wouldn't prevent the "Starship Troopers is epic!" problem
Of all things Mushoku Tensei, in one of the later novels, has one of the better anime-related takes on goblins with a passage talking about how they're clearly not monsters^["monsters" diegetically being usually ontologically evil magical warped animals or objects, although there are also counter examples of things like domesticated treants demonstrating that maybe that in-universe understanding of "monsters" is wrong too, even if most magically mutated things tend to be predatory and extremely aggressive.] because they're observably intelligent, they have a language, they exhibit clear signs of social structures and empathy, and if they were native to any region other than the periphery of the genocidal human supremacist Church of Millis they'd probably be considered a tribe of demon and might well be able to coexist peacefully with others instead of being stuck in a permanent low-intensity war where people hunt them for sport and they in turn raid villages or waylay travelers.
It just then doesn't actually do anything with it, basically being added to the list of things that, diegetically, were maybe explored more after the series ended or maybe weren't, because even the late-series "basically Harry Dresden if he wasn't a chauvinist, except really flaky and lacking in any real convictions" Rudy was really bad about actually pushing back on any of the shitty things in the setting and was so conflict averse that even something as low-stakes as calling out his friends over implicitly seeing his son as being above his daughters is beyond him, and he just brushes it off and quietly seethes instead.