chat

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.