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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.
Same energy
I want a fantasy thing where the goblin is the hero. Let goblins win for once.
Boy do I have the series for you. Check out the goblin emperor.
I'm not endorsing all the messages of the book but it's a good romp. It's very feel-good, the goblin wins by just being super understanding and committed to fairness and justice.
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.
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.
Goblins were uncool way before JKR would enter the scene. We are in a renaissance of goblin media if anything.
I’d say stuff like Warhammer making them silly little guys is the thing that started the goblin resurgence.
I’d say stuff like Warhammer making them silly little guys is the thing that started the goblin resurgence.
Agreed, someone lmk if I'm wrong, but goblin's being silly little guys came about because they make a great comedic foil to hooligan inspire Orcs
From what I remember from Tolkien aside from not really being a distinct thing(orc and goblin are used interchangeable a lot) they're just cruel with no humour
And the ones in the D&D Forgotten Realms novels are never real characterised
I can't thing of any silly example prior to Warhammer, perhaps there's some out there but they aren't on the popularity level of the above settings
But I do believe the money-grubbing goblin is a JKR invention, that position being held by some dwarfs, halfling or gnomes at least in D&D settings like Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk
edit: Just remembered while not particularly silly on a whole or predating Warhammer, T. Pratchett's goblins are great sorrowful stinky little guys
A lot of the fae folk are interchangeable up until national romance as a movement was trying to set things into canon (and then later still when we got fantasy nerds doing the same). So a gnome, brownie, pixie, goblin, elf, dwarf etc. could be the same thing. For example, the source for ‘dark elves’ is pulled from Prose Edda (Svartalfar and Dökkalfar) which literally translates to black/dark elf but most scholars agree that they are just synonyms for dwarf.
The most pervasive things associated with goblins is their mischief and greed, but it all depends on the story. So of course there are be many stories where they mirror antisemitic stereotypes, seeing as medieval Europe was pretty damn antisemitic.
There is mischief in a lot of the early ones, but I do think that the more ‘fun’ goblin archetype we see now is largely based on war hammer making them cheeky chappies. Kind of like how they gave dwarves a Yorkshire accent which then morphed into Scottish with the live action LotR and Warcraft.
Pathfinder goblins are pretty great
Hell, the iconic alchemist is a goblin now
Likes to start fires while hopped up on alchemy juice
There is a very strong resemblance, yes
With Tolkien being the only fantasy I like enough to have gotten really into, ive gotten REALLY into Tolkien, and i have a huge soft spot for the orcs/goblins. Fucking everyone can get corrupted by evil, thars a big point in his work. So is pity. The lotr books take time to have some orc dualgoue whenever possible and it generally speaks to a deeper culture than we're entirelt shown. Don't even get me started on all the Evil Men. Most had really legit beefs. Ghan Bury Ghan is my favorite minor character
Love the orcs who are like "after the war is over, we should find a nice farm in the countryside and retire, do a little light pillaging occasionally"
The Dunlendings and other peoples who were colonized by the Numenoreans (and their vassals) would make for some really interesting stories
stays winning
If no one tells me not to start a riot, I could start a riot!
You heard 'em baby, start that riot!
There was a project called Goblin Camp that aimed to be Dwarf Fortress but goblins. Years and years and years ago. Pretty sure it got abandoned in the end.
I sometimes think about the person who started it and wonder how they're doing.
EDIT: Oh apparently it did get abandoned, and then revived as an entirely different project, and now that project is a game currently in early access on Steam lol. https://goblincamp.com/2023/07/03/Havent-I-seen-you-guys-before.html
No idea if it's the same as the original project I saw. That original project is still on github I think.
Isn't Dwarf Fortress easy to mod? Could probably just do that
Isn't Dwarf Fortress easy to mod?
No. Not yet. It's pretty limited for modding at the moment. It will be much better for modding eventually though, they've been working on making everything accessible via lua for a while.
The Goblin Camp project also started back when DF's UI was atrocious and one of its main aims was to make a df-like that was far more playable via mouse.
i wonder if there's anything like Overlord except without the overlord, like just a big pile of goblins doing stuff
Goblins should either be silly green dudes or machinebuilding slaver warlords
Either way they gotta have fun songs
It's true. It's sort of forgotten context, but one of the most canonical silly songs in western music, In the Hall of the Mountain King, is about a goblin court that wants to eat a guy.
in old school WoW, the goblins were pretty tropey. when you clicked on one they were play from their preset list of audio clips, with a range of pitches. "time is money, friend" "hiya" "heya" etc.
my favorite of all was the occasional, very low pitched "Yo."
I have been watching Dimension 20's A Court of Fey and Flowers and it features Brennan Lee Mulligan playing a Goblin commander in a regency era setting, I highly recommend
Hell yeah love me some Brennan Lee Mulligan
Terry Pratchett made goblins into train engineers iirc.
Yes, in the novel Raising Steam. They're introduced in Equal Rites and are more prominent in Snuff.
Gobunism
Hard agree, the goblins are good and cute and deserve better. It's also bullshit bioessentialism to make them the villains.
There's a series of books called Goblin Quest that I keep meaning to read but have not so I can't say if it's any good.
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison is interesting and I enjoyed it when I read it years ago. you might like it because it is deliberately the opposite of a lot of fantasy. It's about goblins and their court politics, and there's almost no violence at all. It's kind of slice of life, kind of court intrigue.
I am fond of the band Nekrogoblikon. Their 2011 album Stench is about a bunch of space goblins invading Earth to eat all the humans. "Goblin slander!", one might object. But no, this is very pro-goblin, and John Goblikon is quite charismatic. Over the top gruesome, but the music has a thread of cheerfulness throughout that is very catchy
Fantasy is kind of boring without bullshit bioessentialism. Without it monsters are just people with horns.
You can do both. The bioessentialism can be a backwards reactionary cultural view that different cultures have, for example your humans could view the goblins as essentially just monsters that have to be slaughtered but the reality of goblin existence could be quite different.
When told from the human perspective you're getting your bioessentialism and then when told through the elf perspective, who could have an entirely different opinion of goblins, you can humanise them.
This would work best told in multiple books with completely different viewpoints. Viewpoint 1 being human, viewpoint 2 being a different race, viewpoint 3 being another. Each with different bioessentialist views of other races and each with more nuanced views of the races they respect and interact with amicably.
This guy does comics of his goblin DND character.
Eeee! Thank youuuu
Goblins are synonymous with mischief, and we should have more magical mischief.
I want a fantasy thing where the goblin is the hero. Let goblins win for once.
I'm warning you now, you may not like what you see. CW: torture, SA, terrible art
That comic has been going for 20 years, that alone is pretty damn impressive, I couldn't even imagine working on a single project for 20 years.
It looms large in my mind because I really liked it in high school, but I'm a bit harsh on it now because a) the art hasn't improved in over a decade b) despite having decades of experience it still takes Thunt two weeks to draw a single page and c) the writing does not hold up.
But I mean... I can't blame a guy for making a living, so I've got nothing against Thunt personally, unlike some others on the internet who have formed a bit of a hatedom for the guy.
We posting our goblins in here?
I want a fantasy thing where the goblin is the hero. Let goblins win for once.
RuneScape’s goblin quest series. But do yourself a favor and disregard anything past The Chosen Commander. Jagex kept fucking with the story. Do the OSRS version, although it only gets up to Land of the goblins and not the Chosen Commander proper.
Also there is an artist named pocketss who has some comics about goblins that are very cute and have a sense of humor that I think you'd like. I think they're on tumblr but I don't have a tumblr account to find them.
There's a Goblin that sings melodic metal songs and does podcasts called John Nekrogoblikon
I've been having a fun couple of hours with Trash Goblin so far, it's a cozycore shopkeeper game where you upcycle trash for curious customers