Where, Jackal, where?

I don't know if I can take another humanoid race that's belligerent, that constantly fights among themselves, that has a god that urges them to fight, that acts with cruelty or any other thing that focuses the creature's entire mental capacity on war or battle or vicious backstabbing.  They're evil, they're evil, they're evil.

It is in just about every humanoid monster description.  It's meant to sound all demented and nifty, all this evil, this service of evil creatures, their associations wtih evil creatures, their making humanoins suffer "a lifetime of slavery" and "agonizing death," blah blah blah ... but it is repeated so ungodly often, it borders on a fetish.

The reason is quite clear: the worse the creature is, the less guilty we should be about killing them ... so we heap on the gore and hideousness and what not.  It's precisely the same tactic used in hateful propaganda, familiar as Donald Duck fighting the Nazis and the Japs.  Make the enemy look stupid, make them look like cowards, preach about how they stab babies and drink blood, anything that alleviates any possible guilt that anyone can ever have about killing these creatures.  Keeping in mind that this isn't propaganda from world war II, this is published in 2014.  When the anti-racists online carp about the questionable nature of slaughtering orcs and black elves in D&D, they can pick up a book published in the last year (every splat book from the company indulges in this) and see it right on the page.  Where you see Jackalwere, think Jap.  Think Jew.

These murderous sadists are not my jackalwere.  Admittedly, I have a race or two like this; the players just finished helping wipe out a frogling lair, and they were pretty bad.  But the average orc in my game is a farmer; the average kobald builds a village where they can raise meat for food; the average bugbear is a hunter gatherer.  True enough, some of them raid, and some of them kill.  But that's true of humans.  We humans invented this grilling-babies-on-pitchforks shit.  Not all of us, obviously.  Just enough of us who happened to be in charge of the war effort, who thought this was a good idea, and just enough people working for the company, who no doubt literally get off on the ooey-gooey magnificence of their writing prowess.  "Kewl, Mike!  But wait -- when I'm done writing the gnolls, the readers will barf!"

But of course, all the people in charge at the WOTC are adults.  They're not infantilized man-boys.  The repeated theme of the passage written above throughout all their splat books proves that!

I prefer humanoids that can change sides in a fight.   Humanoids who appear to have learned something through their mastery of large political sub-divisions.  Humanoids who love their children and their partners.  Humanoids that are, at least in some ways, like us ... in a way different from sociopaths.  With D&D, you're either all bad, incredibly so, or you're so squeaky clean you shit soap.  This polarization is boring.  Being good or evil is okay; but I'd prefer if we could stop being so two-dimensionally evil.  Or good.

I had more trouble with the Jackalwere than usual.  But there is no mythological "jackalwere;" and the Anubis warrior thing appears to have been an invention for the Scorpion King.  It doesn't fit Anubis, at all.  A little looking turned up cynocephaly, but the content here and elsewhere on the net is, well, meh.  I kept on looking and turned up this god, Wepwawet.  But yeah, no jackalwere here either.  At some point you just have to make things up.

I remember my creative writing instructor telling me in university, way back 30 years ago, not to make things up.  It's much better to write about what you "know," because then you will always write from the heart.  If you write about things you just make up, readers will be able to tell and it won't sound genuine and authentic.

One has to admire the obtuseness of this point of view, given the mountains of literature and religious influence on society that were clearly "made up" on truly gargantuan levels; and the purebred evidence of how many people cheerfully and violently believe it, to frightening degrees.  There's something so utterly navel-gazing about post modernistic writing, which yet finds a way to exist in a universe that has Poe, Scott and Shakespeare books aplenty.  I wonder; did my instructor suppose that Lew Wallace learned to drive a chariot before writing Ben Hur, or that Jules Verne actually built a submarine?  More likely, she just didn't "believe" it.  A rather idiotic standard to hold fiction to, if you ask me.

Anyway, you can read the whole wiki page for my Jackalwere here.  I made it all up.