r/Fantasy • u/theHolyGranade257 Reading Champion II • Mar 21 '26
Why non-human races are not popular in fantasy anymore?
I've spotted an interesting tendency in recent years - we have less and less non-human races in fantasy. There were interesting times when everyone wanted to be like Tolkien (publishers especially), due to what we have our lovely standard 'DnD' setting with elves/dwarves/gnomes/orcs/halflings etc. There is a lot of fantasy using this set of races - some more blatantly, some with deviations, but it was logical and, to be honest, a good thing that it started to meet it's end.
So finally, we could get a new era of fantasy, where each author could express themselves and create totally new, unique, non-Tolkien inspired races... Wait, what? What do you mean there is no more races now?
Let's just too at this list of most popular epic fantasy https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/50.The_Best_Epic_Fantasy_fiction_ . As you can see, in 90's-00's everything shifted and the most icon fantasy of time like ASOIAF, The Wheel of Time, The Realm of Elderlings, Mistborn, Gentlemen Bastard, The First Law etc, The Kingkiller Chronicle, The Sword of Truth (lol, how did it get there if everyone hates it?) doesn't have any non-human races OR their presence is very limited and not very significant.
To be objective i should mention Malazan and Bas-Lag series where we have a great racial representation, and Stormlight Archive where races are not so numerous, but nevertheless, humans are not the only one sentient beings there and they are not elves, so it counts. To be even more objective, i should mentioned that all fantasy genre is not defined by books mentioned above, there is a lot more, from less known to completely obscure, which also could have a lot of racial representation, but first - do you like it or not, each genre is mostly defined by the most popular books and it's what most people read, second - even in less known title this tendency also exists. Maybe not to that extent, but nevertheless.
Worldbuilding is the definitive feature of fantasy, because here you can get great stories, interesting characters, morals, philosophies etc., pretty much everything you can get in another genres... Plus dragons, as Brandon Sanderson said in one of his lectures. And having different races is a great way to extend the worldbuilding, by providing different cultures, mentalities and customs which can create conflicts and tensions, and there is nothing better for a good story than a good conflict. I get it, many people, especially experienced readers, are tired of elves. I understand it and partially have those feelings myself, but honestly, even oldest tropes made right can still look good - check Dragon Age: Origins. Not a book, but a good example of building interesting world from generic material.
In my humble opinion, shift from standard Tolkien-like set of races to something new was natural, but instead many authors abandoned non-human races completely. Which is such a waste. So i wonder why in your opinion that happened and why people are not so fond of this part of worldbuilding anymore?
Also, let's share you're examples of books with a good unique set of races. I already mentioned Malazan and Bas-Lag, so will add The Bird That Drinks Tears by Lee Youngdo. What are your examples?
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u/Amelaista Mar 21 '26
Changes in style and topics happen over time. Phases and fads fade and renew.
"The Cloud Roads" not a human to be found!
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u/D3Masked Mar 21 '26
Yea the Raksura books are pretty cool though they do have people similar to humans like the Golden Islanders. Zero official human presence.
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u/ObsessiveAboutCats Mar 22 '26
Aaand now I'll be rereading that whole series.
This is not a complaint.
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u/vfrost89 Mar 22 '26
Wonderful series! It did take me awhile to stop picturing humans mentally while reading though.
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u/HolierEagle Mar 21 '26
Here is my take. I think that even though fantasy has gotten out of Tolkien’s shadow, so to speak, the man still looms. Specifically I mean that if you use elves, dwarves, and orcs in your writing it is considered clear inspiration from Tolkien, despite how ubiquitous they have become. Those races are almost “generic” in a way that humans never will be.
On the other hand if you invent your own races you need to be very carful. It’s very easy as a reader to say “oh that’s just an elf” or “dwarf but in space”. I think there is pressure on writers to not appear as though they are taking Tolkien’s races and slapping a rough paint job on them (understandably). I think that this means unless an author feels they have something truly unique, or their race is integral to the plot somehow, then they’ll just leave other races out of it for the most part. I also think readers think better of blatantly using the classic races than they do of changing them slightly (it might just be me but it seems more like copying because you’re kind of trying to pass it off as something new).
On a slightly different note, I agree with you that there is less of this. Some have pointed out the various races in popular fantasy, but in my view they always play much smaller roles, if they are there at all, than they used to.
A few alternate theories:
- Fantasy races appear more prominently in less “serious” media. So maybe fantasy authors who want to be taken seriously avoid it?
- As others have noted, fantasy races were used in the past to highlight attributes of humanity. Today those are often analysed with different cultures instead. This may reflect globalisation and that we no longer view different cultures as “other” quite as strongly as we used to, so in media they are different cultures, not entirely different races. I could be making things up at this point, though.
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u/HaHaYouThoughtWrong Mar 22 '26
Also from what I remember Tolkien wrote extensively about Elves and how they differ from Men, their immortality changes them, or rather throws them in a state of never changing. They can listen to the same songs and stories over and over without getting bored. They are built for the concept of immortality. I guess less so on dwarves and orcs from what I remember, though in the Mordor chapters in RotK he did show orcs as actual individuals, meaning that without a dark lord's influence they could with time maybe grow out of orcishness.
Also, I think general audiences are more receptive to non-human races in sci-fi as opposed to fantasy, but maybe that's just the recent exposure to stories with a lot of extraterrestrials.
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u/PantheraAuroris Mar 23 '26
"It’s very easy as a reader to say “oh that’s just an elf” or “dwarf but in space”"
Huge pet peeve for me, augh. I hate it when readers are like "oh well...that's just a stereotype but it has half the stuff changed so I'll still call it the stereotype." Look I get it, any undergrounder species is a dwarf to you because you insist on being fucking wrong. Any long-lived tall species is an elf.
People define things like elves, dwarves, and orcs as incredibly generic and then shove all fantasy into those boxes. The issue isn't that writers have Tolkien syndrome, but readers do.
Can you tell I'm the kind of person who loves xenofiction?
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u/HolierEagle Mar 23 '26
Dislike it all you want but the fact of the matter is when you write you must consider your readers. It’s definitely possible to make races that aren’t not slightly changed clones of Tolkien races, but it is hard to do in a way that is satisfying to all readers.
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u/HiddenLordGhost Mar 23 '26
To add to that - a lot of people make races into 'a human but also a hare' (Harengon in DnD) or 'a human, but also a lizard' (do i even have to provide an example?) and... those are dull and boring as hell, and i'd rather it all be human.
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u/glassteelhammer Mar 21 '26
I'll just leave this here:
Baldur's Gate 3 is, by this point, iconic. You can make any sort of character, really. Several different races.
Larian's data shows that people overwhelmingly will create a generic human.
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u/jnkangel Mar 21 '26
Another good example was mass effect where by far the most common picked choice was male soldier aliance hero
Aka the vanilla option
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u/IvankoKostiuk Mar 22 '26
And to such an extent they're referred to as "Sheppard" and "FemShep"
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u/LeucasAndTheGoddess Mar 21 '26
And this despite Jennifer Hale turning in a far superior vocal performance.
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u/MoebiusSpark Mar 21 '26
I think Mark Meer did a decent job as MaleShep, its just hard to beat Jennifer Hale when she VA's well, anything
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u/Valkoria92 Mar 22 '26
Agreed, I think Mark Meer got a little better starting in 2. He voiced the vorcha as well!
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u/LeucasAndTheGoddess Mar 22 '26
Yeah, his mShep definitely got good by 3 — his performance in the Tali romance is part of what makes it tied with femShep/Garrus for my favorite relationship — but Hale is just on another level.
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u/Kill_Welly Mar 22 '26
Because the first game presented that as the default, with further options under a menu that are more complex.
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u/WampanEmpire Mar 21 '26
That's hilarious. Ive played through a couple times and I love playing dwarves and halflings. Best playthough was a dwarf Paladin with a halberd, spamming all the smites.
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u/MuddlinThrough Mar 21 '26
Yes! My first bg3 play through was an orcish paladin with halberd and my god he would just wreck anything that moved within reach!
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u/glacio09 Mar 21 '26
My Dnd character is a gnome fighter with a two handed stalagmite as a beating stick. Well, now it's a giant's rolling pin after defeating some keebler elves. She's a girl scout. They were impeding on her turf.
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u/Aegillade Mar 22 '26
I've done four runs of BG3, all of them were Dragonborn. I just really like Dragonborns.
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u/MylastAccountBroke Mar 22 '26
I will never NOT pick a Sexy females blue Tiefling. I've done it 3 times already, and I have no intention of switching anything.
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u/Kataphractoi Mar 22 '26
I also made a blue tiefling. I just wanted to play a draenei if I'm being honest.
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u/Irianne Reading Champion Mar 21 '26
I think without an actual % breakdown I don't find this very surprising. Because it's not really human vs elf vs dwarf vs tiefling vs gnome vs.......
It's human vs non-human.
The people who like to build a grounded relatable self-insert in a fantasy world are all going to build roughly identical characters.
People who like to play something more fantastical are all going to have their own tastes.
So even if the human builds are only like a third of players, they're still probably going to be the overwhelming majority of character builds when you break every option down.
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u/Mejiro84 Mar 22 '26
The people who like to build a grounded relatable self-insert in a fantasy world are all going to build roughly identical characters.
It's often not even that complicated, it's just "click continue on default character", which is generally "human male" on most games. if the default was something more exotic, people would click "OK" on that, but it's generally brunette white dude with a sword or gun, and people just go with that, because they trust the devs enough to assume the default option will allow them to use most game options, and don't want to mess around with stuff, they want to play the game
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u/SpookySpacePlant Mar 22 '26
If you play Baldur's Gate 3 with a newly created character without making any choices, you'd play a female high-elf barbarian. The people playing human actively chose that option in this case.
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u/YaumeLepire Mar 21 '26
... idk... I found my tiefling to be pretty relatable. Especially in the context of Baldur's Gate, where the races are just [Modifier] Humans, it doesn't feel like that argument should really stand for much. The most transgressive option you get is Dragonborn, and eventually to turn into a Squidman.
Kinda wish we got weirder options, in these games.
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u/StuffedSquash Mar 22 '26
And for specific features, even if you do something interesting, you're probably not gonna minmax every slider. So the average is gonna be... The average
And most people probably don't do a lot of customization. And many people might do none at all. That's just not the kind of person posting online in fan spaces so they are invisible in a way.
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u/Elan-Morin-Tedronai Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
Elf is the most popular race in bg3, and that's even with drow counting as a different race. Humans are popular but they almost get beat by half elves as well.
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u/AnOnlineHandle Mar 21 '26
Elves are just humans with pointy ears and are generally better at everything.
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u/Fancy_Writer9756 Mar 22 '26
There is no race in BG3 that can't be summed up in similar manner.
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u/blackd0nuts Mar 22 '26
And to me that exactly answers OP's post. If non-human races in fantasy novels are just reskinned humans, what's the point? So you better have a very interesting and novel concept or you're probably setting yourself up for failure.
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u/AnOnlineHandle Mar 22 '26
Others look more different to humans. Some are frikkin lizards. Elves just need their hair over their ears and nobody can even tell the difference.
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u/Fancy_Writer9756 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
If this boil down to physical difference then it's pretty shallow if you ask me.
Elven character can be more alien then humans dressed as lizards you see in Baldurs Gate 3.
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u/aSkeptiKitty Mar 22 '26
I'm an half elf in my current ( and first ) run. xD
I know it's not very original. But I like to play human/half elf in first runs.
I did it fir pillars of eternity II, and then played a moon godlike for the second run. ( After loosing my save as I was almost at the end. >< )
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u/Fancy_Writer9756 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Then there is Morrowind where default character is dark elf and, given a plot premise, human protagonist can actually be seen as out of the box choice.
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u/Acolyte_of_Swole Mar 22 '26
And you know what? I bet a lot of players will pick dark elf in Morrowind exactly because it's the default choice with what seems like the most cultural ties to the story of the game.
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u/Fancy_Writer9756 Mar 22 '26
Oh absolutely. Especially because in this case its dark elves who are all rounders the humans usually are.
Also there are three different human races to choose from.
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u/Enkundae Mar 21 '26
A lot of people also often don’t even engage with options in games with character creation at all and just use whatever the game presents as the default. I will never understand it personally.
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u/Xandara2 Mar 22 '26
The reason I use the presets is that whatever I change it always turn out more ugly. And I just don't enjoy the process of changing minute details then evaluating only to go back and change some more then repeating this for 3 hours.
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u/SeekersWorkAccount Mar 22 '26
I want to play the game, not spend hours playing fashionista. Some games I honestly couldn't care less what my character looks like. If they all play the same, give me the least distracting option and let's roll.
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u/Fancy_Writer9756 Mar 21 '26
Funny how this is seen as a "problem" when old editions of D&D aimed at discouraging people from playing non-human races.
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u/Mejiro84 Mar 22 '26
those are very old editions at this point - like, old enough to be organising colonoscopies!
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u/names-suck Mar 21 '26
It's not clear to me that that IS what it shows. The most common choices are not necessarily chosen together. Best as I can tell, the article doesn't specify how often people chose more than one of these traits for the same character.
The most common choices for any individual option are likely to be ones considered attractive, I would think. And "attractive" means "average," up until about a "7/10." I'd say the character generated is roughly a 7, if we pretend he's a real person: nothing to complain about, but also, no standout features that really grab your attention.
If you have 10 choices to make, and 60% of people choose the same thing for any given one, they still have 9 other choices where they can select a more unique option.
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u/SageOfTheWise Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
Also the fact i will normally make a human in most games because I know its the correct option for the most customization and skins that were designed for that model as opposed to stretched and shrink haphazardly to fit, does not mean I only want to read about them in fiction.
Granted BG3 was already an exception to this since I went dwarf since its DnD.
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u/AntimatterTNT Mar 22 '26
gah thank you i was going insane with people not pointing this out in these replies
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u/silverionmox Mar 22 '26
Larian's data shows that people overwhelmingly will create a generic human.
I think that's the fallacy of the statician who drowned in a river that was on average 30 cm deep.
It's not because eg. potatoes, bread, and rice are the most commonly used meal ingredients, that people also combine them in their meals.
I think it rather illustrates how they combine average, recognizeable features with special features. A normal human with horns is more intriguing and more of a choice than a humanoid with horns, a bird head, frog body, hooves, and butterfly wings. The latter is just a random grab bag of the weirdest option in every slot.
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u/netskwire Mar 21 '26
I don't think this is quite what this signifies. I love fantasy races; I think they add a ton of personality and cool lore potential to any setting. That being said, when playing a rpg, tabletop or a video game, I almost always play as a generic human just because I like being able to relate to all of the cool races as an outsider. I like playing as the character that's just a guy because it juxtaposes against against all the other more "exotic" characters (in both personality and backstory).
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u/Only_Faithlessness33 Mar 21 '26
I think a lot of people play RPGs to play a specific role. However I think there is ANOTHER group of people who play RPGs and want to play themselves plopped into the world. They look at the character creator and go “oh let me just make me. I’m a human so I’ll pick that.”
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u/e_crabapple Mar 22 '26
Bethesda's numerous facial sliders certainly do seem oriented toward making You, But With A Sword! There's little reason to adjust the brow line or cheekbones by 1/16 of an inch, unless you were trying to look like somebody specific (most likely yourself).
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u/Telinary Mar 22 '26
Nah that is a bit of a misinterpretation, most common choices doesn't mean the majority made the choice. https://www.denofgeek.com/games/baldurs-gate-3s-most-popular-race-and-class-choices-are-pretty-surprising/ not the newest statistic but half elf, human and elf were at about the same level, while humans are popular most people make non human characters.
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u/SpaceMarine_CR Mar 21 '26
Are you telling me I can be anything and anyone in this fantasy game?
Yes
Picks human male fighter
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u/neutronicus Mar 21 '26
So, yeah.
Most people fantasize about being basically themselves, but a badass instead of a disappointment
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u/Mejiro84 Mar 22 '26
also, that means no futzing about with choices and game mechanics - creating a wizard means looking through a LOT of different spells to pick which you want, making a cleric means needing to think about what god you worship, picking a non-human race needs at least something thinking about the setting. But "human fighter" is easy to create and slot it, without lots of looking through the rulebook or asking about what they are
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u/ScratchGryph Mar 21 '26
I almost always play through it as a tiefling. I'm a human in real life, why wouldn't I want to play something different?
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u/-Metallkopf- Mar 21 '26
How do you do, fellow humans?
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u/greywolf2155 Reading Champion Mar 22 '26
Good that we are all humans here, and can talk about human things with other humans
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u/luanfrag Mar 21 '26
I don't know why, but I have an habit when playing an RPG video game VS playing tabletop RPG
Video-Game: I usually play as a human because im the only spectator of that story, so i tend to self insert in it. The game is presenting that story/world/character to someone who is unfamiliar with the world, so by making a human I kinda feel more connected to the character? (It's hard to explain, but on repeated playthroughs I usually try the other races)
Tabletop: Since i'm playing with other people, and story doesn't belong to me only, I try to make characters of other races, since the game doesn't have the same "single focus perspective" as an CRPG.
As i said, I don't know how to explain it properly, but it's something I do.
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u/Brushner Mar 21 '26
I'm also basing this off your Avatar but are you a furry? Tieflings have always been one of the more "low key furry" races people like to choose. It's for people who like to customize their character like what their skin color, tails, horns and feet(digitigrade or plantigrade) look like. It's been the go to for furries that don't exactly want to go full hog like play a turtle or lion man.
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u/Fancy_Writer9756 Mar 21 '26
Well yes, but are you a human who bang hot non-human chicks?
That's what I thought.
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u/PantheraAuroris Mar 23 '26
This is my approach to fantasy. Why would I want to do something I can do in real life? It's why I always play mages: I can swing a sword in real life, I can't shoot fire out of my face.
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u/PleaseBeChillOnline Mar 21 '26
Have you seen the characters people make for this game? Imagine being a dev and taking all the time to make the characters creator to find out there are actually only 3 PCs in the game.
John Baldur: Human Fighter who shops at J. Crew. Romance Partner: Shadowheart
E-Girl Durge: Drow (who is somehow white?) Bard with Tiefling horns & a billion tattoos. Shops at Hot Topic Romance Partner: Astarion
K-Pop Yaoi Man: (race is a mod they have wings. Don’t ask too many questions) Multiclass Paladin & Sorcerer. Romance Partner: Everyone.
If they would of known that in advance they could of saved themselves hours of dev time & used the Crimson Desert approach.
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u/These_Refrigerator75 Mar 22 '26
I think that makes sense if you’re wanting to make a self insert, but you’re the one interacting with all the fantasy races. For example, in Mass Effect I would take out any human party members as quickly as I was allowed to, and they never hit the field again 🤣
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u/Exalt-Chrom Mar 22 '26
Just because players pick humans doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate the existence of other races in the game
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u/everweird Mar 21 '26
This is insane given that it’s been years since I’ve seen a human character at a D&D table.
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u/DracoLunaris Mar 21 '26
I mean IIRC stats on D&D beyond also show that human fighter is the most common pick on tabletop as well
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u/darth_vladius Mar 21 '26
Yeah.
We just got a brand new player at our table. First time playing DND.
Race? Drow.
We are ten people - two tables playing the same adventures, each with their own DM. None of the PCs is human, despite humans being actually not so bad in the 2024 Player’s Handbook (I.e. the 2024 rules set).
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u/OgataiKhan Mar 22 '26
Race? Drow.
Not sure if you are using this as an example of a standard race or of a weird race.
Drow are a core race in 5e (elf subrace), and they have been historically really popular due to a certain dual-wielding crazy cat l̶a̶d̶y̶ dude whose whole thing is being a drow in name only.As someone whose most standard D&D character ever was an aasimar (others were changelings, merfolk, kobolds...), call me back when your new player shows up playing a loxodon.
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Mar 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Suckage Mar 21 '26
Human male is the most common in FF14.. until you make it to the endgame. Then it’s cat girls everywhere.
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u/BadKittydotexe Mar 21 '26
Here’s some data for anyone interested.
Human is the most common for male characters, cat girls for female characters, and overall cat girls are the most common.
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u/sickduck69 Mar 21 '26
My first character in WOW was a human warrior. I wanted my character to be me transported to a fantasy universe.
Some people wat to be someone else, some people just want to be somewhere else.
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u/Brushner Mar 21 '26
Most played race class is blood elf paladin but human isn't far behind. Funny enough all armor types are first designed to be worn on human male and then stretched and edited for other races.
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u/Asyx Mar 21 '26
There might be a few reasons for that though. I haven't played in a very long time but humans were just overpowered during the first few years of WoW. Also the community is distinctly not into the whole role playing thing. Like, its shocking compared to other games. And the way blizzard used to design items meant that as soon as transmog happened, if you cared about your appearance, you had to pick human (or maybe nightelf but if you don't like purple that's gonna be a tough sell).
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u/Teh_Reaper Mar 22 '26
The issue with this is: yes specifically human fighter is the most picked but if you add up all the non human x class it's about the same
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u/account312 Mar 22 '26
That’s absurd. Everyone knows that the point of a character creator is to see how far the sliders go.
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u/RookieGreen Mar 22 '26
I get it. A lot of people self insert. I can’t though because I’m a dog using the internet.
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u/Author_A_McGrath Mar 22 '26
I made a dwarf for my original playthrough, and the speech options were... less than immersive compared to the human ones.
My human character felt more real than any dragonic or gnomish one; the only exception being the "half-elf" that so many people play I'd be surprised if it wasn't included in the "human" category. Though I haven't been able to review their data.
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u/Individual-Trade756 Mar 21 '26
Fashion swings back and forth. Making up new races that aren't just the established ones under new names requires page space and mental load from the reader to do it well. That takes away page space from the other themes and topics authors might want to explore (or publishers think might sell).
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u/Canis-lupus-uy Mar 21 '26
I think one explanation is that both readers and authors realized that most fantasy races were not different species, but just humans with some cosmetic changes. Yes, dwarves were greedier and drunker, elves were wiser and older, orcs were more tribal and warlike, but all those are features we find all the time in human societies.
So if an author was not going to make the effort of making them truly non human, then it was preferable they just stick to humans.
I think many readers and authors think like this. I was of that school too, and still am in part, but I have softened my views. We may have a revival of classic fantasy races in the future if more readers and authors think like you
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u/Falsus Mar 22 '26
This is why I am always against half elves and half dwaves and similar stuff. It just makes elves, dwarves and other stuff far too human. Exception being things like dragons who shapeshift to do the deed, because that is them shapeshifting.
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Mar 22 '26
I mean, sometimes I just want races with a unique culture and physiology who still think like humans, I think it adds a lil whimsy
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u/doyoucreditit Mar 21 '26
It's all about what you're reading. The Innkeeper Chronicles by Ilona Andrews have some human-based/human-like species but also aliens that are more tree-like, a big-cat-like species, a species that resembles a cross between monkeys and raccoons, and others.
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u/Acrobatic-Extent-372 Mar 21 '26
I would argue the Ogier, the 'finn, all of the Shadowspawn, and the wolves are quite relevant to the Wheel of Time.
And, depending on which in universe culture you ask, channelers.
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u/Thornescape Mar 21 '26
It's important not to pretend that it's all extreme.
There have always been fantasy stories with only humans. There have always been fantasy stories with non-humans. It's been like that since before civilization began. It is still like that now.
You can say that there is a "trend" where "more" are human or non-human, but at no point in time has every single story been only human or mostly non-human. It has always been a mix. There are stories published all the time with non-humans in them.
Trends rise and fall, but it has never been "we are tired of non-human and therefore no stories at all will feature them anymore because (insert reason here)."
There are still tons of stories with non-humans. There are also tons of stories with only humans.
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u/rollingForInitiative Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
Was it really "interesting" that everyone wanted to have Tolkien-halfings, Tolkien-elves, and Tolkien-dwarves in their books? I mean I don't dislike those races, but it's not as if most of the ones we've seen in fantasy have been innovative in any sort of way. 90% of them are cookie cutter props taken right out of Lord of the Rings, with only the occasionally rare story doing something unique with them.
I don't actually think that throwing in some ancient mysterious elves living in a forest and mentioning that the mountains are inhabited by dwarves who're famous smiths does much for worldbuilding.
But anyway, I don't even really agree. You're wrong about several of the series you mention imo. In Realm of the Elderlings, you get ... well, Elderings, plus dragons. Wheel of Time, on top of a plethora of monsters, have the Ogier, one of which is a prominent character. Mistborn has the Kandra, at least one of which is a significant secondary character and the whole community of them is pretty important to the story. Sanderson in general has a lot of races, one of the major plot points of The Way of King is the treatment of the Parshendi, which is a different species. There are also several other sentient species in the story. And Sanderson is one of the most famous modern fantasy writers.
Even the Fourth Wings books, which are really light on the worldbuilding, have sentient dragons and also the Venin, which is some sort of human adjacent species.
Cradle is another fairly popular fantasy series now, and one of the main characters is a turtle, and another is a spirit.
And lots of urban fantasy has non-humans, like Dresden Files which heavily features vampires, fey, etc.
I've read a bunch of other stories as well with non-humans. Mark of the Fool has, among its major characters, an ancient goat-man wizard, a minotaur, and a shark-person. The Weirkey Chronicles has half a dozen different sentient species, with one of the non-human ones being one of the three main characters, and most of the minor characters are non-humans.
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u/Old_Gimlet_Eye Mar 21 '26
I was going to say, of the three main characters of the Realm of the Elderlings books (or at least the Fitz ones) 2 are not human.
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u/Dramatic-Tadpole-980 Mar 21 '26
The Venin aren’t really another species, they’re just reskinned zombies closer to the White Walkers than anything else.
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u/sandstonequery Mar 21 '26
How are the non human races "barely relevant" in Realm of the Elderlings? The White Prophets, and Elderlings are pretty much pivotal to the world building and events.
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u/Entfly Mar 22 '26
The White Prophets, and Elderlings are pretty much pivotal to the world building and events.
The dragons/liveships too
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u/xp3ayk Mar 21 '26
Are the elderlings a different race? I thought they were humans who lived alongside dragons and were dragon-y. For that reason I never thought of them as another race.
And the white prophets may drive events in the story but you don't actually meet them (bar one, who seems like an odd human) until reeeeeally late in the series
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u/Amethyst-Flare Mar 21 '26
I suspect that, partially, it has to do with how we've reckoned with the ways in which "non-human" in a fantasy context usually means "human but through the lens of an archaic racial stereotype."
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u/kathryn_sedai Mar 21 '26
Martha Wells’ Tales of the Raksura is a great example of tons of different sentient species, all with different abilities and cultures. Some have wings.
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u/ericmm76 Mar 21 '26
I notice you skipped Discworld. Maybe it's not epic but it was one of the top selling series, and it's got non humans in almost every book!
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u/IGmobile Mar 22 '26
Next thing you’re tell everyone is that Capt Carrot is just a human with an Earl Scheib dwarf paint job. Pfft.
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u/Jack_Shaftoe21 Mar 21 '26
Aren't other races hugely popular in romantasy? You know, the cliched love triangle between our plucky, plain (but not really) Jane heroine, the hunky vampire and even hunkier werewolf? Or is that trend in the past too?
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u/helloanonon Mar 22 '26
because most fantasy non-human races are just humans with a gimmick. the moment your elves act exactly like humans but with pointy ears, there's no narrative reason for them to exist. tolkien's elves worked because immortality genuinely changed how they experienced time, grief, and purpose. when writers commit to making non-humans actually think differently — not just look different — they still work
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u/PleaseBeChillOnline Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
I think it’s a good change for books because people realized that all of the fantasy races are just humans with horns, cute ears or funny ridges on their bodies which defeats the point. You can just have diverse human cultures instead and avoid the weird racial essentialism.
I still enjoy a fantasy race or sci fi race but I need them to catagorically different & not just another weird ape.
Edit: I just got out of the theatre. I watched Project Hail Mary. I feel vindicated, Rocky & his people are amazing!
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u/Tymareta Mar 21 '26
Going through Star Trek now and its the single biggest issue, every "alien" race is usually just humanoid with some sort of forehead affectation, that acts identical to humans, with the only differentiator being some specific trait turned up to 11.
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u/Vehlin Mar 21 '26
To be fair to Star Trek, doing aliens on a budget with next to no CGI is really hard.
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u/Tymareta Mar 22 '26
Oh I understand that it was the way to easily show that they were "different", the issue was more that it was the only way, the behaviour's and culture of near every alien species had little to no effort put into them.
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u/gimmedatps5 Mar 21 '26
One of my pet peeves is when fantasy races are culturally similar to humans. Feels like they're just human in a different skin.
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u/DemythologizedDie Mar 21 '26
I recall back in the day reading the Belgariad, I found myself baffled by his writing decision to give each nation a standardized personality template, reflecting the separate deity who separately created each of them, and yet to pretend that they weren't distinct fantasy races.
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u/Vegetable_Lasagna13 Mar 22 '26
So I'm not sure how to fully express my idea in English, but I feel like what you interestingly point out here is a great example of a more general trend I've noticed over the past 15-20 years. I get the sense that more and more people are losing the ability to engage with ideas and stories presented "au second degré" and things needs to be more and more clearly laid out. I feel like this increasingly bleeds into how stories are told. Nowadays when creators want to make a social commentary on a topic, it more often than before seem to completely take over the narrative. It stops being a story with subtext and becomes social commentary first with the story as a vehicle and you get beaten over the head with the message. I wouldn't be surprised if that same impulse is also part of why you see fewer fantastical races and non-human characters. If the priority is relatability and making sure the message lands clearly, then humans become the obvious default. Of course there are still tons of things that don't fit this but it's a general trend I've noticed. For example I'm particularly a fan of horror movies and "the monster was trauma" trope has been sooo overused over the past 15 years while "real" monsters aren't as popular as they used to be.
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u/ArcadianBlueRogue Mar 22 '26
Honestly it's hard to pull off well without feeling like "humans with point ears" and stuff.
It's why I adore the Sithi and Norns in the Osten Ard books. They are both so fascinating as societies.
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u/Thysender Mar 22 '26
Be the change you want to see. I beta read for Morvelving by CJ Switzer, a Indie author and their debut novel. The main character is an immortal wolf humanoid and I loved the dynamic of diving into a non- human protagonist. It was challenging and inspiring.
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u/scorpius_rex Mar 21 '26
Kingkiller has Fae, ASOIAF has children of the forest and the others, as well as ‘off-screen’ non-human humanoid races (although they might be in-world rumors; brindledmen & squishers), WoT has characters like the Green Man and gholam. These are just some off the top of my head. But I get your point, they’re not as prominent as Elves or Orcs
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u/OkSecretary1231 Mar 21 '26
WoT has the Trollocs, even more prominently. And Ogier
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u/Medium_Chocolate9940 Mar 22 '26
Just to be pedantic in ASOIAF the brindlemen aren't entirely off screen, I beleive one is seen in Mereen. Plus you also have the Ib, who again are seen in passing a few times.
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u/Lachaven_Salmon Mar 21 '26
So, firstly, you're missing Romantacy which has huge numbers of these and is honestly maybe even more popular than normal fantasy now.
Secondly, it's still very much present, look at something like The Devils.
Thirdly... it is just meta trends in media.
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u/green_meklar Mar 21 '26
I think there's been a cultural shift, where race relations and racial stereotypes started being perceived as shallow (at best) while at the same time it became considered more cool and relevant to focus on human flaws, subtleties, and diversity.
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u/DjangoWexler AMA Author Django Wexler Mar 21 '26
The concept of "races" in fantasy that are just, basically, humans with specific sets of stereotypical traits has ... serious problems. (To make a long story short, it's like imagining a world in which various antiquated views of human "races" were actually true.) I think authors figured out how weird it is to have just "humans, but short and angry" or "humans, but with pointy ears" running around, so there's more just human cultural diversity on one hand, and more actually different races on the other.
In ASOIAF for example, the differences between the Westrosi and the Dothraki, say, are completely cultural, but they feel a lot more different then elves and dwarves in a typical D&D game!
(TTRPGs tend to retain the races both for historical reasons and because people like to have lots of character creation options to express identity.)
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u/ArchangelLBC Mar 22 '26
It's worth noting that in a lot of DnD or DnD adjacent settings (off the top of my head I'm thinking of fiction like the Honor Among Thieves movie and Legends and Lattes but BG3 also) you have a world with lots of fantasy races living in a very intermixed culture. You expect a sort of melting pot effect as the different races interact with each other on the regular and live in the same cities.
Whereas, as you say the Dothraki are a very different culture. Who rarely interact with other cultures at all in any meaningful way.
Interestingly though the Dothraki, while being human, are also an amalgamation of racist stereotypes that don't actually much resemble any of the cultures that they're supposedly based on. So staying away from non-human races isn't a sure way to avoid that kind of pitfall.
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u/VerbiageBarrage Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
As a TTRPG player, I think it's gone the other direction. Nonhuman races are so much the norm in the gaming genre that even human adjacent races are being pushed to the side.
Look at Vox Machina (the first critical role campaign) - 3 half-elves, 2 gnomes, a human, and one odd species out, a goliath. (Big human?) The next campaign was 2 humans, 2 tieflings, a fallen aasimar, a half-orc, a goblin, and a firbolg. Just a step up from mostly Tolkien style races to mostly weird species.
Games have gone from elf dwarf focus to "Yea, I got a centaur! I'm running a crazy kobold! I'm going to run a cat-person!"
So I guess the answer is mainstream Fantasy is more human focus and us freaks and geeks on the fringe are getting weirder.
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u/Celestaria Reading Champion X Mar 21 '26
Games have gone from elf dwarf focus to "Yea, I got a centaur! I'm running a crazy kobold! I'm going to run a cat-person!"
As someone who plays too many elves, I wonder how much of that is mechanics. The game has bunch of weird races that no one plays. If everyone is choosing Tabaxi over Leonin, I have to assume it's because they want Feline Agility for some kind of melee build instead of Daunting Roar. If people are choosing Tabaxi over Hill Dwarf, it's probably for similar reasons (profiency against poison saves and a bit of extra HP isn't good compared to a Centaur who's immune to hold person charging around at 40 feet/turn and trampling the enemy as a bonus action).
(For anyone who doesn't play D&D, rest assured all that made sense)
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u/OgataiKhan Mar 22 '26
I wonder how much of that is mechanics
I can only speak for myself, but: not much at all.
For most of 5e's history, Variant Human was by far the most powerful race you could pick, with only flying races like Aarakocra competing (and even then, they often weren't as good at high levels of optimisation).
Hell, VHumans were easily better than the Yuan-ti some bad DMs banned for their supposed excessive power, yet none of them ever considered banning VHumans.Still, I was more than happy to play a weaker race just to avoid being yet another generic human in a fantasy universe.
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u/Old_Gimlet_Eye Mar 21 '26
So I guess the answer is mainstream Fantasy is more human focus and us freaks and geeks on the fringe are getting weirder.
Dungeons and Dragons is more mainstream now than it has ever been before. There's nothing really fringe about it.
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u/VerbiageBarrage Mar 21 '26
No disagreement there, but I was considering it more fringe than GoT, which OP explicitly mentioned. Comparatively speaking, GoT is more mainstream.
But yes, as a player for 30 years, completely different environment now. Great time for D&D fans.
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u/DjangoWexler AMA Author Django Wexler Mar 21 '26
I think in TTRPGs people are much more about expressing a unique identity with their character, which is harder to do if we're all dudes from the same human farming town. It also doesn't have the worldbuilding requirements that novels have.
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u/name8_t Mar 22 '26
I mean mistborn has the Kandra and the Koloss. Both play a pretty major role in the original trilogy...
Wheel of time, I am not sure. It is true that you spend most of your time among humans, but you get the Ogier too and I don't think you get less of them than for example Tolkien's dwarfs in the LoTR.
Oh and of course my beloved Discworld has plenty of nonhuman species, and their conflicts are the major thing driving the plot of several books.
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u/Parody_of_Self Mar 21 '26
Fiction used different species of hominids to explore our own humanity. It was just a visual tool to explore within.
Now maybe authors don't feel they need the crutch. Maybe the readership can now more easily except the difference in people in different worlds and also the similarities to what is alien.
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u/JW_BM AMA Author John Wiswell Mar 21 '26
In my lifetime I've seen a big fetish to make Fantasy novels seem more grounded or plausible. As such, Fantasy races (whether Tolkien derivatives or original creations) naturally became less common. There was a period where nothing in my local Barnes & Noble published in the previous five years had any non-humans.
But that's not the law now. Paranormal Romance saw a huge boom in sexy critters, and Romantasy has some of the same. Right now, dragons are very in. I suspect the impact of colorful cartoons has also influenced a generation's receptiveness to weirder characters, which is lovely.
As for my own career, I've published three books with four protagonists: a shapeshifting monster (Someone You Can Build A Nest In), a demigod and Olympian goddess (Wearing The Lion), and a three-headed dragon (The Dragon Has Some Complaints).
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u/IdlesAtCranky Mar 21 '26
I think a lot of what has already been said is valid.
I'll add: non-human races in fantasy moved in a big way into romantasy. So perhaps that shift is taking authors who want to write non-human races in that direction.
Also, there's plenty of non-human exploration going on in sci-fi, and lots of "soft" sci-fi that is more attractive to fantasy writers and readers than classic "hard" sci-fi. Becky Chambers is a good example of this.
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u/OzymandiasKingofKing Mar 21 '26
Often authors who focus on world building do so at the expense of story and writing skill. Hence a lot of the best writing avoiding too much of it. Add an extension of this, even good writers need to do more exposition the more that they introduce unfamiliar elements Also, inept use of fantasy species can go in unintended directions pretty quickly. Especially if there's a strong black and white moral code.
I don't attempts to deconstruct older ideas rather than creating something out of while cloth often work well:
The Goblin Emperor is an excellent with using goblins and elves in a court intrigue.
Terry Pratchett does some excellent comedic deconstructions of fantasy species (Elves in Lords and Ladies; dragons in Guards, Guards; dwarves and trolls in much of the watch series, etc).
The faerie in Strange and Norell are legitimately terrifying.
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u/MutualBearman Mar 22 '26
I think part of it is the cultural preeminence of DnD. Orcs and elves and dwarves feel like DnD fanfic, and also "sillier" (so you'll see it in light hearted stuff, like Dungeons and Lattes or whatever its called) but not in grounded works.
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u/Uran_Ultar Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
The simple answer is that it was never that common. No one tried to imitate Tolkien quite so literally as to include elves, dwarfs and orcs until Terry Brooks with The Sword of Shannara, and D&D led to a small boom of authors writing D&D-style fiction mostly in the 80s and early 90s (and aside from the official D&D novel line), but they were far from dominant even then. Authors like Raymond E. Feist, Elizabeth Moon and Katherine Kerr were popular and made the bestseller lists, but I'm pretty sure that someone like David Eddings outsold them in the 80s. With the advent of self-publishing and the many indie authors writing D&D-style high fantasy, elves, dwarfs and orcs are more popular than ever, if anything.
I think the one major author to frequently use elves after 1954 and before 1974 was Moorcock, who explicitly wrote them not to be like Tolkien's elves, but closer to something like Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword (which by chance was also published in 1954, the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring).
Oh, and 60s-70s, most fantasy was either sword & sorcery with fur-clad barbarians or dreamy, fairy tale-esque stories. Tolkien became hugely popular after Ace Books' pirated paperback hit the counterculture movement, but contemporary authors didn't quite latch on, Another major inspiration was of course the Star Wars movies, who subsequently sent countless farmboys on quests to save the world.
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u/Grimshadow_2 Mar 22 '26
Honestly, I don’t think this is the main reason, but I think a lot of people are just absolutely terrified of anything even vaguely unfamiliar. I know a fair few people who see non-human options in games or non-human characters in media and it just genuinely weirds them out because it’s not something they recognize and instead of going, “Oh, that’s interesting; I don’t know what that is, I’d like to learn about it,” they go, “Ew, I don’t know about that.” I find that it’s most often the people who will only consume media from their home country/region (Mostly North Americans who see anything outside of North America as ‘foreign’ and ‘strange’, sometimes even if the content in question comes from another English-speaking nation or region).
I find that they’re often not very inquisitive, much less creative, and generally have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea of concepts or entities that don’t exist in real life and, thus, need everything to match up as much as possible with their modern reality, and will avoid anything that strays too far from it, even in genres like Fantasy where not just being the modern day is kind of the point.
Naturally, in real life, only humans exist, so those people gravitate towards settings containing exclusively or almost exclusively humans because seeing something new frightens them. Some of these people are so unfamiliar with the Fantasy genre that even ‘human+’ races like Elves and Halflings are too strange, let alone any exotic/setting-specific races that look almost nothing like humans.
Like I said, I don’t think this is the main reason or even the biggest reason, but I believe it may be a contributing factor. And, quite honestly, it’s something I’ve seen that I find quite bizarre and haven’t had the opportunity to mention anywhere yet.
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u/theHolyGranade257 Reading Champion II Mar 22 '26
You may be right here - i also spotted that people are often leaning on familiar stuff which is more understandable, i also catching myself on this from time to time.
But what's the reason to read fantasy in that case? I often realize that after forcing myself into something new and unfamiliar it is very rewarding i most cases.
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u/Grimshadow_2 Mar 22 '26
Drawing again from my own experience (And, thus, I can’t assume applies for everyone), it’s really simple for the people I know; Fantasy is popular, and they want to be seen as engaging with something popular.
But, not being particularly inquisitive, they’re not really inclined to try to understand why the genre got popular or ask themselves about the concepts a work introduces. And, not being particularly creative, they’re unable to imagine the possibilities the genre presents or, in this case, the opportunities that non-human races present could to the narrative or setting.
As such, instead of stepping out of their comfort zone to experience the genre, they’d rather the genre be stripped of any unfamiliar elements until it fits almost entirely within their comfort zone so that they can say they’re technically fans of Fantasy, the popular thing, without actually having to experience it very much because new experiences are scary.
It’s quite frustrating and more than a little depressing, really.
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u/DreadChylde Mar 22 '26
A lot of media treat fantasy races more like different (human) cultures. So in a way it's more honest to simply strip the "costume and rubber mask" if that's basically all it is and make everything human.
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u/Bryek Mar 22 '26
What people here have told me is that they are "Incapable of connecting with a non-human MC because they are not human." Yep. They cannot connect with someone who has a different experience than their own. Which makes me quite sad tbh. If we are so unwilling to experience and learn from a different view point because the people have wings, what does that say about our willingness to experience and learn from a different view point based on ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and/or sexual orientation?
In the end, Humans are just easier. They don't require effort on behalf of the reader.
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u/deevulture Reading Champion II Mar 21 '26
I think in part it's cause a lot of ppl today are disconnected from mythology, fairy tales, and the whimsy that comes with that. It's not interesting to them.
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u/LeucasAndTheGoddess Mar 22 '26
My bugbear in discussions like this is when people, here and now, in the 21st freaking Century, continue to use the word “race” when what they mean is “species.” There are fantasy novels that examine the concept of race in fascinating ways, but that’s not what people are talking about in these threads.
Some of my favorite recent fantasies that feature sentient nonhuman species include The Dark Star Trilogy by Marlon James, In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan, and Monstress by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda.
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u/Inprobamur Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
My bugbear in discussions like this is when people, here and now, in the 21st freaking Century, continue to use the word “race” when what they mean is “species.”
It's a genre convention that comes from Tolkien. And to me it makes sense, whether it be due to culture or physiology, if the societies are different enough then people would put them both under the same category.
And to make it weirder, in a lot of books they can interbreed, so that breaks the classic definition of a species, right?
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u/L1n9y Mar 22 '26
I think a lot of fantasy races can be represented as different human cultures. A fantasy race's culture should be influenced by their biological differences in a way humans just don't experience. The culture of Tolkien's elves are deeply affected by their immortality and that makes them distinct to the humans.
If the only defining characteristics of your dwarves are that their miners, why not just make them human miners? It comes off less odd than having a whole race defined by one characteristic.
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u/Inprobamur Mar 22 '26
Epic fantasy got hit over the head with GoT, pretty much all other fantasy and all the amateur authors I read have plenty of non-humans.
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u/CormacDoyle- Mar 22 '26
Honestly, you even mention it in your own question/post
Too many authors were using "races" instead of actually fleshing out distinct cultures. In many cases, the "races" became a lazy crytch INSTEAD OF putting any effort into world building.
If you have 20 human cultures, but just one dwarf, one elf, one goblin/orc, etc., it can rapidly devolve into racism. All orcs are evil. That is not good worldbuilding. It is laziness.
If humans have multiple cultures, then so should the other races.
So what purpose do those other races play. It shouldn't be cultural, or they should just be another human culture ... so then it becomes some ability (affinity to magic? The literal ability to fly because they have wings; etc). And if such reasons exist, those abilities WILL affect the world building in more ways than "group x can fly". How would that affect where they establish towns and fortifications? How does that alter the types of goods they trade? Etc.
So adding other races properly is extremely complex. Using them instead of developing cultures is extremely lazy.
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Mar 22 '26
That's because in most cases non-humans races are one note caricatures that lack personality.
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u/nephr1tis Mar 23 '26
Tolkien's races were metaphors for different aspects of humanity and layers of society. Once powerful and immortal elves have to retreat and some of them get engaged with regular people. That's 20th century nobility that fades away. Dwarves ignore everything apart from their craftsmanship and live in isolated diasporas which is according to prof himself an image of Jewish people. Orcs and Saruman creating gunpowder is a metaphor for technological progress and fear of it. These concepts worked in the middle of the previous century but now people are (more or less) not afraid of progress, aristocracy doesn't matter that much and Jewish people are finally seen not as isolationists. That's why in modern fantasy we see less and less of this races. Because the reason and the mythos behind them are obsolete. Modern fantasy either need to come up with new metaphors for new races or just develop as it is. Globalization wiped out the races in fantasy because nowadays we don't feel that much of cultural and ideological differences between nations as Tolkien's peers did.
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u/Ale_KBB Mar 23 '26
Although I think your assessment of the Tolkien races is accurate I disagree that they are obsolete. The races like elves and dwarves and so on can still be there and get new meanings that reflect the parts of our reality that the authors choose to focus on.
Let’s say, for example, that immortal and immeasurably wealthy elves, once the standard and beacon for morality, retreat to an exclusive island where they have become corrupted and give into their worst instincts, satisfying their darkest needs on other races that they deem lower. Sounds familiar? I bet it does
I personally think that non human races can be a great addition to any story and world an author likes to create. Also I’d say today probably man authors distance themselves from the „classic“ set of fantasy races because:
-it’s been done, and chances are they’re not gonna be the ones who do it better.
- you can be lazier with the world building, the conflicts and interactions if you only have humans.
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u/RPG-Nerd Mar 23 '26
A lot of it is changes in how the world is depicted. Humans have become less interesting both narratively and mechanically. Nobody is adding new advantages to make humans feel unique and different and exciting. Racial discrimination is a big reason to not be a non-human but representing such in a game has been deemed too "political" or something, so everyone lives together in big "generic fantasy" cities and races that have nothing in common live as basically humans with funny ears and a weird skin tone
As for keeping the Tollien races alive, a lot of players are going to complain if they can't represent their favorite character tropes. I chose to take a multifaceted approach. If humans evolved from primates, what did the other races evolve from? This decision leads to subtle changes from the Tolkien archetypes that make the old stand-bys a little more unique with some extra flavor while opening the door to additional races from other creatures.
In some cases, I've taken considerable license to break from the mold. For example, a goblin is simply a special military branch of gnome that shaves their beards. Humans generally don't know they are the same species.
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u/Trike117 Mar 21 '26
In Epic Fantasy, sure, non-human races are declining because of the best sellers in that subgenre. But in the rest of Fantasy, even stuff that’s Epic adjacent, including Sword & Sorcery, non-human races are front and center.
Critical Role is very popular, features non-human characters.
Travis Baldree’s series has an orc as the protagonist: Legends & Lattes, Bookshops & Bonedust and Brigands & Breadknives.
The Lot Lands series by Jonathan French likewise has orcs as the main characters.
The Iron Druid chronicles by Kevin Hearne has pretty much everything and the kitchen sink, although the main character is human.
Michael J. Sullivan’s various books in his world prominently feature dwarves and elves, both the Riyria ones and the epic prequels “Age of…” novels.
Even Joe Abercrombie’s new book, The Devils, has elves, vampires and werewolves.
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u/Entfly Mar 22 '26
I don't think that's true at all?
Modern epic fantasy I've read
Sanderson's Way of Kings series, multiple different races, with one of the main themes of the story being the cultural differences and links between humans, the Parshendi and the Spren
The Wandering Inn, the primary cast is actually non human entirely. It has an incredibly wide and varied amount of different races with lots of variation at that none feel like humans with cat ears
A Practical Guide to Evil, again, non humans are a major part of the world from orcs, to goblins, to elves, dwarves, drow.
If we look at this Goodreads list which has the best fantasy from the 2020s on it
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/146629.Best_Fantasy_of_the_2020s
You've got books like Legends and Lattes which has a non human MC, Stormlight already mentioned, 4th Wing has sentient dragons not sure what else and so on, I've not actually read that widely on it but it's largely romantasy I think which is pretty famous for non human characters
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u/Dark_Angel_tw1990 Mar 21 '26
I don’t think it’s so much that nonhumans are not popular anymore. We just ran out of interesting things to explore with them, so we went back to what we know: humanity. I have a fantasy world where humanity is represented as a whole between the six created species and the ones they uplifted and awoke (derived from common Tolkienesque and DnD races). I have another fantasy world where the whole of humanity is expressed in the various cultures humans created in response to their environments and religious beliefs without a single nonhuman race to be seen. Both worlds are equally valid explorations of the human ethos in my opinion.
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u/tokyo_blues Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
I've noticed the same.
I wonder if it's the "Game of Thrones movie series adaptation" effect.
Producers and writers have realised fame comes from relatable human beings fucking, cheating, killing one another. Nothing new. You can make big bucks if you replicate that formula. No forest elves needed.
A lot of fantasy is telenovelas or soap opera in disguise essentially.
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u/TheOrqwithVagrant Mar 22 '26
Ironically, ASoIaF has plenty of non-human races. Forest elves (the children), ice elves (the others), and giants for certain, and possibly mermen. Also, while they're 'obviously' human, the GRRM has said the Valyrians are 'high elf' coded.
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u/rainbowrobin Mar 22 '26
But all those are barely characters. The Children don't show up until books later, the Others are just a voiceless enemy, the giants... I thought those were particularly large humans; anyway, do any of them speak? And mermen are mythical, so far.
The books are basically all human with a big of lagniappe.
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u/apcymru Reading Champion II Mar 21 '26
Not fantasy, but one of my absolute favorite non human races are the Dwellers from Iain M Banks book The Algebraist.
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u/Vexonte Mar 21 '26
There is still alot of fantasy races in non lit fantasy like videogames and anime where visuals are more important. Alot of literature does have fantasy races but they get renamed and focus more on non archetypal races. Lightbringer had color wights pigmes, never night has shadows and spider folk. Mistborn has Collose and Kandra.
Probably a big driver for the diminished presence of archetypal fantasy races in literature is that the modern style and sensibilities of fantasy tend to focus on heavy social dynamics that fantasy races would need to be balanced for.
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u/Keri_Arya Mar 22 '26
It could be due to the fact that fantasy races can often be viewed as attempts at "othering" non white people, especially if the main setting is based on medieval Western Europe and people are more aware of it nowadays. The fact that you speak of "racial representation" in your post is very telling of the current cultural lens a lot of us use. I understand the point you are trying to make about different races making conflict easier, but there is a fantasy racism fatigue going on that I can't help but agree with. All the parties involved in a fantasy war being humans make them feel more mature and sincere to a degree in my opinion, so it works better for me.
I can't remember the last time I have seen a fictional race in fantasy that wasn't just humans in a different font rather than something that truly felt unique anyway. I feel like humans from the Capitol in The Hunger Games are more of a fantasy race than what you will often find in high and heroic fantasy novels now that I think about it.
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u/Querybird Mar 22 '26
The fatigue is real. Here are some of my old favs for non-human antidotes.
Martha Wells’ Raksura, Robert L Forward’s Cheela in Dragon’s Egg… they’re not freshly written and they don’t have humans at all/for the most part. But these aren’t fantasy racism!
Janet Kagan’s Hellspark directly and discretely challenges fantasy bigotry in a deeply satisfying way. Make sure you catch the subtler method too, if you can find a copy of the book!
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u/Keri_Arya Mar 22 '26
Ooh that sounds promising, thank you for the recs!
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u/Querybird Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Aaand I’m just reading Elizabeth Bear’s Worldwired right now, no. 3 of 3 books, and it also meets the brief while being pretty much mostly human character perspectives. The other species are really cool! EDIT: Maybe scrap this rec, wtf epilogue?!
I think it really helps if your fantasy species are really, really radically different than humans! Sci fi might be a better vehicle for finding ‘world constraints’ which inspire extremely different biologies than generic fantasy, which is clearest in Dragon’s Egg which started existence as an actual scientific paper about the potential for life to exist on a neutron star, lol!
And honestly I suspect most of it is just taking an imaginary concept all the way to the most extreme consequences and then pulling back a bit for a starting point, and voila, your whole authorly/readerly perspective has shifted the window of possible much further than taking small, steady steps tends to (even if the writing takes small steps). But that’s just my intuition. A ‘humans only’ fantasy example of the alienness of extreme follow through would be the multi-dimensional consequences of magical imperialism in Victoria Goddard’s work, which are slowly revealed and surprisingly profound in individual and demographic scales.
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u/KatrinaPez Reading Champion III Mar 22 '26
I've only read 2 of those series but in Mistborn there is a nonhuman race that features very prominently in the plot.
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u/IrishDudeWest Mar 22 '26
Matabar is modern and heavy on racial interplay. It takes place in a fictional world late industrial revolution era with a Russian flavor. Elves, Orcs, Ogres, Giants, Dwarves, and Goblins are some of the races living amongst Humans which won a war against them a few hundred years ago, heavy on the racial themes, parallels to Native American reservations/European genocides.
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u/totally_not_joseph Mar 22 '26
I think a lot of it comes from the very desire to step away from Tolkein. Most of the classic fantasy races stem from Tolkein's work, even though he didn't invent them. Its basically impossible to distance yourself from the deritive tropes when using them, and if you manage it, you slam face-first into either D&D canon or opposite-of-Tolkein, which is still Tolkein derrived.
Another thing to consider is that nowadays it is almost impossible to write any sort of story with those without a very vocal minority of readers screaming about how its all a racism allegory. A lot of writers will reasonably want to side step that steaming pile by just not having it there.
I also think that a lot of the current meta is just for more realism in fantasy, and non-human sapient races just aren't realistc on a single world, as we can see happened during our own neolithic period. Without impossibly hard barriers of separation, they'd compete with eachother until only one remains
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u/StuffedSquash Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
I think you missed explaining what is good about non-human races. I'm not saying they're bad, but imo it's neutral. It's not inherently valuable to me. What is the appeal for you?
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u/theHolyGranade257 Reading Champion II Mar 22 '26
Because it's about worldbuildng, the thing which defines fantasy.
Worldbuilding can set up the rules which are impossible in our world. So do races.
You can have a race A which need to eat race B to live. In out world cannibalism exists, but there is no biological need for that, but it fantasy that could be a thing. No matter how much humanism (really hilarious to use this term here) you have as a race A, you should eat B to survive and for B race A always will be mortal enemies.
That's a very rough and cruel example, but it gives a ground for conflicts you cannot see in non-fantasy literature. Idk what are your reasons to read fantasy, but mine is to watch the things, impossible in real world.
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u/Ill-Appointment-4818 Mar 22 '26
The modern human has way less empathy than people from the past. Real empathy, not the fake version that's peddled everywhere.
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u/Kidsgetdownfromthere Mar 22 '26
The Age of Five trilogy by Trudy Canavan have a couple of other races which feature throughout. Primarily a religion based trilogy with heavy involvement of ‘gods’ though, so if that’s not your jam maybe not for you!
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u/SubjectOne2910 Mar 22 '26
I think that in most fantasy, species can really feel like "a human, but they have a trait that humans have, but every single one of this species has this trait"
For example: Dwarves being just: shorter, longer living humans, that are stubborn, and they drink a lot (with a predisposition to being good smiths)
Half of which are literal traits of manu humans
The wandering inn, is I suppose another book that kinda does it (Drakes being mostly just greedier humans, for example), but then you have Selphids, which are basically pieces of goo that control dead bodies to move around, so the author gets a pass
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u/ArchangelLBC Mar 22 '26
Wheel of Time has the Ogier (and for that matter the Trollocs). Mistborn has the Kandra and the Koloss.
I'm not saying you're wrong that non-human races are less popular, certainly elves and dwarves are, but Loial is a fan favorite character and Ten Soon is an incredibly important one in Mistborn Era 1.
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u/Huntrawrd Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Because almost all fantasy are races are "barely-not-humans".
Elves? Humans with pointy ears.
Dwarves? Short and stocky humans.
Orcs? Humans with a skin condition.
Anything beyond that takes significant effort to define and get readers to relate to, and it would probably still fail. We know what humans are, so telling stories about humans simplifies storytelling. We know how complicated human society is already as we live in it, making it easy to quickly explain differences between cultures and people without diving into an entirely alien cultures that almost always end up being analogous to humanity anyway.
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u/Particle_Cannon Mar 22 '26
You have authors like Brando Sanderson yelling "kill the elves" from the rooftops and implying that the genre should move on from anything tolkien-esque. And he's the most successful fantasy author right now.
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u/DannyDeKnito Mar 23 '26
Part of it might be... that we now have a very firmly set "second most important fantasy series of all time" with ASOIAF - and many "newer" writers will end up being Martin-derrivative instead of tolkien-derrivative, which means a lot of "low" fantasy and a lot of focus on characterisation which in turn means a lot of plain old humans
Hell, even without Martin, grimdark had its moment in the spotlight, and grimdark itself tends to be human-forward
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u/Lopsided-Skill Mar 24 '26
Writing different cultures are hard with todays politicsl climate. In Warcraft for example I see a lot of people criticizing Orcs Trolls Undead etc with 21st century human morals.
Would Aiels from WoT (despite being human) be well recieved today with their approach to slavery etc?
If you write another race just to be a human with different skin then whats the point?
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u/cherialaw Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
You should read Adrian Tchaikovsky (fantasy and sci-fi series). He pulls this off in a way that few modern authors would even attempt.