How do you justify a "pest race" like goblins or rat people in your setting? Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?
>>728943392They procreate by seducing human men
Too much effort ontop of not everyone being onboard with outright genocide
>>728943392Like any real life pest, they breed fast and in high numbers, a few always survive anything to restart a colony.>Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?No, not really. It takes world-ending threats to unify them.
>>728943392Make them indian
>>728943392>Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?outnumbered 50 to 1 and the only thing keeping them from overruning you is that they are dumb
>>728943392>in your setting?Did you think you were posting on /tg/ or something OP? Or do you expect an answer from a video game dev lurking here?
>>728943392They keep giant spiders in check
>>728943631post it
>>728943392Pests generally implies a nuisance but not enough of a threat to bother eradicating. Same reason humanity hasn't wiped our mice and rats even though we should theoretically be more than capable of doing so. Come to think of it what if the goblins fulfill an important ecological niche and wiping them out would upset the delicate balance of the food chain. For example maybe humans keep goblins around because roaming dragons find goblins to be easier prey than humans and so if there were no goblins dragon attacks on people would go up.
>>728943881If Alberta can find a way to be rat free I think any fantasy or sci-fy superpower can find a way to genocide the gobbos
>>728943392just read the news bro>verification: not required
if they live out in the wilderness you're never going to be able to exert enough effort to actually eradicate them, at best you keep them out of your walls.if they are integrated with society already, then your setting has already accepted them and the most you can show is fantasy racism
>>728943392Fodder species are great buffers against more dangerous creatures.Sure the goblin tribe across the hill is annoying but we keep them there because the griffons nesting in the mountains eat them instead of our people and cattle
Most fantasy settings don't really pass the easiest sanity checks, never mind actually being internally consistent, and when they do, it's probably for highly contingent idiosyncratic reasons. For that matter, most of these are built to provide archetypes people want to play or tropes writers want to use, so "pest races" were included for a reason that weighs heavier in the authors' minds than worldbuilding.But if we take the question seriously, here are several considerations:>These settings tend to take place in "medieval" (actually early modern) societies, and the state capacity is basically nil. There's no state bureaucracy and workings of a polity are based on competing claims to rights rather than a duty to centralized state: if the King of France tells Count of Toulouse or Duke of Burgundy to do x and the count and the duke don't wanna, they say "cba" and what's the King gonna do? Either just forget about x, or start a war to reign in his vassals at which point he doesn't accomplish x anyway. The mention of Count of Toulouse wasn't an accidental, because he didn't play ball when the King asked him to destroy cathars in the Albigensian Crusade, and while the King and the Pope ultimately got Simon de Montfort to do it, it wasn't easy for them to exert control! Note: the cathars usually didn't even fight back.
>Exterminating a population is actually really really difficult even for high state capacity societies! If you have some set of population in a city or a camp then yes, you can lock the gates and start the proscriptions, historical examples range from Second Triumvirate to Timurids to nazis, and it's pretty effective. But most people don't live in cities! If you try to do it in the countryside, people flee to the hills, the swamps, the forests, and your army supposed to commit genocide eats state finances every moment they are mobilized. Even when we're talking about proper states like Rome, they mostly can control cities, and little of much else. Even Imperial Japan, a modern administrative state with railroads and telecommunication, basically controlled cities and roads and nothing else in WW2.>Insofar as goblins and rat peoples, etc, are "pests", the powers that be might prefer it that way. For instance, they might provide services that aren't socially acceptable to citizen populations (spartiates might have thought of helotes as "pests", but since it was literally illegal for a spartiate to work without losing citizenship...). Insofar as "actually undesirable" activities like narcotics trade are concerned, they might have a deal to take a cut of the profits. And disenfranchised classes are useful as scapegoats, for taking a disproportionate tax burden, etc (for example, in Al-Andalus the muslim rulers kinda preferred the population to stay Christian so as to raise the jizya tax). Likewise, individual people who'd have to be involved in the cleansing might have personal contacts, friends, etc, and they don't want to work.Consider: Why can't modern states exterminate the nazi populations within?
>Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?Because there are different factions in the dominant species that would rather screw each other over than band together.
>>728944259The goblins fulfill an important ecological niche of being cocksleeves for human men.
This thread was moved to >>>/tg/97213989
