Editing Always Chaotic Evil (section)

==Okay but why tho?==
The term has gotten a little unwelcome on /tg/ in modern years, as the basic idea that thinking humanoid races are somehow inherently evil and deserve only extermination is seen as being... well, a little too [[/pol/]]-friendly. That, and what's the point of roleplaying if you can't go against type ([[Drizzt|''meaningfully'']], mind you)? These last years, focus has somewhat shifted to throwing people actively doing evil things ([[slavery|slavers]], [[Nazi]]s, etc...) as chaff to be exterminated to players, instead of [[kobold]]s and other similar monsters.

Another work-around for punching bad villains is automata, simple robots and skeletons and suchlike. Things which can navigate their enviroment, move and perform basic tasks like fighting which have no real will of their own and just blindly execute their directions. On the one hand, taking them down is like breaking a sword. They're not really evil any more than a landslide is given that they have zero agency. 

Additionally, Eberron has actually broken the trope entirely: alignment in that setting is canonically fluid by the rules given, so that evil-aligned clerics may worship/serve good-aligned deities, and vice versa with a few exceptions; certain class-based restrictions, such as paladins having to be Lawful Good before 4th edtion, remain. 

It is telling that the grandfather of modern fantasy, [[J.R.R. Tolkien]] himself, presented orcs as the servants of evil 'overlords', but was uncomfortable with the notion of 'born evil' or 'always evil' due to the theological implications of being born with an inherently evil soul. As a devout Catholic, the idea that Eru Iluvatar (his stand-in for the Christian God) would deliberately create people who were inherently evil was contrary to his depiction as a purely good being, but Morgoth (read: Satan) could not create life himself, and Tolkien believed that making Orcs soulless would have caused them to become mere animals. 

The solution that Tolkien used was that Orcs were effectively immortal (like the Elves they were based off of), and had been under the influence of Morgoth and later Sauron (the Evil Overlord of the setting) for thousands of years by the start of the story, who enforced a nightmarish culture of dominance, power jockeying, enslavement, and submission to them as gods -- and even then, as soon as Sauron's will vanished, so did their desire to fight, meaning that they were probably under some form of mind control at the time as well. Even then, he was never wholly satisfied, and settled for it only because the alternatives were worse.

Morality in humans, according to a mundane/scientific view, is an extension of the fact that we are social animals that work better together. Parents raise their children, protecting them when they are small and vulnerable and teaching them how to do things so they don't have to figure out everything on their own and build on the knowledge of their fore-bearers. A tribe of humans pools its food so that those which are unlucky can get the calories they need to live and forage another day, when they will be lucky and bring in a surplus - to say nothing of the sick and injured, whom even the earliest tribes and societies valued and cared for. In an agrarian setting, several farmers till the land and raise livestock which they give to the local blacksmith, who forges iron tools so they can better till the land and produce more food per square meter; together they provide food, weapons and arms to a warrior who defends them from attack.

Those are are just two basic arrangements of which a medieval society needs to operate, let alone a modern one - all of which is predicated on people getting along, which we generally do more often than not. If everyone around you is liable to stab you in the back for momentary gain (or for a larf, if they are all dyed-in-the-wool self-centered sadistic sociopaths), the listed arrangements can't work. The lack of cooperation would prevent any such society they might dream of making from getting off the ground. The only rational thing for said creatures to do is to avoid others of their kind like the plague, unless of course they can mug them... and in the case of humans, subsequently die from a wide variety of circumstances (famine, crippling injuries leaving then unable to find food, etc.), which they would probably have avoided if they had just worked with others.

(If this sounds a lot like the problems many people have with default portrayals of [[Drow]] to you, then congratulations! You paid attention for more than five seconds.)