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I would love for D&D to be taken away from WotC and put in the hands of someone who will make some fucking content for it.
Also, this battleground isn't dead, the 5e player-base is fucking ridden with leftists that will eat up queer land acknowledgements. There legitimately is a market for their products. The biggest blow they took lately was the OGL fiasco and how it made all the big-deal podcasters (who have mostly drifted towards being Leftist or Leftist-safe if they weren't there already, to my understanding) try to swap to third-party systems.
Yes, just recently ran into another hobby drama, and learned that about half the super-mega-permaban-list was for saying a nono word on unaffiliated discords. People have been announcing the death of wokeness since... well social justice started maybe 4 years before Trump was elected, and its been 9 years since then.
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This has driven a lot of the growth in the OSR scene... which is interesting because now you can watch in real time as outsiders and entryists accuse the OSR community of being full of fascists, while inside the community it's roughly divided between "I just want Old School orcs" and "We must make it clear that the OSR community is a welcoming and inclusive space."
WOTC making orcs basically humans with an odd skin tone is an unusually poor choice. Really speaks to them missing the fundamental purpose of morally unambiguous enemies in a game. I get the real point is they don't want a race of dumb savages so they have to change them into human with oddly colored skin. Like an identifiable group of real life humans drawn in fantasty style.
I don't play tabletop game any more, but if I did I'd want old orcs and racial bonuses.
From a gameplay perspective, if you want a tabletop equivalent of a video game beat-em-up title, it makes sense that you want a race of always chaotic evil antagonist who exist in endless supply and can be mowed down with no moral compunctions. It's the same reason we have zombies, or Nazis. But, from a worldbuilding/roleplaying perspective, that seems both pretty boring and also kinda unrealistic? Not unrealistic in the sense that you cannot build a world where it doesn't make sense; with enough effort, I'm sure you can. Unrealistic in the sense that it doesn't map to anything in the real world.
If they are going to turn a monster race into fantasy Mexicans, then I prefer goblins. They are much cuter.
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I think the strange thing to me is the weird double think involved. 5.5e turned humanoids into homework monsters by making the DM have to manually apply racial traits to the NPC statblocks, and reclassified a few humanoids as other creature types, but it still has bioessentialist "evil" races all the same. Even if the front of the Monster Manual clarifies that alignment can be changed by the DM, it is really hard to imagine, say, Mind Flayers ever having a good relationship to humanoids, given their diet.
And 5.5e still has monsters that are practically only ever going to be used in a "horde of unambiguous evil" way, like undead and fiends. Like, sure, it might be fun to have an antihero vampire or a risen fiend under certain circumstances, but most DMs are not going to put much thought into it, and just start breaking out the undead or fiendish hordes.
What's weird about it? It is as you said: Mind Flayers are an acceptable "evil" race because they are literally an obligate predator of humanoids. Traits that aren't present in real humans are an acceptable factor to base "evilness" upon. Aside from small clusters of the kind of people who hate Frieren for writing demons as evil anyway.
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Best orcs are Project Long Stairs orcs. Wattsian P-Zombies that breed explosively and instantly learn and integrate any tactical behavior they observe.
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OSR?
Old School Renaissance/Revival. Basically, D&D going "back to its roots" (generally 1st or 2nd edition AD&D, depending on who you ask, but sometimes Basic or even Chainmail). There are a host of Old School "retroclones" which are all variations on the old "6 stats, class/level, d20" fantasy game, but the aesthetic is generally to appeal to 70s and 80s kids disenchanted with everything post-TSR and all the newer games. Unsurprisingly, there is a large overlap between OSR fans and gamers sick of "woke D&D," though it's by no means an entirely right-wing or anti-woke movement.
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Old School Renaissance/Revival (generally, clones/imitations/enhancements of the first two editions of Dungeons & Dragons)
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Yeah, I'm at the front lines of it. Every few months, we get a scare where a leftist theater kid or a straight woman who keeps talking about Queerness turns up and calls things problematic or harumphs at someone's accent.
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