Roughly halfway through El Paso, Elsewhere you meet Draculae for the first time. At this point in the game we’ve heard quite a bit about her through protagonist James Savage’s brooding monologues and his memories made manifest as voice messages in the mutated motel the game takes place in.
Here’s what we know:
- Draculae is the lord of the Vampires.
- Draculae is trying to end the world through a deal with extra-planar gods.
- Draculae and James dated.
Here’s what we learn from the face-to-face:
- Draculae is white.
Her whiteness is not important in and of itself. There have been many white villains in games and other media (albeit not many white women villains), but very few white monsters opposing a Black man. To better understand the ways El Paso, Elsewhere subverts fiction norms, it’s worth a brief examination of the ugly history of Western Fiction.
After the abolition of slavery in the United States, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation, relegating African Americans to second-class citizens despite emancipation. The laws and general sentiment among the white ruling class permeated through infrastructure, district lines, and culture. Fiction and propaganda became tools to engender fear and distrust towards African Americans.
The Jim Crow Museum refers to this purposeful alienation as “the Brute Caricature.” “[it] portrays black men as innately savage, animalistic, destructive, and criminal — deserving punishment, maybe death. This brute is a fiend, a sociopath, an anti-social menace. Black brutes are depicted as hideous, terrifying predators who target helpless victims, especially white women.” During slavery, black people were portrayed as childlike and helpless, savages in need of education and rescue. Slavery was, paradoxically, framed as emancipatory.
In 1900 former slave owner and professor Charles Carroll published the text, “The Negro A Beast,” Or “In The Image of God.” The first chapter was titled “The Formation of the Negro and other Beasts — then Man on the Sixth Day.” Each chapter was a repeat of this theme, one thought hammered home. “Biblical and scientific facts demonstrating that the Negro is not an offsping of the Adamic family.” “Cain’s offspring soulless…” etc. Carroll went as far as to label Black people as the “original tempters of Eve.”
Much of the anti-black propaganda of the time speculated on the threat Black men in particular would pose to white women. It was a quick way to reinforce malice. White women, in novels such as Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, were pure, virginal, and importantly properties of their husbands. On the other hand, the black man was a “snarling tiger…a half child, half animal, the sport of impulse, whim, and conceit.” According to Dixon, Carroll, and co., the Black man was a creature of insatiable sexual appetite and possessed an unrivalled capacity for violence.
Obviously, whatever threat Black men posed towards white women was exponentially dwarfed by the inverse. The “burden of proof” didn’t apply, and any accusation made towards a black person by a white person was the truth. Anti-black lynchings were common, public, and barbaric. The act itself was further incentive for Blacks to stay in line.
The conflation of Black men with beasts is not uniquely American. It was a favourite comparison of European colonists, see: white American ancestors, to justify attitudes towards African slaves. While the rhetoric has largely faded, it will occasionally seep up like racist sewage from bad plumbing. The world of sports commentary regularly dips into this as if white commentators, coaches, etc., default to an ancestral tongue when it comes to describing international matches. A soccer match between an African nation and a Scandinavian one would be a battle between “Pace and Power” and “Cunning and Guile.”
Today, Dixon and co’s work is universally panned as abhorrently racist. The same cannot be said for his successors. HP Lovecraft was an American author who has come to define the niche genres of weird fiction and cosmic horror. He focused on the fear of the unknown delving into secret societies with hidden agendas, clandestine races of extra-planar beings, and the persistent paranoia that one’s blood might at any time betray them.
Lovecraft was a white supremacist, his cults in the “The Horror at Red Hook” were immigrants with religions he didn’t understand, the strange fish-like beings that plagued the titular town in his novel “The Shadow over Innsmouth” were allegory for non-Anglo-Saxon races with hidden agendas of miscegenation, and the “betrayal of blood” that drove many of his protagonists to suicide is an extension of his own paranoia that the ancestry he’s so proud of might itself be compromised. When describing the inhabitants of the fictional Red Hook, Lovecraft pens, “The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth.”
Lovecraft was a combination of bigot and coward, and suffered from an acute lack of curiosity. Paradoxically, he died relatively unknown and impoverished, his stories only gaining traction long after his death and offering him a form of perverse immortality. Modern media, especially video games, gleefully boast their “Lovecraftian” themes and imagery. Red Hook Studios, presumably named after the Lovecraft story, has developed two entries in their critically acclaimed Darkest Dungeon series, both in an explicitly “Lovecraftian” setting. The games pit a group of mercenary heroes against Lovecraft’s monsters. The studio makes attempts to sand down more racist edges: in Darkest Dungeon 2, you can compose a party of black and brown combatants. But the brown man is an occultist. He wears a turban and offers blood to some unknown god in exchange for power. He fights these monsters, but is in league with one of his own.
If Lovecraft was fencing bigoted thoughts through the eras, then J. R. R. Tolkien set the racist rebar that is the foundation of much of fantasy fiction. His seminal work, The Lord of the Rings, has inspired countless franchises with its stories of humans, elves, hobbits, and dwarves fighting against encroaching evil. Tolkien was obsessed with motifs of light and darkness that went as deep as pigmentation. His heroes were fair skinned, varying in heights, lengths of beards, but they were all explicitly white.
His villains, mostly made up of orcs, were described as “slant-eyed” with “sallow skin.” Uruk-hai were stronger, faster orcs, who could better brave the sunlight and travel during the day unlike regular orcs. Tolkien described them as “black orcs of great strength.” Before chattel slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas, Europeans experimented with indentured labourers from Ireland. Europeans were ill-suited to work in the tropical climate; this was a contributing factor to African enslavement — darker bodies were better attuned to toil for longer hours in the tropical sun.
Tolkien set the template for fantasy worlds. He presented medieval Europe as the centre of the universe. Orcs weren’t allowed internality or culture but they were suspiciously armed with eastern scimitars and partnered with “Easterlings,” tribes of men who were explicitly coded as Middle-Eastern and North African and allied with the series’ villain, Sauron.
Tolkien’s work persists through direct adaptation and has inspired multiple successful properties. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film adaptations are among the most beloved genre films in cinematic history, enjoyed by critics and fans alike. The same work has inspired the increasingly popular Dungeons & Dragons multimedia IP (now in its 5th edition) owned by Wizards of the Coast (WotC). That same IP was adapted into Larian Stuidos’s Baldur’s Gate 3, the biggest game of 2023 by most metrics.
WotC has only recently begun to address the racial implications that have plagued their game for decades. In as recently as their 2016 printing of Volo’s Guide to Monsters, one of the official D&D sourcebooks, role playing as an Orc is described as follows: “Most orcs have been indoctrinated into a life of destruction and slaughter…it’s possible that an orc, if raised outside its culture could develop a limited capacity for empathy, love, and compassion. [However,] No matter how domesticated an orc might seem, its bloodlust flows just beneath the surface.” The language closely mimics the Jim Crow era of describing black men, creatures that need to be rescued from themselves.
In 2020, WotC released an errata removing this description along with a paragraph that implied Half-Orcs were in part a product of eugenics, as well as a sidebar on cannibalism and sacrifice. The errata also removed the intelligence penalty playing as an orc accrued, no longer capping intelligence at -2 artificially.
These tentpole monsters are metaphor and time capsule. They smuggle the ideology of corpses forward through time and in digestible bits. None of these games are about race — not Baldur’s Gate, not most of these “Lovecraftian” titles, and not Dungeons & Dragons. El Paso, Elsewhere is also not a game about race. James and Draculae’s relationship is never examined through that lens. Just like Draculae’s whiteness is only noteworthy juxtaposed against James’ blackness, El Paso Elsewhere is a commentary on race only when juxtaposed against the rest of the medium. Instead, it is an incidental course correction, a natural result of Black creators working within genre and outside of franchise.
Through its inversion we get an analogy that’s finally accurate to history. The power dynamics tilt towards Draculae. She is the one with the capacity for great violence. Draculae is faster, stronger, and literally more bloodthirsty than James could ever be. She’s the one pulling the world into chaos through the same machinations that Lovecraft feared, and she does it to claim power she’s lost. On the other hand, James is the rare Black character in the medium that exists separate from an ensemble where he’s a minority. He’s normal, the only bit of normal in a world trying to kill him at every turn.
