Hot Goblin Discourse
Goblin girls. Petite, green, down to clown — but can she really gobble it all?
The overlap of fantasy art and pornography is nothing new. The 20th Century had the voluptuous succubi and licentious lamias of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual and the chesty centaurs and scandalous snake-babes of Frank Frazetta. And further back, the many monstrous maidens of pre-colonial Japan — the shape-changing kitsune, the bondage-loving jorogumo, the lonely yuki-onna — were far from the only bewitching spectres seeking out men and women for some very specific activities. Artists have been blending the paints of hot and monster to delight horny dorks the world over for centuries.
The specific thirst for goblins isn’t an entirely new phenomenon: a whole generation of women got a taste for that green gobblin’ back when Jim Henson’s Creature Shop put a puppet in David Bowie’s pants for the 1986 cult classic Labyrinth.
But there is an endearing weirdness to goblin girls, a relatively new entry to the pantheon of sexed-up monster girls, despite how obvious the combination is with hindsight.
Per Google Trends, the interest in goblins swelled following the debut of the anime series Goblin Slayer (think The Mandalorian, but if The Mandalorian was interesting and full of ultraviolence) in the fall of 2018. This is when the internet figured out that goblin girls can get it. These days a search for “goblin” will return over 3,000 hits on the fetish art site e621, outweighing the entirety of distinct goblin cards printed by Magic: the Gathering’s nearly thirty-year reign by a ratio somewhere around 900%. Meanwhile on Twitter, there’s a smorgasbord of artists tapping into this vein — a particular standout is @HuffsLoves, who has racked up over 45,000 followers with an endearing art style combining soft lines and a playful edge.
A goblin girl is everything a Victoria’s Secret model isn’t. Instead of an aloof, ethereal ice queen marketing sexy underpants to teenagers, the goblin girl is a trickster — her beauty laughs in the face of convention. Joseph Catalanello — animator, illustrator, and all-around cool dude — describes the vibe perfectly: “so unexpectedly attractive that it’ll make people question if they discovered a new fetish, or if it was there all along and this was just its awakening”.
Fantasy art has usually had room for fuller figures. The Italian Renaissance is widely held up as the crown jewel of artistic accomplishment. The art of that era is feverishly obsessed with two subjects: genre elements and fat chicks getting naked. And the underground fantasy art of the 1970s had its flirtations with curvier female subjects — from Vaughn Bode’s infatuation with softer stomachs and Elinore, the leading lady of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, to the aesthetic obsessions of R. Crumb. Not a bad decade for curve appeal.
As much as we like to say “cartoon violence isn’t gonna make someone go out and do real violence” when confronted with comstockery demanding that we clean all the filth and fun out of art, the presentation of bodies in media is real enough to be measured. Fijian girls were living fat, happy lives for centuries until the introduction of television presented Western media’s vision of absolute thinness as the standard for women. This massive psychic wound begs the question asked by actress/model Lilith Fury: “Why is it that a preference towards thin women is seen as standard, but a preference towards women my size is a fetish?”
Late capitalism has thrown the babes out with the bathwater. If the kind of chicks I fantasize about are remarkably absent — if bigger girls are still having their bodies treated like a problem — how is this a fantasy? “Thick thighs save lives” isn’t just a catchphrase, it’s an ethos.
In the recent yet-to-crest wave of hot goblin girls, a pattern emerges. A contemporary goblin girl is often as wide as a human woman and about a head or three shorter, making her already vast ass appear hypnotically huge on her stubby frame. In the bleeding-edge lexicon of horny internet people — for those not in the know — this kind of vertically-truncated voluptuous lady is called a shortstack. Exploiting a quirk of non-Euclidean geometry to make their curves go further is the lecherdemain that goblin gals use to steal wallets and hearts the world over. Some she-goblins take the bit further with outright Willendorfian proportions: a cup size somewhere in the back half of the alphabet or thighs thicker than an entire elf.
Our imaginations have an amazing potential to conjure up possibility, but we still frequently find ourselves as unfortunately bound to racial shorthands inherited from centuries of colonialism and racialized caste systems as anything else is. Every year alongside the wholesome Halloween fun, there’s always some schmuck ruining it for everyone else by dressing up in ethnic caricature and calling it a costume, as if they think they’re the Prime Minister of Canada. Leave it to the gruesome denizens of the chanboards — 4chan, 8chan, and other realms too terrible to contemplate — to take something great and ruin it by rubbing their racism all over it.
Out there in the wild waters of /tg/, /aco/, and other such places, a new archetype — the Ghetto Goblin — has risen from the foam in between Warhammer 40K memes and debates about which cartoon characters are cucks. For the uninitiated, the Ghetto Goblin is a subgenre of goblin girl pornography that’s exactly what it sounds like: grafting the Jezebel stereotype onto goblins. In the same way that zombie survival fantasies can be a way of indulging in colonialist fantasies of slaughter and conquest behind the safe distance of dehumanization, the Ghetto Goblin archetype is a way for the racist pond scum of the internet’s stinkiest frog-swamps to indulge in lascivious misogynoir layered behind a coat of green, plausibly deniable paint.
“Suddenly it’s payback for all those days she spend dishing out dirty talk to you. You decide to go against every workplace assimilation training course you ever went to and drop every slur and insult you can remember hearing before. There are a lot, and she loves them all.”
“Ghetto Goblin Girls”, Sandcastles Luffington
That is the sentiment underneath the underneath, made more obvious in that moment than the Gish gallop of made-up fantasy slurs that immediately follow — this fantasy that the cheesedicked racism of the presumed reader is actually a huge turn-on for the women they’re degrading with it. One could ask what this taxonomy of goblin pornography subgenres has anything to do with… well, anything, but a glance out the window any time in the last few years shows us gruesome lessons about how much damage niche internet racists can do.
The problem of laundering colonialist racial fear and shorthands through presentation of non-Europeans as inhuman monsters is far from unique to contemporary goblin pornography, either in newness or in specificity. This practice is as old as the modern concept of Science Fiction and Fantasy as a distinct section of the bookstore.
From H.P. Lovecraft’s purpiloquent tales of terror about how everyone more ethnic than a glass of unpasteurized milk is some kind of demonic fish from outer space, to Tolkein’s depictions of orcs as a yellow peril scourge upon creation that it’s okay to do war crimes to, these attitudes have existed in science fiction and fantasy from the very beginning and still linger far too often. Recycling senescent race science is far from extinct in new releases, either.
As noted by Chance the Rapper, the 2017 Netflix fantasy cop drama Bright comments on racism by dressing up black stereotypes in orc-tusks and then proceeds to set up a narrative where orcs’ problems are more or less their fault for some dubiously-historical event thousands of years ago.
Meanwhile, Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War — a paleoconservative version of the Turner Diaries — blows into the whistle from the other end, repeatedly referring to black or Hispanic characters as “orcs.” White liberals aren’t above indulging their own flavor of this either, gushing over the thudding mediocrity that is The Goblin Emperor, a book that presents an allegedly comforting escapist fantasy in which Goblin Obama builds a literal bridge with a bunch of racist elves.
But the channerfrogs feverishly consuming this racist fantasy fare aren’t conjuring their very specific kink-nouveau out of thin air; they’re just moaning the quiet part loud, dick in hand.
Without excuses, we need to build a better future than this. Goblin girls, like any other fantasy creature, are not inherently problematic, and the tao of goblin girls is essentially empty — filled by whatever purposes a particular artist has in mind for her. With that in mind, some suggestions:
Goblins are alarmingly effective as goth girls, and spinning that out to every corner of the vast tapestry of alternative scenes offers countless opportunities to iterate. We could try punk goblins, hippie goblins, beatnik goblins, rave goblins, hipster goblins, hypebeast goblins, e-girlblins, or any of the hundreds of alt-aesthetics I didn’t mention. There is a lot of promise in the joblin — a goblin in office attire — that somehow works despite (or because of) running counter to the typical free-spiritedness of a goblin gal.
Science fiction and fantasy are genres of imagination with boundless potential. Tediocrities creaming their jeans to racial stereotypes are only the future if no one else dares to dream. Our imaginations should instead be like the goblin girl: free, fun, and getting a little weird with it sometimes. Whoever is out there drawing those chubby, plus-sized goblin girls: keep up the good fight, the world thanks you for your service.
This essay was originally published in BLOOD KNIFE #7’s “SEXUAL OVERDRIVE” collection.
