It makes me sad that half-elves and half-orcs were removed from modern games. Half-elves were the fifth-most-popular race option on D&D Beyond before D&D 2024 moved them to "legacy support."
They are mixed-race creations created out of love, not hate. They give bi-racial people an identity in the game and allow them to work through the struggles of belonging to two separate cultural identities and express those struggles within it. This is beautiful stuff, fraught with tragedy and a hard-fought victory in bringing both sides of the family together despite cultural differences. It allows us to mirror experiences from our own lives in the game and work out the divisions between our families and cultures.
And now, Tieflings are the popular choice because the choice that spoke to people going through this internal battle was removed. Why shift the cultural struggle stories to humans and demons? It doesn't make sense.
And Gary Gygax got this right 50 years ago, back during the 1970s, when media and television openly explored biracial themes and struggles in our family dramas and sitcoms. He first expressed those themes in fantasy gaming and brought them into the mainstream through the games that kids played.
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