Quote from: Two Crows on February 12, 2025, 04:04:37 PMIs this whole topic based upon some lady in the 1980's confusing biological race with "race" as used in a cultural context?

Yes though that confusion is still very much with us today.  They are conflating the way race is used in a fantasy game like D&D with the way race is used in current year racial politics discussions.  A lot of these people are obsessed with race, racial politics and racism, real or imaginary.  This is the lens through which they see everything.  Everything is about race and everything is about racism.  The most obvious proof of this is that they were molified by the change from race to species even though it's an entirely superficial, meaningless change.

Quote from: Two Crows on February 12, 2025, 04:04:37 PMI can't believe things have gotten this bad, lol.

Stick around. You'll become jaded to it all.

In my experience, there are a few common reasons why a played makes a non-human character.

The first is the "humans are boring" crowd.  Some are trying to make their bland character interesting by making it non-human.  They will generally go for the most rare or weird race option.  Quite a few of these have main character syndrome.  For some, it's simple escapism.  They are humans in real life so, when they play a fantasy or sci-fi rpg, they want to be something else.  For some players I have had, that's pretty much all there is to it.

A sizable majority of people pick their race for simple mechanical advantage.  The race's stats and abilities go well with whatever character build they want to do.  Being able to see in the dark is handy.  Every player I have ever had in 5e who wanted to play a Yuan-ti fell into this category.  Having advantage on all saves against spells of spell-like effects from level 1 with no resource cost is really good.  That's why they want to play a Yuan-ti. 

Then there's the furries.  They want to play an anthromorphic animal because that's what they like.  I don't mean pervy fur fetish people though that subset can be hard to spot until they have been in the game a while.  I mean regular people who are fans of media with anthropomorphic animal characters like Redwall, Mouse Guard or the many animated movies that have such characters like Robin Hood or The Secret of NIHM.  They are fans of that and that's what they want to play.