(Alternate title: "Heyeward Peepers Lensscleraft's Cat")
Disclaimer: I do not unreservedly endorse using any of this in actual play. It's but a thought experiment, with certain downsides to it -- see the last section.
I have seen Beholders described as: Lovecraftian abominations with horrifyingly gibbous eldritch cyclopean* physical features as found in Lovecraft's oeuvre, but also with the horrifyingly racist mental features found in actual human HP Lovecraft.
*Fun fact: 'cyclopean', in English (probably, but not entirely necessarily, as Lovecraft uses it), only means 'large', specifically pertaining to large stone blocks. Similarly, 'cyclops' in the Greek doesn't even mean 'one-eye', it means 'wheel-eye' or 'round-eye'. The sort of multiple-entendre meaning here, because it is a much-favored Lovecraftian word and calls to mind creatures with one large eyeball, is but a fortuitous coincidence.
What would that look like if we took it very seriously? Why might we do it like that?
Beholders are traditionally, like, hate everyone who isn't themself. They just about tolerate other beholders who look and act exactly like themself; the set of {lesser organisms} starts at beholders who look even slightly different and goes on down to, like, earthworms.
A good thing about this is that racism is clearly villainous, and making horrific aberrations who are bad guys racist is clearly of value to reinforce that.
One downside to this is that it lends credence to the kind of person who says "I'm not racist, I hate everyone equally", which is dumb and bad in various ways and for various reasons.
Another is that beholders are cool, or at least look cool, so they run into the same problem as, say, Nazis in stylish uniforms.
An upside to leaning into Lovecraft's goofily over-the-top racism specifically is that it makes beholders less cool. Racism can be better tolerated by the audience when the racists are otherwise cool, but making it over-the-top gonzo stupid makes it harder to tolerate. In general, it is didactically powerful when villainy is not just evil, but also stupid and goofy.
Lovecraft's Cat and the Eigenslur
HP Lovecraft was so stupidly goofily racist that he named his cat the N-slur, with the hard R. Should, perhaps, beholders be so stupidly goofily racist that they keep pets named with the fantasy equivalent of the N-slur? Which raises the question: what's the fantasy equivalent of the N-slur?
Intuitively, to many of us, the N-slur (with the hard R, as used by non-Black people) is equivalent in power and malice to the R-slur for the mentally handicapped, the F-slur for gay persons, probably the C-slur for women and the K-slur for Jewish persons, etc.
Eigenvalue is a thing that I don't 100% understand, but, basically, the eigenvalue of a thing is its essence, that which remains unchanged when the thing is otherwise transformed. (I figured 'eigen' was some guy's name, but no, it's just a German word for 'own'.)
The eigenslur, I am told, is what we call what you have left when you subtract Blackness from the N-slur, mental handicap from the R-slur, homosexuality from the F-slur, etc. -- reflecting the fundamental similarity between these slurs. The eigenslur is the core essence of the most maliciously hateful fightin' words.
So, to do this properly, we may need to come up with words that take the eigenslur and add human-ness, orc-ness, elf-ness, etc.
My first instinct for orcs is vird, from 'viridis', meaning 'green'. But probably your higher-intensity slurs should come from Germanic, not Latin, because Germanic-origin words are typically seen as stronger and more emphatic in English, but 'vird' might strip out enough of the obvious Latin-ness as to be strong. Or we could just go straight for the German 'grün' -- my instinct then is grunk, but that might be a little too cutesy to be obviously a partaking of the eigenslur.
Elves: unfortunately, all the words for 'elf' are cognate, even between Romance and Germanic languages. 'Baumficker' would be 'tree-effer'; 'Pflanzenficker' would be 'plant-effer'. Drop some syllables, call it flacker or maybe placker (plakker?).
Perhaps every beholder has a pet cat or similar lifeform. Or perhaps some beholders have, like, pet sapient creatures? But whom they name with various instantiations of the eigenslur? But never actual applicable slurs -- Lovecraft of course didn't name his cat a slur for cat, he named his cat a slur for a disfavored race of human. So it'd be, like, a pet elf named Grunk or a pet orc named Plakker, never an elf named Plakker nor an orc named Grunk.
We could of course do a beholder with a pet tiefling, orc, or drow, or a pet something else named with the eigenslur-instantiation for one of those, or (best of all) a pet one of those named with the slur for another of those. And then compare and contrast the stupid goofy racism of the beholder with the more everyday racism facing those species from regular humanfolk!
Why Maybe Not In Actual Play
I have encountered the claim that, just as sexual assault has no place in a D&D game, neither does racism or slavery. Melanistically-well-endowed persons deal with enough racism in their day-to-day lives, making the D&D villains racist too just risks triggering trauma. I can see why this position might be compelling -- mostly by analogy to how compelled I am by the argument that sexual assault is verboten.
That said, I don't actually fully 100% buy it. As long as racism (and slavery) is not good or well-tolerated in the D&D world, as long as it is clearly villainous and evil, I think it's fine -- especially if you only have white people at your table; this is something to ask any people of other races at your table during Session Zero. I think a white player experiencing annoying racism because they're playing a non-human (or even because they're playing human, but the campaign brings their character amongst other species) can be didactically powerful -- one of my favorite D&D experiences was my Drow Paladin of Bahamut, in the Forgotten Realms, who kept getting racism'd at by everybody she encountered, which got old and tedious real fast and thereby enlightened me more than all the critical race books and articles in the world.
Having a beholder with a 'pet' sapient creature is of course slavery, and (even if we're okay with slavery in the game) do we want to be drawing analogy between pets and slavery? Cats domesticated themselves; dogs and humans co-domesticated each other, but for any other kind of domesticated pet/livestock/plant, the slavery comparison is more apt than we might be comfortable with. Of course, we don't want to say that slavery is fine because it compares to domestication which is fine; the more accurate thing is that domestication is unfine because it compares to domestication which is unfine, but drawing the comparison will still be seen by many to be unfairly diminishing the terribleness of slavery, unfairly embiggifying the terribleness of domestication, or both. Maybe we don't want to get into that discursive morass, even if the entity doing the enslavement/domestication is explicitly an evil racist aberration.
Another possible reason not to is because beholders look cool, and I like using beholder iconography in my personal life (I've got a beholder keychain, my laptop is festooned with googly eyes and is named Beholder, and so on), and I don't necessarily want it to become widely recognized that beholders are synonymous with stupid goofy racism, lest I find myself tied to stupid goofy racism.**
**I'm not about to get a beholder tattoo, of course. Especially if I were ever planning on running for public office. Topical! Or should I say, totenkopfical?
