#and it seems entirely arbitrary. im sure if we didn't have a gith companion they would also just be all evil

[tomurakii]

I kind of hate the whole "evil race" thing that you get in fantasy worlds. Like I know 5e specifically has relaxed the moral alignment chart rules/generally made racial traits less of a thing, but a lot of adaptions of its lore still use those things (like bg3) so I feel it's still a relevant point of discussion.

First of all it seems like there's a fundamental difference between the humanoid races that can be individually good, but come from evil cultures (like Lolth-sworn Drow or Githyanki), and (non-playable) races that are credited as being innately morally evil, like orcs and goblins. Probably just because the player can choose to be a Drow or a Gith, and if they were made exclusively evil like the non-playable races it would restrict gameplay a lot.

There are small moments that touch on this in-game (like the discussion about stealing the githyanki egg, or when you can choose to save Sazza) that seem to imply that the 'correct' option is to say that no race is inherently evil, and yet morally-good characters like Wyll and Halsin are FULL of vitriol for goblins, and when you kill goblin children to save Halsin (despite several companions saying that childhood is a time to be forgiven regarding Arabella) nobody bats an eye. After saving Halsin you can ask him if his grove was worth the bloodshed, implying that it was bad to kill Gut/Dror Ragzlin/Minthara, but none of the companions regard the camp you massacred as having nearly the same importance as the tieflings in the grove. So goblins are evil, and yet Sazza is "a person who doesn't deserve to die" and Githyanki and Drow are morally complex.

I don't think it's interesting to just say all goblins are evil, personally. It's a cop-out so that players can fight a lot of enemies without having to grapple with the moral implications of that. And I honestly don't think bg3 as a whole is completely set on whether they agree with the idea of evil races either, between Omeluum, the Emperor, Sazza, Minthara, and Lae'zel who are all characters of "evil" races that you can protect and sympathise with anyway.

But it's tough to see how characters like Wyll who are meant to be so morally steadfast and good treat Lae'zel completely differently to Sazza, ostensibly just because Lae'zel is romanceable so they have to get along. If Wyll really hates evil races like goblins (which he does. A lot), he would hate Lae'zel, so it feels like just another area where his character (and the broader moral stance of the game) was underdeveloped.