I think it's more like social justice free association. Like saying Watto is a jewish caricature because he has a big nose and likes money. Says quite a bit more about the claimant than the claim, IMO.
Okay, then how many points of similarity should a fictional species have with a racist caricature/stereotype before you'll lend credence to the critique? Three? Five? Twenty? (Also,
Watto was apparently supposed to be an Italian stereotype, not Jewish.)
You're argument boils down to: "You noticed that a fictional character bears a fair resemblance to racist caricatures? Then you're the real racist!" I think that goes too far in the other direction. Our fiction doesn't exist in a vacuum. If a fictional character closely resembles a racist caricature, then it likely that they were inspired by that caricature even if the creator didn't understand what they were doing. Somebody who is actually racist is going to have a lot more red flags in their work, whereas somebody who is merely imitating things without understanding their context will probably have flags that contradict a purely racist interpretation and it is pretty easy for somebody in the later position to simply be unaware that they are giving mixed signals.
While it is possible to read caricature where none exists,
it is equally possible to ignore caricature that does exist.The aliens and predator are pretty obviously neither deliberately nor subconsciously inspired by racial caricature. The aliens are literally taken from the artist's nightmares and are far too Freudian, biomechanical, and eerily
beautiful to be limited to a purely racialized discourse. The predator seems actively designed to subvert racist expectations, as he dons supposedly "tribal" aesthetic while utilizing highly advanced technology and is ironically defeated by low-tech solutions. It stretches disbelief beyond the breaking point to argue that they are intentionally or subconsciously intended to evoke blackness. Are we talking "blackness" in the sense of Ancient Egypt's Nile-fertilized soil? "Blackness" in the sense of chthonic deities and primeval goddesses of night?
The terraformars are pretty obviously a racist caricature and the plot of the comic is clearly some kind of ultra-conservative quasi-fascist tract (and possibly deliberate trolling). It's trivially easy to make a list of their similarities to racist caricature and argue that they're an intentional racist caricature designed to offend people (e.g. unrealistically human-like visage, afro-textured hair, swarthy skin, hold pistols sideways, wear bling, chase after our women, stereotyped as strong and muscular, build pyramids, constantly derided as unintelligent savages despite evidence to the contrary, live on land that Earth wants to colonize). This should be blatantly obvious to most people,
but the fans are bending over backwards to argue that it totally isn't blackface when it clearly is.
That's the real problem with political extremes like Wokeness. Their rhetoric descends from sane schools of thought, but the problem is that the woke cry wolf so often that when there really is a wolf then nobody notices as they're being eaten.
With orcs and goblins and drow and whatever, you can't easily argue that they evoke racist caricatures because so many authors use them and in so many wildly different ways. Some depictions are ugly as sin, while others look like supermodels. But that doesn't mean people can't make mistakes and unintentionally evoke racial caricature (including of, well,
white folks), particularly when you imitate something written in less enlightened times. I mean, the original pulp fiction genre alone was full of some really nasty attitudes towards women, black folks, and so forth.