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I thought this was an interesting article. It traces the history of orcs in fantasy games back through Tolkien. It talks about the tropes and real-world ideas which have influenced depiction of orcs and to what extent these influences continue today.
There's some interesting facts I was unaware of. For example, my mental image of orcs gives them very green skin like nothing we see in the real world, possibly due to too much Warcraft :P I didn't know that in some older depictions, orcs were described with a wider variety of skin colors, including some found in the real world!
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Interesting, and fairly persuasive, though most people (including the author) seem to be unaware that orcs are older than Tolkien.
The word Orc comes from Italian folklore, the Orci or Orchi, who are satyrs or wildmen (akin to the English Wose and French Homme Sauvage)- a sort of ape/human hybrid. These date back, eventually, to at least the Middle Ages.
Also, Hobbits in Tolkien have brown skin, which undermines the racial component of the criticism. I realize they are seldom depicted as such in media, but the actual text of the book contradicts this stereotype.
However, the Orcs themselves do have a disquieting implication in their depictions. To a limited degree, however, they represent the enemy Tolkien fought in WWI; though not the Germans per se (Tolkien being himself a German-Englishman) - more the imagined enemy.
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Utter silliness. And predictable silliness at that.
Orcs are in the same mythological family as trolls or ogres. The genesis of the myths of those creatures in our pre-historic oral tradition is generally considered to be early human interaction with neanderthals.
If anything orcs and their mythological brethren are a glimpse into the early human race's co-existence, and probable conflict, with neanderthals.
Tolkien was basically accused of fostering racial stereotypes with his orcs. His reply was some version of: "I give you monsters. You see africans. Who is the racist?"
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Congrats on stopping after the second paragraph, Adamantine Dragon. I'm just not sure why you had to stop in this thread to let everyone know you didn't read the linked article.
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Good find. This article delineates one of the main problems I have with the depiction of orcs and other "evil" humanoids in RPGs. I can't understand how a species that can use tools and language and has the capacity of forethought and hindsight could be universally evil. Or even mostly evil. Wouldn't they be able to choose just like any human?
I understand that some players don't want to wade into moral uncertainty. It's not convenient to have to stop and ask, "Are you a good orc or a bad orc?" all the time. But, wait, don't we ask them to do this all the time for human, elf, and dwarf villains?
In the campaign I run, races don't have alignment. Rule of thumb is this: If it can speak, it can be any alignment. They have to stop and ask questions.
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I read enough to know it was pointless to read more. Typical academic pseudo-intellectual claptrap masquerading as deep meaning. "Look at all the big words I know!"
No doubt that approach works with a lot of people. Especially when they already agree with the premise.
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I read enough to know it was pointless to read more. Typical academic pseudo-intellectual claptrap masquerading as deep meaning. "Look at all the big words I know!"
No doubt that approach works with a lot of people.
So just ignore and move on. You don't have to come into this thread to let everyone know you're too smart to be taken in by the article. Let people who want to actually talk about the article talk about it, and people who don't want to talk about it can... not talk about it.
I can't understand how a species that can use tools and language and has the capacity of forethought and hindsight could be universally evil. Or even mostly evil. Wouldn't they be able to choose just like any human?
I totally agree. I cannot take the morality in the game seriously if there are supposed to be intelligent people who are incapable of making moral choices. How is it meaningful for my paladin to struggle to be an exemplar of good when just being born a different race would be enough to make her incapable of acting good? Is she just good because she was born an elf? If there's no moral choice in the setting, then choosing to be good doesn't mean much.
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That's exactly why Tolkien eventually came to the conclusion that true monsters have to be automatons or individually evil via their own decisions. He came to that decision, however, after writing most of his books; hence the trolls in the Hobbit and the Orcs in the LotR seem both sentient and are depicted as innately evil.
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Yeah, I read the whole thing and while I initially felt the best way to deal with it would be to let it fall off the front page with disinterest, I have to say that I generally agree with Adamantine Dragon. The article is pedantic nonsense. There's no reason to make the text so dense other than to show off, especially when one of the stated goals was to make this sort of discussion more accessible.
The arguments are not even always coherent. In one section, Tolkien is quoted as describing orcs as "sallow-skinned" (i.e. pale yellow), and the conclusion drawn from this quote in the next paragraph is that orcs are almost always depicted as black. Huh?
Early D&D describes orcs as greenish-brown/olive-brown. Those were chosen because they are totally unnatural skin-colors, not because bad people are brown or any other racist reason. The inhumanity of their coloration is the important take-away, not the non-whiteness. It feels like the author is really reaching here.
Ultimately, I think the first comment on the article is pretty spot on. Orcs in roleplaying games are just bad things you can kill without feeling bad. That's it. There's nothing special or nuanced about them. If you want a more nuanced game, then you change things and make good orcs and bad orcs and turn the whole system gray.
Male orcs dominate orc women because orcs are bad and gender-based domination is bad and we all know it. It's a lazy short-cut, again, to help us not feel bad about killing orcs. Orc women are brutal and dominating to non-orcs so that PCs don't actually have to feel badly for the orc women and the treatment they receive from the men and can just kill all of them without worry, because the point of orcs is to be killed without guilt.
D&D is based on a world with objective good and objective evil. Things that look mostly human are good, things that don't are bad. It's not that orcs don't look white, it's that orcs don't look human. It's not connected to any sort of real people.
It's fantasy--it's wishing the world were easier to deal with, morally. In the real world, you can't just look at someone and know they're bad guys. You can't just wipe out every bad guy and save the day. Orcs let you play the easy hero who doesn't have to make complex judgments--you can just kill the things labeled "bad guy," and feel good about it. The point is that this is not like the real world. To me, trying to twist it so that orcs somehow parallel real racism and sexism is bordering on offensive.
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I have to say I agree with AD here. Seems a rather superficial article that is completely built on assuming the Author intended for Orcs to be compared to whatever. Tolkien said that was incorrect. People still want to make the comparison. So this person wrote this article knowing that Tolkien wasn't making a racial stereotype or was clearly uninformed. And anyone who blatantly goes about branding themselves as a feminist isn't winning any points from me either. Its like that age old saying, "How do you know someone is vegan? They'll bloody tell you."
Alignment has alot to do with the culture of the race as well. Also keep in mind that its only true for the specific campaign setting. Orcs could quite possibly be the pinnacle of civilized society in another setting whatever.
Honestly the whole article stunk of "This MONSTER has been portrayed in a manner that might offend someone! Other people be offended with me!
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I totally agree. I cannot take the morality in the game seriously if there are supposed to be intelligent people who are incapable of making moral choices. How is it meaningful for my paladin to struggle to be an exemplar of good when just being born a different race would be enough to make her incapable of acting good? Is she just good because she was born an elf? If there's no moral choice in the setting, then choosing to be good doesn't mean much.
I think you're missing the point of this stuff.
It's a power fantasy. The Paladin was not written for people that wanted to struggle with morality, it was written for people that wanted to be super amazing heroes above and beyond normal heroes. There was not supposed to be any struggle. Orcs and other "always evil" monsters were there to facilitate this kind of a power fantasy.
You get to be a shining beacon of good by killing the bad guys. It's easy to defeat evil, which is intentionally utterly unlike real evil, which has no easy answers.
It's no different than someone who wants to be a wizard and feels awesome because in real life he can't throw fireballs. In real life, the existence of evil is frustrating because you can't just chop its head off. You often can't even identify it properly. The fantasy then, is being able to immediately identify evil and physically fight it.
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I totally agree. I cannot take the morality in the game seriously if there are supposed to be intelligent people who are incapable of making moral choices. How is it meaningful for my paladin to struggle to be an exemplar of good when just being born a different race would be enough to make her incapable of acting good? Is she just good because she was born an elf? If there's no moral choice in the setting, then choosing to be good doesn't mean much.I think you're missing the point of this stuff.
It's a power fantasy. The Paladin was not written for people that wanted to struggle with morality, it was written for people that wanted to be super amazing heroes above and beyond normal heroes. There was not supposed to be any struggle. Orcs and other "always evil" monsters were there to facilitate this kind of a power fantasy.
You get to be a shining beacon of good by killing the bad guys. It's easy to defeat evil, which is intentionally utterly unlike real evil, which has no easy answers.
It's no different than someone who wants to be a wizard and feels awesome because in real life he can't throw fireballs. In real life, the existence of evil is frustrating because you can't just chop its head off. You often can't even identify it properly. The fantasy then, is being able to immediately identify evil and physically fight it.
I really like this post. Probably the only thing good that'll come from this thread. I totally wish I could just chop Evil's head off in real life.
Ooh look! A special snowflorc!
What color iss its? Is its evil my preciousss?
Predictably so. Wait until the exterminators/muder hobos arrive to clean it up. Wait, why are you lisping like that? Is this a veiled attack on people who lithp?
Aiiiiieeeeee! We hates it! [Bites dice rolling hand of speaker]
...
[Later, after non-specifically caricatured biting, lisping, bent creature has been dispatched]
Can I be one of whatever he was? Or a snowflorc? [Ducks]
Tolkien said that was incorrect.
It's rather silly to believe that an author not purposefully drawing upon something means that they aren't drawing upon it. It's very easy to unintentionally include background memes in one's writing. For example, consider this thread from the other week. The gist of it is that the way a few dwarven deities were talked about ended up being heterosexist. The general consensus of the thread (or at least, my opinion on the matter) is that this was unintentional. No one intended that Bolka be written to be exclusive of queer dwarves. Nonetheless, it still happened. (I have a post on the second page of that thread which explores in more detail the implications of how these deities are depicted.)
One purpose of the sort of analysis in the linked post in the OP is to better understand these invisible pressures that exist. We are all products of the world. We don't magically avoid widespread social ideas. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending we are free of any influence we are unaware of doesn't solve anything. If we are willing to self-reflect and look at how these ideas influence us, we can try to resist their influence. We can overcome them.
Early D&D describes orcs as greenish-brown/olive-brown. Those were chosen because they are totally unnatural skin-colors, not because bad people are brown or any other racist reason.
I am the most failed lurker ever...
The arguments are not even always coherent. In one section, Tolkien is quoted as describing orcs as "sallow-skinned" (i.e. pale yellow), and the conclusion drawn from this quote in the next paragraph is that orcs are almost always depicted as black. Huh?
That was somewhat of a error on my part. I do describe them as being depicted as almost always black skinned, right after I give the Tolkien quote about "sallow-skin." I was trying to keep the Tolkien section short, because I wanted to spend most of my time on the roleplay literature, and Tolkien is already widely discussed elsewhere on the internet. But I don't think this slight error in composition. Tolkien says that orcs are depicted []as a race[/i] and I then state they're depicted as a race. This isn't really incoherent, but just a lack of clarity on my part.
Early D&D describes orcs as greenish-brown/olive-brown. Those were chosen because they are totally unnatural skin-colors, not because bad people are brown or any other racist reason. The inhumanity of their coloration is the important take-away, not the non-whiteness. It feels like the author is really reaching here.
Brown (AD&D), dark olive brown, and black (Warhammer) are all "natural" skin colors. And the fact that one defining characteristic of Orcs is their "non-whiteness" is very important, something that I try to press both in the Introduction (Making up Human(oid)s and the other), and elsewhere in the article.
As for the rest of you comment, I'm not sure what to say. Whatever you think is pedantic, I can't say. I use the language I use because it's important. In both the introductory post to this series and the Discussion section of the article, I make it pretty clear why I think using detailed language is important. If you're not convinced, I can compel you otherwise. But I think accusations of "pedantism" is just an easy out for those unwilling to interrogate these issues.
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I can't understand how a species that can use tools and language and has the capacity of forethought and hindsight could be universally evil. Or even mostly evil. Wouldn't they be able to choose just like any human?
Because its a game. There's really nothing more to understand than that. The game is fantastical escapism with easily identifiable good and evil because reality is so much more complicated.
And I agree with AD; the article's author sees racism because without seeing racism, the article has no central thesis. This horse has been beaten numerous times and the author isn't bringing anything new to the table.
-Skeld
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I think when he says olive brown he's referring to the color of green olives, which is definitely NOT the 'olive' skin color attached to Mediterranean-toned humans. The 'greenish-brown' right before it kind of gave it away.
==Aelryinth
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Tolkien said that was incorrect.It's rather silly to believe that an author not purposefully drawing upon something means that they aren't drawing upon it. It's very easy to unintentionally include background memes in one's writing. For example, consider this thread from the other week. The gist of it is that the way a few dwarven deities were talked about ended up being heterosexist. The general consensus of the thread (or at least, my opinion on the matter) is that this was unintentional. No one intended that Bolka be written to be exclusive of queer dwarves. Nonetheless, it still happened. (I have a post on the second page of that thread which explores in more detail the implications of how these deities are depicted.)
One purpose of the sort of analysis in the linked post in the OP is to better understand these invisible pressures that exist. We are all products of the world. We don't magically avoid widespread social ideas. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending we are free of any influence we are unaware of doesn't solve anything. If we are willing to self-reflect and look at how these ideas influence us, we can try to resist their influence. We can overcome them.
Uh yes it does. Your posting right now on a board where we have to interpret developer intent as clearly as possible in order to play the game.
If an Author says a particular detail has no extra meaning, IT HAS NO EXTRA MEANING.
The Blue curtain doesn't exemplify the sadness of the author or whatever if he said it didn't.
The Orcs aren't being alluded as a racial stereotype. They're just fugly and evil. Because Tolkien said that was what he meant by what he wrote. In the end the only thing that matters is what the author meant. To say otherwise, just simply means your wrong. Period.
The Article sounds a bit accusatory to be simply about intellectual discussion.
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Good find. This article delineates one of the main problems I have with the depiction of orcs and other "evil" humanoids in RPGs. I can't understand how a species that can use tools and language and has the capacity of forethought and hindsight could be universally evil. Or even mostly evil. Wouldn't they be able to choose just like any human?
I understand that some players don't want to wade into moral uncertainty. It's not convenient to have to stop and ask, "Are you a good orc or a bad orc?" all the time. But, wait, don't we ask them to do this all the time for human, elf, and dwarf villains?
In the campaign I run, races don't have alignment. Rule of thumb is this: If it can speak, it can be any alignment. They have to stop and ask questions.
I certainly agree with the general rule to remove alignment restrictions from intelligent species. In fact, I just had a Handmaiden Devil (Gylou) who was CE. I mean, she was still evil, but she had escaped hell to the material plane in search for a place without devilish patriarchy. She still was doing some bad stuff, but she rejected the lawful axis of her alignment (whatever that means :P).
Because Tolkien said that was what he meant by what he wrote. In the end the only thing that matters is what the author meant. To say otherwise, just simply means your wrong. Period.Intentional Fallacy
How is that even a fallacy? It even states in the definition that it's a quite valid interpretation.
That's exactly why Tolkien eventually came to the conclusion that true monsters have to be automatons or individually evil via their own decisions. He came to that decision, however, after writing most of his books; hence the trolls in the Hobbit and the Orcs in the LotR seem both sentient and are depicted as innately evil.
I didn't know this, but I'm not surprised. I certainly think that after writing as much as he did, he had worked out some things. I mean, it makes complete sense to look back on one's work and realize that what you learned from them changed how you would have made them. But it's cool to know that he realized that!
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Early D&D describes orcs as greenish-brown/olive-brown. Those were chosen because they are totally unnatural skin-colors, not because bad people are brown or any other racist reason.Ahem... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_skin
And here I always pictured the color of those pickled green olives with the red thing in the middle. What an odd choice of descriptor for that skin color. Point conceded.
This isn't really incoherent, but just a lack of clarity on my part.
I'll accept that. I'm impressed you even addressed it.
Brown (AD&D), dark olive brown, and black (Warhammer) are all "natural" skin colors.
I think this is where the disagreement comes in. Those three colors don't sound like human skin tones to me, and I never imagined them as such. I can't picture any human skin color when I hear "brown," I think of that brown crayon you used for tree bark or whatever. I already mentioned what I thought of upon hearing olive. And black I assumed meant black--not the color of "black people," but actually black.
I can see now another take on it, but those descriptions just read as, "these are totally not human colors" more than anything else to me.
And the fact that one defining characteristic of Orcs is their "non-whiteness" is very important, something that I try to press both in the Introduction (Making up Human(oid)s and the other), and elsewhere in the article.
Well, yes, I saw that, but I was arguing that it wasn't their "non-whiteness" that is significant, but rather their "non-humanness."
As for the rest of you comment, I'm not sure what to say. Whatever you think is pedantic, I can't say. I use the language I use because it's important.
I think the language you use is harmful to your stated goals because it makes it less accessible. Even your language in this response is bordering on the supercilious.
"...for those unwilling to interrogate these issues." Really? Interrogate? I know it's correct, but come on.
And while I can see the possibility of subtle racism now, thanks to the color clarification, I still think the true point of the orcs is just to make them inhuman and impossible to empathize with, so that the party can feel heroic for killing them instead of feeling guilty.
I read enough to know it was pointless to read more. Typical academic pseudo-intellectual claptrap masquerading as deep meaning. "Look at all the big words I know!"
No doubt that approach works with a lot of people. Especially when they already agree with the premise.
You'd make me the happiest CG undead in the world if you read it all! I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on it in its entirety, even if you eventually find yourself in opposition to my thesis.
Seems a rather superficial article that is completely built on assuming the Author intended for Orcs to be compared to whatever.
I may have slipped up somewhere in my writing, but I am 100% sure that this article's thesis rests on no claims to author intent.
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If an Author says a particular detail has no extra meaning, IT HAS NO EXTRA MEANING.
I'm sorry, but that goes against the approach of pretty much every modern school of literary theory. You are just simply wrong here.
Seems a rather superficial article that is completely built on assuming the Author intended for Orcs to be compared to whatever.I may have slipped up somewhere in my writing, but I am 100% sure that this article makes no claims to author intent.
The Author meaning Tolkien. You are criticizing his work on a detail that he clarified had no meaning or intention of being applied to a racial stereotype.
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If an Author says a particular detail has no extra meaning, IT HAS NO EXTRA MEANING.I'm sorry, but that goes against the approach of pretty much every modern school of literary theory. You are just simply wrong here.
What book are you reading if not what the author intended for you to read?
I wouldn't be making this argument if we were discussing poetry or some other open ended medium but this is a fantasy novel. Its a third person narrative. We see what the author wants us to see. What the author doesn't want us to see, he doesn't write.
I thought this was an interesting article. It traces the history of orcs in fantasy games back through Tolkien. It talks about the tropes and real-world ideas which have influenced depiction of orcs and to what extent these influences continue today.
There's some interesting facts I was unaware of. For example, my mental image of orcs gives them very green skin like nothing we see in the real world, possibly due to too much Warcraft :P I didn't know that in some older depictions, orcs were described with a wider variety of skin colors, including some found in the real world!
Honestly, I would love to do further work on this, investigating orcs (and other "mook" races) through a wide variety of roleplaying games and publishers. Sadly, we work with what we've got, and a new graduate's impoverished salary does not pay for very many classic RPG rulebooks :P
Suffice it to say, I think there is a lot to learn investigating a kind of "archaeology of roleplaying knowledge." :P
What book are you reading if not what the author intended for you to read?
Here is a link to a copy of the essay which introduced the idea that xn0o0cl3 linked you to. You should read it.
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Tolkien said that was incorrect.It's rather silly to believe that an author not purposefully drawing upon something means that they aren't drawing upon it. It's very easy to unintentionally include background memes in one's writing. For example, consider this thread from the other week. The gist of it is that the way a few dwarven deities were talked about ended up being heterosexist. The general consensus of the thread (or at least, my opinion on the matter) is that this was unintentional. No one intended that Bolka be written to be exclusive of queer dwarves. Nonetheless, it still happened. (I have a post on the second page of that thread which explores in more detail the implications of how these deities are depicted.)
One purpose of the sort of analysis in the linked post in the OP is to better understand these invisible pressures that exist. We are all products of the world. We don't magically avoid widespread social ideas. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending we are free of any influence we are unaware of doesn't solve anything. If we are willing to self-reflect and look at how these ideas influence us, we can try to resist their influence. We can overcome them.
Uh yes it does. Your posting right now on a board where we have to interpret developer intent as clearly as possible in order to play the game.
If an Author says a particular detail has no extra meaning, IT HAS NO EXTRA MEANING.
The Blue curtain doesn't exemplify the sadness of the author or whatever if he said it didn't.
The Orcs aren't being alluded as a racial stereotype. They're just fugly and evil. Because Tolkien said that was what he meant by what he wrote. In the end the only thing that matters is what the author meant. To say otherwise, just simply...
That is wrong, for several reasons.
First of all, the most obvious reason is that the author might be lying.
Secondly, the author himself might not be aware of the meaning.
Let's use the blue curtain scenario:
The author might say that, "no the blue curtain symbolises nothing", but, and here we get to the important bit, he chose to make the curtain blue in the first place. Why did he make that choice?
That's where it gets interesting. Why do dark elves have black skin? Given that they live underground in darkness it seems more reasonable that they should have albino skin. Someone had to make the decision at some point that their skin was black.
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What book are you reading if not what the author intended for you to read?Here is a link to a copy of the essay which introduced the idea that xn0o0cl3 linked you to. You should read it.
I see very little relevance it has to the medium used by Tolkien. I already said that my argument would be rather pointless to construct against an open ended medium.
In fact the only arguments in the essay relate to poetry which I have no qualms with.
As for you Ganryu,
1. If we assume the Author is lying then we cannot make any assumptions about the literary work whatsoever. Did Frodo destroy the ring? Well Tolkien wrote it, but if he could have been lying...
If the writer is unaware of the meaning then it effectively has no meaning. Why did he write it there unless he had a reason?
2. As for the Blue curtain, the author may have very well just liked the color blue. It was only mentioned to set the scene in our heads.
3. As for the Dark Elves, because the writer wanted their skin to be black despite what would occur naturally. Why they did I can only guess, but had I the time and was certain I would get a response, I would ask and take their word for it.
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You'd make me the happiest CG undead in the world if you read it all! I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on it in its entirety, even if you eventually find yourself in opposition to my thesis.I read enough to know it was pointless to read more. Typical academic pseudo-intellectual claptrap masquerading as deep meaning. "Look at all the big words I know!"
No doubt that approach works with a lot of people. Especially when they already agree with the premise.
Annabel, as one writer to another I will say that the article has literary merit, and is exactly the sort of article a typical college English professor would love to read.
But I don't write for English professors, and I don't write for self-actualization or to present my desirable bona fides for the world to see. So it's not my kind of writing.
Let's just say that I find your premise fundamentally flawed, your logic less than crisp and I think the article reveals more about the author than it does about its thesis.
But as I said above, it works perfectly for the purpose I believe it was written. So congratulations on that score.
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Some of the best stories involve traditionally evil fantasy stereotypes breaking the mold. If you don't like a fantasy stereotype then write a story about it breaking the mold and help create a new perspective.
How many people have read about Drizzt Do'urden over the years? How about the zombies in Paranorman becoming the victims of the violent townsfolk? I'm sure this well read community can provide lots of other examples.
The Paladin was not written for people that wanted to struggle with morality, it was written for people that wanted to be super amazing heroes above and beyond normal heroes. There was not supposed to be any struggle.
Perhaps, but unless you can find a source for this, it must remain supposition. Regardless, if people want to play paladins that struggle with morality rather than/as well as receive kewl powarz, it is not wrong to do so. Just incredibly boring. ;P
Orcs in roleplaying games are just bad things you can kill without feeling bad. That's it. There's nothing special or nuanced about them. If you want a more nuanced game, then you change things and make good orcs and bad orcs and turn the whole system gray.
Male orcs dominate orc women because orcs are bad and gender-based domination is bad and we all know it. It's a lazy short-cut, again, to help us not feel bad about killing orcs. Orc women are brutal and dominating to non-orcs so that PCs don't actually have to feel badly for the orc women and the treatment they receive from the men and can just kill all of them without worry, because the point of orcs is to be killed without guilt.
[Emphasis mine] My mileage varies so much from this it is in kilometers. It also assumes a generic approach to RPGs. Not all tables/players/GMs agree with this cut and dried approach to murder-hoboism. Then again, my brothers subscribes to this wholeheartedly, and sadly promulgates the trope with his children. And yet they can all read Elfquest, in which the heroes are elves and the humans are all evil...
D&D is based on a world with objective good and objective evil. Things that look mostly human are good, things that don't are bad. It's not that orcs don't look white, it's that orcs don't look human.It's not connected to any sort of real people.
Again, this is your version of the game. Not mine by any means. Reading your comments doesn't seem to leave any room for different approaches. Or should I just assume that this is a given? If so, ok.
It's fantasy--it's wishing the world were easier to deal with, morally. In the real world, you can't just look at someone and know they're bad guys. You can't just wipe out every bad guy and save the day. Orcs let you play the easy hero who doesn't have to make complex judgments--you can just kill the things labeled "bad guy," and feel good about it. The point is that this is not like the real world. To me, trying to twist it so that orcs somehow parallel real racism and sexism is bordering on offensive.
[Emphasis mine] I can agree with that last part.
And the fact that one defining characteristic of Orcs is their "non-whiteness" is very important, something that I try to press both in the Introduction (Making up Human(oid)s and the other), and elsewhere in the article.Well, yes, I saw that, but I was arguing that it wasn't their "non-whiteness" that is significant, but rather their "non-humanness."
And I think in the very same section, the one about human(oid)s and the other, I try to alude to the point that Whiteness is closely connected with the dominant identities that make up the human(oid), what is most "human."
Because of this racial dominance, I have become accustomed to abbreviating the dominant discourses that make up the privileged players identity as human(oid)s. Human(oid) is all those unmarked, unremarked, or corresponding things that are the inverse of the other. To put plainly, the human(oid) is white, male, cisgender, heterosexual and ablebodied. These characteristics are made invisible through defining the other as the opposite.
As for the rest of you comment, I'm not sure what to say. Whatever you think is pedantic, I can't say. I use the language I use because it's important.I think the language you use is harmful to your stated goals because it makes it less accessible. Even your language in this response is bordering on the supercilious.
"...for those unwilling to interrogate these issues." Really? Interrogate? I know it's correct, but come on.
And while I can see the possibility of subtle racism now, thanks to the color clarification, I still think the true point of the orcs is just to make them inhuman and impossible to empathize with, so that the party can feel heroic for killing them instead of feeling guilty.
The thing is, I believe that this language, the very language you think is harmful because it lacks accessibility, is essential for us to understand and undermine systems of oppression. The fact is that we live in a world where a lot of things, like privilege and oppression, are made invisible through corresponding, interlocking hierarchies, knowledges, and systematic delineations of human difference. That italicized sentences is hella inaccessible, but that doesn't make it any less true.
To understand the sentence takes a large number of other concepts, which when taken together, help us understand what that italicized sentence means. One of my purposes with this article was to use a few of the concepts developed by critical race theorists, feminist theorists, and others on a subject most of us are familiar with: roleplaying games.
If we can get a handle of these things with something as simple as a RPG, I believe it will make larger issues more accessible through this shared language.
I don't think the depictions of orcs are actually separate from how "real world" racism works. It's something I try to argue through the article. It seems to me that convincing people that language is important and that this "fantastic racism" is real racism goes hand in hand. I am just trying my hand at getting these messages through.
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Proof that if those who can, do, while those who can't . . . apparently use their very expensive degrees to write this stuff.
Why do dark elves have black skin? Given that they live underground in darkness it seems more reasonable that they should have albino skin. Someone had to make the decision at some point that their skin was black.
I kinda figured because it let them more easily blend into the dark places in which they lived. Of course, the stark white hair screwed that up. I'm not sure Gary Gygax thought about it in terms of physiological/environmental reality/verisimilitude.
Also, if they are Dark Elves, perhaps a dark color suits them? Perhaps their outward coloration reflects their inner darkness.
[waits for argument about the colonial horrors of Western induced color-discrimination to unfurl from the non-specific ur-holy place (up or down, wouldn't want to choose lest one be branded religionist) - because we need another 2,500 post, locked down thread]
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I think the issue here is that the author proposed a problem but not really a solution.
Orcs are problematic due to historically ignorant opinions of race.
But consider that as a GM I want to run an adventure. In the adventure someone has stolen a pie. Now I could have a sensitive, tolerant and kindly orc who just happens to like pie steal said pie. But then when the heroes show up what can they do? Talk to the orc so that they can rescue the pie?
Yeah that's a much more culturally sensitive story, but it's not a very interesting one.
I want my players to kill the orc and take the pie.
Orcs are badguys, fantasy RPG worlds need "badguy" races in order to function. Heroes need villains to slay. Yes sometimes that means you can have nuanced villains with goals and motivations. But most monsters barely last 5 rounds (30 seconds) against the players. Moral conundrums are fun in games occasionally, but I don't want to start every fight with a 30 minute debate about the nature of evil.
Orcs are a great "other" because they don't exist. They are shorthand EVIL, like Goblins, Trolls, Nazis and Genetically Engineered Space-Bugs. If you make them too empathetic then there's no guilt-free fun in the slapstick violence applied to them on a regular basis.
It's a common joke that adventuring groups are just wandering murderous hobos, but to be honest nobody wants to roleplay that. They want to be heroes.