cookingwithroxy:morlock-holmes:cookingwithroxy:morlock-holmes:trveroman:lozfunposts:kansascity-elffr
cookingwithroxy:morlock-holmes:cookingwithroxy:morlock-holmes:trveroman:lozfunposts:kansascity-elffriend:wheel-skellington:takashi0:>Be John Ronald Reuel Tolkien>Sign up to fight in WWI and come back as a man changed and haunted by war>Write a Fantasy series based loosely on your Christian Beliefs, Your Experiences in the War, and your raging boner for language that’s so fucking good and in-depth that it codified the Fantasy Genre TO THIS DAY>Write a scathing letter to the Nazis that you WISH that you were Jewish and that their ideology of Racial Superiority is Morally repugnant when they contact you to proclaim you an “Honorary Aryan”>Borrow from various myths and legends all around the world, and create Orcs based on a quirk of language that goes all the way back to fucking BEOWULF.>Characterize them all as evil servants of a Dark Sorcerer based on your experiences fighting German Infantry, who were very much NOT Black people>Decades after your death, Mediocre Fake Nerd White Men who want to play White Savior declare you a racist for this, and use the characterization of Orcs as Primitive, Savage, Crude and Murderous as a sign that what you secretly intended them to be a metaphor for Black people.>This despite the aforementioned hatred of racism being common knowledge>This despite many, MANY people pointing out how drawing such a conclusion on a completely fictional race of typically tusked, green-skinned, pig-nosed monsters is actually pretty fucking racist because you’re saying that Black people are all Violent Savages >Woke Mediocre Fake Nerd White Men ignore this and keep trying to rewrite history in an even more egregious version than what happened to Lovecraft (Since you were never racist to begin with), all to shill their subpar products or otherwise fish for cloutIf there was ever a reason that proved Social Media was a mistake, Progressivism is a Cult, and that fandom gatekeeping was actually good, it’s fucking this. Holy shit someone please kill Twitter. also the “default nature” (if you can even call it that, dnd books explicitly state that the writing within them are merely suggestions and you can write whatever you want) of many races in dnd are directly a result of 1: gods and devils being tangibly real within the setting and 2. many races being directly created and controlled by these beingsgnolls controlled by Yeenoghu, orcs by Gruumsh. even half orcs (often characterized in the book as not evil but feeling emotion more strongly; they get very angry but also very happy) feel the occasionally call of Gruumsh.Tolkien also heavily implied that not all orcs were happy serving Sauron, but it’s all they knew. He once said “We were all orcs in the great war,” acknowledging that anyone has the capacity for that kind of evil in them, including himself.Pc clown police Orcs are the result of people being broken by war. Their cruelty, their malice, their brutal atrocities? They all pale in comparison to what normal men did on the Western Front. And the people who did these horrible things used to be normal, affable men who would’ve fainted at the sight of such nightmares in their civilian life. But alas- war had already taken them, and broken them into the sort of hateful, paranoid murderers that he based the orcs on.Anyone can be an orc, because it isn’t really a race- it’s a state of mind, caused by trauma and pain. They’re a foe to be defeated, but also victims to be pitied, in their own way.I should let this rest, but if the approach you’re taking is “Orcs are soldiers”, if that’s part of or the main thing you’re using as material for your Orcs, then that paragraph about how they have a “limited” capacity for love and always will have a bloodlust boiling just below the surface is still, uh, pretty darn gross.But that kind of… IS the point. Or at least was. Orcs are ‘Acceptable Targets’. In the real world they don’t exist, there’s never a true ‘universally evil and there’s nothing wrong with killing them’ kind of enemy.But in the world of D&D, which is ESCAPIST fantasy? They exist so that when you slay the enemy forces and destroy the lich king, you don’t have to come back from it with crippling PTSD because you killed people just like you who thought they were doing the right thing.From a design perspective this feels like a false dichotomy to me. Like, e.g. Die Hard doesn’t have to start from the premise that Hans Gruber is from another species which is inherently violent and uncontrollable in contrast to humanity; he’s just a murderer and an asshole.The original Star Wars blows up a whole Death Star worth of people and it doesn’t need to go out of its way to explain that the Stormtroopers are actually incapable of feeling love.I don’t really buy into all the arguments around this; sometimes people sound a little like the loons from the 80s who thought Dungeons and Dragons was secretly training people in the occult. I don’t think this is some nefarious plot to inure people to racism.I think the arrow kind of goes the other way; I think the reason that people going, “What would make a good experience pinata for the PCs to beat on?” settle on, “Evil primitive savage!” as a “natural” answer to the question is that centuries of real life racist narratives filtered into fiction and were a large influence (though not the sole influence) on the creation of the evil savage stereotype.What on Earth is wrong with, “These particular Orcs that you’re fighting are just assholes?”There’s other approaches too; D&D creatures like Skeletons or Golems are usually pretty much just objects, machines with no self-awareness; that Lich King you mentioned made the choice to turn himself into a Lich, he wasn’t born that way.Even Demons and Devils usually don’t go back home to eat dinner and talk about their day with Mrs. Devil and Junior.I also don’t really play D&D, partly because I don’t like the kind of assumption made in the OP. The last time I tried was 25 years ago, puzzling through the Players Handbook, DM’s handbook and Monster Manual for the first version of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.That one has populations for Orc (And several other evil humanoids) settlements that talk about how many females and young can be found there, and I’m reliably informed that “Should we kill all these Orc children?” was one of the evergreen arguments for the game, often devolving into people pointing at their alignment in the players guide [EDIT: I mean Monster Manual.] which is just, to me, not fun on any level. I think experience pinatas ought to be designed in such a way that this doesn’t come up in the course of normal play.Back then Half-Orc was a PC option; don’t know if it still is in whatever version that quote is from, but it limits character concepts pretty severely and, more importantly to me, it breaks what I think should be a cardinal RPG design rule:Don’t ever give a player an excuse to go, “No, see, it says right here in the book that my character would be really disruptive!”Now, while all of these are good arguments against having the Orc as a pure evil race in a DESIGN context, please do remember that the discussion is about if they are built-in racism.I state this, because a vast majority of your statement is about how pure evil characters and the questions about them raise questions on a narrative level (which also misses the fact that demons and evil gods do go home and talk about their successes with their families, who are also evil. It’s a thing about settings, that stuff can and does happen.) or on a roleplaying level (with the issues of ‘That Guy’) but while those might be related to the reasons why the orc CHANGED over the years, that does not factor in to the actual subject at hand. -- source link