Ecce Orcus! An Argument for Humanizing the Orc

Orcs are overused, and boring. Also, the core of your argument, that, ”
In a world where “straight white male” is the presumed default of most fiction,” we should use Orcs to stand in for other races, and then, demonstrate the intolerance of racism, is juvenile, as well as racist itself. Orcs receiving intelligence penalties in the original Dungeons and Dragons was done because they were monsters, NOT humans done up ugly in order for us to use them as symbols to explore racial issues. They were monsters, from an alien society born from alien thinking, which did not mesh with the human society. That’s what made it interesting. Humanizing them does not make them interesting.
I strongly, strongly disagree with using orcs, or any particular make believe fantasy race, as a way to explore racism. It reeks of nerdy white male misunderstanding of the historic realities of the situation. It reminds me of a review of the Dragonlance novels, which (paraphrasing), stated that, “Tanis Half-elf suffers under tremendous racism much like African Americans, where sometimes people say they don’t like him, except he’s white, can live for 180 years, has low light vision, and an immunity to sleep effects.” It’s just stupid. There is no one-to-one here that is not completely insulting to the realities of racism, never mind the inherent racism of using something as distinctly “other” as an orc to represent the historical trials and tribulations of humans.
There was nothing wrong with orcs being frightening, alien creatures that want to eat you. They weren’t human then, and they don’t need to be now.

‘I plaed a T’skrang Swordsmaster up to Fifth Circle back in my day’

Hehe, those swashbuclking lizard people are cool as well! :D

10 Mordicai

Maybe some day. The more I say it in my head, the more I think I’ve stumbled across the kernel of the problem– When your fantasy pastime is to envision a world in which racism is TRUE and OK, and then to go into that world to be impossibly wealthy, well-armed civilizers? (Is that even a word)?

That’s messed up! Don’t get tricked into doing that by lazy game writers!

@J Mccaffery

That is somewhat the problem, for sure. There is an imperialist slant to adventure fiction. I’m not sure the answer is Orcs Are Just Like People of Different Color, though.

I think I have to agree with Sindri, in that I find it more interesting to view the distinctly NOT human races as NOT human. It’s bland, in my opinion, to just make them humans. Elves, Orcs, Trolls, Gnolls, etc, etc, etc. started out as magical races, beings to be feared and to evoke wonder. It’s a latter day gaming trope that they’re not so different at all, and in fact are just human, they just have magic powers that make them better (stronger, smarter, longer life, etc.). To each there own, I suppose, and I’m not arguing for them to be cannon fodder (as the orcs in Tolkien mostly are), but rather there are fundamental differences that aren’t as simple as, “I need to get my reagents from town and they told me to leave because I’m ugly.”

24. TWGrace

There’s a universe of difference between Ancient Spacefaring Braineaters From Before Time and “green, tusked guys who live over there and have an ongoing territory conflict with the humans who live over there.” Like, do they have a language? Do they… do they have children? If one of them produces offspring with a human, IS THAT OFFSPRING IN THE CORE RULEBOOK, same as the half-elves?

It becomes increasingly difficult to argue that they have “murder & pillage always, no remorse” hard-coded into their nature and, like I said, increasingly problematic to engineer your imagination to believe that. It’s facile at best and actually repugnant at worst.

Oh I’m glad you came to this. I thought your previous modest proposal was… too modest, and I think this cuts a bit deeper. Thanks.

I have a few points:

1st – In Tolkien I believe that Orcs are specifically Cursed. That’s unambiguously stated right? They’ve been cursed to be crummy right? That, I feel, is acceptable in a fantasy setting. It’s more Mark of Caine than Sons of Ham so to speak. Meaning a person in the setting can have an objective understanding that Orcs are objectively crummy – because they’re under this curse, it’s not a matter of debate – there is a magic curse on them. I say this is acceptable and makes for an amusing, interesting playable character type.

2nd – If we accept, and I think we aught to, that the idea of the noble savage is a fantastic fiction, then maybe it’s acceptable to include that in our fantasy fiction. Without making broader claims of symmetry to actual history, we can have noble savages, heck, if the idea weren’t appealing it wouldn’t have appeared as a fictitious trope. Which doesn’t mean that this problem in ‘real-world’ history isn’t a problem, but we don’t need to run our games as analogues of the ‘real-world’.

3rd – I think about this a lot. Orcs are mistreated and presented as analogues of the racial-bad-guys in ‘real-world’ historical contexts. They’ve got all the bad and none of the good, they’re baby-eating barbarians and there is a… there’s a strong undercurrent of discomfort that’s associated with having them included as a lesser race or classed as monstrous humanoids. Monstrous Humanoids is maybe – maybe – a morphic description, but more likely it is a bad thought about the racist other in human cultures.

Finally – I want to speak in favor of some of the statistical modifications of the different races, Orcs included in the game. To my mind – these are storytelling challenges, things that need addressing on a world-building scale. Physiological differences are easier to explain – Strength, Constitution etc… They’re just bigger or stronger or have extra redundant organs – Done. But explaining the intellectual stats being modified – to me this demands more storytelling and that I like. My Orcs, if you recall were stunted intellectually by their total immersion into their ancestral recall – they couldn’t develop or learn new tricks because their intellectual capacity was devoted to old tricks exclusively. They had physiological blocks against eating plants and so they were bloodthirsty etc… The stat mods are often used as a simplistic note about deviation from the norm, but they can be, and I say should be, used as a method for fully and thoroughly distinguishing between these races physiologically – not just culturally. Culture flows from physiology.

27. Sindri

I mean– Yes, but if you want to imagine a culture with different physical traits and different values, that’s one thing; don’t use, note-for-note, the early 20th century caricature of the Primitive Non-White to describe that? Especially when the purpose, their place in the plot, is to be OK to murder for XP.

“All people are different and have their own values and cultures– we can’t apply a strictly human perspective to all things. For example, OUR culture is to value law and the sanctity of life, and YOUR culture is to be murderable.”

That’s the problem.

Fantastic racism is fraught with unfortunate consequences where the differences among races are more than skin deep. But then this can be used to make the more profound point, I think all too often forgotten in our post-modern thinking, that individuals should be treated as individuals irrespective of racial differences. All that crap one side shouts is real and the other shouts is completely fabricated is irrelevant.

I think there is also a tendency to apply thinking that is both entirely modern and entirely nonsensical to fantasy races, i.e., the idea that race really matters and is a primary method for divvying people up. I’d like to see the differences between humans-dwarves-orcs-whoever treated as much more muted and unacknowledged.

30. IIRC, there is no evidence from the books that orcs can be redeemed, but Tolkien at some point said they could, because to say otherwise wouldn’t be reconcilable with his Catholic beliefs.

I see 2 distinct moods in the comments to this thread. On the one hand there are DMs and players who are looking at Orcs as a crossroads between the chump-monster – the low HD baddies that PCs slaughter by the hundreds and the Named NPC monster. Orcs really are something of a confluence of these themes- because they’re low HD monsters that PCs slaughter in their hundreds, but also because they’re plausible, almost have a real story and are potentially equivalent to the more conventional playable races.

Arguments toward using only handmade races is … well we all champion our own worldbuilding, but no matter what you make you owe some debt to TSR et. al. if you take my meaning, whatever we make we’re informed by the history of the hobby, denouncing the standard set up is just dishonest. And besides that, doesn’t really break down any of the positions relating to my first point. Are Orcs interesting enough to be People or uninteresting enough to just be HP bags that offer XP like pinatas?

Otherwise we’re talking about the naisance of the Orc as an idea and how it’s clothed in racism and the ideologies of the 19th century. The fantastic elements of the game being essentially victorian, altogether bound up with the revival of the gothic in that era. The hobby owes a lot to that period and we should, I suppose, consider what we’ve inherited from Eddison and Lovecraft and everyone else and weigh it for value before committing it to our own handmade realities.

For my part I think that questioning the cultural and memetic origins of the Orc as a player race. To me- the Drow were a popular choice in the 90’s when their evil subtext was all about excess and perversion and amorality. The Orcs are what? Bestial, aggressive? Atavistic? I only think of it as one of the mirrors held up to our own society -that these choices are compelling.

56 Mordechai: “an offensive Fu Manchu character”

BTW, exactly what’s offensive about Fu Manchu as Sax Rohmer originally wrote him?

He’s a brave, intelligent, determined, superbly educated Chinese (well, Manchu/Chinese) nationalist and scientific genius who wants to get back at the Westerners who’ve screwed over China and used it as a combination door matt/piggy bank.

Plus he has degrees from four European universities and understands Westerners (including the rather thick, dim Nayland Smith, whose idea of “subtle” is to say “look at the birdie” before he punches you) far better than they understand him.

The British heroes are quite understandably frightened of him.

He’s a resistance fighter from a Chinese perspective, in other words. A ruthless one, of course, but so what? War ain’t beanbag, or even Chicago politics.

Nayland Smith and the others fight him because they’re on the Other Side. He’s a Chinese nationalist who thinks Europeans are predatory barbarians, and they’re patriotic supporters of the British Empire and its civilizing mission.

And of course the story is told from their viewpoint because Rohmer is, ummm… British!

Everybody does this.

I saw a truly hilarious Indonesian martial-arts historical movie recently, in which the Bad Guys, who were supposed to be Dutch, were all played by Indonesians in blond wigs, mugging for the camera and rolling their eyes as they plotted cackling villainy against the stalwart Javanese hero.

(Except for the evil Dutch official’s beautiful daughter, who of course couldn’t resist the hero’s manly charm.)

It didn’t bother me in the slightest; why should it? People are generally on their own side; it would be extremely odd if they weren’t.

58. mordicaiVIEW ALL BY MORDICAI | MONDAY JULY 30, 2012 04:56PM EDT

“Yes, & I think it is important… they were doing these things to actual people.”

— yeah, so? Not having elves or orcs or surviving h. habilis around, who were they supposed to do it to, sheep?

Actual people who’d be doing exactly the same things to them if they’d had the opportunity.

I don’t wring my hands unduly over this. People are people; I’m one of them; and I like people. As they actually are, not as some fantasy alternative. I don’t trust them, not being an idiot, but I generally rather like them.

“I say it is better if nobody is giving or receiving.”

— this is precisely equivalent to saying that the world would be paradisical if only everyone obeyed the Golden Rule.

That is, it’s technically true, but functionally meaningless.

In any case, if that’s your perspective, what the hell are you doing playing games largely predicated on war and conflict?

You think people should do it, but then feel -really guilty- afterwards, like Puritans and sex?

“I never really get the casual “well, history is a litany of terrible things” attitude; yeah, it is, & that is terrible.”

— so? We’re all going to die, usually alone and in great pain, too. That’s terrible as well. Asi es la vida.

“especially given the fact that most historical murdering & looting (& raping & slaving) were justified by appealing to the notion that the victims were subhuman.”

— post hoc propter ergo hoc. Generally people were thought inferior -because- they could be beaten. You’ve got the causal chain bass-ackwards. We despise those who appear weaker than us, and admire and copy (as well as resent) those who appear stronger.

Kiss up, kick down, it’s human nature.

Furthermore, human beings are instinctive (and I use the word in its technical sense) tribalists. Us good, Them bad, or at least suspicious. Our customs good, Theirs disgusting, and so forth.

You can no more avoid this than you can outrun your own sweat.

Even attempts to renounce tribalism just end up creating an Anti-Tribalist Good People Tribe, which then wages passive-aggressive war against the Unenlightened Bad People Tribe, all the while hypocritically denying that they’re engaging in the standard tribal game. Good luck with the outrunning your sweat thing.

There are people who will kill each other over football teams, fer Ghu’s sake!

Take a look at tribal naming habits sometime. Mostly the in-group has a name that means “The Real People” or something of that sort. Eg., Dine, which means “People”. Or Deutsch, which means… “People”. Or Lakota, which means “Friends”(*).

But the names for other people… well, “Sioux” is an English mispronunciation of a French mispronunciation of an Anishinabe/Ojiibwa word meaning “Snakes”.

The Anishinabe being the people who drove the Sioux out of the Great Lakes country, whence they migrated onto the Great Plains a couple of decades ahead of Lewis and Clarke, driving the Crow (IIRC) out of the ‘sacred’ Black Hills with fire and slaughter. And so it goes.

(*) We Anglo-Saxons proudly named ourselves “People With Big Knives”. Our word for the neighboring Romano-Britons, “Wilisc”, meant “People Who Can’t Talk”. Also colloquially, “slave”.

And, staying on-topic, can somebody tell, where is Mordor in this map?
http://www.bogost.com/blog/where_in_the_world_was_middle.shtml
It is in the Carpathian basin. But considering that Tolkien modelled his orcs after Nazi Germany and its allies, and unfortunately, as much as it pains me to admit it, we were one of them, Mordor’s place in the European map is not something that comes as a surprise to me. Feeling insulted because of this would be a hypocrisy on my part.

68 Mordicai:

“I see a lot of handwaving about how you aren’t sorry when genocide or slavery happens”

— cue the Misrepresentation Fairy to hit this with her wand… 8-).

Dude, talking with you is this weird experience. It’s as if you’re looking past my shoulder, talking to someone else… someone who exists only in a script running in your head. And then attributing to me what this person in your head said.

It’s really odd.

It would help if you read -what I write down- and react to -that-, rather than your stereotype of what someone who disagrees with you -must- have said.

Read it slowly and carefully, and read right through to the end.

Now, to demonstrate what actually -engaging- with someone might look like:

“hey, maybe having a colonial system that plunges the world into conflict & war isn’t the best way to get the gross global profit index up.”

— well, for starters, can you name any period of world history that -wasn’t- one of conflict and war? Pre- or post-1492.

You see, your statement contains an ASSUMPTION.

This assumption is that there was (or could be?) a prelapsarian peaceful world which nasty people (Europeans?) upset at some point.

But this assumption is simply false-to-fact, as far as I know. Am I wrong about that?

It’s also oddly Eurocentric, giving Europeans some sort of supernatural power to change the way the world works, as if they were the serpent in the Garden of Eden or something.

It also contains a further universe of assumptions about moral philosophy, Rawlsian and Utilitarian, unless I miss my guess, though I’m open to correction if you’d care to.

OK, let’s go further:

‘when trade would have served better.”

— served better for what? It all depends on what your -purpose- is.

A tank makes a lousy schoolbus. It does not fulfill the purpose of a schoolbus.

But then again, it isn’t intended to be a schoolbus. It’s function is to crush and kill, not take the kiddies to school.

Eg., when the English came to the Atlantic shores in the 1600’s, they were ready enough to trade but their primary aim was to take the land and settle it with their own folk. Note terms like “New England” or “New York” or “Carolina” or “New Jersey”. (Or for that matter, “New Spain”.)

Those emigrating hoped (apart from those who had a mostly futile vision of doing a smash-and-grab and then going home with the loot in the style of Cortez) to create a new society pretty much like England, but tidied up, without the people they disliked (Anglicans or whatever) and with themselves further up the social scale.

As high as possible, but the commonest hope was to own land for a family ‘competence’ which most English people yearned for but few achieved.

As one of them said at the time, “It is the people living on the land who make the land English, not the land the people.”

The Indians, naturally enough, found this agenda troubling… 8-). Mostly since it implied that, at best they unconditionally assimilate, or, failing that, just die or leave.

This is the historical process which resulted in the US, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, Israel and so forth. Most nations, in fact, if you go far enough back. Like the Magyars in Hungary, as someone upthread mentioned.

And — in fact — from the English p.o.v. this was better even in terms of simple trade.

Their own colonists (and the equally imported slaves) bought much more from them, and produced more for them, than aliens living in their own self-sufficient societies ever would. By definition, English people wanted English stuff, either made and grown locally or brought from the Old Country. Trade with England was peripheral for the Indians until they’d been smashed up, but central for the English settlers from the gitgo.

“But then, you seem to espouse a real “us versus them” attitude, which you also seem to grant as a given, which isn’t the case.”

— mmmm, read what I said about “imagined communities”. Nations are, like tribes, an imagined community based on fictive kinship.

” Look around! America! It is a nation!”

— yeah, an imagined community based on fictive kinship… a Big Tribe. Tribes aren’t “natural” either. They’re stories people tell each other. The urge to be a member of a tribe is innate. The form that the tribe takes is culturally/historically contingent. You get the distinction?

“What I am saying– as I have always said, when you’ve painted the straw man that I somehow am calling for an end to conflict in narrative– is that the work itself shouldn’t be racist. Or sexist.”

— as far as I can see, this translates into plain English as “the work itself should be written from the viewpoint I and my friends — My Tribe — espouse.”

In which you get to define what all those terms mean and anathematize those who don’t fit.

Now, this is natural human tribalistic behavior. Which is -exactly my point-.

The problem here from -my- point of view is not that you have a point of view which you prefer — we all do — but that you’re trying to universalize and privilege it, and demonize and silence others.

You see what I’m getting at? You’re saying that terms like “sexist” have a universal, unproblematic meaning. And they don’t.

“Like for instance, George R.R. Martin (as J Mccaffery brought up) can have a horrible murder in his book…& in the real world condemn murder as a bad thing. & in the text, we see that– oh man, crap– murder is a really bad thing. That person was a person!”

— look, dude, have you ever had a person try to kill youd, and had to return the favor? I have. The fact that it’s a person, with a personal history and feelings and a family and all -really doesn’t make any difference-. It really doesn’t. They try to kill you and you return the favor.

It’s no giant huhu. Just part of life. Judging by the results of forensic arcchaeology, it’s always been that way.

Cf. Otzi the Iceman.

I never -liked- being in that situation; adventure is someone else in deep shit far away. It was scary and sorta disgusting. Though I’ve met people who got off on it, and frankly they scare the crap out of me.

But it’s not some monstruous unnatural eruption of Cthuluism into a normally benign world.

That -is- normalacy.

81. mordicai

>Red is you, blue is you quoting me.

— good idea, if I could figure out how to do it! Can’t, though: not a very computeresque person. My bad. I’ll use “you” and –me.

The captcha feature on this blog is an absolute pain in the arse, too.

“Flippant dismissal of murder as the course of human history.”

— more “humorously resigned acceptance”.

As for tone, history has been defined as ‘tragedy for those who feel, comedy for those who think’.

I laugh a lot. It beats crying.

Incidentally, using “murder” in this context is rhetorically illegitimate. Murder is unlawfull killing; killing is just killing, whether it’s me killing you to take your wallet (murder) or you killing me to stop me (not murder). That’s a matter of the common dictionary definition of the words.

It’s the sort of confusion of terms which the mistranslation of the Sixth Commandment engendered.

It actually reads “Thou Shalt Not Do Murder”. Hebrew makes exactly the same distinction that English does. The King James Bible is magnificent poetry but exceedingly bad scholarship. (Take a look at the original terms translated as “witch”, for example.)

“as though every moment of the past was about genocide & looting. ”

— did I say this? You’re addressing that straw man again.

War and other forms of lethal conflict are a -big part- of history; and the -threat- of violence is ubiquitous in human interactions.

“The State is not argument. The State is force”. Or as Max Weber summed it up, “Violence is the ultimately decisive form of political action.”

The violence may be implicit — a threat — but it’s there. This is actually an advance on the situation prior to the invention of the State, when forensic archaeology indicates that violence was the commonest cause of death for adults over immense stretches of time.

Private property, for example, can’t exist without the law (the force) of the State. It’s not a relationship between people and things; it’s a power relationship between people, mediated through things. If I “own” property it means I can call on the force of the State, the community, to exclude you from it unless you meet my terms for using it.

“I am opposed to paradigms where “us versus them” is defined by ethnic categories. ”

— why? ’cause most of the human race evidently disagrees with you.

Granted there’s an arbitrary element to this — ethnic groups are socially constructed — but then there is to every other human grouping too. Our social groupings exist essentially as a form of collective belief.

Of course, as Marx put it, human beings make history… but they don’t make it just as they please. The fact that you don’t identify with an ethnic group doesn’t mean that others won’t pin that particular tail on you, and quite possibly kill you for it.

Getting killed while protesting your disbelief in that paragdim will help not an iota. From an individual’s perspective, social constructs can be as real as rocks… or bullets.

>I’ll use your term. “Normalcy.” That isn’t “normal.” It might happen a bunch in the historical record

— ummm… I can’t think of any other definition of the word “normal” than “happens consistently”.

“Normal” is a descriptive term, not a prescriptive one. It does not mean “good”, any more than “natural” means “good” (unless you’re an Aquinian, and I’m not.)

People in the contemporary West are almost uniquely sheltered from violence, you know. Beware generalizing excessively from your own experience.

“The Crusades, for instance, I might point to as an obvious historical use of propaganda to dehumanize a potential foe in order to motivate people to go murder them.”

— ummm… where did the Crusaders “dehumanize” Muslims? (And again with the murder thing: kill, quite possibly, murder, no. No law, no murder.)

They believed that Muslims were the perfectly human adherents of a different religion (true) and that that religion was false (partially true; all religions are false) and that God wanted Christians to rule Jerusalem and adjacent areas (wildly false).

If the Muslims weren’t human beings with souls, there would have been no grounds for religious conflict. You don’t have religious wars with unsouled animals. They didn’t dislike the people ruling Jerusalem because of their language, physical appearance, customs, dress or any “ethnic” marker; it was strictly their theology.

Note that in the Crusading romances of the time, Crusaders are always -converting- their enemies. That is, the Evil Them becomes People Like Us, by joining the True Faith. The chivalric romances often express admiration for brave Saracens, like Saladin.

In the cold light of day this was usually much less converting than killing, but we’re talking propaganda here.

I might note that “Crusade” and “Jihad” are precisely equivalent; Christians probably picked up the concept from Islam, part of a long cross-fertilization. Both cultures use it metaphorically as well (“Crusade against sin”, or “internal Jihad”) but the original meaning is straightforward holy war against infidels.

“but I admire a bunch of people telling a king to go screw himself to run a (flawed) social experiment in equality. ”

— really, I don’t see how this refutes tribalism. (Or nationalism.) The Revolution created an independent state, after all, to which citizens were expected to feel loyalty, just as the British did to Britain.

Where’s the conflict with what I said? Wars of national independence are an -expression- of tribal identity, of Us againt Them.

How am I wrong there?

“Now who is using posterior logic to inform their arguments? They were better because they won? Really.”

— I said they were better AT WAR because they tended to win wars. Note that the entire (for all practical purposes) Western Hemisphere speaks four European languages.

Is there any better evidence of how good you are at war than winning wars? Really?

“There is a rule in comedy in which a piece of satire only works when it is lampooning the people in power, not the people being harmed by that power. ”

— really? I’ve got news: cruelty is the basis of well over half of all humor. Again, you’re mistaking “what I wish was so” for “what’s so”.

“Said is hardly perfect”

— actually (this is a different topic, of course) he’s a systematic liar; ORIENTALISM is full of statements that just… aren’t… so. Elementary stuff like who published what when.

It’s not scholarship at all, more of a “grito”, a howl.

I don’t object to his political orientation; he’s entitled to be on his own side. It’d be a very odd Palestinian who liked Zionism.

It’s the falsehoods. Incidentally he systematically falsified his personal history too, well beyond the “stairwell wit” that everyone does occasionally.

” but criticising Western history for an unexamined look at the…well, wrong assumptions of their histories?”

— no, if you’ll read his stuff, what he’s actually objecting to is scholarly curiosity.

Frex, he interprets the fact that Europeans studied Middle Eastern languages and collected the books of the area (while people in the Middle East didn’t, to any great degree) as evidence of hostility and evil intent.

“I again disagree with your hypothesis”

— can you name me a conflict at the level of war in which both sides -didn’t- attempt to blacken and discredit the other?

Really?

“Though you have a lose point that everyone brings bias to the table; I suggest we examine those biases & discuss them– which is the fundamental conceit of the original post.”

— forgive me if I misinterpret, but what you’ve been saying is that OTHER PEOPLE have discreditable biases, but that you don’t and may majesterially sit in judgment upon them.

In other words, they have evil false ideologies, and you have the Truth.

If I’m wrong about that, how am I wrong? Isn’t that what you actually believe?

Okay, just because we have reached topics of ‘ultimate nature of humanity’ and ‘legacy’, here is my opinion:

– I think this article is useful – it deals with topic we need to talk about, and it handles the subject with an intelligent and profund way, even if one does not agree with the article. And if one does not agree, he or she has the right to tell it, which leads to the much needed conversation.

– Humans – and I meant us – ARE tribal – or, if you wish, horde – creatures. That does not mean, in my opinion, that we will ultimately paint the other side black, that we will kill and eat people unlike us just because they are different. Neither does it mean, that we cannot relate to said people.

BUT! But we do not care about them in the same way as we care about our friends and family. We actually can care REALLY for a certain amount of people – in this way the horde instinct manifests. It is not a good or a bad thing – it is just the way things are. (Or so far, has been.)

There are reasons, we have just started conversations like that. Thanks to numerous inventions, like railroads, planes, television and the internet, we just started to get to know each other. Take for example me, or other people in my shoes – one hundred years ago, I could not have had a conversation with people from other countries that easily. Therefore I could not have had the chance to get to know them – and, in return, neither could they. We could not have found a common topic, which is vital to define us as… US. (Or rather, we could not have found out that easily, that we had that many things in common, like hobbies, etc.)

Even before, before the railways and other modern vehicles, distances were great. Common people did not have the chance to travel to another country, in fact, they hardly travelled farther than the neighbouring community. Their world was incomparably smaller than ours, and they did not have the information flow we have. That is why their world view was more rigid and simple – we live in an age which changes our perceptions about our world constantly. Think about landing on the Moon or the internet. During the life of an average man who lived several hundreds year ago, things did not change that rapidly – and we shall add, that their life was shorter than ours.

Which brings me to my next point: we live in better conditions than they did. We are not at the mercy of nature in the same way – i.e. the length of the winter and summer – as they were. I do think, that we have more choice to avoid bloody conflicts than they had.

Because, wars are not fueled by ideologies, after all, but rather, by need. It is just that we like to justify our needs with ideologies ( I think, actually, it is also a need, social, not physical). Yeah, we like to tell tales about wars waged for the heart of a beautiful maiden or for God or for truth, justice and a certain way, but in reality, these wars were waged because of need. If people have plenty of need, they are not prone to risk their lives – we would be foolish to do. Actually, we are more concerned about our lives. However, I also have to add, that Us vs. Them opposition was many times fueled by that people in the past many times were forced to make the choice to take away food from other people via war of looting… or let their family starve. Combine that with their short-sightedness I described above, and you get the reasons for war.

So, we have better conditions and better possibilites for communication and obtaining information from the past or another part of the world. And, actually, we have the responsibility to use these possibilites well. Not because we are inherently better than our ancestors – that is such a delusion as the ones with which our ancestors tried to justify their wars. But because we do not wish to risk the life of our beloved ones, our own life with an unnecessary war or conflict.

The whole drive to build a civilization is safety, after all. But mind you, civilization is relatively new, and that is why we have problems discussed above. As I said, for millions of years, we lived in packs. For thousand of years, we lived in communities ranging from several dozen people to several thousands. This global conciousness is relatively new – only several decades old. That is why we have hard time to adjust our cultural legacy with all of its contradictions to our new perspective… it is really-really new.

And, when I talks about the horde instinct, that does not mean, that my ‘horde’ consists of solely white straight males. All I just say the follows: if a person would attack a friend of mine because of his or her religion or sexuality, I would feel more vehemently, then if the same would happen with another person from that community (which would anger me, nonetheless, because what if this happened with my friend or with me… I don’t say, that horde instinct makes you not caring about people outside your horde, I just say, that this would prioritize certain people over others. You would give change to the homeless guy, but you would give high amount of money to your beloved ones.)

– While I really believe in equality – because I think that this would serve our civilization better -, I always found strange when somebody tried to proove their progressive thinking with bashing people from centuries apart for their outdated believes (for example, it is a vogue to bash Kipling for his writings). Of course their thinkings are outdated, they lived decades or centuries before you – calling them different slurs because of that won’t make you a better person. Partially, because you had the chance to learn from their faults.

No, regarding Fu Manchu, who was the product of his time… I could never take him seriously in a social commentary way, and I do think, that there is not only social responsibility but individual responsibility as well on the side of the recipient. Namely – open a freaking book, before you assume that such an outlandish character would be real. Or just open a book, for knowledge’s sake. If you seriously believe, that every Asian is Fu Manchu… well, it is mostly your fault.

Okay, I might not have the authority to speak such things about an Asian villain… instead, I choose to talk about two Eastern European villains, since I am Eastern European. The one is Dracula – he is based on the legend of Vlad Tepes, who is an important historical figure of the Romanians. I barely hear any complaints about the ubiquitousness of Count Dracula in Western pop culture on the part of the Romanians. In fact, Romanian government tried to lure turists through the Western image of Dracula.

Now, the other villain is Countess Elisabeth Bathory, the Hungarian distaff counterpart of Dracula. Needless to say, that that image is far from the reality. In fact, poor Bathory was the victim of a witch-hunt… but I don’t feel insulted at all by her popular representation. Why would I? At least there is a character from our history, of who many Americans heard. However, if a person would seriously believe that we bath in the blood of virgins because of that image, I would be amused – but I would not blame the image of Bathory, I would blame the person being ignorant.

That said, I don’t mind questions like ‘do we still ride on horses?’ (No.) At least they show honest curiosity for my culture. And I also never mind Transylvania depicted as a medieval forest-‘country’. But I think every person has the responsibility for her own beliefs, and sometimes she should do a little research. If a person arrives to Bukarest, and wonders, where are those armadillos from Dracula, then it is her fault, not that of the film.

– On the other hand, yeah, literature can enhance our empathy. It can persuade us to think about the position of another man. How it would feel if this happened to me or one of my family-member? But then, literature is a tool and every tool’s efficiency depends on the way its user uses it.

Personally, I favour human orcs over evil orcs, because the formers are way more interesting.

– I dislike the notion that ‘one must act this way because the world is supposed to be a place like this and that’. There are people who would save a child life, because they are God-fearing people, and that is what Jesus said… and there are people who would do the same, because there is no God, and we have to care for each other. And there are people, who would kill said child out of religious fanatism or cold nihilism.

Ideas are also tools. They will not work themselves for you – you have to learn to use them. There is no idea that cannot be warped, and that is why I think, that while I personally favour certain ideas over others, what really matters, is the responsibility of the person who believes in them. We have to learn to take personal responsibility for our choices (and yeah, I know, we cannot be unaffected by the world surrending us, but still, we have choice, I think).

That is my opinion – and I wish to say, that I am pro-choice, supporting gay marriages, and feel the responsibility to stand up against genocide and slavery – I cannot make past attrocities disappear, but I might be able to stop future ones. But I also wish to say, that we have to learn more and more about ourselves, and we shall not just honest about ourselves, but also have an empathic attitude towards our ancestors – if we know more about their choices, we have more chance not to repeat their faults.

There’s a scene in 12 Angry Men when the jurors, one by one starting with Jack Klugman’s character, turn their backs on Ed Begley’s character. I saw that when I was a kid and I think it’s an important lesson on how to respond to shameless, unabashed racism.

But there’s still a lot to respond to here– I think we have gotten somewhat sidetracked from what is a very simple thesis.

1) It is OK to have an “evil race” in your story.
2) Presenting “unrepentant, purposeless, complete evil” probably should mean that the race you are describing are not people. You’ve basically made vampires or the Alien xenomorph.
3) There’s no way to get around the fact that Orcs are people. This isn’t an argument for making them “Green-Skinned People.” They already are. They are definitely people. Even in Tolkien, they’re people. Remember: They are Sauron’s slave army. Where there’s a whip, there’s a way! They’re not vampires. They’re not the xenomorph. They’re not smart zombies. They’re people.
4) Orcs use the vocabulary of racist archetypes to smooth over the cognitive dissonance– they are our preferred faceless punching bags, but they are also definitely people. So in order to make that OK, to preserve our idea of a punching bag race, we decide that they must be savage, cultureless, dim-witted racists! Too dumb for art, too savage for agriculture!
5) That’s effed up.

Remember, this is a simple, straightforward idea. It should be non-controversial. The accusation is not one of racism, but one of problem-solving; I don’t think the writers of Pathfinder and D&D and Orc Fiction are all racists. But it’s lazy storytelling. Lazy storytelling glosses over “Why?” Lazy storytelling lets real world ideas — the savage hun is a real world racist trope, not a real world race — sneak in to fiction.

I love punching bags! As a roleplayer I have a hard time divorcing self-examination from even the lightest, slashiest of games. Which is why it’s great when vampires show up! Screw ’em, let’s slay vampires. They’re a great punching bag. Orcs are bad punching bag, because when you punch them they hurt just like you do. Which is a fine story to tell! Think about the way players interact with, I dunno, bandits, or pirates, or vikings (I don’t mean to keep harping on this point, but I think it’s an important place where our double-standard is exposed). Those guys hurt just like we do! It’s a shame we’re totally at odds anyways! Orcs let you bypass that story because they’re savage and stupid and it’s not a coincidence that these are the same things that privileged people have used to justify killing non-privileged people since time immemorial.

Remember: Having prejudice in your game is not a problem. I think presenting a world without racism in it is kind of infantile, really. But having racism in your game, and having your game justify racism are different things.

The thesis is not you are all racists, roleplayers. (although some of you are)

The thesis is if you want a punching bag, build a better punching bag.

And yes, I just discovered the “Bold Text” button.

100. TWGrace

I stand corrected on vampires! Matheson already tackled this with I Am Legend decades ago and I let it slip right by me. STILL, while they are a bad example for my argument, they are better than “primitive peoples” — and more interesting! They get to have a viewpoint and motives and they invite empathy while simultaneously being totally opposition for the party.

mordicai: I don’t think, that the we would disagree, but nevertheless we have touched a topic I just liked to discuss… and this forum provides me the possibility to do that with intelligent people. :)

Regarding the vampires, the same applies to them as for orcs. They are more interesting if they are treated as three-dimensional people. If they have a reason to act ruthlessly, then their acts have more importance. And of course, if they just murder and laugh evilly, they will be predictable and not that interesting.

‘I think there certainly is a legacy of racism against Eastern Europeans, sure!’

As an Eastern European, I can assure you, that this goes more than one way. First, I said that Bathory was a victim of a witch-hunt… and the ones behind that hunt were Hungarian nobles who tried – and eventually, did – rob her from her heritage. It is debated, whether her trial really served the Habsburgs as well, but at least the then king, Matthias II proposed a fair trial for her – it was the Hungarian nobles who gave her a show trial. And, BTW, the legends of the Bloody Bathory were revived by a Hungarian historian, Dezs? Rexa.

Second, Dracula. The reason, why Vlad Tepes has such a bad reputation in Western Europe is that he brutally chased away peasants and merchants of German origin from his realm out of some kind of nationalist fervor – he favoured his people over foreigners, which was not that a rare thing, but he still did not win the heart of Germans.

Historians argue, that it also did not help for his reputation that he was not in good terms with King Matthias (already mentioned in a previous post) who might have defamed him. The truth is, that as I said, King Matthias himself was not popular in Western-Europe, he was in fact feared, which was one of the reasons he was never elected as the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, so, he might not have had the ground to slander another ruler effectively. BTW, the reason of the enmity between the two is that both of their parents were part of the Order of the Dragon, which order was created to halt Ottoman conquest. Vlad wished to continue the legacy, Matthias had other plans in his mind – therefore when Vlad visited him to ask his help, he betrayed him, arrested him and made a peace with the Turks in Vlad’s name. Ruthless politician, our Matthias was.

However, sorry for the history lesson, I try to be short – all that said, Vlad has my respect as a leader, because he did everything what he could do to protect his then weak country from the Ottoman Empire. His country was in a turmoil even without the menace of an invading army, and he had to be callus. Regarding his notoriety, I must add two other things:
a) successful monarchs of weak(ened) countries tended to be brutal to forge a stronger kingdom. Our first king, Steven I, made really cruel legal punishments, and when his brother rised against him, Steven quartered the brother after his victory.
b) Vlad was shrewd enough to use psychological terror against his enemies, therefore he showed himself as bloodthirsty as he could.

Now, of course this is not obligatory knowledge for Dracula-fans. However, I feel myself involved, because the most famous Dracula was arguably Bela Lugosi, a fellow Hungarian. And, BTW, when Bram Stoker created Dracula, he asked the help of a Hungarian folklorist, Ármin Vámbéry, who was an expert in vampire legends… mind you, Stoker used his help with broad strokes – ‘Whoaw, that ability is cool, that one is lame, etc.’ -, but as a thank for his help, he modelled Van Hellsing after Vámbéry, and we can find his name as a cameo in the novel as a collegue of Hellsing, if I remember correctly.

And, by the way, I do not find Dracula that problematic because the Victorian pantheon is full with true British monsters as well… you got Mr. Hyde, you got the Invisible Man.

Anyway, if we are on the topic, I tell you, which things really annoy me. Actually, these are not just stereotypes, but rather, misapplied ones. A mild source of annoyance, when for example a supposedly Hungarian character has a Bulgarian name. But that is bearable.

However, what really frustrates me, is for example Ultimate X-men by Mark Millar, which depicted Croatians spectacularly as arab terrorists/warriors/dontknowwhat in issue 4. Croatians, who are devout Catholics, BTW. That said, I really like his Red Son, because I live in a country which was part of the Eastern Block… and it was good to see a communist superhero which was not depicted as an irredeemable asshole. (And yeah, during the Cold War, each side had propaganda against the other one, so I am not here to complain against the ‘Kids don’t do communism’ Captain America of the fifties.)

Anyway, and now I wish to be ON-TOPIC, I agree that racial moral alignment is bull. First, it simplifies things, second, each nation has its darker days, but that does not mean, that the people of said countries are inherently evil. However, I think one can have fun with stereotypes, i.e. one can have his ‘proper’ answer for “Oh, I’m not insulting you, I just always heard orcs were great barbarians; if anything it is a compliment!” For example, what if a sophisticated orc magician believes, that humans are sheltered, even if they are likeable? It is a two-sided thing, after all.

And, BTW, what if said orc does not take insult from that compliment (just mild annoyance), because he has trully nasty experiences of racism? (Mind you, during the 90s, little more than a decade ago, the Yugoslavian wars raged… and I live near to the border of the late Yugoslavia, when I was a kid… these things happened next to me, and boy, there were ethnic cleansing, rape and genocide… it did not happen to me, but I know people who were victims… sorry, I do not want to sound patronizing, or diverting, or anything… just maybe that is why I do not take ignorant, implicit, but not malicious racism to my heart, if Dracula and Bathory are real examples… I have seen explicit, truly despicable, outright evil forms of racism – we had a refugee camp next to our town, and the sound of plane in the night were not uncommon. But that is another topic, I know.)

Man, so many comments already! Hope I don’t repeat anything.
So, great article, and very relevant to me as a fantasy novel writer who has found one too many cliches in his story! Masked villain – sigh*
However… before i go and rewrite: Not every story is geared to handle the humanisation of its “savage” race. It’s a worthy sentiment, just not always realistic…

Sure, for the typical RPG scenario this idea of diversity and humanization is an absolute must, because those stories have integrated worlds where the races have lived (relatively) alongside each other for decades, if not centuries. Then it becomes necessary to break away from colonial ideals in order for the story to gain relevance in our era.

But one must remember that in a medievil, racially non-integrated world, the orcs are realistically seen as the enemy as a result of our human nature which forces us (as a genetic trait – argue that point if you will!) to ostracise any sentience that is non-human.

Damn, and now I see J Mccaffery (post 99.) has said it all better.

Speaking of illithids and Spelljammer, the Spelljammer books had a secondary character who was an illithid. Other than his craving for brains(which he satiated with kobolds, sort of a pescetarianism of cerophagy), he was a decent fellow.

Most of the illithids on the Spelljamer itself were vegans, although not by choice, and the most feared nemesis of the illithids was a mind flayer that swore off brains in order to retain the memories of its host.

Your anthrocentricism is showing.

Can we have orcs play as a completely different species, rather than humanizing them? That is to say, throw out all the morphological and cultural distinctions of humans, and the craft from there. Why are there necessarily family units? Do they operate on an emotional level? Do we share a common genetic ancestor at all? I think warhammer came close to this by having them sprout like trees, but after that they act nothing like plants at all. They put on clothes, have 4 limbs and babble like people do. It’s pretty boring, and reminds me of star trek aliens, where they’re just men with masks.

I would prefer adding three dimensionality to their inhuman elements as opposed to attempting to shove them into human archetypes. The issue is that their current motivations are two dimensional, not that they are impersonable.

Well said and agreed. I went through about 95% of the same critique process you did (and I’m delighted to get some exposure to the other 5%), which is why lostsouls.org (my MUD) has had orcs, goblins and ogres as mainline player races for 15 years or so.

While I understand where you are trying to go with this, I have to say that you’re missing an important point, and that’s genetics. In terms of intelligence, and genetic make-up, there isn’t a significant difference between any of the human races. You don’t see asians having enlarged adrenal glands that cause them to have explosive tempers, however we do see that with other species that live on our planet. Trying to treat orcs, elves, and dwarves, as humans is a ridiculous idea, because they aren’t. It goes beyond their culture, it’s part of their physical make-up. I do like the idea of actually treating orcs as people, and adding moral considerations to the wanton slaughter of orcs, but acting like it is wrong to assume that another species could be inherently violent and evil is preposterous. It is entirely possible for members of a species to always be born as violent psychopaths.

Bah, yuze ‘umiez is da sneakiest.
You call us colonized by da ‘umiez, but in thousandz and thousandz uv game worldz across da entire univerz and millenia uv history weez not subjagated.

So instead yuze uze seek ta subjagte uz by wordz.
Yuze say we iz needing da humanizing and be treeted likez we iz one uv yuze.

I iz here ta say we iz not. Like wiff every’ting else weez gunna fight ya on dis tooo.
WE IZ ORCZ. WE IZ DIFFERENT FROM YAZ.

Yu dun unnerstand dat weez luv da violence. Iz part uv us. Weez not stand in frunt uv Gruumsh afta weez finally beet and cry dat it wuz not fair.
We iz standing proud and smilin’ cuz we lived like da proud orcz and wuz not beeten. Yuze humiez can come ta da orc village wit yuze sneaky gunz and magicz and wordz and killz uz, but still weez dying wid da smilez of da winnaz coz we is gunna be back wiz da more of uz.

Gruumsh iz not a god uv peace, milk and hunny like da hated elvez. Gruumsh da god of da punch ta da face, da smell of da burning village, da god uf da sound uf da screaming and da runnin.
He iz da god of enjoyin da beetin of da week and dat makez da orcz da best and da strongest. Da week diez and cum backz to try again. Da strong stayz ta make da young orcz da strongest and da best.

Yuze humiez like a difersity, unless it be da difersity of people not agreeing wid ya or beein differnt from ya. But we iz different and weez likez orcz betta dan ya sneaky weaklingz.
And plenty da humiez nowz it and comez live wid da orcz and likez da orc wayz, da fightin and da winnin.
An datz why uze find so many da half-orcz.

So yuze can argue dat de humanz wayz iz da best, but da orcz wants ta argue differnt, so next time ya smell da burnt village and hear da sobz of da widowz, dat is uz tellin ya dat we iz gonna make da humiez like uz, not weak and sneaky but strong enuff ta face uz and take fight uz like da orcz, not talk da smiley wordz like da sneaky elvez.

-Orc Sage, Smack Talka