DnD addresses racism.
- Thread starter Worgen
- Start date
Basically yes it has a history and timeline, to an extent. Many varieties of D&D roleplaying games, will try and keep their histories vague, to allow individual player groups to tweak things as they need for their own settings, without it causing too much friction. Basically they usually provide a template and framework, with enough details on the various factions and their geographic locations, and let the players fill in the blanks. Some game lines are more in depth than others, and have REALLY detailed histories, others specifically leave it vague, so that they aren't locked into any particular framework or story.
For example, the game system Pathfinder, released a scifi variant of their setting called Starfinder. And in that setting, they basically said "This is the same world as the one we created in Pathfinder, but it's been like several thousand years, and Something Vague and Very Bad happened many many years ago. Nobody knows what happened, but the planet is gone, and this space station is in it's place. We don't know what happened, or why, and attempts to learn what happened are met with magical resistance from the cosmos. But here is the current events and players going on now, go have fun." And that's all they really say on the matter in direct terms. They leave it like that, because it's VERY common for gaming groups to leave out certain elements they dislike for their own game, or alter major events with the player's actions, etc.
I haven't played the official D&D line in a few decades, but I seem to recall they had an established history/timeline to an extent. As much as any of them ever have, to prevent contradictions in later publications and such.
- Apr 1, 2009
- 14,985
- 3,847
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Hmm, that could be really fun, have a displacer beast who ends up being a merchant because they stumble upon some intelligence boosting supplements (assuming they aren't supposed to be sapient in starfinder) and it was easier to get neat stuff from trading then just killing people since if you just kill someone then you can only get what they have on them, but if you trade you can make requests. And he could just teleport between ships to trade goods, no docking required.
What did Vampire the masquerade do? I know that awhile back the world of darkness did that reboot kinda thing where the apocalypse happened but I haven't been keeping track of any of their stuff since then.
I personally found it very fun, as I never played Pathfinder, so having a scifi +magic setting, but the premise is that the entire galaxy society has a case of amnesia or whatever, was GREAT. Because I didn't really need to know shit about any of the previous cultures, or their histories and rivalries, etc. It just didn't matter. There were new things going on sure, but they were summarized in the Starfinder book, and were easily digestible. So it was a great launch point for new players, in my opinion.
Plus they had one of the funniest races I've ever seen put to paper in that setting, so funny that as I read out their description to my friends, he and I were having difficult breathing, because the concept was so gloriously silly.
Basically, and I'm super-generalizing because I don't remember it very well at this point. But, they are this little tiny race of sort of furry dudes, sort of like Gremlins from the movie, pre-Midnight Snack. So tiny and floofy, and EXTREMELY helpful, like biologically compelled to be helpful to anyone and everyone. So much so, that when a hostile race invaded their planet to conquer it, they just all moved out into the wilderness and let them have their cities. Because, you know, HELPFUL!! When the other race would encounter them, they basically just kind of waved and were like 'Hi there! Welcome to your new digs boss! Can we do anything to assist your conquering today?" *big grin* and the invaders would be like ".... (-_-) ...."
They just killed me it was so funny, the writeup.
In fact here it is. And I just freaking love these little dudes.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent. Racism in D&D bad, yes. Removing it good. Yes.
I'm only quoting bits and pieces of your post because I actually agree with most of it, but:
Sometimes this works, such as the orcs in Warcraft. Don't need to explain how the orcs went from a race of savages in WC1/2, whereas by 3 they were given much more depth, and WoW continued the trend. Sometimes it doesn't, such as the necrons in Warhammer 40,000. Short version is that the necrons went from legions of silent metallic killers in the service of the c'tan, incapable of feeling pity, or remorse, or fear (hello Kyle Reese), to...space Egyptians. Space Egyptians that have their own dynasties with various rulers, various goals, who disdain other species but are willing to work with them, and the c'tan are no longer star gods but just weapons in the necron arsenal. I can't speak for everyone, but I loathe this change. It makes the necrons much less alien, much less interesting, much less intimidating, and I don't even know why it was necessary in the first place. GW could have kept the old lore, and simply have these new necrons be distinct from the ones we'd seen. Like, some necrons are slaves to the c'tan and are soulless, emotionless killers, others managed to retain their necrotyr culture, and want to liberate their breathren from the c'tan. But no, the entire race was switched.
And even with orcs, there's some cases where the fact that orcs are a race of thugs is part of the appeal; orks from W40K are a classic example. I haven't commented too much here, because I don't know DnD lore well enough to say whether 'de-evilizing' orcs is viable in the context of the setting, but in 40K, from the in-universe perspective, it isn't really. And if GW did it, I guarantee you a lot of people would be up in arms.
Not entirely, but in DnD and other settings, the rules of the setting are different from our own, so races/species can exist and operate under a different set of rules. Like, from that, what's more likely - that every species in DnD is biologically related, or that the rules of the setting are different, so that humans and other species can mate and produce fertile offspring?
Ultimately though, when you create a fictional group, you can apply fictional rules, and when you create a fictional species, you can create even more fictional rules. I can't criticize DnD for trying to add moral ambiguity to orcs or drow, because I don't know what the 'rules' are. Based on what you describe below, it seems that the 'rules' do allow for that. On the other hand, there's certainly races in tabletop gaming where them being inherently evil is part of the appeal. If Games Workshop declared today that they were going to make orks more morally grey, I'd roll my eyes and comment that they missed the point of why people liked playing as orks in the first place.
Orks and all der boyz be gitz. It's part of da appealz.
Who stereotypes atheists apart from faith-based films? I mean, not telling you what to (not) get offended by, but as someone who's irreligious myself, really haven't noticed this as a trope. And I've laughed my ass off at Big Bang Theory, even in the knowledge that I'm the person they're making fun of (though luckily I'm not nearly as socially inept as Sheldon).
This is the crux though. Sometimes, the whole "not all orcs" approach works, sometimes it doesn't, and this is true when it's trying to 'rehabilitate' a fictional group.
Sometimes this works, such as the orcs in Warcraft. Don't need to explain how the orcs went from a race of savages in WC1/2, whereas by 3 they were given much more depth, and WoW continued the trend. Sometimes it doesn't, such as the necrons in Warhammer 40,000. Short version is that the necrons went from legions of silent metallic killers in the service of the c'tan, incapable of feeling pity, or remorse, or fear (hello Kyle Reese), to...space Egyptians. Space Egyptians that have their own dynasties with various rulers, various goals, who disdain other species but are willing to work with them, and the c'tan are no longer star gods but just weapons in the necron arsenal. I can't speak for everyone, but I loathe this change. It makes the necrons much less alien, much less interesting, much less intimidating, and I don't even know why it was necessary in the first place. GW could have kept the old lore, and simply have these new necrons be distinct from the ones we'd seen. Like, some necrons are slaves to the c'tan and are soulless, emotionless killers, others managed to retain their necrotyr culture, and want to liberate their breathren from the c'tan. But no, the entire race was switched.
And even with orcs, there's some cases where the fact that orcs are a race of thugs is part of the appeal; orks from W40K are a classic example. I haven't commented too much here, because I don't know DnD lore well enough to say whether 'de-evilizing' orcs is viable in the context of the setting, but in 40K, from the in-universe perspective, it isn't really. And if GW did it, I guarantee you a lot of people would be up in arms.
That's...kind of my point?
Not entirely, but in DnD and other settings, the rules of the setting are different from our own, so races/species can exist and operate under a different set of rules. Like, from that, what's more likely - that every species in DnD is biologically related, or that the rules of the setting are different, so that humans and other species can mate and produce fertile offspring?
Ultimately though, when you create a fictional group, you can apply fictional rules, and when you create a fictional species, you can create even more fictional rules. I can't criticize DnD for trying to add moral ambiguity to orcs or drow, because I don't know what the 'rules' are. Based on what you describe below, it seems that the 'rules' do allow for that. On the other hand, there's certainly races in tabletop gaming where them being inherently evil is part of the appeal. If Games Workshop declared today that they were going to make orks more morally grey, I'd roll my eyes and comment that they missed the point of why people liked playing as orks in the first place.
Orks and all der boyz be gitz. It's part of da appealz.
Why does this remind me of when PETA went after Warhammer 40k for using animal fur as capes and cloaks?
Its a high fantasy setting with like a thousand different gods, devils and dragon baristas. It feels a little silly to say that not all servants of the Death Lord SkullTaker are evil, some of them are accountants and watch My Little Pony.
Jeez just wait until some people here about Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect and every other IP that has more than one race in it.
Its a high fantasy setting with like a thousand different gods, devils and dragon baristas. It feels a little silly to say that not all servants of the Death Lord SkullTaker are evil, some of them are accountants and watch My Little Pony.
Jeez just wait until some people here about Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect and every other IP that has more than one race in it.
Pretty much any movie that has a supernatural/religious angle, and has a skeptic character that is only there to poo poo on all the "wacky people and their crazy, unsubstantiated beliefs". And then they usually get killed in an ironic way, because you know, they were too arrogant to believe. The Skeptic Is Always Wrong, and is used as a punching bag in many films. Also in a lot of films that has the character have a tragic backstory, they often illustrate their grief by making them angry at god. A non christian film that comes to mind is Signs, and how Mel Gibson's character is represented between the start of the film, and the end of the film. The show Preacher, where when the town learns that god isn't real, the show makes a point to spend several minutes of an uncut scene, of a mother character telling her children "don't worry, it's ok that we now know god doesn't exist, it's not going to impact our lives in any negative way. everything will be fine, it's all just fine" and then smash cut to their entire town devolving into total anarchy and bedlam, murders in the streets, raping, burning, directly contradicting what the mother just said, clearly implying that without faith, people will just run around and murder everyone. And while, given who produces Preacher, I'm willing to bet they are probably just trying to make a joke, the fact is that plenty of fucking idiots out there genuinely think that is what the world would look like, if we didn't fear their invisible sky daddy. I could go on, but this thread is about D&D, not representations of atheism in media.
I've never played Warhammer, 40k or otherwise. Well I have dabbled with the Space Marines game, but I didn't finish it, and I've never been terribly interested in the other aspects of the setting, so I can't really comment on their representation. As I said though, I'm sort of middle of the road when it comes to the "all are one" style of depiction, or "they are all individuals! yes, we are all individuals!" schools of thought. Because in a fictional, fantasy setting, where the reality can include things like "beings composed entirely of the essence of good/evil, because they are the literal manifestations of these spiritual concepts, because magic" I find it less of a problem. As another person above posted, things like saying "All Demons from the Plane of Evil Torment Bad Times are Evil" well yeah..I mean that checks out in my book. The problem is that if you portray those demons as "Straight up ripping on the stereotypical Egyptians in their look and culture" then yeah, perhaps you should rethink your design, at the very least their cultural depiction.
I just personally PREFER the "let them all be as varied and diverse" approach, because I find it's way more conducive to storytelling and interesting characters and concepts. I've had entire game campaign ideas, pop into my head, simply from one of my players giving me a skeleton outline of a character concept they had, and it was so cool that my imagination just went crazy. And I feel that you have more opportunities for things like that, when you don't codify, and restrict the various elements of your setting, to a single note. OR, if you are going to do that (which again, I don't fundamentally have a problem with the idea of a mindless evil horde or whatever) at least take the time to not portray them as a real world culture, that might piss off the people you are portraying as mindless, evil hordes.
Because as much as we'd like to think that our media doesn't influence the way we view the world, it really does. I've heard people use movie references to justify their ideas on why some thing/group is bad. And this site, back in the 1.0 days, was really REALLY bad about couching their articles about ANY scientific breakthrough as "It's the end of the world! They've built the Terminators! It's Grey Goo! The Robot Apocalypse is Here!" For like EVERY article. They instantly went for the doom and gloom, because that's the only point of pop culture reference they had. "News article about being able to network brains together? It's mind control, Cyberdyne, we're all dead." Ignoring the fact that the technology could potentially help millions of people with neural problems. "News article about a nanobot breakthrough that could seriously help medicine and fix certain disorders? Grey Goo scenario, we're all dead."
So yeah, I don't think it's a bad thing to remove the cultural unpleasant markings from groups, if you are going to keep them all one note beings, especially as antagonists. Or, leave the cultural markings, and just have them be as varied and different as anyone else.
Racial alignment is one of many pants-on-head stupid systems in DnD that no self respecting DM should be using anyway. There's always a more interesting explanation for why any character is doing something than them just being evil. Even plain old fashioned naked greed is more interesting than the nebulous concept of them just being evil. The assumption you can just apply human ideas about good and evil to different species always rang a bit hollow anyway. You can still have orcs working as minions of a dark lord or raiding farms in the night, you're just going to need to spend a minute thinking about why they might want to do either of those things.
Handling the racial stat caps is more of a challenge, first and foremost because the Intelligence and Wisdom stats represent a huge range of ideas related to mental aptitude, which is barely papered over by the existence of proficiencies. Nonetheless, as different species do have varying degrees of mental capability in the real world, it's reasonable to expect that this would also apply in a fantasy world. What might be better would be to define what the average stats of particular races are, while bearing in mind Daniel's theory that the average man doesn't exist. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/bsedsqvgbohy5wg/The "Average Man"?.pdf?dl=0) Therefore, individuals Orcs could display intelligence that is significantly above average for their species, or even above average for humans. Good GMs should also avoid the easy trap of assuming that primitive lifestyles are the result of low intelligence; the diversity in the levels of technological advancement achieved by real world humans is a testament to that.
Handling the racial stat caps is more of a challenge, first and foremost because the Intelligence and Wisdom stats represent a huge range of ideas related to mental aptitude, which is barely papered over by the existence of proficiencies. Nonetheless, as different species do have varying degrees of mental capability in the real world, it's reasonable to expect that this would also apply in a fantasy world. What might be better would be to define what the average stats of particular races are, while bearing in mind Daniel's theory that the average man doesn't exist. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/bsedsqvgbohy5wg/The "Average Man"?.pdf?dl=0) Therefore, individuals Orcs could display intelligence that is significantly above average for their species, or even above average for humans. Good GMs should also avoid the easy trap of assuming that primitive lifestyles are the result of low intelligence; the diversity in the levels of technological advancement achieved by real world humans is a testament to that.
I'm sure those tropes exist, but how many works of fiction exist where religion is seen as a blight, where people who are religious are deluded at best, and where organized religion is a source of tyranny?
Way I see it, don't dish it out if you can't take it. God's Not Dead and Life of Brian can exist side by side and criticize atheism/religion respectively.
"I'm not."
"Sssh."
Real life? Your counter argument would hold more weight if there wasn't mountains of evidence of the harm religion does to the world.
But that's not really the point. You asked when do they portray the group that I am tied to in an offensive way? And I gave you examples. To say "yeah but they do it to religion too" has no bearing on it. When the portrayal is simply WRONG, that's not the same thing as when the evidence actually backs up a claim. I really don't bat an eyelash when someone *gasp* portrays the catholic church as an evil organization that rules through fear and oppression....because they do that. Or when they portray them as being all nice and smiles on the outside, but secretly they are a corrupt club of old men who indulge their own vices, while secretly condemning the world around them. Because again, they do that. This is about misrepresentation, not actual representation.
Except the god's not dead series of films, and other bullshit that religious group churns out, are misrepresenting the group they are trying to vilify and demonize. Which is the entire point of this thread and the response D&D has to it. They aren't "criticizing" atheism, they are making up false claims about what we actually stand for, and think about the world, and then construct false narratives to refute the very false narratives they created. That's not criticism, that's propoganda.
*shrug* I mean, the idea of racial alignments being a hard and fast rule kinda went out the window when Drizzit was introduced as the good exception to the otherwise always evil Drow race, which made player attempts at pulling off something similar take off. The various spinoffs(?) have been trending towards "They tend towards <alignment> because of the dominant culture, not a rule of their biology" for some time now. Pathfinder's Blood of Fiends, for instance, is a supplement made to expand on Tieflings, and it deliberately muddies the waters in asking but not answering whether it's nature or nurture that makes Tieflings trend towards evil (much of that trend being explainable as lashing out at the world that's treated them like garbage), and noting that despite their fiendish heritage they are fundamentally mortal and thus possessed of free will and the capacity to choose between good and evil. Similarly, Blood of Angels notes that despite their descent from good aligned outsiders, Aasimar are quite capable of having an evil alignment themselves.
If anything, I see this as basically just saying "you know what, sure, you can be a good <traditionally evil race> or an evil <traditionally good race>".
If anything, I see this as basically just saying "you know what, sure, you can be a good <traditionally evil race> or an evil <traditionally good race>".
D&D isn't really a single setting. Forgotten Realms is the most famous D&D campaign setting, but there are other official campaign settings. In the Eberron setting, for example, drow exist but have a completely different origin, society and religion (I don't know much about Eberron, so I'll leave it at that). On top that, D&D has an ethos that your game should be whatever you want it to be. While the game's rules are built around certain assumptions (one of which is that Gods are real and influence the world) the DM's guide literally tells you you can change this if you want to.
It's worth noting, racism also predates the modern idea of species. Not all racism is scientific racism, it's just that the scientific worldview is so dominant in popular consciousness that racists nowadays have to couch their views in science or sound more ridiculous than they already do. The idea that dark skin is the mark of a supernatural curse is something that actually happened in our own history, for example, and not even that long ago.
Tolkien's racism is weird because it doesn't fit neatly into being scientific or non-scientific. There's that obsession with heredity and purity and breeding, but there's also supernatural curses and metaphysical taint. Tolkien elves aren't humans, for example, they're supernatural beings.. who just happen to look like white people and embody all the virtues of "pure" nordic civilization. It doesn't really fix the problem.
We've kind of absorbed this idea that fantasy is inherently escapist. There's an essay by Michael Moorcock called "Epic Pooh" (amazing title) in which he points out is that the writing style of early fantasy is typically what he calls "the language of the nursery", it's meant to flow in a way that is soothing and comforting. Even when there's violence and peril, you're always emotionally detached enough from it by the language itself that it never feels particularly challenging. I think that notion of escapism sometimes makes it hard for people to see that fantasy is an inherently political genre, it's a genre where you can do literally anything, so what you choose to do with that space matters. There's not a whole lot we can do about fantasy races now, the origins of the concept may be dodgy but it's out there in the popular consciousness and we can't exactly expect people to stop writing or caring about it. But what we can do is make sure our concept of fantasy races is distinct from those uncomfortable origins.
I feel like this comes from a very, shall we say, laymans view of tolkien. One that misunderstands the work he created, and has no real grasp of cultural history, folklore, storytelling, or literature.
Tolkien's work is largely a combination of christian philosophy, european folk lore, and various mythologies, most prominently from saxon mth, and the prose and poetic eda. Orcs, goblins, trolls, elves, forest spirits, ect, were largely borrowed from the aforementioned myths and stories, and they served as either representations of tolkien's view on nature and industrialization, or as a spiritual metaphor for fallen humanity. Dragons represented greed. The idea that they represented real world racial politics is a misunderstanding of his intent, as well as the body of academic work that influenced his writing. I suspect that this is based on a misreading of the silmarillion, an incomplete collection of notes and stories compiled by his son christopher. In it, Tolkien toyed with the idea that orcs were corrupted elves, and represented a state of being that was fallen from god. This was, of course, never part of a finalized canon. He, himself, was aware of the theological problems of this, because while it stood as a metaphor for original sin, it also suggested that orcs had no free will. As a result he also toyed with the idea that orcs were golem like collections of matter, or that they were a sort of souless humonculi. Unfortunately he died before his work was finished, so we don't know what he would have settled on. Regardless, these were theological musings, not racial ones, and any racial implications that exist, exist solely in the minds of the audience.
As for his views of bloodlines and ethnic groups, these are only strange to those who do not understand the academic scholarship behind his work. They certainly are not weird, except, perhaps, to a layman who misunderstands his work. Bloodlines were important both in medieval society and fiction (which his work is based on), and in biblical texts, which feature entire chapters on heredity and bloodlines. The purpose of bloodlines in tolkiens work was either related to family dynasties and kingship, which was the foundation for most medieval governments, or were a metaphor for religion. In the case of aragorn, for instance, there is an idea that he is descended from a fallen line of men, and has inherited original sin. Thus he will face the same temptations as his ancestors, but he can choose, through free will, to resist those temptations. This is tied to the sinful blood of adam, that is inherent in mankind. When aragorn marries, arwen, it represents that piece of the elves, essentially a piece of god, is within mankind. Much in the way that the holy spirit is in mankind, due to the blood of jesus.
The funny thing is, tolkien actually *did* address the literal idea of racism, although it was a minor theme. Dwarves and elves had a long standing racist feud with one another, due to a betrayal during the first age. However, through the events of the novel, gimli and legolas learned about each others cultures, and developed a friendship. This is expanded upon in the film, and most fantasy narratives that deal with racism in this way take inspiration from tolkiens work. Though it is not a major theme of the work, he was one of the first fantasy novelists to utilize this theme in his work. It certainly wasn't present in most mythological works that he drew inspiration from.
Not everyone will necessarily agree with his views on original sin, salvation, and religion, but to spin it into a parable about race is, at best, woefully misinformed.
Except we're not talking about the real world, we're talking about fiction.
Look, none of what you've written is objectionable in of itself, but still, every argument can be flipped around.
When people make fun of groups you're aren't part of, I think it's fair to laugh, as long as you don't throw a hissy fit when it comes to sattarizing your own group. Whether atheists count as a "group" is iffy (I'm irreligious, but I don't consider myself part of an "atheist community" or whatever), but that aside, if I get to laugh at Life of Brian, then I can't throw a hissy fit at God's Not Dead. I can certainly criticize it, sure, but it looks like your argument is going beyond that.
Who's "we" in this case? Again, I'm irreligious, but I don't really "stand for" anything on the subject. I'm more of a "you do you, I'll do me" kind of person.
Look, God's Not Dead, as I understand it, is a case where every atheist is either a lapsed Christian, an SJW, or just an all round terrible person. Okay, fine. The film doesn't have a favourable view on atheists. But I can look at something like His Dark Materials, where every religious person is at best, naieve, and at worst, a murderer, and one of the major characters is formerly Catholic before she 'found science.' No work is above criticism, but as part of a wider principle, again, I can't claim special treatment.
This goes well beyond religion mind you. For instance, there's the Simpsons episode Bart vs. Australia. There's elements of the sattire that simply don't exist; for instance, no, the Australian flag doesn't have a boot kicking someone's buttocks, and every Australian the Simpsons meet is an idiot or a liar. When I first saw the episode, it, um...let's just say I didn't take it well. Later on though, I came to appreciate it more, and now, I actually really like the episode. Part of this is due to becoming more emotionally mature, the other part is the wider understanding that the Simpsons has parodied people from all over the world, but none more so than the US itself, so I can't cry foul when Australia gets its turn to be mocked, while laughing without reservation at everything else.
I keep hearing about "Tolkein's racism" being thrown around. Honestly, you'd have to squint at the text to see it, and even then, there's mitigating factors. But as for the elves...really? Are the elves intended to be white people, or are the elves Tolkein's take on a pre-existing piece of folklore? Also, the elves end up fading away, and what humans regard as the "Doom of Men" (mortality), is alternatively called the "Gift of Men." Elves are 'better' than humans in one sense, but it's humans that are the chosen people in the setting who'll go on to inherit Arda. And purity/breeding? I recall that the Dunadain were 'better' than "lesser men" in a sense, but what did that accomplish them? Lots of hubris, Numenor is destroyed, and Numenor went imperial on the Easterlings and Haradrim before they went imperial on Gondor. There's a lot of skepticism in Lord of the Rings about the idea of "great" heroes or "great" races. As has been pointed out, even within the text, it's telling that it's a hobbit that has the willpower to destroy the One Ring, whereas anyone else, including 'great beings' such as Gandalf, would have been corrupted.
How early is "early fantasy?" Because what you cite from that essay seems to be an inditement that could be labelled against genre fiction as a whole rather than just fantasy.
How valid the Genre vs. Literary Fiction paradigm is aside, the idea of "fantasy races" being problematic. Okay, sure. But fantasy races have been out of vogue for awhile now anyway, at least outside games.
It's not actually that common, believe it or not. While there is plenty of fiction wherein a given religious group is abhorrent, they're almost always treated as a heretic cult (achieved through either classic [literal] demonizing spin wherein they worship what is for all intents and purposes an evil demon, or making a point of how they pervert the teachings of the parent religion their cult spun off from), or otherwise hypocritically using their nominal spiritual role for materialistic gain. Rare is the story where it's suggested that religion in a general sense is anything less than a net good. At worst, it tends towards "they just aren't following the right religion (or the right denomination of a religion)"
Using a relatively well known example of this, The Da Vinci Code paints the institution of the Catholic Church (Specifically Opus Dei) in a very unflattering light, but that's not treated as a mark against the actual faith. Rather, the zealotry of the supposed shadow organization is basically treated as unknown and anathema to most true believers...and certainly not limited to that faith, as demonstrated by the story's true antagonist who is happy to take advantage of the aforementioned shadow organization's zeal, but is motivated by his opposition to their beliefs. And even then, it suggests that their actions are ultimately self-sabotaging through the suggestion that the people they're trying to silence might actually have the spark of the divine in them, strongly suggesting the veracity of Christianity's core theology.
Perhaps the classic example would be Moliere's play Tartuffe, wherein the titular character is a con-man feigning piety and religious authority to take advantage of his marks. The operative word, of course, being feigning, hence the alternate titles of "The Imposter" and "The Hypocrite". The entire point is that Tartuffe is a charlatan using a veneer of piety to take advantage of gullible amongst the faithful, and that Tartuffe deserved scorn and ridicule for it.
This actually underscores a common element in the aforementioned story themes: that the antagonists are members of the cloth (or feign to be such) makes their actions all the more reprehensible because their self-serving goals make a mockery of the virtue that the position is supposed to embody. To invoke a more recent example, we see this spelled out to us and later indirectly evidenced in Netflix's Castlevania series through the early antagonist of the Bishop, who is aptly summed up by the phrase "reprehensible self-righteous bully". When Dracula starts his vengeance, he unleashes a demonic horde upon Wallachia, and the Bishop holes himself up in the safety of his church while he has others try to purge the city of the Speakers...basically scapegoating them and using that as a pretext to get rid of a rival culture/religion. Cue, then, demons entering the church leading to an interesting exchange wherein the demons basically spell out to him that despite his protests to the contrary, he's been acting so detestable in God's eyes as to remove any semblance of holy protection for him or his church. This amusingly ends up coming back around again when another antagonist later raises him as a zombie, and the zombie is capable of blessings with actual holy power behind them. So it's not that there's nothing behind the faith, it's that - as the demon told him - God found the Bishop in life to be reprehensible.
I think the idea that Tolkien's writing is merely a reflection of mythology is a common and uncritical defence of Tolkien which conveniently sidelines what the philological approach of the early 20th century actually entailed.
Magical creatures in mythology are not representations of fallen humanity (we'll get to that) or the perils of industrialisation, they are features of a historical worldview that predates the idea of humanity itself, let alone industrialisation. To adapt them into that modern worldview, to turn orcs from a nebulous Anglo-Saxon word meaning some kind of vague supernatural evil to a fantasy race within distinct qualities and attributes and heredity requires some kind of process of translation. Not just linguistic translation, but conceptual translation.
This process of translation is central to the body of academic work that influenced Tolkien's writing. It is not about the distant, neutral appreciation of myth, it is about reconciling and rationalizing the inherently fragmented, contradictory nature of myth, originally in service of illustrating its relationship to Christian truth (typically as a perversion thereof) and later a dominant paradigm of western exceptionalism.
Tolkien may have disliked the modern world, but what he did was only possible from a position informed by philosophical modernity. A 10th century Anglo-Saxon could not have written The Lord of the Rings.
I mean, I'm not sure how else to interpret it.
But of those unhappy ones who were ensnared by Melkor little is known of a certainty. For who of the living has descended into the pits of Utumno, or has explored the darkness of the counsels of Melkor? Yet this is held true by the wise of Eressëa, that all those of the Quendi who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes. For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar; and naught that had life of its own, nor the semblance of life, could ever Melkor make since his rebellion in the Ainulindalë before the Beginning: so say the wise. And deep in their dark hearts the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery. This it may be was the vilest deed of Melkor, and the most hateful to Ilúvatar.
But let's ask a more fundamental question, what does it mean to be corrupted?
The corruption of orcs manifests in several ways. They are physically repulsive ("least lovely mongol types"), they are inherently drawn to evil and they are created to be obedient slaves who cannot challenge the will of their masters. Whether they are the remnants of broken and tortured elves or soulless golems kind of doesn't impact on what they are. They are physically and mentally subhuman, that is what being corrupt means within the narrative.
In terms of theme, you can read this corruption as a Christian moral concept, that orcs and other corrupted beings are outside of a state of grace, but as you point out yourself that doesn't work theologically. Traditionally, demons were depicted as ugly to reflect their existence outside of divine grace, but the idea that ugliness is an inherent mark of evil isn't really an orthodox Christian concept. It's also not an Anglo-Saxon concept. It's a concept that exists in classical Greece and Rome, but there's no evidence Tolkien incorporated classical ideas or sources into his writing.
So where would this idea even come from?
In short, it's hereditary degeneracy.
Nowadays, we tend to think that racism is just this weird irrational prejudice that people got into because they wanted to be cool or something, but the reality is that racism was built on a much broader foundation of ideas about human nature. One of the ideas we are still struggling with today is the belief that humans can be hierarchically arranged in terms of their complexity based on how far they have degraded since some imagined higher state (traditionally, that was the fall) and that higher orders of humanity are, by virtue of their complexity, prone to inevitable decay. Hereditary degeneracy is the basic ideology of the British middle class, our nice bourgois white British family, as the epitome of civilization and sophistication, is tasked above all with with preserving themselves against the threat of decay, and decay which is both physical, mental and psychological.
It's not a case of either being racist or Christian, it's not a case of racial metaphors or religious metaphors. They are the same thing, or at least deeply interconnected through the idea of hereditary degeneracy. That whole nineteenth century crusade against masturbation which is quite funny to laugh about now wasn't just about masturbation being a sin, it was about the belief that masturbation would literally cause you to physically and mentally decay into some kind of subhuman gollum creature, because people actually believed that was possible. It's not a fantasy concept, it was a basic organising principle of British society for over a hundred years.
A friendship founded on a solid mutual desire to genocide the fuck out of orcs..
Seriously though, I don't think Tolkien's races are a direct 1:1 analogy of the real world idea of race. I don't think any of this stuff was written with the explicit intention of teaching us about race, rather, it simply happens to reflect a worldview in which race is a feature. Tolkien definately flirted with the idea of Dwarves as "semitic", but I don't think this can really be called an anti-racist narrative. The idea that certain cultures, even those with historical grievances, should overcome their differences in order to present a united front against their real enemies is hardly an uncommon position among racists.
Last edited:
Honestly I have no problem the idea of creatures such as orcs as inherently hostile, violent, greedy, oppressive beings who pose an intrinsic threat to other life and which may as well be wiped out for the betterment of everyone else. There's no particular reason they have to be anthropomorphised into anything nicer. I think "anthropomorphise" is an appropriate term: the error to think of something as being human-like in ways it is not or (in the case of a fantasy race) need not be. This makes them in a sense more two-dimensional, but it's not like there's a shortage of options for scenario creators that want three-dimensional interactions. They can just casually slaughter their way through some green-skinned cannon fodder at various points along the way.
This approach is admittedly trickier if you play in a setting where these orcs or orc analogues can interbreed with humans, because that has some serious implications that orcs and humans are branches of the same species.
Wouldn't they actually be sub-elven?
If we need to consider what the orcs represent, we surely need to view them in the frame of what elves represent, not humans.