Certainly if I also had that background, I think I'd see why that would be your first pass understanding of the structure of D&D, but the fantasy foundations of D&D go back to a time well before Europe was a mighty colonizing power, to a time when on the contrary Europe was one of the world's cultural and technological backwaters and more often than not, it was being colonized by foreign nations (Huns, Turks, Moors, etc.).
D&D's fantasy and folk roots don't start in the 18th or 19th century. Trolls and goblins and elves and dwarves and the like didn't come out of Europe's colonial experience, but out of its dim dark prehistory. The fantasy roots of goblins and trolls and the like aren't Europeans driving out indigenous groups in the Age of Exploration, but the brutal man versus nature fight of the European Dark Ages.
my nephew use to watch the cartoon series Blinky Bill, which is about a group of Anthropomorphized Australian animals having adventures in the Australia bush. Anyway I remember watching one episode when Blinky and friends go back in to the past to explore history, except they didnt go back in Australian history, instead Blinky (who is a koala) becomes a armoured knight out to save the princess from a medieval castle.
I for one was really disappointed, sure it was a kids show but the example does illustrate the inherent bias of 'Western' views of their romantic 'fantasy' past - Fantasy has developed from the old folklore rendering of the Dark/Middle Ages with its Rogues, Knights, Castles, Wolves and Dragons who lived "Once Upon a Time" in a "Land Far Far Away".
They might well, predate the imperial era of the 18th/19th century but the modern understanding of them was most certainly transformed and modified by the era.
Tolkien, who popularized this sort of thing as much or more than any other, was a medievalist. His inspiration was Beowulf and the Viking Eddas and the rest of that Northern European we are just now emerging into literacy a good 5000 years after writing was discovered literature. The northern Europeans that believed in savage fairy people and driving them into the wild country weren't thinking about non-European peoples of which they had almost no contact. They were thinking of their own bitter cold, inhospitable, and savage land with its long lightless nights and short growing seasons.
Its notable that you raise Tolkien as he also reflects some of the colonial reality of his era via the inclusion of the 'elephant' riding black Southrons, a 'warlike people' who side with Sauron and fought alongside the Orcs against the heroes.
When D&D establishes the idea of driving out monsters, and settling the land in a pastoral manner, it's entirely self-contained within European setting...Even writers who held at times in their life deeply racist attitudes, like Robert Howard, when they projected their own race into this fantasy setting, they projected them as the barbarians in the setting and not the civilized peoples. The white peoples of Howard's setting were the primitive, unsophisticated ones, limited in technology, lore, commerce, and wealth. Howard's setting isn't about white colonialism per se - it's about a yearning for that mythic primitive bygone time when supposedly Caucasians were more manly, honest, virtuous or whatever than they were now in his eyes, polluted by commerce, decadence, excessive learning, and the sort of things that Howard thought led to social and racial decline. In other words, it's back to yearning to that just emerging from the dark ages mythic narrative. Does this not being colonialist necessarily make it better? No. But there is a danger I think in seeing things too much within the lens of your own experience.
I accept that most of the Eddas and earliest European folklore has Man v Nature as its foundation, that of course is very evident in the development of the dragon, ogre and of course the wolf, witch and fey. But to say that the foreign other is unknown is incorrect as Africa and Near East were known, and even within Europe you have people like Saami, Roma and Picts who were other'd.
REHs states that the Cimmerians were ancestors of the Irish and Scots Gaels and while Conan is a barbarian herepresents the finest ideals of the North West European as he is set against both decadent civilization of the northern lands and the exotic foreigners further south in Stygia (Egypt), Kush, Zamora (Middle East) and Vendhya (India).
While these renderings of the exotic other as dark scorcerer and beguiling enchantress may not play to the savage image (although the Afghuli of Afghulistan do) they are nonetheless colonial images of other as untrustworthy enemy that influenced the development of RPGs.
As an aside does anyone remember Aesheba? an older setting envisioned as Greek-Africa? The book had some good research and nice ideas but for me there was always that niggling thought that Africa is rich enough to have its own existance without needing to overlay ancient Greece on top
I think it bizarre to self-identify with orcs. I don't identify you with orcs. Why would you identify yourself in that way? Why consciously adopt a negative stereotype? The orcs, ogres, trolls, goblins, kobolds, and so forth were never meant to mean you.
Actually my playing orcs was probably more inspired by my love of Pigsy (Cho Hakkai) from Monkey Magic, I also used a half-orc to approximate Woefully Fat the Pirate bokor in On Stranger Tides. The character I played most often was a gnome - also non-human, but more easily kept out of conflict.
So if you appropriate them and self-identify as them, then of course you are going to see all violence against them as some sort attack on yourself whether it is meant that way or not. But then, you are at that point the one engaged in cultural appropriation - taking dark age fears of a different culture and reskinning them for your own purpose. You can't blame the author for that baggage. I spent almost my entire youth playing a 1e AD&D Thief. I probably did it because I was an adolescent and adolescents are almost always attracted to rebellion.
That indeed is one of the dilemma in playing DnD races as races rather than as monsters and of course I am not unique in that as can be seen in the various cultural reskinnings that have happened over the years, most notably of course the Native American Elfs of Dragonlance.
Anyway this thread has been popular and the discussion moved ...