Do orcs in gaming display parallels to colonialist propaganda?

Riley37 said:

Here's a significant difference, in the course of that comparison:

In JRRT's setting, when Morgoth tortures and corrupts elves, their physical appearance changes.

On the input side: elves are "the fairest creatures in Arda". The Quenya word "Vanyar", translated as "fair", refers to their light-coloured hair. When their eye color is mentioned, it's gray. Some Elves have brown hair, but JRRT wrote, in these words, "no Elf had absolute black hair".

On the output side: we've already quoted physical descriptions and established which human populations match those descriptions.

Meanwhile, in the 'Verse, the process which tortures and corrupts ordinary humans into Reavers changes their minds, and NOT their physical appearance. In the episode "Bushwacked", we see a person on both ends of the process. I could have played that character, because in the 'Verse, an ordinary humans can have black hair, and as a Reaver will still have black hair.

I could not play an elf whom Morgoth corrupts into an orc, because no Elf ever has my hair color. I could only play the output side of that process. Apparently the process which turns a good person into a bad person, also makes a fair-haired person look... more like me? Well, that explains a lot, doesn't it?

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I think the association between fairness and beauty (and beauty and goodness) runs deeper than racism. Last I checked it's considered scientifically plausible that blond hair, blue eyes and even pale skin evolved primarily due to sexual selection rather than any environmental advantage.

Libramarian said:

I think the association between fairness and beauty (and beauty and goodness) runs deeper than racism. Last I checked it's considered scientifically plausible that blond hair, blue eyes and even pale skin evolved primarily due to sexual selection rather than any environmental advantage.

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Well, I guess the question to ask would then be, do we see the same association between fairness and goodness in other societies where there is much less variation than in Northern Europe?

IOW, are there fairy tales and myths in, say, Kenyan or Native American cultures where being fair skinned is equated with goodness?

Libramarian said:

Just skimming through the thread - Canadian white people ask each other about their ethnic background all the time. Actually they seem more interested in this topic the higher status they are.

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People whose ancestry and features have never put them on the short end of a power dynamic, are comfortable exploring the minor variations within their genetic common ground... and that's different from the comfort level of those whose ancestors would have (in the USA) been on the short end of the Internment of 1941, or the Naturalization Act of 1790 (which restricted citizenship to "any alien, being a free white person"). Rather predictable, actually. Meanwhile, anyone among the bosses who was less white, would get a reminder of their outlier status. "We're all Aryan here, but who's Nordic and who's Persian? Oh, all of us excepting you, Carlos, no offense meant."

Libramarian said:

Wrt to Orcs...I'm pretty sure I find the concept of an inimical "savage" race - cunning but incorrigibly and mercilessly warlike - to be kinda scary and cool *independent* of its real-world historical associations. That is to say, if we were on an alternate Earth where every civilization developed technologically at exactly the same rate and colonialism never happened and we never recognized and developed language and stereotypes for this distinction between civilized races and savage/barbarian races, I *think* I would still find it an interesting concept for fantasy roleplaying. Maybe more interesting.

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Yes, would still be an interesting concept, kinda like the Warrior class in Niven's "Mote in God's Eye". (Deadly warriors, tactically sharp, not as useful for farming or engineering.)

In that alternate universe, we would have no grounds for concern about whether our fantasy stories were adding insult to injury. No one would adapt Andrew Jackson's famous saying about Indians into an equivalent opinion about goblins, because Andrew Jackson's saying would not be part of our history. If you can bring us a copy of that universe's version of D&D, please do!

Riley37 said:

People whose ancestry and features have never put them on the short end of a power dynamic, are comfortable exploring the minor variations within their genetic common ground... and that's different from the comfort level of those whose ancestors would have (in the USA) been on the short end of the Internment of 1941, or the Naturalization Act of 1790 (which restricted citizenship to "any alien, being a free white person"). Rather predictable, actually. Meanwhile, anyone among the bosses who was less white, would get a reminder of their outlier status. "We're all Aryan here, but who's Nordic and who's Persian? Oh, all of us excepting you, Carlos, no offense meant."

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Caveat: in the USA, even certain Caucasian Europeans have faced their own versions of bigotry. “Irish Need Not Apply” signs were popular, once upon a time. And Eastern Europeans were not so well received when they first started coming to these shores in big numbers.

Not saying it was equivalent to the mistreatment of nonwhites, but it was still of a similar nature- the prejudice of imagined innate superiority.

Libramarian said:

I think the association between fairness and beauty (and beauty and goodness) runs deeper than racism.

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You have your opinion, I have mine. I say that the association between fair-skinned people and good people, runs EXACTLY as deep as racism.

If I showed you 100 photos of people, chosen randomly from the 7 billion humans, and asked you to sort them, in order, from Best Human to Worst Human... and you acted on that association... then you would sort those 100 photos from fairest and best person, to darkest and worst person.

If you assess Carol Bundy as fairer, and prettier, and in turn *a better person*, than Harriet Tubman, then we'll just have to disagree.

Riley37 said:

Hello, Bedrockgames. For clarity and context: I’m not calling you a racist. I didn’t even need you telling me about your marriage, or how you’ve voted (which, by the way, I discourage, because how each of us votes is “political”, it’s quite literally political). I’m not calling for torches and pitchforks. There’s a Monty Python line, “We have found a witch! May we burn her?”. I leave “We have found a racist! May we ban him?” to the mods. If you were on Twitter, your fear of pack-attack Call Outs would make sense, but this isn’t Twitter; again, because EnWorld has active moderation.

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These kinds of conversations tend to make their way onto twitter, so I figured the clarifications were important.

Hussar said:

Now, should you have a game where the goblinoids are only evil because they are goblinoids, live in small tribal groups on the fringe of civilization and are constantly attacking that civilization while being described in terms that are directly linked to racist depictions of minorities?
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I wasn't arguing it this way. I was just saying an evil goblin (which could have any cultural features the writer thinks are interesting). Heck they could be based off the Nazis if you want them to. I wasn't even thinking about what cultural details would yet be involved (I think as long as the cultural details are incidental it is fine, if you are trying to paint an image of all people who share a cultural trait as evil, then sure it is bad------but most inspiration is going to come from some real world cultures just by the nature of human creativity)

Hussar said:

I'm going to have to jump on you here a bit BRG. Sorry.

What and who are "most people"? That's a really indefensible position to take. I mean, the problems with fantasy and race are well documented and go back decades. This isn't some new idea that's just sprung out. You can go all the way back to the 60's and the original criticisms of Tolkien and find examples of people seeing the problem.

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By most people I am stating an opinion: I think most people don't really notice this stuff. I could be wrong. But it is just based on my impression talking to people. Again, I get that you are pointing to an academic debate on this topic, but most people are not steeped in that debate. And I think often times in academics mountains get made out of mole hills. Maybe people were saying Tolkien was racist in the 60s, I do recall there being an essay by MM calling Tolkien Fascist, which I think isn't a very valid argument and the kind of academic argument I have in mind when I am skeptical (there was a similar argument among film critics when we were kids labeling movies where heroes used guns as fascist----even Robocop got the label). I think sometimes these hyper critical lenses find problems most people don't really see (which is why I say this is something you need to squint to observe and why I call it taking a fine tooth comb). By the way, I am not talking about other aspects of S&S. Obviously if you read HPL and if you read Conan, the racial stuff is way more obvious and troubling (like I said, I noticed that about Lovecraft when I was a kid reading him). I think Howard, at least in my experience is not nearly as bad as Lovecraft, but the stuff is still there. With Tolkien, none of it feels intentional at all. And a lot of it, like the eye description and 'swarthy' bit, feel like they could be pointing to other things. I think we are just starting to repeat ourselves. But in the case of orcs, I just don't think it is the closed case you believe it to be, and I think most people really do just see a green skinned monster and don't think of it as stand-in for another race (and certainly most people don't have colonialist propaganda in mind unless they've read a lot of criticism that invokes things like colonialism and orientalism). This is one of these things that I just think requires a bit of training to become aware of.

Hussar said:

Arguing that "most people" don't have a problem is pretty much precisely the problem when we're talking about issues with minorities.
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I am including everyone in that most people. Again, I think this has a lot more to do with educational background. One thing that frequently surprises me about this is how often people in minority groups have a very different opinion about this stuff than I might think if I just went by this thread. So this isn't about just listening to white people or something. But again, at the end of the day, i think we have to weigh what different people say, and still retain our own mind and decision making about it.

Riley37 said:

That’s true. Most people don’t think about it.
Also, *most* fans of the football team in Washington DC don’t think about whether the name of that team sounds like colonialist propaganda.
People who have actually been called by that name, however, tend to think about it. Some of those people apply a “fine-toothed comb” to the history of that word.

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I don't watch football so this isn't an issue I follow much (for example I don't know what the opinion of the team name is among Native Americans in polls). But I see a clear difference here. This is a team name that is using an actual ethnic slur of a real people as its name. If orcs were instead called something like that as their name, sure that would be pretty hard to ignore. Instead we are going by two lines in a description from tolkien, and again, it isn't clear to me if he was pointing to an actual race or not in that description. I just think it is a lot more murky.