Do orcs in gaming display parallels to colonialist propaganda?

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Which way is that? Not asking you to point out posters, just clarify which interpretation of the film in here seems prevalent among the Caucasians you know

not prevelent, by any means, but the few people I’ve seen espousing what celebrim seems to claim as basically axiomatic have been exclusively white.

Hmmm... imagining an off-shoot...

Ages later, after the War-forged and the Orcs both turned on their creators, you have a perpetual war between orcs and War-forged still going on with a more cyber-punk blasted landscape and a bit of meat vs metal thrown in with nomadic bands of survivors of the other races.

Wouldn’t work in this setting, where the warforged were made free citizens of the empire as soon as their sentience was discovered, but certainly a fun setting concept!

 

[Gradine]

Oh goody, it's time to talk about the "Death of the Author"

I'm of two minds on this, but ultimately I think that the concept of the "Death or the Author" is pretty rubbish. First, we need to separate it from a related but adjacent context: the idea of "intent vs. impact" (though we'll get back to that in a bit). People tend to quote Barthes et. al. in those arguments, but what Barthes is talking about isn't that. The "Death of the Author", as Barthes argues, is very specifically related to literary (though it can extrapolated to all creative endeavors) criticism that says we shouldn't take what the author's stated intent or biographical information into account when conducting criticism of the work itself; that we should focus on the "text" solely. That this argument didn't really start to pick up steam until women and artists of color were starting to gain prominence and credibility in artistic and literary circles is, I'm sure, merely a coincidence. But I think the argument falls flat on its face, even if we do ironically ignore the context surrounding it. See, context matters; and there are some who argue that the sum total of an author's writings, personal statements, and biography are all inextricably part of the text as well. Literature is a definitionally messy way to convey a point; if it were completely and entirely straightforward it would be an essay. It does not take much to convincingly subvert or pervert an author's original meaning beyond or even against their own original intent. This is true even when people are speaking straightforwardly, let alone metaphorically through literature. Context helps us understand and critique what we're reading; why the author made the choices that they made. The "Death of the Author" doesn't improve our understanding of the work; it specifically removes information that would be useful to helping our understanding.

On the other hand, I wouldn't argue that our own interpretations matter any less. We shouldn't ignore what the author says about their own work, but we also shouldn't necessarily take it at face value either. Authorial intent, biographical information; these are additional pieces to the puzzle, which we should examine as critically as the work itself. This is why many argue that "everything is text"; those who espouse the Death of the Author would have us throw away half of the puzzle pieces.

This brings us back to the "intent vs. impact" argument, which is not really (or at least I should say not always, this did come up in a thread primarily about fantasy literature and Tolkein more specifically) about literary or artistic criticism, but about the real-world impact of problematic statements or content, and how much (if it all) the owner of the statement intended those consequences to happen. I would argue that the we could apply the same level of reasoning. I think it's wrong to say intent doesn't matter; it's just that the impact matters far more. We would, as a people, treat differently a man who stabbed somebody accidentally (say, they trip while holding knife) versus somebody who stabbed somebody on purpose. However, in both instances we would also acknowledge that harm was done (somebody got stabbed), that a specific person was responsible for that, and that something ought to be done for reparations. We wouldn't charge the tripper with attempted murder or even assault, necessarily, but we would recognize that some form of apology is owed; that the person ought to attempt to make amends. We ought to carry the same sort of reasoning when the harm done is not necessarily physical (I would hope we could skip past childish and demonstrably false arguments that words cannot cause harm). That is, just because Tolkein nor Jackson intended their Middle-Earth Orcs to be racist caricatures doesn't not excuse them from the fact they kind of are, but we wouldn't lump these men in with, say, Lovecraft or Vox Day. Nor should that stop us from putting more thought into how we can utilize the tropes Fantasy has held on to in spite of drawing their origins in writings that were ignorantly harmful at best and outright malicious at worst.

And in many ways, we've already moved on from that. I'm not certain Tolkein is even the foremost touchstone for "orc" in our culture anymore; I would argue that distinction belongs to Warcraft, which at least since Warcraft 3 (and especially World of Warcraft) have presented orcs in a very different light than the typical purely evil, vaguely racially-tinged creation of Tolkein that most canonical D&D (outside some outliers like Eberron) still stubbornly clings too. I'd still wager that at most tables these days, however, orcs (and goblins and the like) hew much closer to their presentation in WoW than in Volo's Guide.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[jasper]

Hussar…I mean, this is English 101 stuff. Any first year university student can tell you the same thing. The notion that the author is a sole or even important element in interpretation died decades ago….
I still laugh at this. Especially since college English teachers must publish something or lose their jobs. And first years have to do term papers in a way that sucks up to said teachers. English teachers ruining good stories and making them boring because they can.
If the author said my work means x. I will believe him. She wrote it. They were in the room typing it up. Robert Frost stated his “Stopping by woods” was just a poem he wrote to describe the event. Isaac Asimov took various letters in his magazine to task about his symbolism. It is nice to know they were internet trolls before the internet. I think authors after replying to repeated questions just change their answers to go along with the interviewer.
Hussar… with edits
3. By placing the author in this privileged position to tell other people what the real interpretation is, we grant the author power that is very troubling. "Oh, you thought that was offensive? Well, I didn't mean it to be offensive.. (cut the rest of the paragraph) Add the following. A Period….
If you find fault, that is up to you. Go forth and be offended. But buy the author’s book so he can offend you more.
Celebrim … claims like, "The drow are an evil dark skinned matriarchy. That's so racist and sexist.", are almost always wrong. The drow are a matriarchy not because Gygax…
Gee a science fact about spiders. Did Gary know this? Or was just because a matriarchy would be something totally different from the norms at the time of publishing?

 

[Gradine]

I really don't want to get into this on a TTRPG site, but this isn't right (even if many people have this vague recollection of S/Z from undergrad).

Modern critical theory (or, as you call it, the death of the author) really dates back to the beginning of the 20th Century with Russian Formalism.

But you can easily see the antecedent in the New Criticism (which, of course, has its antecedents in the 19th century) in America, which was separate from the type of close reading that occured in France and also predated Barthes.

By the time La mort de l'auteur rolled around in 1967, these ideas were old hat.

Anyway, this is important because during the rise of the intentional fallacy (1954), we were still looking at a superstructure that was dominated by, and served the interests of, white men. Jus' sayin'.

PS- The rise of modern literary criticism happened to coincide with rise of modernism in literature.

Barthes may not have proposed it, but he certainly popularized it. The fact that he is so often credited for that suggests that while those ideas may been percolating for a while, they did not become the predominant social position of literary critics until at least l'Morte.

It may or may not be worth pointing out that Ellison's Invisible Man predates The Verbal Icon by two years.

Again, I'm not arguing that there was ill intent behind the philosophy (it certainly makes a kind of sense, even though it's wrong); but that the idea of having to take women and POC authors as seriously as their works almost certainly contributed to the idea gaining popularity.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Gradine]

Um .... okay, not going to agree on that. The big work is not Barthes, it's the Intentional Fallacy (1954).

Barthes' work is one of many, after that, that take remove the authors' intention out of the work.

I disagree, or else most people would refer to the "intentionally fallacy" rather than the "death of the author" when referring to the concept. This is unarguably not the case.

I don't know how to respond when someone says that the publication of the Invisible Man means that POC had run of the intellectual sphere. It's like, "Hey, remember Viriginia Woolf? Women RULE the literary field now."

That is not what I meant and you know it. But the fact that Ellison's work was lauded in many circles (including winning the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction, over such works as Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck's East of Eden) had to have stuck in the craw of many influential literary critics of the time. And Ellison just happens to be the most historically recognizable examples; Zora Neale Hurston's career began in the 1920's, nor that any of these authors had any great deal of cultural capital within the larger field of literary criticism, nor were they some monolithic block that had a singular vision to impart upon the field, even were it in their power to do so (Ellison was not a particular of Hurtson's works, for instance).

Agree to disagree. I think it's more of the same- old white men, many of them French, but not all of them, counting angels on the head of a pin.

You'll have to excuse me if I find it more than a bit naive to think that racial animus had entirely no impact on the fields of either philosophy or literary criticism at the dawn of the Civil Rights' movement.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Sadras]

The very term "barbarian" comes from ancient Rome and their term for non-Roman peoples they considered unable to interact with them in a civilized fashion (which usually meant the Germanic peoples of central and western Europe).

Just a quibble, the term originates from the Ancient Greeks for those who did not speak Greek and follow Greek customs. I haven't read the entire thread so I might have been ninja'd.