D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Bedrockgames]

While yes, clearly there are some people who will say something like 'your evil if you like evil orcs,' I don't think it is really that prevalent, especially when you divide by the sum total of gamers out there. Skimming Facebook or Reddit (or better yet, have a politically motivated friend collate them all into evidence that they are being attacked somehow*) can cherry pick a swath of this, but I'd need a lot of convincing that it is a trend. What I do see is a lot of calls for WotC (or Piazzo) to change how the default presentation of these humanoid species is presented in their published rulebooks. Not policing game tables, urging changes in specific corporate decisions.
*or am I the only one with a friend like this?

On this I largely agree. I think much of this is online discussion and that is different from what you encounter in the wild. But I do think sometimes these 'what should WOTC default to' discussions get incredibly divisive and heated (and I am not excluding myself from that----I get passionate too). If someone disagrees with me about whether the default orcs in D&D should be x, y or z, I don't care at all (in fact I like encountering other points of view on that). Where it bothers me, is when it becomes 'if you don't agree with me about D&D defaulting to X" you are morally bad or you are engaging in an 'ism' of some kind.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It should be noted that Tonto was set up as 'the exception' and Native Americans were, if not as universally villainous as cattle rustlers or bank robbers, certainly seen as dangerous entities. This was more pronounced in the radio show than the later tv version. I think we're generally agreeing that there is a transitional trend across the 20th century.

Like I said, I am not a huge fan of the genre, and haven't seen a full episode of the show, so I was just going by very general impressions of the character from it being on in the background and from what people who watched it told me. But my point was just he was a native american character you were meant to root for. But yes, I didn't imagine Tonto would be something you could present to a modern audience without critique.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Interesting. I grew up in the 70s/very early 80s and my interpretation is that there was a large shift between me and the kids I ended up babysitting -- their cartoons started having lessons at the end (and also were more often bald-faced toy commercials). The 90s seemed like just an extrapolation of that trend. I then went to college and had an eye into children's shows again at maybe 2000-2005 when I dated a woman with a child (I seem to recall starting Dora the Explorer and ending with Kim Possible) and those shows seemed to have the lessons those earlier heavy handed very special shows taught as assumed qualities.

I could be way off about the 90s. I didn't watch those kinds of shows in the 90s so I am just going by what my sister (who is ten years younger than me) says and what friends of mine who are that age say. But speaking to the 80s, we had a ton of very special episodes and "Learning is half the battle" style messaging in our shows. I don't know when it started exactly but you couldn't watch Different Strokes, Gimme a Break or Facts of Life without bumping into an episode like that at some point, and they were often proceeded by an actor explaining to the audience that this was a special episode that dealt with series issues.

For whatever reason I feel like were a little skeptical of them because they were so ham-fisted at times. They weren't as bad as refer madness, but they could get into that territory. And I think the exaggeration is where they really produced skepticism. One example is the Scott Baio movie about pot (where I think he almost kills his brother in a row boat because he is high on marijuana). And there was a similar anti-drug movie where the lead character kept his drugs in a hollowed out book, which his younger brother found, used then drowned in the pool. I also think part of the problem was you essentially had kid shows doing things that were generally better handled by school, church and other institutions in our lives at the time. The messaging at the end of GI Joe for example already felt simplistic even at like age 9 or 10. Just look at the result. They spent the entirety of the 80s telling us how bad and dangerous drugs were, and the 90s, for people my age at least, was an explosion of experimentation with drugs (and I think one reason those lessons failed wasn't because drugs don't have dangers but because they failed to accurately address the nuances of the dangers: i.e. you aren't likely to kill your brother with an oar after smoking a joint, maybe you lose concentration and motivation, and getting hooked on pain killers could lead you down a dark road, but you are not likely to die from a single pill).

EDIT: Apparently there is a wikepage on the topic: Very special episode - Wikipedia (it is interesting that I instantly liked Seinfeld from the first episode)

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Since we're bringing cartoons into the discussion two popular 2010's series involved more empathetic protagonists who initially start out opposing the "bad guys" before learning the situation was more complicated. Star vs The Forces of Evil had the later revelation that the show's monsters were the indigenous people who had been driven out by the main character's family in the past, and Steven Universe had the antagonists be part of a caste system based empire with a mix of loyalists, rebels, and mutated, animalistic individuals that were put in suspended animation until they could be cured.

I hadn't made the connection until now, but younger people getting into D&D now may have been influenced by those two cartoons. I'm sure there were others that went in similar directions, too, but those are the ones I'm aware of.

My understanding of messaging in kid's shows is that it was mandated in the 80's and for the most part show creators weren't onboard with it, 90's and 2000's show creators rebelled, but some 2010's kid show creators earnestly wanted to convey certain messages and themes in their shows (for example, Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Gravity Falls all had recurring subplots that basically amounted to a main character trying to get into a relationship with a girl and screwing things up before moving on).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would second this strongly. Just about everything I saw growing portrayed Native Americans as positive and complex characters - and 99% of the time they were bad asses as well. (Charles Bronson's movie Chato's Land comes to mind when I think of the bad ass example.) But everything I saw as a kid and adult made the expansionists the bad guys, or at best, mistreat the Native Americans with double-crosses. From my experience, this is the opposite of how orcs were portrayed in D&D.

Side Note: Heck, one of the greatest American lies, that exists in many families, is the notion that someone is part Native American. I know of very few families that don't believe this. DNA tests have proven most of this to be false. But the myth is still perpetuated. Imagine Keep on the Borderlands where all the NPCs insisted that somewhere in their lineage they were 1/4 orc.
Chato's Land

I'd argue that one of the differences here is that, while it definitely has its own problems, the Noble Savage narrative existed as a stream in American thought on the natives pretty early on, sometimes mixing with the Uncultured Brute in weird ways. The former at least allows for their to be admirable traits in Native Americans in a way that, at least prior to the slow move in perception of orcs (which I ascribe to World of Warcraft), was going to be hard to apply to orcs; they were not seen as having any meaningful virtues at all.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

I'd argue that one of the differences here is that, while it definitely has its own problems, the Noble Savage narrative existed as a stream in American thought on the natives pretty early on, sometimes mixing with the Uncultured Brute in weird ways. The former at least allows for their to be admirable traits in Native Americans in a way that, at least prior to the slow move in perception of orcs (which I ascribe to World of Warcraft), was going to be hard to apply to orcs; they were not seen as having any meaningful virtues at all.

Is the 'Noble Savage' trope racist? Or is it at least an acknowledgement of the dignity of indigenous cultures?

 

[CleverNickName]

Is the 'Noble Savage' trope racist? Or is it at least an acknowledgement of the dignity of indigenous cultures?

It can be both. It often is.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I find it really hard to go back to a particular time and say "This is what D&D was". I mean there were trends, but I didn't really notice much homogeneity until the d20 boom (and even then I think that is fading). during that period I encountered a lot of groups who played D&D in the same way, in the same style. Prior to that, it seemed like every table was different (it also seemed like there was a more mainstream appetite for other systems and games). I started in '86, on the west coast (wasn't born there but spent five years there), and I gamed with three different groups of friends. Every group approached the game differently because you had to read these books and then figure out how they worked in practice. Then I moved back to the east coast, and again every group of friends, even within the same school, was different. Each group definitely had its style: because that style was formed reading the books, experimenting and talking about how the game is played. But even inside those groups, each GM was quite different. Then when we started playing with people in other towns, all kinds of variety.

There's a particular narrative that D&D in the 70's was A Particular Thing, mostly put forth by some Old School types in a "return to our roots" thing that, at best, overextends how influential the Lake Geneva games were on the D&D populace as a whole, and at worst assumes this influence kept people solidly in the lane for far longer than it did.

Yeah, I mean an awful lot of people started out with very basic dungeon runs and characters that, if they had personalities at all, they were really broad stroke things. But I saw an awful lot of West Coast games that had gone beyond this within a year of the game coming out, and I have trouble believing what I saw were some kind of massive aberration.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

There's a particular narrative that D&D in the 70's was A Particular Thing, mostly put forth by some Old School types in a "return to our roots" thing that, at best, overextends how influential the Lake Geneva games were on the D&D populace as a whole, and at worst assumes this influence kept people solidly in the lane for far longer than it did.

Yeah, I mean an awful lot of people started out with very basic dungeon runs and characters that, if they had personalities at all, they were really broad stroke things. But I saw an awful lot of West Coast games that had gone beyond this within a year of the game coming out, and I have trouble believing what I saw were some kind of massive aberration.

D&D was first published formally in 1974 so what "roots" were they returning to? Those WERE the roots.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Is the 'Noble Savage' trope racist? Or is it at least an acknowledgement of the dignity of indigenous cultures?

"Benign" stereotypes are still stereotypes, and often have some less than ideal assumptions baked in with them. Note the phrase is "Noble Savage"; that's important, since it links together a benign trait with one that would not have been considered positive at the time (aka uncultured and unsophisticated, even though other than technology there were native groups who had every bit as sophisticated cultures as any European, they just went about them different ways).