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

[Thomas Shey]

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

I mentioned it. "How Gary played." Other than to the degree that was baked into the rules (and even that wasn't a given, since house ruling and extension of rules was rampant pretty early on) that pretty quickly had nothing to do with how many people played. As a simple example, the "horde of hirelings" thing that was apparently common in Lake Geneva never seems to have been as prevalent in the wild as people will try to imply it was.

 

[Vaalingrade]

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

It has 'savage' right there in the name.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

It has 'savage' right there in the name.

Hey man, I would consider being called a savage a compliment but that's just me.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I'm really impressed at how World of Warcraft went back in time at least five years and created Obould Many-Arrows and other sympathetic, humanizing veiws on orcs. Those dang vidja games can do anything, they're so evil.

 

[Mordhau]

I could agree with the mixed bag message in cartoons. But not movies and tv. From the 70's on, it seemed that they were anything but villains. But the point is that is the exact opposite of how orcs were in the primary texts.

We seem to be playing a weird game of whispers here.

The point made earlier was that Orcs sometimes filled a structural role that Native Americans had once filled. One of the reasons you would use Orcs to fill that role is because you are no longer comfortable filling that role with Native Americans.

If you want a story about savage attackers mounting a bloodthirsty raid upon homesteaders on a frontier, then once many writers would have had no qualms about making it a straight historical (or not even historical if you go back far enough). If you feel that you can no longer have that story without addressing it with more complexity, then moving those homesteaders to a fantasy world and having those savage raiders be Orcs rather than Native Americans is way one to avoid that. You can still tell the same basic story of terror and heroism under siege that you could once tell, and you don't have to worry about thorny questions that might be arising in the historical version of why the Native Americans are raiding, or whether the white settlers ought to be there in the first place.

The point here is that Orcs are NOT Native Americans. It doesn't work if they are. In many ways the less they resemble real Native Americans in terms of things like cultural details the better for the above purpose.

Of course what happens is that the structural simularities get noticed and people may start adding native American elements to their Orcs to flesh them out. And once they do that, they may also start adding in some of the historical complexities as well, so now Orcs aren't all evil, and maybe the settlers are moving in on their land as well (or they remain evil and the portrayal gets increasingly racist, or they get turned into noble savages etc).

Also because they are NOT Native Americans the Orc vessel is very malleable. It can be different things in different times. There's lots of alternative ways the details can be coloured in. Lots of places and situations can have savage raiders, so there's plenty of alternative caricatures that can be added to Orcs.

Consider how R.E.Howard uses Picts in his Conan stories. Here we have a writer who is really making no effort at all not to be racist and is steeped in racial ideas. His picts are based off conceptions of barbarians beyond Hadrian's wall, but the pictish frontier is clearly in many ways a western one, yet in other stories (such as his Pirate Story, the Black Stranger, the parallel seems more African). His picts basically fill a structural role in a whole lot of different colonialist myths.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

I'm really impressed at how World of Warcraft went back in time at least five years and created Obould Many-Arrows and other sympathetic, humanizing veiws on orcs. Those dang vidja games can do anything, they're so evil.

Whether or not they were first, I think you're going to be very hard pressed to say that WoW and W3 didn't do a lot of heavy lifting at rehabilitating the orc image for mainstream audiences.

 

[Willie the Duck]

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

This is similar to Han Solo being 'a criminal with a heart of gold' -- it is saying, in effect, 'despite this notable trait we normally consider a negative, they do indeed have redeeming value by possessing this other trait which is positive.' Mind you, it can go farther and get into 'the negative trait isn't actually negative at all, but somehow cool and impressive,' and sometime 'noble savage' depictions end up in that category (along with 'the magical nopenotgoingtowriteitblack person' and mystical Asians). That changes the actual type of racism from treating a group as inferiors to treating them like fairy tale creatures. It's still a dehumanization, and certainly doesn't sound like it dignifies anyone.

I mentioned it. "How Gary played." Other than to the degree that was baked into the rules (and even that wasn't a given, since house ruling and extension of rules was rampant pretty early on) that pretty quickly had nothing to do with how many people played. As a simple example, the "horde of hirelings" thing that was apparently common in Lake Geneva never seems to have been as prevalent in the wild as people will try to imply it was.

I definitely always saw that as how the game was designed to be played, if for no other reason than TSR D&Ds by-the-book-otherwise was crazy hard without massive walls of henchfolk or everyone playing multiple characters. We just decided it wasn't our cup of tea and adjusted the challenge to match. It certainly never occurred to us to play the game in a way we didn't find fun because of some notion of original intent. I don't remember anyone ever proverbially patting themselves on the back over adherence to 'RAW' or whatever similar term would have been at large bitd.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

...'the magical nopenotgoingtowriteitblack person' ...

I might get in trouble for this but people sound like such children when they do this, (quoted above). Just say 'magical negro'. It's a real trope of racism that has been written about and examined for years. It has it's own wikipedia page.

 

[Faolyn]

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

IMO, saying that a race (or culture, or ethnicity) is Always Good is just as bad as saying it's Always Evil.

But anyway, I've read one criticism of the trope as saying that it's designed to differentiate the "good" savages from the "bad" savages--you could kill/exploit/enslave the bad ones with impunity, but you can't with the good ones. But even the good ones are still savage, and therefore lesser, than the civilized people.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Consider how R.E.Howard uses Picts in his Conan stories. Here we have a writer who is really making no effort at all not to be racist and is steeped in racial ideas. His picts are based off conceptions of barbarians beyond Hadrian's wall, but the pictish frontier is clearly in many ways a western one, yet in other stories (such as his Pirate Story, the Black Stranger, the parallel seems more African). His picts basically fill a structural role in a whole lot of different colonialist myths.

But doesn't this have more to do with Howard living in a time when racialist ideas had a lot of traction than with story structure? He uses racialist descriptions all in a number his stories (I am going by memory, so it isn't like I have a list of examples next to me, but one that sticks out was his him talking about a character's semitic features (something about the way it was done) for example and at times him talking about peoples that was noticeably racialist). I think had he not been steeped in an intellectual world where racialist explanations were the norm, those descriptions would have been a lot different. I get that there is an argument to be made for the picts occupying the same space as native americans and Howard possibly using the american frontier and stories about it as foundation....but I am not seeing how that means the structure itself is the problem. I can have a game with orcs filling in that role. And I can imagine a world where those orcs aren't littered with racist stereotypes, and I can also imagine a world where they are (I can also imagine a world where those orcs have real world cultural features and whether those are negative, racist, bad or good depictions are debated).

Racialist thinking itself is definitely something we call agree is bad. I think where I would disagree with people is the direct line they draw from orcs are evil to racialist theories about human groups.