Do orcs in gaming display parallels to colonialist propaganda?

[Celebrim]

From what I vaguely recall reading, even Tolkien in his later life began backing away from his own depiction that orcs were inherently evil creatures.

Actually, the opposite.

The moral quality of it increasingly grew at odds with his Roman Catholic faith that redemption and goodness was possible for everyone. Though this says nothing about whether Tolkien employed, whether intentionally or not, casual racism in his depiction of the orcs, only that he recognized that one aspect of his depiction of orcs was morally problematic.

That he realized his depiction of Orcs was morally problematic is true, but his solution to the problem was not to go in the direction of a more humanized redeemable creature, but rather to go in the exact opposite direction - to present Orcs as less human creature which was entirely a puppet of the will of its evil master/creator.

Tolkien's fundamental issue was he never expected anyone to take his books particularly seriously, and when they did, it frightened him. Maybe someone reading his imperfect theology would be misled by it.

One particular area that bothered him about the orcs as he'd written them thus far was that he'd envisioned them as corrupted elves (or corrupted men, or corrupted elf/men hybrids). But it bothered him immensely that evil had the capacity to triumph so thoroughly than any part of the creator's creation could become completely unredeemable. At the same time, he also recognized that he couldn't reconcile the Northern European pagan trope of gleefully slaughtering foes in battle which represented one of his two major influences, with a Judeo-Christian view of violence and empathy, if in fact those orcs had any shot of redemption. So the solution that he wanted to adopt was the one he suggested with Trolls, that orcs weren't corrupted beings, but things created in the mockery of things that are good. Rather than going in the direction of making the orcs more human, he wanted to explicitly render them soulless puppets - akin to what the Dwarfs might have been had not Illuvatar blessed their creation.

However, the more he tried to make all his theological dominoes line up, the more it turned his writing from the vigorous imaginative thing it had been, into something that he had always despised and avoided - allegory. The more he tried to make the story perfectly congruent to the things that he believed, the less creative and the more didactic it became. You started having writing that resembled less his own, and more that of C.S. Lewis with his parables and analogies. And as a result, the more it got this way, the more he as the perfectionist he was struggled with it and despised his own work. Late in life, it's really painful to observe him tearing down the foundations of everything he had built, completely unhappy with his ability to get it to both work as a story and not have some sort of message that could be misunderstood.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

These people can imagine black people with advanced technology and education, but they can't imagine black people who don't act like animals.

The only things that save Black Panther from being a truly racist take in this are:

1) we know from the character’s inception back in the 1960s that he was created in part as a response to the racist attitudes on open display in the USA at the time, just like Superman was an answer to the concept of the Nazi aryan übermensch and

2) the genre convention of superheroes means you’re going to be solving problems with fights, not diplomacy.

And I’m sure your friend knows some of this at least casually. It is still nonetheless a tad rueful that Stan Lee and subsequent writers couldn’t fully escape the whole animal skins & claws aesthetics, tribalism, shamanism and totemic imagery, etc. that still cling to depictions of the Wakandans. To be clear, I’m talking the comics AND the movies, not just the movie, which did a LOT better. You don’t see the people of Kinshasa, Abuja or other major African population centers dressing or acting like that today, and you didn’t see it in the 1960s, either.

This is not to say that ancient attire isn’t still in use- see Daniel Laine’s excellent photobook on African Kings for images like this:


But that’s ceremonial garb, not the day-to day stuff.

And again in all fairness, Black Panther is a superhero movie, an action subgenre. That means that we EXPECT there to be action. Would there even be a Die Hard franchise if John McClane has successfully negotiated the peaceful surrender of the terrorists in the first movie?

Would the Taken franchise be so much fun if Bryan Mills’ “very particular set of skills” been a deep understanding of negotiations and applied psychology from the FBI/Interpol, etc.?

 

[pemerton]

Jackson's Maori Orcs are definitely quite striking! I suspect an English director would have gone more for JRRT's original classist theme, mirrored more recently in the Games Workshop cockney orcs.

I don't know how much of it is about aesthetic vision, and how much of it is the realities of casting in New Zealand. I'm sure Jackson and co must have discussed this somewhere, but I've not looked into it very much. But I found it noticeable when I saw the films! (And to be clear, I'm not saying it's wrong. Nor that it's not wrong, for that matter. I'm saying it's a thing.)

 

[Immortal Sun]

Well, remember that we are playing a game, not building an actual world. The elements in the game world do not actually have a purpose other than to serve the game, and the plaery's goals for the game. If their goals do not include particularly deep consideration of the morality of violence, then yes, the bad guys are just going to be bad, and we are not supposed to feel much for them when they come to harm at the hands of the PCs.

You have seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? The bad guys are there to be a difficulty for Indiana Jones to overcome, often by punching or shooting them. And they come to a bad end, because they are *bad*.

If, for example, you want a deeper consideration of the morality of violence in your game, then yeah, this doesn't work for you. If the PCs are supposed to worry about whether it is okay to stab the enemy, you need some deeper consideration.

This is a terrible, terrible comment. To the first part: many people are engaging in world-building, while yes some people build deeper worlds than others, many folks across this board regularly express the desire to create an internally consistent fantasy world. So lets just chuck the whole "not building an actual world" statement right out.

Secondly, the "bad guys" in Raiders of the Lost Ark were Nazis! They weren't "bad" because they were token enemies put in Indy's path to make his adventure more dangerous, they were Nazis! Nazis who, I should remind you, wanted to use the Covenant to command God's power to kill people. It wasn't "some guy who wanted to use the Covenant for personal gain" or "some guy who wanted to sell it for money" or "some guy who was just kinda a jerk". Nazis have an established non-fictional "bad guy" tag to them. It isn't some two-dimensional fictional enemy who may or ma not be representative of some non-fictional real people, it's a depiction of a group of people who were IRL, "bad guys".

Yeesh.

 

[pemerton]

The only things that save Black Panther from being a truly racist take in this are:

1) we know from the character’s inception back in the 1960s that he was created in part as a response to the racist attitudes on open display in the USA at the time, just like Superman was an answer to the concept of the Nazi aryan übermensch and

2) the genre convention of superheroes means you’re going to be solving problems with fights, not diplomacy.

Your (2) is very true for the superhero genre.

My sense from talking to (middle class ie movie-going) Africans recently about this - so an anecdotal sense, but no reason to think of the people I was hanging out with as especially unique - is that Black Panther (the film) was hugely popular because (i) the case was overwhelmingly black and African as well as African-American, and (ii) it was set in and about Africa without the "tragic/suffering Africa" stereotype.

I'm pretty sympathetic to some of the critical commentary on the film (eg Teju Cole) but that sort of analysis didn't get much traction with the people I was talking to, because of the relatively overwhelming power of (i) and (ii).

 

[S'mon]

It's noticeable that WoTC adventures especially in 4e era on moved very much to having Demon Cultists as the enemy - ideological, not racial opponents. I did something similar in my Wilderlands campaign with the very Nazi-esque Black Sun of Neo-Nerath as the primary long term villains. Unlike
demon cultists though, they had pretty comprehensible motivations - they just wanted to Make Nerath Great Again. Sadly, restoring the Shining Light of Nerathi civilisation would require exterminating the barbaric Altanian Nomads - the PCs' faction.

 

[S'mon]

Your (2) is very true for the superhero genre.

My sense from talking to (middle class ie movie-going) Africans recently about this - so an anecdotal sense, but no reason to think of the people I was hanging out with as especially unique - is that Black Panther (the film) was hugely popular because (i) the case was overwhelmingly black and African as well as African-American, and (ii) it was set in and about Africa without the "tragic/suffering Africa" stereotype.

Yeah, my African-African friends - former grad students mostly - loved Black Panther as much as I did; I'm sure these were major reasons.

 

[Celebrim]

And again in all fairness, Black Panther is a superhero movie, an action subgenre. That means that we EXPECT there to be action. Would there even be a Die Hard franchise if John McClane has successfully negotiated the peaceful surrender of the terrorists in the first movie?

I think you misunderstand me.

I don't think anyone denies that 'Black Panther' takes on a serious issue, and that it has at its heart and intellectual disagreement that has echoes of serious real world intellectual disagreements. The fighting is how the movie works on a superficial level, but the things that elevate the movie from just being another superhero movie are its willingness to take on deep and important real world issues through the medium of the comic book superheroes. One of the things that have made the Marvel movies so successful is that, at their best, they work on multiple levels and involve problems that leave their heroes deeply and emotionally conflicted.

In the context of the movie, 'Black Panther' takes on its own setting, and introspectively inquires into Wakanda's isolationism. Is it right and proper for Wakanda to take a sort of 'Prime Directive' approach to the rest of the world, observing it, but prioritizing its own safety and perceived moral purity over its opportunity to intervene in the world with the attendant ugliness that getting involved in world politics would entail. It also has a question over the proper response to injustice, which echoes debates within the African American community (and within the African community). One take that I think works on 'Black Panther' is to see T'Challa and Eric as divided over how to respond to injustice in the same way that W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were divided, or more recently in a way similar to how Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were divided.

This ethical dilemma and not whether Eric Killmonger is a better warrior than T'Challa is at the real heart of the movie, and for 2/3rds of the movie it carries the story very well - in part because however you come down on this argument, it's easy up to some point to have some sympathy for anyone whose anger is motivated by a sense of compassion for those that are victims of injustice. Actually, I personally wish that Killmonger had been presented as a more nuanced villain, as I really think that they missed a toss by showing Killmonger being completely ruthless up to that point. By doing so, they eliminate much need to be thoughtful about the problem.

But in any event, when Killmonger challenges T'Challa in the throne room, he first does it in the intellectual sphere. He first tosses in the face of the assembled 'wise folk' of the Kingdom that they are immoral, indifferent, self-centered and slothful. To these accusations, they have no response. Neither does T'Challa. T'Challa only sits back and acts stunned, before barking out that he will accept the challenge to physical combat. But there are plenty of things that T'Challa could have said, using only the knowledge he has at that moment that would have saved lives.

For example, he could have noted Killmonger's deception. Killmonger only has the political support he needs to plunge the nation into civil war because he's lying to T'Challa's best friend. T'Challa could easily counter that the only reason T'Challa did not succeed in bringing the criminal to justice, is that Killmonger rescued him. Further, he knows now because the CIA told him so that this is the son of the man who killed his father's best friend by working with that same criminal, and further the son Eric has himself been working with that criminal for some time.

Nor does he challenge any of Killmonger's assumptions. Nor does the movie challenge his assumptions. One of the worst of these is the assumption that everyone with dark skin would rise up immediately and kill his neighbors if only he were sufficiently armed. Eric renders everyone with dark skin into a very ugly stereotype that harkens back to the notion that oppressing Africans is justified because of their inherent violent natures. But rather than overturning this stereotype, it becomes critical to a major plot point of the story. When Eric becomes king, he orders that Wakandan intelligence cells be armed with high tech weaponry to distribute to the African diaspora. At no point does the story question whether the African diaspora actually wants high tech weaponry to commit murder with. So engrained is the assumption that they do to the movie, that the 'good guys' order the White ally to shoot down the airships that are delivering these weapons (along with any innocent pilots that might be aboard) before they leave Wakandan airspace as if it was hugely important that these devices not reach their destinations. A good third of the final act is absorbed with this problem, and it's left to the one White ally in the story to make the one truly counter-instinctual decision allowed the heroes, namely ignoring the risk to his own life which he might otherwise save without suffering shame, to complete his mission. And it's all bogus to begin with, because it would you would normally expect take time to recruit violent followers, train them, and plan operations. The movie leaves us with the sense that masses of violent Africans will riot as soon as they get their super-weapons.

I'm not trying to say a villain like Eric Killmonger could be talked down with diplomacy. I am trying to say that T'Challa doesn't attack Killmonger's assumptions, leaving the audience with some sort of nebulous sense that Killmonger was basically right, just not the right man for the job, rather than being fundamentally wrong about almost everything.

One example of how this really rang wrong for me is Killmonger's death speech where he says, "Bury me at sea, with my ancestors who jumped overboard rather than accepting bondage." Powerful defiant words... and also as completely and utterly wrong as they could be. T'Challa misses the response: "Your ancestors were not the ones that jumped overboard and died. They were the ones that choose to live. You have chosen the broad and easy path, cousin, and you have left me the harder one."

I offer up in comparison the best scene of a movie I liked less well: "The Dark Night". Again, the real core of this movie is a philosophical question being offered up by the Joker - is humanity worth saving. And the Joker tests humanity by setting up a trial wherein two passenger ships must choose whether to blow one another up, or be blown up themselves. Consider how much weaker this super hero story would have been had The Batman resolved the problem purely in the physical realm, rather than first showing how the passengers resolves the philosophical dilemma in the intellectual realm. The Joker is actually defeated by the passengers. The Batman at that point is merely cleaning up loose ends.

 

[Immortal Sun]

It's noticeable that WoTC adventures especially in 4e era on moved very much to having Demon Cultists as the enemy - ideological, not racial opponents. I did something similar in my Wilderlands campaign with the very Nazi-esque Black Sun of Neo-Nerath as the primary long term villains.

In the long run, "kill them because they're going to destroy the world" gets more traction with more people than "kill them because they're green and green people are going to destroy the world."

Even if someone is looking for a simple game of "kill the orc" you can just as quickly ascribe an evil motivation "these are fanatical orc cultists" and never even show a "good orc" and get the same game without the genocidal overtones.

Also, if you start off playing "whack an orc" and transition into something more, that teeeeny bit of effort leaves your world with a lot of room for better content, instead of saddling your world with the idea that "green people must die".

 

[S'mon]

Nor does he challenge any of Killmonger's assumptions. Nor does the movie challenge his assumptions. One of the worst of these is the assumption that everyone with dark skin would rise up immediately and kill his neighbors if only he were sufficiently armed. Eric renders everyone with dark skin into a very ugly stereotype that harkens back to the notion that oppressing Africans is justified because of their inherent violent natures. But rather than overturning this stereotype, it becomes critical to a major plot point of the story. When Eric becomes king, he orders that Wakandan intelligence cells be armed with high tech weaponry to distribute to the African diaspora. At no point does the story question whether the African diaspora actually wants high tech weaponry to commit murder with. So engrained is the assumption that they do to the movie, that the 'good guys' order the White ally to shoot down the airships that are delivering these weapons (along with any innocent pilots that might be aboard) before they leave Wakandan airspace as if it was hugely important that these devices not reach their destinations.

I don't think this is really accurate. In the film only two of Wakanda's many intelligence cells are prepared to take the weapons and try to start uprisings - that's why there are only two transports to shoot down. And there is no real indication within the film that Killmonger's plan to establish an "Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets" will have any real chance of success (unless maybe it escalates to total war of World vs Wakanda - I think this is Killmonger's real plan). More likely a small number of Wakanda-armed terrorists would wreak a lot of havoc before being defeated, much like ISIL IRL. Stopping mass destruction via Wakandan weaponry & consequent political fallout is still an important goal though.