Do orcs in gaming display parallels to colonialist propaganda?

[pemerton]

The solutions I am seeing are things like automatically accept peoples reactions to things because of what group they belong to.

I'm not sure what you think that is a "solution" to.

It's a suggestion that the best way to find out if a trope or idea is racist is to see what people of colour believe about it. Do you think that's bad advice?

 

[Doug McCrae]

Yet in the British and American pulp and proto-pulp literature it is the "natives" who are headhunters, and the civilised people whose heads are in danger.

There's a similar inversion in LotR. During the attack on Minas Tirith Sauron's army uses catapults to fire the decapitated heads of the defenders' dead comrades over the city walls. But in the Siege of Malta this was actually done by the defenders - the European knights - using cannon, though it should be noted that was in response to an act of similar barbarism by the Ottomans.

"Then among the greater casts there fell another hail, less ruinous but more horrible. All about the streets and lanes behind the Gate it tumbled down, small round shot that did not burn. But when men ran to learn what it might be, they cried aloud or wept. For the enemy was flinging into the City all the heads of those who had fallen fighting at Osgiliath, or on the Rammas, or in the fields." - The Return of the King.​

"Mustafa had the bodies of the knights decapitated and their bodies floated across the bay on mock crucifixes. In response, de Valette beheaded all his Turkish prisoners, loaded their heads into his cannons and fired them into the Turkish camp." - Wikipedia article.​

 

[generic]

Where exactly in this thread did the converstion switch from D&D and gaming to J.R.R. Tolkein's works?

 

[pemerton]

I don't find orcs to be a colonialist trope. I think the vast majority of people probably think that is pretty crazy.

Including the vast majority in Kenya, Iran and India?

Including the vast majority of Indigenous Australians, Native Americans and Maoris?

I was recently talking to a friend who was born in South Asia but now lives in Australia. She was expressing shock at the ignorance of British colonialism in Australia (itself an offshoot of British colonialism) compared to the country where she was educated.

When I speak to East Africans, they are not unfamiliar with concepts and imagery of colonialism. It might surprise you, but when they talk about Hollywood stars they focus almost exclusively, and quite unselfconsciously, on Black actors.

I haven't done any sort of systematic survey on any of this - it's not really my field of study - but my anecdotal experience makes me think that your "vast majority" may be located within a rather particular sample of humanity.

Seem to recall discussion of the table and of chainmail bikini type art.

<snip>

I am saying people are being a bit puritanical about this stuff in my mind. I think the obvious humor and playfulness is being missed.

<snip>

All I am saying is we may want to chill out a bit and realize how some of this stuff is built on layered assumptions that come from pretty deep academic arguments

Frankly, I don't think it requires deep academic argument to note the character of a book that has nothing to say about sex, and frankly almost nothing to say about women, except that cities and towns all have their fair share of Wanton Wenches et al waiting for (one assumes male) adventurers to do them.

That's playful in the same sense that a Playboy centrefold is playful. I mean, maybe it is, but it's a rather distinctive sort of playfulness, and surelyt it's no great surprise that not everyone sees it quite that way. And of course that latter thought is only compounded by the male rape fantasies found in some of those early White Dwarf adventures that were being discussed upthread.

Is it really puritanical to suggest that RPGing might engage sex and sexuality other than by fantasising about prostitutes who are really into it?

 

[S'mon]

Is it that you can't see how these two cases are different or that you won't see how they are different?

I think (white) Americans are very lucky not to have been oppressed by anyone since George III - and that was about the mildest oppression possible. And they tend to project their experience onto other Europeans.

(As for Australians, they dodged a bullet in WW2 thanks to MacArthur, so I guess their position is similar)

 

[generic]

Including the vast majority in Kenya, Iran and India?

Including the vast majority of Indigenous Australians, Native Americans and Maoris?

@pemerton, I don't agree with @Bedrockgames on all topics that he/she/they have mentioned in this thread, but this seems like a pretty unfair interpretation of his/her/their words.

 

[S'mon]

@pemerton, I don't agree with @Bedrockgames on all topics that he/she/they have mentioned in this thred, but this seems like a pretty unfair interpretation of his/her/their words.

I was away from ENW for a few years.

...It seems that the regulars spent those years arguing with BedrockBrendan.

 

[Derren]

Including the vast majority in Kenya, Iran and India?

Including the vast majority of Indigenous Australians, Native Americans and Maoris?

Have you asked them?

The concept of barbarians at the border is pretty universal. From Rome, both before and after the expansion to China and Japan and their respective northern neighbours.
The mesoamerican nations probably didn't had a high opinion of some nomadic tribes in the north and the Zulu were not really all that nice either to to bushmen they found when they moved to south africa.

So why would orcs resemble people that got colonized and not one of the many examples of barbarians which occasionally raided cities like the Huns, Mongols or other tribes from the middle east or even just the myriads of "more primitive people than us on the other side of the border" which existed basically everywhere in some form and would be a much better fit?

 

[generic]

I was away from ENW for a few years.

...It seems that the regulars spent those years arguing with BedrockBrendan.

Hmm...

 

[S'mon]

A recurring idea that justified "dispersing the natives" (that is the term that was widely used in Australia; I'm not sure what the American or East African analogues are, but I'm sure they existed) is that they are coming to kill us and destory our civilisation.

As a point of interest, did anyone ever claim that Australian Aboriginals were coming to kill you and destroy your civilisation? I highly doubt it. What I do see often is the Terra Nullius claim that the land was 'unowned'; combined with the rather more plausible claim that if Britain hadn't taken it first, someone else would have taken it later - and that they probably wouldn't have behaved any better.

(Plus a lot of "We're colonising them for their own benefit")