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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 6455769" data-attributes="member: 6686357">The problem is this conceit takes away that race's agency, turning them into automatons. All the satisfaction of defeating a villain vanishes when it turns out they never had any free will to begin with: they didn't choose to do evil things, they're just soulless meat puppets programmed to perform evil acts. Good and evil as cosmic forces only works well when people have a choice between them, otherwise free will doesn't exist and everyone becomes soulless meat puppets.In Pathfinder, good and evil are actual cosmic forces which just so happen to coincide with the values of progressive Americans. Moral ambiguity doesn't really exist except with the neutral alignments. Eberron tried to include moral ambiguity, but in practice what they did was create good counterparts of all the bad guys; which admittedly is the only thing you can do when good and evil are cosmic forces.Tolkien explicitly compared orcs with Asians. The Easterlings were clearly modeled after Arabs. However, Tolkien struggled with the idea that anyone could be born evil, and struggled with it until his death. He actually stopped writing the LOTR sequel "The New Shadow" because he couldn't stomach the idea of evil coming from the hearts of men rather than an external entity like Sauron. The orcs and Easterlings weren't inherently evil, they were being manipulated by Sauron. (Aside, orcs had a taboo against cannibalism of other orcs in the books and consider leaving comrades behind to die needlessly is bad, so they do have a code of honor.)</blockquote>

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