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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dire Bare" data-source="post: 8021997" data-attributes="member: 18182">You joke, but the analogy is actually a pretty good one.OG Klingons were swarthy, dark-skinned, mustache-twirling villains in OG Trek. Very problematic in the sense we are talking about in this thread. Of course, they were FUN bad guys (racial issues aside) and became popular, so got a major redesign and a LOT of development over the decades of Trek movies and TV shows (not to mention comics, novels, and video games).Even today, while Klingons are a much more developed and 3-dimensional alien species, they still suffer somewhat from the "warrior race" stereotype and a lot of uncomfortable parallels can be made between how Klingons are portrayed and how Europeans have viewed the "warrior" indigenous folks across the globe. Various Trek stories even address this, or attempt to, in positive ways.So, should we dump Klingons from Star Trek? Should we redesign their culture to be less savage and warlike? How far do we go with that? I don't hang out in Trek fan forums, but I bet this issue has come up, with back-and-forth not unlike what we are seeing here. And the writers behind Trek certainly have taken effort to make the Klingons a more rounded, more fully dimensional species, with some degree of success.Orcs are the fantasy version of Klingons. Or perhaps it's the other way around. OG orcs are dark-skinned, savage, warlike, bestial, black-hat wearing villains. But in both D&D and the fantasy genre at large, they have become a very popular race of antagonists, and have undergone the "Klingon Effect" and crossed over to sometimes protagonists. Each fantasy property treats them a little differently, but overall they have become a more rounded and fully dimensional fantasy race, that can still be portrayed problematically. My favorite thing to come out of Warcraft is the very humanistic portrayal of orcs that simultaneously fits into the existing narrative but also flips it on it's head.</blockquote>

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