D&D General Why are "ugly evil orcs" so unpopular?

[Deset Gled]

This statement is important from an anthropological point of view, as it seems to reflect popular ideas...

I'm pretty sure you're attempting to argue against my point, but I this is pretty much exactly what I was talking about.

The full title is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, so I consider Frankenstein to be the primary title.

Well, that screws up my "A to Z", so I choose to be wrong.

 

[Charlaquin]

Oh, boy, the species argument… Ok, in real life, species is a social construct. There’s no such actual thing as species, just different forms of life with different characteristics. Biologists constructed a system to classify those life forms by common traits, including the ability to interbreed (though this is not nearly as hard a rule as people tend to think it is), but ultimately the lines dividing one from another are arbitrary, and often say as much or more about what the people drawing them consider important as they do about the actual life forms. In a scifi or fantasy setting, we have to redraw the lines because the system real-world biologists use doesn’t really apply. And just like the real-life lines, how we draw them says as much or more about what we consider important as it does about the fantasy creatures themselves.

So, whether you want to call different humanoid races “species” or something else, doesn’t really matter. What matters is the differences you’re using the words to describe. And the way orcs have been depicted in D&D is probably best compared to the difference between humans and Neanderthals. Which means in my book, they’re people, and should be treated as such. If you prefer them to be purely monstrous, I think you have some work to do to make that not feel like a hollow statement.

 

[Scribe]

The notion of savage [animal]-men was still just as colonialist when they had literal pig heads. All that humanizing them has done is make the uncomfortable reality of the archetype more obvious.

That’s not to say orcs can’t be done in a way that is purely monstrous. Warhammer 40K orcs are the usual go-to example here. That’s just never been D&D orcs. D&D orcs have always been an indigenous group that the PCs drive out of their homes and appropriate their land and resources, with their inherent savagery used as justification. It just gets harder to ignore the more human they look.

All of which speaks to any number of issues.

1. The desire to humanize Monsters.
2. The lack of making monster races, truly alien and monstrous (40K Orks).

I truly believe the only 'out' if one desired or cared to justify evil humanoids as a default/standard/monolith, is Gods.

If it's not Gods (which again I've come to believe introduce a number of truly setting crippling flaws if deconstructed) then either one is saying the cultural angle is too strong, and you will get into racism territory, or that they do not wish to make it anything deeper than 'here are bad guys' no why/how provided.

Which is fine at an individual level, but not something we can expect Wizards to forward as a default in the year 2021.

Ultimately, I think Gods are kind of an underlying problem to be addressed, and I have to wonder if Wizards has thought on it at all.

Lunch over, back to work!

 

[Mind of tempest]

The notion of savage [animal]-men was still just as colonialist when they had literal pig heads. All that humanizing them has done is make the uncomfortable reality of the archetype more obvious.

That’s not to say orcs can’t be done in a way that is purely monstrous. Warhammer 40K orcs are the usual go-to example here. That’s just never been D&D orcs. D&D orcs have always been an indigenous group that the PCs drive out of their homes and appropriate their land and resources, with their inherent savagery used as justification. It just gets harder to ignore the more human they look.

what would make a race not have that problem?

All of which speaks to any number of issues.

1. The desire to humanize Monsters.
2. The lack of making monster races, truly alien and monstrous (40K Orks).

I truly believe the only 'out' if one desired or cared to justify evil humanoids as a default/standard/monolith, is Gods.

If it's not Gods (which again I've come to believe introduce a number of truly setting crippling flaws if deconstructed) then either one is saying the cultural angle is too strong, and you will get into racism territory, or that they do not wish to make it anything deeper than 'here are bad guys' no why/how provided.

Which is fine at an individual level, but not something we can expect Wizards to forward as a default in the year 2021.

Ultimately, I think Gods are kind of an underlying problem to be addressed, and I have to wonder if Wizards has thought on it at all.

Lunch over, back to work!

the gods are just resemble demonized foreign gods throughout history thus gods do not work as an angle.

 

[Charlaquin]

All of which speaks to any number of issues.

1. The desire to humanize Monsters.
2. The lack of making monster races, truly alien and monstrous (40K Orks).

I truly believe the only 'out' if one desired or cared to justify evil humanoids as a default/standard/monolith, is Gods.

Even that, I feel has some pretty gaping holes. If orcs are always evil because Gruumsh created them to be evil, why aren’t elves and dwarves always good?

If it's not Gods (which again I've come to believe introduce a number of truly setting crippling flaws if deconstructed) then either one is saying the cultural angle is too strong, and you will get into racism territory, or that they do not wish to make it anything deeper than 'here are bad guys' no why/how provided.

Which is fine at an individual level, but not something we can expect Wizards to forward as a default in the year 2021.

Ultimately, I think Gods are kind of an underlying problem to be addressed, and I have to wonder if Wizards has thought on it at all.

I agree, although I don’t think the majority of the player base is “there yet,” you know? I think if we follow the train of thought that has led people to recognize always-evil races as problematic to its final stop, we will ultimately arrive at gods being objectively real and directly interventionist as the root of the problem. But I think we’re still a generation or two from that being broadly accepted. Maybe in 7e.

 

[Charlaquin]

what would make a race not have that problem?

I mean, either letting them be as diverse and nuanced as humans, or totally disconnecting them from anything resembling personhood. To put it glibly, either make them full-on fiends or “humans with prosthetics.”

 

[Mannahnin]

orcs can successfully breed with homo sapiens and produce viable fertile offspring so they are like neanditles logically they are homo horridus.

Or in Shadowrun Homo sapiens robustus.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Even that, I feel has some pretty gaping holes. If orcs are always evil because Gruumsh created them to be evil, why aren’t elves and dwarves always good?

I agree, although I don’t think the majority of the player base is “there yet,” you know? I think if we follow the train of thought that has led people to recognize always-evil races as problematic to its final stop, we will ultimately arrive at gods being objectively real and directly interventionist as the root of the problem. But I think we’re still a generation or two from that being broadly accepted. Maybe in 7e.

so kill the gods then? clerics were always secretly evil to begin with?

I mean, either letting them be as diverse and nuanced as humans, or totally disconnecting them from anything resembling personhood. To put it glibly, either make them full-on fiends or “humans with prosthetics.”

how would you divorce something that thoroughly?

Or in Shadowrun Homo sapiens robustus.

that is an option.

 

[Charlaquin]

so kill the gods then? clerics were always secretly evil to begin with?

Huh? I’m suggesting rebuilding the setting from the ground up to make the existence or nonexistence of gods a matter of faith rather than an objective fact. And add that to the list of things Keith Baker already figured out 17 years ago.

how would you divorce something that thoroughly?

Like I said, Warhammer 40K orcs are the go-to example. Though, my preference is instead to make the humanoid races more diverse and nuanced.

 

[Sacrosanct]

As someone who grew up with AD&D 1e, I get how there is resistance to change orcs to be more friendly than the evil monsters they were that we knew. But I'd posit that changing them and/or their behavior is on par with what D&D has done from the beginning. That is, kobolds and hobgoblins were good creatures (or neutral) in mythology and folklore, and D&D made them inherently evil. So really I have no qualms if modern D&D players want to shift how orcs are depicted. Everyone has different preferences, with different exposures and access.