Yep, this is going to be a post discussing racism.
One thing that confused me greatly about orcs and goblins is the severe difference in technological levels between them and regular human empires (also something else, but I’ll get to that later). Regular humans are depicted as being from the (unrealistic view of the) medieval period, but orcs and goblins are portrayed as being extremely underdeveloped tech-wise. Their cultures don’t feel like they belong together in the same geographical locations, and orcs don’t seem capable of learning from the people they’ve warred with for hundreds of years.
Now you may argue that that’s because orcs and goblins are intended to be genetically mentally inferior; their intelligence stat is certainly below the average human intelligence (average human intelligence = 10, orcs = 8 (5e orc = 7)). However there’s a reason why this doesn’t make sense: human barbarian tribes exist in the same regions as more technologically advanced humans and they’re not advancing either, despite co-existing or warring with other humans of their region for hundreds of years. Their tribes, unlike their literal neighbors, have been entirely unable to advance and yet remain as a constant warring group against their medieval counterparts without ever getting wiped out. They don’t live in neighboring nations, they live within the same nations as their medieval counterparts.
In the real world, you have situations like this arising because nations like Britannia (I’ve no idea what it was called before the Romans invaded) was literally invaded by a technologically advanced nation, putting them at odds and making neighbors of people who were technologically lesser. Situations like when the native actual American peoples were invaded by Europeans.
I’ve seen King Arthur portrayed as a knight fighting off ‘barbarians’ (one of the transformers movies, but also probably other depictions too), which would more accurately translate to a colonialist terrorizing the local population in this scenario, although apparently in the actual myths he was a Briton who fought off foreign invaders instead (not a depiction you see in media as far as I’m aware, especially as king Arthur is portrayed as being clad in plate armor of the medieval period).
Basically a more accurate representation of this situation in your usual TTRPG setting would depict the more technologically advanced nations as colonizers, at constant struggle with the neighboring populations that they’re actively trying to suppress, and I say neighboring because had those populations existed within their nation they would have murdered them all. TTRPG settings never depict this relationship, instead asking that you accept this current situation as though it just sprung up into its current state all of a sudden (which it did).
Going back to the cultures of orcs and goblins, they’re usually portrayed in a way that also makes them similar to human barbarians, neither of which match the cultures of the medieval peoples, but settler colonialism is never used as an explanation for why that is (settler colonialism being the only/most likely logical reason). No technologically medieval culture still has its barbarian beliefs or even traces of it, meaning they are indeed more akin to foreign invaders, which just makes the settings feel off given that those nations aren’t settler colonialist.
Now as regards orcs and goblins and their alignment by birth, I reject the automatic evil alignment they get and I reject it because in principal I repudiate Gygax’s views, which you can read here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/dtpgim/gygax_on_lawful_good/
He agrees with Chivington about the ‘nits make lice’ being an observable fact, a quote Chivington made in regards to actual human beings and not a race of beings who are objectively/genetically evil. Chivington was in the process of ethnically cleansing the region for settler colonialist reasons; Chivington’s side is the evil one and yet in a bizarre twist his logic is the one being considered as the rationale for lawful good.
Any accurate depiction of medieval societies living in such close proximity to orcs and goblins would require that the medieval society is a foreign one, where they’re the ones who are basically a pox on the orcs and goblins rather than the other way around as it’s portrayed. Orcs and goblins are always shown to be a constant threat to human societies, when in reality the inverse would be more realistic. There’s never any depictions of humans encroaching on and terrorizing orcs and goblins but the other way is always what’s presented, and that never made any sense.
Given Gygax’s son’s (Ernie Gygax) comments about native actual Americans, I got the sense that maybe he was raised on an unhealthy diet of ‘heroic’ cowboys versus ‘savage’ natives, and if this was the case, then his father probably raised him that way and had similar views (especially given his quoting Chivington as rationale behind the lawful good alignment of paladins).
When you consider Gygax’s opinions on the views of a genocidal murderer, suddenly it would make more sense to flip alignments between the medieval society and orcs and goblins (I’m not comparing orcs and goblins to native actual Americans), and suddenly paladins become basically the medieval Wehrmacht.
Unfortunately this line of reasoning brings me to…the tired old racist view that ‘technologically advanced’ = objectively good.
(oof this post was long)
Oh boy this topic again.
You hit the nail on the head pretty much.. The problem started with Tolkein (who, to at least give the benefit of the doubt, was a product of his time)- this is what happens when you frame the cannon fodder grunts that your heroic band of heroes need to mow down as ontologically evil, because you’re trying to tell a simplified good vs evil narrative, but then just happen to give them dark skin and features similar to a Jim Crow caricature. Intentional or not, racists will latch on to this depiction to reaffirm their own views.
You can try and reclaim the depiction the way that Warcraft did (although that kinda opens up it’s own can of worms, the Noble Savage is probably just as pernicious a trope), but realistically the easiest way to dispense with the racism is to abandon the concept of a sentient being being ontologically evil at birth, which as I understand it the new editions of DnD do (to give scant credit where it’s due).
Bonus round: Remember when David Ayer made a movie about fantasy races that was the single most clumsy allegory for real race relations?
I know a fair number of chuds offline that get enraged, like, visibly enraged if some fiction they’re presented with suggests that the ugly-therefore-evil people maybe aren’t evil after all. :frothingfash:
Unfortunately as I continued to write, I got sleepy and missed a few points I’d actually intended on including in my post; One of my additional issues that I took with orcs and goblins was…where do they go when they die? It makes no sense for them to go to the abyss or hell because that’s where evil beings go and like…orcs and goblins didn’t choose to be evil, so what are they being punished for? If you have a setting where beings can be born evil without the choice to become evil, and they go to hell because ‘they deserve to because they’re evil’, then it kind of means that any actual hero would be trying to tackle this system because there are beings being punished for choices that were never in their hands to begin with.
You’d end up with a situation where you literally have evil babies, and if as a heroic character you literally see nothing wrong with the world operating like this, then your own character is either evil or insane.
I think the original lore was that orcs and goblins go to their own plane where their god resides, where they get to continue to do what they did in life in the afterlife i.e. pillage other planes, in a weird parody of Christian “a life of service will lead you to his side” theology. I guess the eviller you are the more you’re rewarded in the afterlife by your evil god? But my recollection of Dnd lore is hazy, I’m not sure if that’s really the case even.
There was that post about JRPGs and killing God, which I think would be the thematic ground you’d want to take to tackle/deconstruct this.
I actually did have a story element I’d intended on dropping on my players’ hands (had my campaign lasted that long); the idea was that in the heavenly realm, divine beings were split in a debate in regards to whether creatures like orcs and goblins were innately evil or whether it was learned, so to create a controlled environment to test their views, they would have goblin babies be raised away from civilization with little influence on them up to the point where they could raise and take care of their own children and then immediately left to their own devices. It would be the players’ duty to watch over this tribe without influencing it and to ensure that no outside influence affects the village; the village does ultimately encounter outside influences, negative ones, but the idea was that regardless of the negative encounters, it doesn’t make the goblins lean towards evil or violence, instead they persevere and maintain a neutral society, perhaps more hostile to strangers, but not ‘evil’. I wanted to make the players think about the nature of evil in traditional fantasy settings and about the innate absurdity of ‘born evil’ races.
Tolkien’s orcs weren’t black people. They were Huns and Mongols - people from the east, from the distant landmass of Asia.
Yes, Tolkein himself specifically described his orcs as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types” (Letters, p. 274), but to a white supremacist everyone whose skin colour isn’t theirs gets lumped into a large Black mass anyway.
As I said, intentional or not, racists will latch on to this depiction to reaffirm their own views.
Also, to head off a potential argument at the pass, minorities don’t get the privilege of ignoring problematic elements- we will end up finding out what racists think of us one way or the other.
Edit: Also also, before I get accused to trying to cancel Tolkein:
Just like I said - the peoples who invaded Europe from the east. We’re agreeing with each other.
This just means that these peoples should stay in their own lands (which is about as common a racist trope as you can get).
Ah ok, fair.
Yeah, but at least Faramir treats them as people. Not much, but better than nothing.