"Ork" - races

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"Ork" - races

Post by Metahive »

I'm using "Ork" here as a placeholder for any race in fantasy and sci-fi writing that serves as nothing but always-evil cannon fodder for the heroes to guiltlessly dispose of in masses. A harmless tool of escapist entertainment? A cop-out to avoid having to deal with moral issues of warfare? A way of the writer to project prejudice and bias into ork-shaped strawmen? What do you people here think about this particular plot device?
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Tribble »

I usually don't mind having the knights in shining armour slash through hordes of orcs, especially when I get to watch it on film. Whenever I hear a battle cry I know its time to bring out the popcorn! Though bear in mind I'm the type who plays GTA just to see how many old ladies I can run over with my car...
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Borgholio »

Depending on the portrayal, the Orcish horde can be used to symbolize the unstoppable force of evil and death that is coming for you. Think of the battle of Helm's Deep. Cannon fodder? Maybe...but unstoppable cannon fodder.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Elheru Aran »

I suppose ever since Tolkien came up with them, the notion of the Bad Guy's Endless Army has been this idea that fantasy/scifi authors haven't really been able to shake. Whether it's WH greenskin, Tolkien orcs and goblins, DnD pigfaces, WoT Trollocs, etc, it's a convenient plot device that has become somewhat symptomatic of poor writing. See pretty much any war or terrorist action flick-- there's going to be a lot of no-name dudes toting AK-47's or whatever who basically exist to pop up and take a few shots at the good guys before they get mowed down.

As to what I think about it? It's kinda unoriginal, but on the other hand let's face it, 'realistic' warfare is a mass of guys walking around for weeks before half a hour of frantic combat and then counting who's still got all their bits once it's over. It's kinda boring. If you can give your good guys some sort of actual justification for killing the other side off that's not "we want their territory/money", but is more like "they're subhuman spawn of the Dark One". Ultimately I think it was rooted in a certain old-fashioned Western European racist attitude towards the 'bad guys from distant lands'. Since then it's pretty much just been people recycling Tolkien's notions for the most part. Robert Jordan, Goodkind, Magog from Andromeda, Borg, Jem'hadar, insert pretty much any fantasy RPG, and so forth.

Tolkien was honestly a bit more liberated about Orcs than one would think, he had issues with how his writing seemed to depict all of them as utterly evil thanks to his religious background. He could never really reconcile their nature with that of their origin (debased Elves). But that's a whole other discussion.

Check out the 'Orcs' series by... I want to say Stan Nichols. It's a pretty decent inversion of the literary device.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Ralin »

Elheru Aran wrote:Tolkien was honestly a bit more liberated about Orcs than one would think, he had issues with how his writing seemed to depict all of them as utterly evil thanks to his religious background. He could never really reconcile their nature with that of their origin (debased Elves). But that's a whole other discussion.
Which is present even in the books. Frodo said he pitied the orcs more than anything when he was in Mordor under the influence of the Ring, and I always figured he probably had more insight into the subject than anyone else at that point.

Also it's been awhile but I did read on a Tolkien site that he rejected the debased Elves idea as the origin for the orcs in one of his letters, but he also never gave an alternate explanation.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Imperial Overlord »

It depends what you do with it. Orcs in Tolkien's works are damaged goods, one of the ultimate products of evil's tendency to debase and degrade everything it touches. Tolkien himself wasn't entirely comfortable with orcs being irrevocably evil, even if they were pretty much so by his own design. In Middle Earth they work because they are tied up with the main themes, minions of dark powers that drag everything worth having through the muck to make it theirs and put their stamp on the world. In a lot of other fantasy worlds they don't work so well.

Inversions and playing on the trope can work. In the Malazan Books of the Fallen, some of the most powerful and independent minded creatures in existence happen to look a lot like orcs. There are other works where orcs are viewed more sympathetically. And there is also the Prince of Nothing where the sranc, orc equivalents, are an integral part of the setting. They are a literally bestial creatures that breed rapidly, primarily feed on grubs, are just capable of tool use and speech, and are driven on by hardwired biological drives that are linked to their sex drive and their ability to feel sexual satisfaction to rape, torture, and murder the human race and to obey their unholy masters. The sranc aren't intelligent enough to have free will, to try and resist their instincts. They've been made to fight and die in endless numbers to bring about the genocide their creator's desire, being little more than rabid dogs with enough skill and cunning to swing a sword and armour themselves in human hide and bone.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Ahriman238 »

Giving the bad guys a vast army of mooks that can be killed without any moralizing is a pretty old way of making them powerful.

The idea that there's a race or nation that is always evil is overly simplified storytelling. If anything, Imperial Overlord is drastically underselling the subversions. Off the top of my head there's the Yuuzhan Vong from NJO, who start off this way but gain complexity as the series goes on. The hradani from Oath of Swords are exclusively this, a noble race enslaved and turned into berserker canon-fodder by dark wizards and forever hated and feared for it even centuries after winning their freedom. Goblins in the D&D webcomic Goblins, heck to an extent gobbos in the Order of the Stick.

Even Avatar treated the Fire Nation as almost exclusively evil for the first two seasons (though they never shied from giving other cultures their villains) and spent the last season showing how the Fire Nation is victimized by the endless war.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by PainRack »

You gotta admit, the use of Orcs as an avatar of evil can be very successfully inverted.

Just look at Unseen Academicals and Nutt.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Darmalus »

They were the original robot drones before there were robot drones. Cheap, disposable, mass produced and made for one purpose. That they are made out of flesh is merely cosmetic. People humanize orcs for the same reason we see faces in power outlets.

Like any story device, they can be done well or done poorly.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by mr friendly guy »

If people are afraid that Orcs are inappropriate as a race which appears just to be evil, then have brainless undead. Then we can make the Orcs more nuanced.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Borgholio »

mr friendly guy wrote:If people are afraid that Orcs are inappropriate as a race which appears just to be evil, then have brainless undead. Then we can make the Orcs more nuanced.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by mr friendly guy »

I was actually thinking of skeletons, but whatever entertains I guess.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Coop D'etat »

I think the bigger problem with Ork races is the tendancy to write villians or at least villianous cannon fodder that are inherently evil or there is no issue with slaughtering en masse rather doing the difficult job of fleshing out the antagonist's mindset and motivations while still keeping the protagonists actions against them morally permissible.

Overlord's PoN series had an interesting approach to it, both by making the cannon fodder weapon race legitimately creepifing and relatively mindless, while the thinking adversaries are both utterly depraved by normal standards but have a legitimate, logical reason for it rather than just teh evilz.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Imperial Overlord »

Coop D'etat wrote:
Overlord's PoN series had an interesting approach to it, both by making the cannon fodder weapon race legitimately creepifing and relatively mindless, while the thinking adversaries are both utterly depraved by normal standards but have a legitimate, logical reason for it rather than just teh evilz.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Zixinus »

The thing about engaging in battle against an organized force is that as far as you should be practically concerned, the enemy is evil and has to be killed. Even if its humans against humans. Having them non-human and generally repulsive just makes warfare actually easier: your soldiers are not demoralized by the fields of of human bodies that are barely distinguishable from their comrades. The enemy is a monster and that makes demonizing them easier. And as a war-leader, you want to demonize the enemy at least to the degree that your own soldiers want to kill them. Not that its a good idea to do so to an absolute degree (and you certainly want to distinguish between civilians and enemy fighters), but it is part of darker side of warfare that can clunk up a heroic narrative.

It is a little justified when the species/race is artificial and is molded to be evil by a greater power. The Lord of the Rings movies did move on the theme that the orcs were made and a product of Sauron.

A bad or preachy writers have a tendency to make take that literary, especially if the writer doesn't think it through. It can be as invasive as the "warrior race" brainbug/myth, where writers forgets that warriors need a society that supports them for them to exist. If the writer doesn't ask whether their heroic narrative isn't actually an egoistical narrative, this can be the result: turning every obstacle the hero faces into something that exists only to be an obstacle.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Simon_Jester »

Zixinus wrote:A bad or preachy writers have a tendency to make take that literary, especially if the writer doesn't think it through. It can be as invasive as the "warrior race" brainbug/myth, where writers forgets that warriors need a society that supports them for them to exist. If the writer doesn't ask whether their heroic narrative isn't actually an egoistical narrative, this can be the result: turning every obstacle the hero faces into something that exists only to be an obstacle.
There have been certain societies that were functionally "warrior races" in that the only face their neighbors ever really saw as that of their warriors. The Huns, Caribs, Spartans, and Comanches come to mind (all of them different in certain ways).

Although those societies had a civilian home life, from a practical perspective everyone else viewed them as "those assholes who fight us all the time."

I think the real existence of such cultures is what keeps the 'warrior race' mythos alive in fiction. It's close enough to precedented to have some appeal for writers.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Thanas »

Before there were Orks, you had Turks and Africans as the bad massive hordes from the east. Before that, you had vikings or eastern tribes. Before that, you had barbarian hordes. Civilization always needs a baddie that can be killed off en masse in their stories.

I do find Orcs less immoral though because the other threats were based on real situations and real threats.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Ahriman238 »

The 'barbarians at the gate' inspiration for orcs goes back a long way. From the Achaens of the Epic Cycle, to heck, the Hitties and Hyksos of Ancient Egypt.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Metahive »

My problem with the use of "Orks" is that it carries this disturbing scent of "degenerate/defective untermenschen that must be destroyed" propaganda and it's doubly disturbing when it's nowadays rolled back again into real world context like in 300. Fuck, that's exactly how the Nazis thought of Jews and Slavs! I'd rather have warfare, including fantasy warfare not contain this sort of moral shortcuts to guilt free mass slaughter, I fear it acts as some kind of gateway drug to bigger douchebaggery.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Zixinus »

I actually start at the the word "barbarian". It is a label invented to belittle and dismiss cultures not of the parent cultures. It is still used in history books, especially of the "after the greeks, only the Roman Empire was of any significance" school of history reading. There were other cultures who were also sophisticated, wrote books and worked iron. But because they had women leaders and drank out of horns, the image that entire cultures were clueless, cruel savages wrapped in clumsily-cut animals skins is projected. When these cultures often had sophisticated clothing and habits. Rome turned times of massacring non-Romans and then presenting that as defending themselves against "barbarian hordes".

Then you have authors who know very little about hunter-gatherer or subsistence-farmer cultures and think that whatever ridiculous image they have is accurate enough. The word "barbarian" is meaningless if you move beyond its label of prejudice. Everyone is a barbarian to someone else. The Mayans didn't have iron-smelting but still wrote books. Being a "barbarian" is a dismissal or short-hand for foreigner, not an accurate description.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Simon_Jester »

On the other hand, there's a definite contrast when you look at large historical empires, and on the other hand at various warlike (often nomadic or semi-nomadic) peoples, whose social institutions might be quite sophisticated in their details but were of a very different scale than those of the larger, sedentary empires.

And these warlike peoples often did take over large, sedentary societies that were ill-prepared to resist them militarily. When they did so, sometimes they proved enlightened and effective rulers; in other cases they really did wreck a lot of things out of ignorance, or out of a lack of interest in maintaining them, or just as sheer massive collateral damage associated with their actions in fighting the war.

This didn't even always involve technological primitives attacking the sedentary culture; the Spanish conquests in the New World consisted largely of (very heavily armed) bands of Spanish warriors demolishing the civilizations of the New World and remaking them in their own feudal image.
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Re: "Ork" - races

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Simon_Jester wrote:This didn't even always involve technological primitives attacking the sedentary culture; the Spanish conquests in the New World consisted largely of (very heavily armed) bands of Spanish warriors demolishing the civilizations of the New World and remaking them in their own feudal image.
What precisely are you talking about?

Zixinus wrote:I actually start at the the word "barbarian". It is a label invented to belittle and dismiss cultures not of the parent cultures. It is still used in history books, especially of the "after the greeks, only the Roman Empire was of any significance" school of history reading. There were other cultures who were also sophisticated, wrote books and worked iron. But because they had women leaders and drank out of horns, the image that entire cultures were clueless, cruel savages wrapped in clumsily-cut animals skins is projected. When these cultures often had sophisticated clothing and habits. Rome turned times of massacring non-Romans and then presenting that as defending themselves against "barbarian hordes".
I think that is missing the point. This is not biological, but political racism. Nobody back then was claiming that there was something wrong with the gallic race, "just" that they were uneducated savages. This was not based on characteristics, but on their political affiliations. People who left the gallic parts and moved to Rome were integrated and accepted.

The same is not true for the racism at the core of the Orcish races, which is based on biological superiority, nor is it true for colonial racism, which also was based on biological superiority. The Romans claimed no such things and indeed quite often acknowledged that gauls were taller and stronger than they were and that only their superior technology and discipline allowed them to defeat them.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Covenant »

I agree. The idea of the barbarian is a social "other" or outcast, defined by the fact that they are not like you and are quite likely a primitive, uneducated, strange people not unlike the great people you are. It's a form of social elitism that may bleed over into a biological racism but does not require it at all. Thus the ability of someone from those "uncivilized" places to become "civilized," or to work with the invaders to raise up their local culture to the standards back home.

Orks are something that work in Tolkein but raise troubling questions elsewhere, because even in Tolkein we see the Orks are not simply a stand-in for the Eastern peoples (those are the Easterlings more specifically) or other non-Western folk. The idea of the Orks as a debased Elf, while Tolkein may have been unhappy with the idea that they are irredeemable, does still give them the roots in the closest that Tolkein made to a superior super race of people. The humans of his world are somewhat lesser "men" as well, as we see with the relationship that normal humans have to the Numenorians, so the idea of "losing something" as time goes on is deeply established. I don't like that much myself but I can take it with the good. Orks are not unusual in the setting, though they are dramatic in just how nasty they are. I think that The Return of the King gives us a window into Ork life and its easy to see how they're basically a brutalized people too. You may be veering away from author intent (or not?) but it is not hard to view the Orks as what humans under Sauron would be, and to see the Orks not as a stand-in for non-western people but as a stand-in for the greed and stupidity we are capable of now. Saruman with the Orks vs the Hobbits and Ents is a good duality in the green is good message of Tolkein works.

Lots of other pieces have them used in much less nuanced ways and it becomes easier to see them as "lesser beings" that are disgusting and deserve to be killed. While this is morally permissible when you make them that vile, it feels shitty to read. I also think that the big allure to this kind of critter is that it can threaten a normal human, but not a hero, thus showing how the heroes are important and why the villain is scary. The shithorde army can be fought 100 to 1 by adequately armed heroes in a story. If your heroes are being threatened by an equal number of enemy forces then it is a very different dynamic. It would certainly feel very odd if the enemy was outnumbered and winning with heroic, charismatic enemies. I think people would groove on that myself, but having a thing where your enemies are a bunch of high-charismatic asshole monsters that you try to defeat 100 to 1 does not allow for you to do the same kind of story as a shithorde does.

Plus, shithordes consume the land and ruin everything as they sweep across it like a wave. Single enemies committing a surgical strike like Frodo feels heroic to us, but if the enemies do it then you run the risk of it feeling like a terrorist or assassination plot.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Zixinus »

I think that is missing the point. This is not biological, but political racism. Nobody back then was claiming that there was something wrong with the gallic race, "just" that they were uneducated savages. This was not based on characteristics, but on their political affiliations. People who left the gallic parts and moved to Rome were integrated and accepted.

The same is not true for the racism at the core of the Orcish races, which is based on biological superiority, nor is it true for colonial racism, which also was based on biological superiority. The Romans claimed no such things and indeed quite often acknowledged that gauls were taller and stronger than they were and that only their superior technology and discipline allowed them to defeat them.
I admit that I am surprised that the Romans themselves used the word more soberly. I retract the "clueless savages" part for the Romans. Although, I have to ask: how widespread was this view and admission? Was it something openly accepted or something that leaders between themselves and scholars admitted?

I do would like to point out how the word "barbarian" does have some racist connotations now, even if the Romans didn't have it.

I should have said that I am how the word "barbarian" became corrupted from that into modern usage. Think Conan the Barbarian. I have the collection of the stories, which I haven't read through entirely, but it a bizarre idea of a barbarian. It has become an idea of itself in fantasy with its own meaning. Then D&D and roleplaying turned it into a class and the class became an idea of its own in fiction.

Hence why I oppose the idea. Once you remove its subjective meaning (political or otherwise), it is meaningless and recycling stereotypes with cliches. Hence my argument how it is not a useful description, merely a label.
This didn't even always involve technological primitives attacking the sedentary culture; the Spanish conquests in the New World consisted largely of (very heavily armed) bands of Spanish warriors demolishing the civilizations of the New World and remaking them in their own feudal image.
Actually, technologically more sophisticated tribes often attacked other, less technologically sophisticated tribes. The "they were barbarians whom we civilize" is, I believe, not a rare self-justification and rewriting of history.

As for the Spanish, the greatest demolishing of civilization happened with the sicknesses. Spanish and other conquerors merely mopped over the weakened people. In fact, I read how the conquerors often actually played power politics with the New World people because they would be otherwise woefully outnumbered, even with guns and steel.
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Re: "Ork" - races

Post by Thanas »

Zixinus wrote:I admit that I am surprised that the Romans themselves used the word more soberly. I retract the "clueless savages" part for the Romans. Although, I have to ask: how widespread was this view and admission? Was it something openly accepted or something that leaders between themselves and scholars admitted?
It was very much admitted to everyone. For example, there are some Roman depictions showing smaller Romans holding of larger gauls, or popular historians writing about how Gaul and Germans being stronger (but less disciplined) or even to Roman army manuals in the Empire saying that recruits from Gaul and Germania are to be preferred due to being on average taller and stronger. (Wanting to have an efficient army to the Romans meant that they very much liked to get physical specimens from the north which they then trained up to Roman standards of discipline).

It also was kinda self-evident to anybody with eyes considering how many celts and germans got imported to Italy or moved there.
I do would like to point out how the word "barbarian" does have some racist connotations now, even if the Romans didn't have it.

I should have said that I am how the word "barbarian" became corrupted from that into modern usage. Think Conan the Barbarian. I have the collection of the stories, which I haven't read through entirely, but it a bizarre idea of a barbarian. It has become an idea of itself in fantasy with its own meaning. Then D&D and roleplaying turned it into a class and the class became an idea of its own in fiction.

Hence why I oppose the idea. Once you remove its subjective meaning (political or otherwise), it is meaningless and recycling stereotypes with cliches. Hence my argument how it is not a useful description, merely a label.
Sure, but you started with the Romans in your initial post. I think it is very unfair to ascribe modern stereotypes to the Romans.
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