Appropriation v Participation

Some days life serves you up a huge steaming turd. Yes, we have a problem and that problem is bog standard human psychology because when we investigate a huge steaming turd we discover a defiance of the laws of nature - what produced that huge steaming turd was a smaller less offensive turd.

I am talking, of course about the attention given to Rachael "Raygun" Gunn's Olympic breaking performance. A performance for which, without any aid of public discourse I feel almost anyone could watch 10~30 seconds of and broadly understand exactly what happened, what needs to happen and really be done with it. Were we sober. But we are not. This is the shit we get high off, and that is our insurmountable problem.

By the end of the Paris Olympics, I was all like "yay Olympics" they are a great thing though perhaps not worth the price of admission. Dubious sports and all. I was likely my most interested since Sydney 2000 where the games were staged perfectly in my time zone and coincided with school holidays where I could just lay on a couch and watch it all day.

Anyway, Paris introduced "breaking" as a sport. I'm not a fan, or at least sit uneasily with subjective competitions. Like gymnastic floor routines with the ball, hoop or ribbon where a panel of judges have to observe and score on multiple criteria and then eliminate the top and bottom scores and blah blah blah. 

I saw some of the gymnastic floor routines, and even an ignoramus like me can understand that despite the artistic expression, costumes, pageantry there's clearly an athletic competition in the mix. Remove the ribbons, balls and hoops and it becomes more obvious in the case of an athlete like Simone Biles. Furthermore, there's only so much innovation one can reasonably expect out of three props that have been featured at Olympics since Stalin and Hitler were around.

By comparison, let's consider Roller Derby as an Olympic sport. A popular competition exists that has a lot of tacked on culture that I'm tempted in all cases to refer to as bullshit. Like someone can't compete as Sarah Johnson but needs to compete as "Mean Machine" that kind of bullshit. Outside the Olympics I think the culture around roller derby helps to keep the sport a women's space, it has a definite sexualized punk vibe even though from what I've observed the sexualization of Roller Derby does not serve to promote beauty ideals. Barge sized women will be in hot pants and fishnets.

I would expect that to qualify as an Olympic sport Roller Derby may need to permit a men's competition, for which I would expect the hyperfeminisation of the sport to be removed. People would compete in much the same uniforms that they compete in tennis, basketball, cycling or ice skating in. 

Breaking was clearly brought in as a spectacle, preserving much of the cultural bullshit including performance names. Though theoretically the same as sports like gymnastics, synchronized swimming, ice dancing, figure skating, diving etc. Cultural artefacts were preserved for the competition like having competitors "live react" and diss their competitor on stage. One was invited to buy into the fun and pageantry rather than treat breaking soberly like a sport. This is true of the women's gold medal match and the men's gold medal match with presumably expert commentators dropping insight like "one of the hypest songs you can get in a gold medal match..." 

Now the big steaming turd inserted into the debut sport of "breaking" was Australian women's competitor "Raygun" who scored 0 points and sucked up all the oxygen. Whatever there is to say about this flash in the pan, it is almost certain that too much will be said.

It is likely simply a story of incompetence built on incompetence, built on incompetence in a manner many people find hard to believe. The existential fear "mere incompetence" cannot be overstated, it is somewhat the basis of all conspiracy theories and the adamantanes of the conspiracists because people breaking things deliberately is much more comforting than things just breaking because we collectively are not good enough at what we do.

The first incompetence is importing break dance competitions into the Olympics. Now, there are numerous events that are popular and draw crowds and it's not always obvious what those events will be. Surfing is evergreen in terms of popularity but it is a much harder sport to spectate compared to beach volleyball on account of taking place offshore. I think indoor climbing will remain. Will the Olympics try fucking quidditch, bike polo or hacky sack?  

Culturally surfing is Hawaiian but the modern sport was popularized via california hence we may find Australian surfers saying "gnarly" but not so much "totally tubular" and they certainly don't sport Polynesian tattoos and while waiting for a wave they don't sit there doing an upper body Hula dance. Surfing can become an olympic event without participants from countries with distant cultural ties to Polynesia and California participating in the bullshit cultural artefacts some surfing snob might do a PhD thesis on constituting "true" or "authentic" surfing.

Not so with breaking, and this is about the extent that I concur with a concept like "cultural appropriation" where we get Japanese and Korean's acting, pretty much solely in the context of the breaking contest like they are African Americans from the projects. 

In this sense Surfing is like calisthenics, the group of bodyweight exercises originating from Greece that carries with it little-to-no-cultural artefacts, and breaking is like Pose based Yoga which is also a series of bodyweight exercises possibly originating in calisthenics but saddled with a bunch of cultural artefacts like mantras recited in a language most practitioners do not speak.

The second incompetence was that in both the men's and women's competitions 16 people competed and somehow Australia's female representative made the cut. Not simply making the cut on the Australian team, but got one of 16 places and managed to score 0 points. It should stretch credulity that Australia deserved representation in the women's comp. 

For example, Ukraine and the US had two "b-girls" in the competition, Canada had none even though it produced the gold medallist b-boy. South and Central America was completely unrepresented as was Mexico. Morocco was the only African nation that got representation. An Afghan b-girl was disqualified from the competition on account of incorporating some kind of political message into her act. It seems to me that Japan's second best b-girl deserved that 16 spot that Australia obtained for some reason.

The third incompetence was the Australian Olympic Commission qualifying Raygun. Soberly looking at the judging that gave her 0 points, and assuming the judges at least competently discharged their duties, a good argument to be made is that sending Raygun was worse than sending nobody at all. Her performance stimulated all kinds of reactions, and that's largely what I'm referring to when I say that it's easy to say too much about it. 

So there's a large chunk of the population who don't really understand sports at all, and their opinion for the most part, simply doesn't matter. 

Beyond that, most people need only 10 seconds or less of exposure to the phenomena to basically understand the situation completely. Somebody got into the competition that shouldn't have, for some reason, and the point is moot because that's it for breakdancing at the Olympics for the foreseeable future.

I suspect though, for many her qualification are at odds with the experience of walking down a shopping mall in the summer time and seeing kids on the street do a better job of breakdancing than she managed. 

I suspect for those contemporary in age to me or older, that's why Raygun's story did not take, and is unlikely to resemble that of Eric Moussambani's 100m freestyle qualifying swim in the 2000 Olympics. It was understood that Eric simply didn't have the opportunity to be a competitive swimmer, having never even seen a 50m Olympic size swimming pool prior to competing in the Olympics. Given the context, Eric became someone to cheer for in the spirit of participation. Furthermore the Olympic spirit is much more aligned with having Equatorial Guinea send someone to the Olympics to represent them on a world stage than it is a rich country with a bloated public spend on sports sending someone to the Olympics simply because we can.

Raygun as a selection from the AOC is from my limited understanding a direct result of the scarcity of women breakdancers in Australia, though it is possible that the core incompetence of the selection process was that Australia gave Raygun points for effort and creativity, that would not be awarded by the Olympic judges, meaning they ran the wrong contest to select a qualifier, that or Raygun made the rookie mistake of dinner party hosting where instead of cooking a straightforward recipe you are familiar with, you try to pull off something complicated on the big day.

If the AOC had money to burn on sending an athlete just to fill a roster spot, it seems they missed the trick on replicating the success of Alisa Camplin at the Winter Olympics, an ex-gymnast that Australia simply put on skiis to capitalize on complimentary skills. It feels plausible that the AOC could have gone to any of Australia's major ballet companies and found someone with the physical intelligence to be better than the best enthusiastic b-girl in Australia.

The final incompetence being that of Raygun herself. I feel it is fair to compare her somewhat to Eric Moussambani. Where there was a genuine question as to whether Eric the Eel could complete 100m freestyle, Raygun by her own testimony conceded that she simply couldn't do many of the dance moves on account of her physical conditioning.

In this regard she could be compared to the similarly self-aware Stephen Bradbury who famously won Australia's first ever Winter Olympic Gold Medal in the speed skating. Realizing he could not compete he consciously adopted a strategy that relied on the faster skaters crashing, and though out of his control the strategy paid off.

The problem for Raygun is that high speed collisions are just not a common occurrence in break dancing. Though I'm sure there's video of breakdancers doing the worm and falling off a stage, there's just nothing to suggest one could macarena or Nutbush their way to Olympic Gold by having competitors get too ambitious, especially in 1 v 1 "battles."

At which point I arrive at having more or less, nothing against Raygun. Her incompetence is the least of the problem, much like that monsters like Harvey Weinstein exist doesn't concern me anywhere near the extent that people facilitated his crimes because they could profit off of it and to my knowledge have paid no substantial penalty beyond dissolving the Weinstein company.

I have more issue with the AOC and IOC and frankly joe regular that has latched onto the spectacle.

It appears on balance of probability that Raygun was allowed up on that stage to give the world a demonstration of the at-this-point-overdetermined Dunning-Kruger effect. 

There may be some, who likely not consciously are incredulous that the breaking community in Australia isn't so mean that they would simply boo and jeer a b-girl of Raygun's age out of the youth scene. I'm against that, I think if 40 yo, 60 yos or whoever want to step into the arena, they should be able to. I am pro-participation. 

The issue lies at the point that someone determined that Raygun was the best Australia had to offer and sufficient to represent Australia on a world stage. 

What tipped me over the edge into compulsively having to say too much about Raygun, was seeing someone post an opinion about how Raygun's performance was much worse because it was a privileged woman doing a minstrel routine because cultural appropriation.

Now, I don't really have an opinion on Al Jolson though I have watched a video of him performing "My Mammie" in blackface and I simply would say: I don't get it. I don't even know why Al Jolson was in blackface when you take the clip from "The Jazz Singer" as he is singing "My Mammie" to his Lithuanian (?) mother in the crowd. 

Do I think Raygun's performance was a minstrel routine? No. I think if you are taking that much offense you are taking that much offense of your own free will. 

She is almost certainly privileged by virtue of being Australian and having a PhD. In India has a general participation rate in tertiary education of 28.8% Mexico 21%, Australia it's something like 51%. If you are born Australian to non-abusive parents you are de facto privileged, especially when it comes to the Olympics, Australia sent 9 skateboarders to Paris, only Japan and the US sent more.

The most common first names among NBA players are "Michael" "Chris" "Kevin" "James" etc. and largely white-held stereotypes might assume the typical NBA story is a kid from the inner city hood playing hoops on the street to escape the drug game with their father Denzel Washington in Jail and their single mum cooking them spaghetti-o's in a project tower, but actually many NBA stars grow up middle class and are given bog-standard Hebrew (Biblical) first names go to good schools with good basketball programs and could have been a dentist if they weren't so tall with extremely large hands and thus having promising NBA careers especially given all the resources behind them.

Now was there any malice? No. Just dazzling incompetence. Beguiling incompetence. From what little footage I have seen, it is clear she was trying to be creative in an obvious way, suspending the assumption many in the humanities do - that the status quo is non-arbitrary. Basically I think she came up with "original" moves inspired by Australian Fauna, to compensate for her lack of athleticism. What she couldn't produce was something like the Frosby-Flop that instantly revolutionised the High-Jump event. Because she lacks athleticism.

Let's keep in mind, the Venice Beach scene from "Breakin" 1984 contained more creative choreography than the entire 2024 Olympic breaking competition, including a lot of creative stuff that is much worse than what has evolved to be the repertoire of competitive breakdances - namely power moves.

She came up with a passable routine for a children's show. Somebody with high body intelligence like a ballet dancer, with ample time to field-test new moves, could probably innovate breakdancing by taking inspiration from the motor functions of animals like snakes, kangaroos, even wombats and koalas. Kung Fu has a bunch of zoomorphic fighting styles that are at the least both aesthetically pleasing and athletic, if inferior to more straightforward fighting arts like boxing. brazilian jiu-jitsu, and okinawan karate.

A better case could be made for malicious cultural appropriation by a privileged white woman, had she tried to incorporate indigenous dance steps by studying Aboriginal dance companies. Not necessarily a solid case however. Nor produce a winning strategy, as this would be like an Argentinian b-boy or b-girl trying to incorporate the Tango into a break routine. Like there's an avenue for innovation, but it's breakdancing as distinct from other styles of dance. Had she the athleticism and coordination to pull it off, she could have contended for a medal by using more conventional power moves.

This is the point at which cultural appropriation fails to garner my sympathies, because it just comes across as anti-competitive (in the same sense as Gilbert Arenas suggesting the NBA needs to kick out all the European players, an unveiled parochialism) and generally requires some kind of double standard (like Gilbert Arenas feeling his culture is entitled to appropriate basketball just because with very few exceptions black Americans have lifted the profile of the game, or in the teaching materials for the Candyman reboot, "reclaiming" Candyman for black culture when it is adapted from British Author Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden" set on an English estate), which just cannot arrive at anti-discrimination. I feel I somewhat understand the power dynamic argument that generally founds left-wing discrimination, it's just what can someone like Rachael Gunn do? She is being asked not to participate in case she wins.

There's nothing this argument has to say about Raygun that also cannot be said of winner Ami Yuasa, Dominika Banavic, Liu Qingyi - the medallist b-girls. Without cultural appropriation breaking just isn't a sport at all. If the distinction is that a "privileged" woman made a mockery of the culture by being bad at it, then we must allow that Eminem and Elvis never be cited as cultural appropriators on account of them being good at what they do. (unless in their cases their unprivileged upbringings makes them appropriators because they are good at what they do?)

The institution won out by giving Raygun 0 points. The culture loses because she is the most talked about 2024 Olympian probably, unless incidentally like some NBA star is being more discussed because he signed a trade deal and happened to be an Olympian.

If I were to rank the 2024 Olympic memes on merit they would be as follows:

1. Photo of Gabriel Medina exiting wave on way to Gold in Surfing.

2. Turkish Yusef Dikec casually winning silver in the shooting.

Nth. Raygun's creative new dance moves.

But in terms of google trends, that ranking is reversed.

Now Rachael Gunn herself has to my understanding basically spun the reaction to her dance entry as what I shall call a "Hannah Gadsby" which is to say, she is leaning into the spectacle as apology for the lack of substance. And I know people regard Nanette as quite substantive, but in time I think it is recognized widely that as a comedy special it sucks on account of pre-subversion-jokes not being very funny, as a marketing package for an extended TED talk it rules.

What else has Raygun achieved though beyond a whole bunch of attention? 

Well, Yusef Dikec resonated because he performed while cutting through a lot of his sport's artifice. There's a positive message about backing yourself and not getting intimidated or sucked into the expensive signalling of richer nations and richer competitors. The meme is a watered down version of Abebe Bikala's story winning the 1960 Rome games' marathon barefoot - these are archetypal underdog stories of the Olympics in terms of rich national sports programs losing to poor national sports programs, and not because Abebe couldn't afford shoes nor that Yusef can't afford glasses and hearing protection, they both prefer(red) not to use them.

The photo of Gabriel Medina captures a moment that almost deifies Gabriel. He is suspended triumphant in mid air, his surfboard almost parallel. It speaks of complete dominion over his environment, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets turned into a statue somewhere. Like Michael Jordan's Airwalk or Vince Carter's dunk of death or Usain Bolt's Beijing 100m win, it is capturing a moment that seemingly expands the frontier of human possibility. Little kids will look at that photo and believe that a human being can fly.

I have to be careful how I word this next bit in particular, because I don't want to falsely attribute intent. When we take this combination of memes with a god-like surfer, an ice cold shooter and an incompetent dancer that eclipses not only the other memes, but pretty much all accomplishment - little girls are blameless for inferring from the memes that in the domain of sports men are gods and cool dudes and women are jokes.

I'm not saying it is the case, I am alluding to the packaging of ideas. The best we can say is that it is a triumph of the attention economy, a confluence of incompetence allowing this spectacle to transpire obliterates what inferences can be drawn from Simone Biles' gymnastic golds, Saya Sakakibara's bmx racing gold, Arisha Trew's skateboarding gold, Jessica and Naomi Fox's canoeing golds...even Kathryn Mitchell's ability to compete in javelin at 42 years of age. 

The misogyny is out and in full, because there is probably no easier dog to kick in western society than a middle-aged white woman. Raygun is a Karen even though she made no complaints to a manager and instead tried to have fun with break dancing. Teaching us that Karen's are not even about what Karen's do but what they are. People are reacting as if some human garbage living in some modest comfort of an academic-in-a-humanities department is an affront to the Just World Hypothesis.

Ami Yuasa the gold medalist b-girl is 25 and Japanese. Aside from that she is a university graduate majoring in English and American Literature. So we are definitely saying too much about breaking at the Olympics if I need to discuss Japanese history and Japanese culture to render arguments of "cultural appropriation" unintelligible. Sadly "do I need to explain Japan to you?" is not a rhetorical question when directed to the modern left, given the extent to which in my experience left wingers fetishize Japan despite it basically being an ethno-nationalist state highly gender-polarized and almost completely dissonant with it's history of imperialism. 

All of which is as irrelevant to Ami Yuasa's performance as the history and culture and economy of Australia is irrelevant to Rachael Gunn's. Complaints of the nature of white-privilege, cultural appropriation etc. are likely a good case study to shelve for when we can pick over the corpse of "Anti-racism" as functioning as a literal reverse racism.

If you read the abstract of Rachael Gunn's academic papers, you will see someone who is completely schooled in intersectional feminism and is trying to fight white-male patriarchal neoliberalism. This is the predictable result, because most of these critiques (either by mode or by composition) are horseshit. I'm not going to invest in reading Raygun's doctoral paper, but if she doesn't use an empirical or historical methodology to determine that lack of female representation in break dancing stems as a bi-product from the overall crappiness of the Australian hip-hop (aka skip-hop) scene then that paper is a horseshit PhD.

Hannah Gadsby took something "unserious" being a comedy special and successfully subverted it by making it serious to the point of harrowing for many. Gadsby probably leveraged millions of dollaridoos if not hundreds of thousands and I think in the fullness of time my money is on the major contribution of Nanette being archival evidence of how little was understood about male violence in the early 21st century, again thanks to pinning it on a nebulous skunked/Motte-and-Bailey term like "patriarchy" basically guaranteeing that the content cannot be understood. 

There's no need to analyse, or wait for the fullness of time with Raygun's performance. We already have movies like "The Room" and reality TV competitions like "Idol", "X Factor", "Got Talent", and "So You Think You Can Dance" for which everything is in the title to know exactly what transpired. I think Raygun could leverage this moment into possibly thousands of dollars as a guest speaker at a few events. In the meantime she is likely being psychologically destroyed by the impact of her high-risk strategy, and that middle aged white women are seen as fair game, even more so than straight white men. The inherent risk of asking: "Where the #b-girls at? politics of (in)visibility in breaking culture" assuming the question to be rhetorical.

Rachel Dracht spoofing Raygun on lightning-rod-of-desperate-need-to-be-culturally-relevant Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is just a poor man's version of Tina Fey quoting middle-aged-white-woman Sarah Palin word for word on SNL. Performances that are pure pandering and will likely age less sympathetically than their inspirations (though it is hard to be sympathetic to Palin, very much forerunner to Trump, she is a symptom of the Republican Party base, a point on the evolutionary trajectory of dumb presidents from Raegan to Bush Jr. to Palin to Trump and as NNT pointed out, if you want to scare yourself extrapolate that pattern into the future.)

Furthermore to the specific delusion, someone who mistakes "originality" as an unqualified good is not new. It is a common artistic delusion. It is the reason Melbourne population 5 million, can somewhat viably support 150,000 seats for 9 professional Australian Rules football clubs 705k memberships and about 3ish truly dedicated Jazz venues.  (I wouldn't be surprised if breakdancing is a bigger scene in Melbourne than Jazz is despite having a fraction of the economic support).

Contemporary Jazz is unpopular because it equates being original with being good. It is dwarfed both in number of performers and crowd turnout by solo female singer songwriters with acoustic guitars. On this front, I have long had a gripe that Jazz snobs think they are taking risks, where I feel risk is a measure of variability of outcome. Modern Jazz is not risky, it is almost guaranteed to alienate audiences and bankrupt its practitioners unless they can sit atop a pyramid of tutelage teaching the next generation of unpopular musicians their difficult artform. It does not resemble Coltrane or Miles Davis' highly listenable jazz, because it isn't allowed to, because originality. 

The breaking routine clearly was risky, because it has had this outsize response. The thing that deserves the most outrage would be the degree to which we are all a sucker for spectacle, schadenfreude and outrage itself. 

So at base, what we have is grist for a very problematic mill.

What do we want out of the IOC the AOC out of Raygun and PhD's? Does the public "discourse" bring us any closer? Does it even approach answering the question "how did this happen?" No, the attention economy is terrible at answering questions and solving problems.

I for one, want the IOC to take risks, to try new sports and retire old sports. There are a bunch of difficult questions in sports, not the least of which is the centrality of defining gender to sports. But like, if you contemplate just the question of prize money for winning a gold medal, does a gold medalist water polo team member deserve the same compensation as the 100m sprint winner or marathon winner?

Things are changing constantly and are unpredictable. In permitting the IOC to take risks, they need to have the competence in researching to ensure they are actually taking risks. I believe breaking was introduced to try and draw in a younger crowd, presumably than say, equestrian events do. I believe if they did their research they may have discovered that break dancing is not that popular with young people. 

The AOC needs to reign in its olympic qualifying standards, such that just because somebody is the best regional representative in a sport wouldn't automatically qualify them, as they do with the current Winter Olympic events, otherwise it represents a potential transfer in wealth from Australian Taxpayers to private citizens via the moral hazard of creating spectacle, intentionally or not. The medalling b-girls and b-boys have a common met criteria of competing in world championships or continental championships and medalling. Someone from Sydney (pop. 5.3 million) beating someone from New Zealand (pop 5.12 million) is not good enough. 

Furthermore, for new sports or exhibition sports the IOC should do its utmost to avoid a "pay-to-play" scenario, as would be true of say the IOC putting Gridiron in the Olympics that would not be true of them putting Cricket or Baseball in the Olympics. Cricket obviously has a world cup, the case for it being a truly global game is likely inferior only to Football (Soccer), baseball there are pro-leagues in Japan, the US and Latin America. Gridiron, not only are there almost no compatible international leagues (I think Canadian football is possibly a thing?) but there is also a dearth of non US players in the NFL, with only a few Australians that generally specialize as kickers playing for the big money. 

If the IOC permits NFL to be an Olympic sport we will see G7 nations putting together bullshit teams and granting bullshit citizenship to US pros in a scramble for a silver medal, but we won't see Equatorial Guinea able to send a Grid Iron team to the olympics because it is a ridiculous amount of people and equipment to put up in an olympic village in Los Angeles at taxpayer expense.

Anyway, what about the impacts on Raygun's doctoral thesis? I believe a PhD isn't revokable even when debunked, even when the doctrate of philosophy debunks her own thesis herself. Raygun is by far and away the most famous Australian break dancer of all time. She is likely currently the most famous break dancer in the world, and she did so with no particular noteworthy ability in the sport. She scored zero points and won something like 5 percentage categories in her bouts out of 270. 

She has unintentionally replicated the grievance studies affair's attempted thesis that the social sciences have no sound epistemology, that they can arrive at any a-priori conclusions in this case a lack of representation and achievement by women in breaking is a product of white-patriarchy and neoliberalism, rather than a broader correlation with a lack of interest in the dance style and the low social status in Australia of break dancers. (Raygun aside from being the most famous Australian break dancer, is also the only woman I have ever known to date a male break dancer.)

Thomas Sowell could cut and paste his critiques of critical social theories onto Rachael's thesis - by broadening the scope we can observe that breakdancing is dominated by Asia and Europe. It is popular with affluent Japanese, Chinese and Korean people. Had Rachael not nested her thesis in Sydney and Australia, she may have identified that the (in)visibility of women in the sport had little if nothing to do with patriarchy, whiteness and neoliberalism. 

Much as the IOC needs to get better at its own research, the research conducted in social sciences needs to be less insulated from reality, so that our academics don't initially test their theories only when it gets real on a stage in front of the world.

Is Problem Wit da Orcs?

I want to say from the beginning, I don't know what J.R.R. Tolkien's position was on the races of his middle earth being analogous to races of actual earth. I'm going to allow for arguments sake, with no interest as to the truth of the matter, that Tolkien was the most cartoonish Victorian Era colonial racist Hitler curious stereotype of racism, rather than some old pipe smoking Oxbridge dude more akin to a Bertrand Russell or whatever.

Allowing that, which could be pure fiction, again I cannot state enough how much I don't care, and therein is a spoiler for my thesis and conclusion, lets say that Orcs were created by cartoon racist Tolkien as his veiled opinion of Africa. Definitely not Asians, definitely not Phoenicians, Jews or Arabs, Africans. 

Okay, now we can move on to premises we do not need to allow for the sake of argument, its shit that actually happened. A bunch of nerds unwittingly pick up LOTR and are like "Wooooahhhh woooah woah!" they are blown away by it. They can't get enough, they become fanatics or "fans" for short and start generating their own derivative content. 

Some of them will produce substantial derivative work where they inject their own modicum of originality. Others will produce thinly veiled derivative works where they are forced to be original because they want to go commercial without being sued by Tolkien. 

Somewhere in this process of creative history, "Warhammer Fantasy Battle" falls out and "Dungeons and Dragons" (DnD) and by this stage, nobody can copyright an Orc/Ork/Orruk, they have become too generic to be enforceable.

LOTR itself, unquestionably is a derivative work, drawing on Norse mythology probably Celtic mythology it was a project of myth making. Hence we can get species like Dwarves who live (somehow) underground, much like goblins and from the Hobbit and LOTR a lot of these role-playing-games that formalised many of the fantasy tropes involve going into a dungeon and fighting some shit.

It used to be very fairy-tale black-and-white (and charge that racially as you will) Reagan era good vs evil. So you get like first edition of fantasy role playing games and it's basically each one of you gets an analogue to a fellowship member, or you are general of an analogue to the Battle of Five Armies, and have at it.

Somewhere later in the process, people start deconstructing, in essence, the ethics of killing intelligent life.

Like there was a period in history, maybe the British Raj that was pre-Tolkien (not that people weren't superstitious) but there were adventure clubs and English men with big moustaches did bullshit like hunt tigers. Now, if I was in my supermarket and a Tiger escaped from the zoo and got into the supermarket - it would probably head for the meat section or the Deli and I could probably just leave the supermarket in a calm and orderly fashion.

But say the Tiger was hunting me, I would probably have little compunction about running to the kitchen ware aisle and trying to rip a kitchen knife or two out of their blister pack and enter a kill-or-be-killed mindset.

I think in early additions of DnD, Orcs were just regarded in this sense as the moral equivalent of Tigers - they are dangerous and it is kill or be killed and that is the adventure.

There probably is a game about hunting Tigers in India or Siberia or whatever, but it isn't really part of the fantasy roleplaying genealogy. 

Orcs, Ogres, Trolls, Giants, Vampires, Revenants, Harpies etc. whatever. I'm sure entered these games and genres as the moral equivalent of Sharks, Tigers and Polar Bears but they are a little more exciting because clearly they can hold clubs and axes and swords, but they were kitsch in the sense of stimulating an emotional response of excitement, and about as thoughtful as a shark with a laser gun. 

Like, I did not experience growing up in the fighting fantasy books, board games like Hero Quest and Talisman that Orc society, or Dwarven society had had any more thought as to how their economies functioned and how they come to have swords and shields and chainmail as how a shark might wind up with a laser.

Which is all to say, from the perspective of fans playing DnD or Warhammer they were savage brutes that were going to kill you unless you killed them first.

What happened later, and I cannot stress how little I care about when. Was that people got exhausted of the nerdy tropes without getting exhausted by DnD, and the quite natural process of deconstruction came in. At some point, and likely as a product of convergent evolution, a bunch of people got captivated by the idea of playing DnD or whatever from the Orcs perspective.

So we just have this natural transition from a very one dimensional baddy to a complex character.

From there, someone deconstructs the trope and deconstruction very quickly moves into problematizing.

Now I already allowed that Tolkien for arguments sake could have been a racist and been being racist when he made the orcs the baddies. It doesn't matter and why I don't care is because of the genetic fallacy where I don't think Tolkien ever described Orcs as being green, and now orcs are green and in many of their incarnations they aren't "corrupted elves" or whatever Tolkiens origin story is I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH I DO NOT CARE ENOUGH TO CHECK OR BE RIGHT OR WRONG ABOUT TOLKIEN.

In so far at this point in the 21st century Orcs are problematic because they are "coded" as African and maybe a specific culture of Africa or maybe African American because somewhere Tolkien expressed negative views on jazz music or something, I think the problem can be summarized as Orcs aren't Nazis. 

Bringing me to the differences between Raiders of the Lost Ark, Inglorious Bastaards and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. 

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a Jewish revenge movie for the Holocaust. It leans into the pulp fiction genre, and the Nazis are unambiguously evil trying to get hold of a powerful supernatural artefact and through Hubris the Nazi occultist gets himself and his whole battallion or whatever killed. It's fine because Harrison Ford and love interest know to close their eyes when the Ark is opened. I think Indy even has his hands literally tied. 

Inglorious Bastaards involves a Jewish girl seizing the opportunity to kill Nazi leadership and end WW2. The opening scene establishes that the Nazis killed her family, and the final slaughter is of the Nazi leadership the Nazis most responsible. Ahistorical and counterfactual as the movie may be when compared to something like Downfall, neither Raiders nor Inglorious Bastaards have moral ambiguity.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare on the other hand, didn't quite work. In The Great War or "World War 1" I would hope that it is easy to imagine that the German soldiers in the trenches are more or less the moral equivalent of British, French and Anzac soldiers also fighting in the trenches. Which side you fought for was not so much a question of ideology as an accident of birth.

Once you get to WW2, I'll admit it becomes harder, but I think the world is on the cusp of being ready to have killing Nazi rank-and-file soldiers problematized. Because we would have two categories we can never tell being in effect when we watch some allied black-ops group gun down a heap of Nazis.

On the one hand, we have people who are fighting in WW2 because they were simply born Protestant or Catholic German, like probably their parents or grandparents that fought in WW1 you just fought for your country, because there was no EU you couldn't freely move and become a constitutional monarchist in England, a Communist in Spain or a Neutral Swede. You couldn't download duolingo and pick up a foreign language if you were working class German.

Then allowing that there's a large contingent of rank and file soldiers in Germany that were ideological. They stood up and saluted the Furer when some kid sang "tomorrow belongs to me" at the beer garden or beer halls. These are people that much like the Allies didn't have access to good information. They just had local papers, if they read them at all. 

To use an Australian analogy, they were likely the moral equivalents of Australian communities whose beliefs align with the Coal Industry in their town. They think climate change is a hoax, the Great Barrier Reef is thriving and Adani is a wonderful company with an impeccable record. Likely the economic devastation followed by the economic opportunities of the build up to war, mostly informed many German soldiers opinions.

So how much am I supposed to relish them being hosed down by bullets from silenced machine guns. I can certainly see how it was necessary in the context of war, but I can't get any gratification from the fact that most of these people are just born in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Now, I can't think of a good segue from Nazis to Harleen Quinzel aka Harley Quinn. Batman villain's henchman created based on a dream sequence in a soap opera witnessed by Bruce Tim put into an animated series and then introduced into the comics and exploded in popularity by Margot Robbie's portrayal in piece of shit movie "Suicide Squad."

Harley Quinn became popular. Little girls wanted to dress up as her for Halloween, it captured a lot of women's imaginations. Harley Quinn is an interesting character, because she is fundamentally a train wreck in an unhealthy and abusive relationship with the Joker, and a tragic figure.

So naturally, cannonically because Harley Quinn is popular with women, she must become a good role model, a good guy. So now canonnically I believe it to be the case that Harley has split with the Joker and joined the Bat family to fight against crime and for law and order and justice and whatever. She was replaced by "Punch Line" as Joker's "business partner" rather than useful idiot abused lover, who engages with the Joker on her own terms with her own agency.

Then there's the feature "Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass" where a highschool student Harley joins a Queer theatre troop and befriends a Woke Ivy as she learns that Joker is just a privileged white male or some shit. Condensing Harley Quinn's whole journey into a single narrative arc, while we can learn some cutting edge politics along the way.

However you feel about it, however entertained or not you have been by Harley Quinn's comic book and movie appearances she's a crystal clear example of an over investment in media effects. Put simply "Girls can't have bad things." They have to have nice things.

Now Harley Quinn as a character required no cognitive effort, no mental expenditure, no video essay to problematize. She was a psychologically and emotionally unstable woman in an abusive relationship with the Joker. She required redeeming just as soon as she became a popular Halloween costume with women who do not at large read comics. I'm aware women do read and write and review comics, but I'm guesstimating that 90% of the women that cosplayed as Harley Quinn know her from Margot Robbie's initial portrayal, punching Harley Quinn cosplay into google image search shows me at least that the Margot Robbie costume is overrepresented compared to Harley's traditional harlequin outfit that she wore in most mediums. (Curiously, Harley's outfits from "Birds of Prey" "Breaking Glass" and James Gunn's "Suicide Squad" are unrepresented, which makes sense given that she was desexualised/de-objectified post popularity, because young women cannot be trusted with media.)

Segueing back to Orcs/Orks whatever, when I think DnD what comes to mind? Well it depends when we are talking about. Like "Stranger Things" I feel captures DnD in the 80s and the Satanic Panic and shit. I think of a hobby largely for unathletic pasty white guys and their middle class college bound black friends who do not range but fall either side of gangly and fat wearing Chuck Taylor's and Levi 501s and black t-shirts, before hitting the 90s and then it's fat white guys in college dorms with white-afros and neckbeards in cargo shorts and butthole surfer tees drinking mountain dew and eating doritos and then the Spice Girls end the 90s and begin the 2000s in 1997 and there's boy band and Britney Mania and shit and that lasts into the early-to-mid-2010s and then much as the French preserved rollerblading and breakdancing while the west forgot about it DnD experiences a resurgence in recent years but I basically equate it with the LGBTQIA+ scene now.

We can cut out the middle part and take the strong problematic argument that Orcs are coded as black people.

If we go back to the 70s 80s scene when it appeared to be an activity dominated by white men like almost all "Nerd" "Culture" I feel safe in retrodicting that none of those players picked up that Orcs were coded as African Savages. That none of the people exploring the fantasy of being a knight, a cleric, a mage, a thief, a bard had Colonial fantasies driven by the "Scramble for Africa" nor the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

I can also confidently retrodict without bothering to check old DnD materials that I won't find such campaigns in there. The historically "problematic" read on Orcs I feel likely to also confirm the scholarly consensus that media effects are weak. It is akin to "the satanic panic" 

Like we just know enough with what 40 years of hindsight that video games, role playing games, movies and books do not produce Nazis and White Supremacists, nor Satanists. 

Flashing forward to present day, where DnD is uses storytelling tech to explore race and gender by a generation for which this shit is their jam. It is more likely that DnD's content is far more likely to change based on who is playing it than the reverse effect.

Bringing me to one of the finest examples of non-journalism I've ever come across. The below video, I am going to say, if you can't guess what the finding of the investigation will be before you've heard the end of the question posed, I'll suspect you of having a debilitating cognitive deficit:

All I learned from that video when I watched it two or three years ago was that "Sensitivity reader" was a job, that based on the thesis of this post, shouldn't exist because media effects are weak.

I think this is the current DnD scene, I don't know what the future holds for DnD maybe it will regress to a hobby seen as mostly for straight white male neckbeards who want to explore the fantasy of living in a heteronormative media culture, but for now DnD appears to an outsider such as myself as far-left egalitarian, all inclusive. Dungeons, dungeons are wheelchair accessible.

What we see more of is a tool - the group conversation based Role Playing Game (RPG) being adopted, appropriated and assimilated by another culture. I'm sure someone who has read continental philosophy and its offsprings, or has atleast absorbed some of it's darwinian memes can explain why there's no doublestandard, but describing DnD as having an indigenous ingroup of white male nerds, that have found themselves on the receiving end of the collonial experience of being discovered, invaded and marginalized is at the very least descriptive.

I don't care, because in this case, while a demographic finds itself maybe losing esteem within the culture (and many adopting or aspiring to the invasive culture) they aren't in anyway dispossessed. Nothing is stopping them from keeping their group all straight white males and playing earlier editions for the sheer simplicity of good vs evil.

I make the point because I find it to generally be the case to explain any and all phenomena as a reiteration of something people have always done. I'm wary of New Era stories.

The real Irony I would point to, is that if there was ever a time to not be concerned that playing DnD would lead to ethnocentric views, in turn leading to ethnonationalism and racial discrimination it is now. 

What could be justified is that more racially enlightened generations are coming into the fantasy genre and finding "racial errors" that they are now correcting, basically being that everyone is qualified to be a sensitivity reader. 

However, they are correcting something that likely, never had an effect. Reshaping fantasy media to be problem free, when the risk that people mistake fantasy for reality is almost historically indeterminate. 

Bringing us to the all important question of intent, which I would specifically word as "Who's doing it to you?" again allowing that Tolkein was a foaming at the mouth racist (which I haven't bothered to substantiate) I don't think the creators of DnD appropriated Orcs for it's 1e bestiary with any conscious knowledge of such, forethought or malicious intent. If they did, by the time you get to Blizzard Entertainment's "Warcraft" I cannot read Orcs as being coded as anything but the fantasy trope of Orcs.

What I overwhelmingly see, from LOTR to DnD to World of Warcraft, is a narrative device to supply enemies to fight so there is action in a roleplaying game. Sure, there could be, and almost certainly must be historical inspiration and likely candidates would be the Mongol Empire, the Persian Empire and the Moors, all the "outsider" cultures that ever seriously threatened or invaded Europe. One can read Dostoevsky's War and Peace (as I just did) and even see a Russian using Napoleonic France as the basis for a foreign invader. 

"Who's doing it to you?" is a crucial question where you create offense where non was intended. Watching Youtube channel "Sit down and Shut up" response to a viewer request on how to get into RPG's host Quinn at one point suggests that characterisation of NPCs should be on the level of pro-wrestling. That is to say, and I'm paraphrasing that your players will enjoy interacting with one-dimensional characters a lot more than interacting with a host of nuanced, dynamic fully realised characters.

I'm sure in many ways, Orcs simply evolved to be best fit to the RPG ecosystem. Again, I'll for the sake of argument grant that they were based in all instances on negative racist stereotypes of tribal cannibalistic savages. I don't think you have a good argument though, even granting this. I suspect those stereotypes existed in the first place to provide the same utility: because people wanted to live in a world where everything was simple and you could embrace the spirit of adventure to cross the Atlantic, invade Mexico, trek to the North Pole, Club Seals, render whale fat etc.

It's really harmful to apply these narratives to reality, where race is a construct. Fantasy is the domain from which these narratives came and to where they belong. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was an excellent film that featured a huge army of motorcycle nomads lead by dementus.

George Miller is on record somewhere, as using them as an analogy for the Huns, steppes people lead by Attila. 

When I watched that movie, I repeatedly got annoyed by the number of motorcycle nomads and the complete lack of supply trains. Like that gang just could not exist without starving to death in a matter of days.

I don't think Miller and his co-writers ever sat down to crunch the numbers on how many calories are needed to sustain the populations of the wasteland. The thing was, even though I couldn't help noticing it, I could just as easily let it go, realizing it was not the point. The point was the story being told.

Maybe the fantasy genre is overrepresented with power fantasies but I do not think fantasy is positively correlated with people attaining power in reality. Unless it correlates to periods of history when tertiary qualifications reliably predicted top quintile household incomes. In which case DnD would correlate to holding power and status in society in the same way that a decrease in Piracy leads to an increase in climate change.

Harley Quinn is in many ways a more interesting problematised fantasy than Orcs. This is because, really there's only been one case of a male identifying with the Joker and then killing a bunch of people as The Joker is want to do (that douchebag dipshit that shot a bunch of people at a premier of "The Dark Knight Rises") but women get involved with abusive men all the time. I think in Australia they are talking about a woman being killed by her domestic partner once every 4 or 8 days at the moment.

I think a statistical analysis would likely show that over the lifetime of the character Harley Quinn, the character has had no discernible effect on violence against women. By which I mean I'd bet that if anything since the early-mid-90s when Harley Quinn debuted in Batman: The Animated Series, to now, it's likely that in countries like the US, Canada, Australia and Western Europe if anything I'd predict the world has become marginally safer.

I would make that prediction because (austerity budgets aside) I think the support infrastructure has likely improved to enable more women to escape dangerous relationships.

I imagine we aren't much closer to solving the riddle of women who mistake danger for safety and safety for danger, who are (like men) susceptible to love bombing, mirroring and being rushed to commit. Just unlike men, women are much much more vulnerable to being beaten to death.

And I would emphasise that I am not saying that a bunch of women are inherently defective when it comes to mate selection. I know too many cases where people have had healthy relationships, then been targeted by abusers. Abusers target and recruit their victims. Abuse is a wicked problem with no clear solution.

Harley Quinn is more likely symptom than cause. Arguably her rehabilitation is likely a symptom of writers who have experienced or studied rehabilitation from abuse writing that into her character. 

But, after rehabilitation, a girl walks into a comic book store and picks up a comic and is presented with a less diverse cast of female characters. Furthermore, I can problematize Punch Line Harley's replacement villain right now, Punch Line's ability to set boundaries with Joker is an implicit victim blaming of Harley suggesting that Harley was simply too stupid or otherwise flawed to handle Joker. A dangerous message all round.

I'll just say I think Punch Line sucks, and thankfully the Lindy effect predicts she will cease to exist before Harley does. Just as Orcs will outlast them both.

When it comes to interpreting media with a critical eye, things are as problematic as you make them. Video games don't kill people, handguns kill people.