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.