Saturday, July 11, 2020

Who Were The Orcs?

No matter what anyone deep inside the D&D dice bag seems to say the world has latched onto the idea that the D&D Orc is a punching bag for white people to take out their hatred of black people on. Which is utter bullshit. Unfortunately, it is a very pungeant bullshit, so much so that Hasbro - the current creator of D&D - has latched onto it and is currently concocting a plan to protect the tender sensitivies of todays youth by slapping warning labels on their older digital offerings.


Granted this statement is not wrong. The product MAY contain yadda yadda yadda in the way that a package of hot dogs may contain rat feces and insect parts. That doesn't mean that it does, but do you really want to see it when you are hankering for a hot dog? 

Remember when D&D’s creators came out in defense of the game against allegations that it promoted Satanism. Remember when they held their ground like a beholder and did not burst like a gas spore at the slightest provocation?

Ugh.

Anyways, I’m tired of discussing it, but there is one more thing I’d like to bandy about the orc before all of this becomes just more sewage under the bridge. And that is a quandry. If the orc was not meant to represent black people then who was it meant to represent?

There is a very good chance that it is not meant to represent anyone or anything other than a somewhat generic bad guy. But. The orc is not exactly generic. According to the Monster Manual from 1977 it has two features which separate it from being just another run of the mill subhumanoid.

The first are its porcine features. As far as I know this doesn’t come from Tolkein. It probably comes from just how much Orc sounds like Pork, but it’s good to remember that the game was being written in the mid-70’s and that it eagerly tried to incorporate anything from the youth culture of the age. The Monk was inspired by Kung-fu movies. All the devil imagery likewise came from music and film. Satan was big in the 70’s. There’s no getting around it. In the 1970’s a Pig was slang for a cop, specifically an intolerant white cop, such as these guys from the movie Fritz the Cat.


The big bad guy of the Dukes of Hazzard is Boss Hogg, a fat intolerant white guy who owns everything as well as the police and has a penchant for dressing all in white.


Are orcs cops? They are lawful evil so they could represent bad cops, but orcs are known for going against the law and not enforcing it so it is a bit of a stretch.

That second unique feature of the orc is its tribalism. While nearly everything in D&D which does not exist on its own follows some kind of tribal structure, only the orc provides us with a list of names for its various tribes…

Vile Rune
Bloody Head
Death Moon
Broken Bone
Evil Eye
Leprous Hand
Rotting Eye
Dripping Blade

If you need more orc tribal names, you would do well with some of these.

Annhiliators
Devils Disciples
Grim Reapers
Head Hunters
Hells Angels
Laffing Devils
Top Hatters
Warlocks

All of which belonged to outlaw biker gangs from the 60's & 70’s. Gangs that were notorious for rolling into small towns on their hogs (yet another pig reference) terrorizing the residents and having numerous b-grade grindhouse movies made about them.



Kill the Pigs! Is their battle cry. I wonder what that is a reference to? I doubt it means black people. 

So how did we go from orcs representing this...


to this...


Well. We didn’t. Politics did. Our age is more politically charged than I have ever seen it and one tactic that both the right and the left revel in is what I like to call the Cult of Victimization. I don’t watch Fox News but I do occasionally listen to NPR (which is rapidly becoming the Fox of the Left) and they are broadcasting just a non-stop drumbeat of victimization stories. If current history cannot provide them with their beats then they will dig into past history to find it. Anything to keep that galvanization going through the election season. Like obsessed people everywhere, if you don’t find what you want where you want it then you tend to find something that works well enough.

In this essay I have done just that. Hopefully I have stuck in your mind the idea that the orc represents bad cops or biker gangs. Do I have any shred of evidence to back up this claim? No not really. But you have to admit that it is far more likely that orcs represented white people than black people.

When I was in college in the early 90’s our DM was black and he was pretty good at it. Reggie was also convinced that the Drow by being of evil alignment was evidence of racism being edemic to the game. At the time I didn't have an answer for him. The idea of the Drow being anything other than the Drow had never crossed my mind, and yet I did have to admit that it was strange that anything living underground should have dark pigment in their skin. Aside from earthworms of course. If I remember correctly, I think I thought that it was more of a stylistic choice, that the game was setting up the Drow and the Grey Elves (who were resoundingly white) as pieces on a chessboard caught in some great eternal secret war against each other. 

Which now that I’ve written it does sound a bit racist. Talk about missed opportunities, if TSR had only made the Grey Elves evil they could have had a lot of fun in a Spy vs Spy kind of way.



A thing about white people which many people of color cannot wrap their heads around is that we just don’t think about skin color all that much. It is just not on our radar. Maybe the youth of today are different, but for us older generations you can bring it to our attention and it will stick for a little while, but soon a chessboard is just a chessboard, the black spy is the same as the white spy, an orc is just an orc, and an office full of white people is just an office full of people. It's not that we choose not to see color, we just generally don't pay much attention to it. And those who do are often the worst among us.

So, sorry about any percieved slight, but if it is not there then it is not there. Do you know what black people are supposed to be in the realm of D&D? 
Orcs? 
Drow? 

They’re human! 
They always have been and in my D&D they always will be.

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Orcs, Ancestry, Racism and Ugh.

It's true. We demonize our enemies. The purpose of propaganda is that it makes it easier to dispatch those you do not approve of into the great unknown. But! If you were to go back in time to the very white and unenlightened age of 1982 and asked my group of D&D players what race a black person was or an Asian or Native American. We would have looked at you as if you were stupid and said, "Ah, human. Duh."

Subhumanoids existed as punching bags so we didn't have to deal with the moral complexity of attacking other humans for XP. Believe it or not, but in my gaming group there was an unwritten rule that you did not kill other humanoids, not unless they were truly asking for it. Subhumanoids were a dime a dozen. You could stack up their skulls and not feel bad about it. The orc in particular was an embodiment of everything puerile - stupidity, viciousness, meanness, disgust - it felt good to rid the world of them. Evil incarnate was a big part of the fantasy of the game.

Saying that subhumanoids are a stand in for ethnic minorities, pretty much dehumanizes everyone. It tells ethnic minorites that they are little more than monsters to be dispatched for the entertainment of ethnic majorities. Is ethnic majority even a term? Okay - white people - and it tells white people that if you enjoyed nearly any fantasy from before the 21st century you were revelling in a genocidal dream of wiping out anyone who does not resemble yourself.

You love Tolkein? Surprise! You're a racist!
And isn't that what the world needs now? More racists?
Because eventually that is the end result of such thinking. Just like any slur, you can only use it so many times against your enemies before they embrace it as their own.

The same peril seems to follow the matter of removing the word Race from the game. Sure - Race - is an ugly word, but removing it doesn't actually solve the problem of racism. If anything it may make matters worse. Sure it sanitizes the look of the game but it also removes that baseline which qualifies all humans as being equals and deserving of preferential treatment over subhumanoids. Changing race to ancestry only tightens the barriers which separate people. According to Ancestry.com (which my sister put me up to) I am...

  • 50% Irish/Scottish
  • 42% English/Wales/Northwestern Europe
  • 3% Swedish
  • 2% Baltic
  • 2% German
  • 1% Indigenous North American

If I were to fixate on any one of these ancestries - historically speaking - it would put me bitterly at odds with all the others. On the whole, I'd rather just be human.

So how do we deal with orcs?
How do we deal with this which has been blazing around the internet recently...


Well, I'm not sure where it came from but I'm guessing it is 5e or possibly 3e from the layout. I also suspect it was written with the best of intentions, somebody trying to figure out a way of turning the orc from a monster into a playable race. Indoctrinated is a key word here. It implies that the orc is a victim of its culture, a bit like a pit bull who has been trained to fight but could actually be a sweet loveable dog if raised right. The second paragraph is the problem child. This one harps on the idea that breeding is largely inescapable, that even with the best of intentions it is hard to change the nature of the beast.

Well?
Welcome to the world outside humanity.

In theory, any wild creature can be domesticated, but not over the course of one lifetime. Foxes can be turned into pets, but it takes three or four generations to breed out their vicious feral nature. Doing so also turns them into something other than a fox. Physically they change. If I remember right, their legs get shorter and their faces less angular, the fur poofier. Dogs are already domesticated, but they are not free from their breeds and it is absolutely uncanny how accurately a breed description can predict the personality of a dog. I own a westie, I didn't teach him how to be a stubborn yet loveable well-spring of attitude. That came with the package. Everything written about westies fits him perfectly and I had nothing to do with it. So there is some truth to the impact of breeding. Humans, however, I like to think are different. We have intelligence on our side. Unlike canines we have the capacity of self-change, complexity, of turning ourselves into something vastly different from what we were over a couple of years rather than generations.

(any excuse to pop in a picture of my dog)

Orcs are not humans. They are not supposed to be smart or domesticated. If anything, orcs should be like foxes who will continue to be just what their nature demands of them until somehow that nature is bred out or they become intelligent enough to change themselves. To turn an orc into a playable race which isn't the embodiement of evil, you literally need to create a new race. For me, this is what the half-orc should have been.  Not necessarily a human/orc hybird but a species of orc which long ago separated from its porcine kin to become something different, something obviously related and yet still quite distant.

In truth, the more I think about it the less problem I have with "Roleplaying An Orc." It reminds me of B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek Voyager who if you know was half-klingon.

 (and if you are reading this blog, yeah you know :-)

Orcs and Klingons. Klingons and Orcs. They're basically the same thing, although I like to think that Klingons are smarter and with better sanitary habits (yet somewhat lacking in the pig-nose department). But was it so wrong that B'Elanna often struggled with her warlike Klingon heritage? It did make for a couple of interesting episodes. Likewise, it could also make for some interesting games. Who are we to say that she should not exist? That klingons and humans should not mix? Or that klingons should not be allowed to be what they are and be offensive in appearance only?

Of course, that is not what the internet is about these days. This latest outrage really seems to be about people needing to vent their frustrations by revelling in some morally justified hatred.
Let's hope they don't burn down the house while doing so.