I love how this thread always becomes a better example of its title than any outside story.
Yeah dude, the orcs were secretly good, in secret stories that Tolkien never wrote.
That’s a pretty bad-faith rendering of what people have said.
I cast aside your strawman.
I think Tolkien stating that there is no absolute good or evil in his world is evidence aplenty.
No, seriously. Your argument is really good.
You are arguing with Tolkien himself. You don’t like how he thought about orcs, take it up with his estate.
Sure dude, whatever you say. Totally.
I am sad you are mad…
… about orcs.
That’s exactly why I’m not bothering to argue about them any more.
I like how Order of the Stick is handing the redemption of evil.
Hey guys what’s going on in the liberal stupidity thread oops never mind
This thread makes me worry about 2020…
Pikachu isn’t mad, just disappointed.
Also, if you’re interested in alternate takes on the Tolkien world, I’d recommend:
It’s much, much better than it appears, and re-works Tolkien’s conflict between good and evil to be something closer to the Israel-Palestine fight, e.g. a long running shitshow with reasons for bad blood on both sides going back and back and back.
Is the liberal stupidity that orcs are redeemable, or that Tolkien writing them irredeemable is problematic?
Guess what, Tolkien’s texts are reactionary-- they are all about the purity of bloodlines and the divine right of kings. Pointing that out is not stupid, just boring. Tolkien knew they were reactionary, which is why he determinedly insisted they were not allegory, that they didn’t engage with the modern world at all.
This thread is always a fascinating view into the conservative mind. Nuance is so hard.
“People are talking about things I’ve already made up my mind about…I must point and call them stupid until they stop!”
It’s an even more interesting view into the liberal mind. More from the responses posted here than the actual seeds from outside.
It’s like an oyster that you put grains of sand into, and they become pearls.
The idea of a race of beings that is born evil is certainly racist. If you lived in Middle-Earth and met a random orc, then you would naturally assume that he is evil. How is that not racist?
Now, you can reasonably argue that racism in Middle-Earth is justified, whereas it’s not justified in Earth Prime. But the next question is whether justifiable racism in a work of fiction could generalize into attitudes in the real world. Sort of like how some people wonder whether attitudes towards fictional damsels in distress could generalize into attitudes towards real women.
No, it’s not. It’s not at all.
Orcs are not human beings.
Orcs are fictional monsters, from a story, where they were specifically created by an evil demigod, to destroy the world. That’s literally the only reason they exist.
And this is not merely a subjective opinion. This is what the story says. It is objective truth in that fictional world. We know that they were created for this purpose.
That’s not racist.
Racism is thinking that some subset of humans are inferior to others. While we talk about different humans as being members of different “races”, they are all in fact human beings. This isn’t the case with the fictional races in Tolkien’s stories. They aren’t men. Again, orcs are fictional monsters.
The idea of evil fictional monsters is not racist.
You’re on shaky ground. As discussed above the origin of orcs is not clear, and there is some support for the idea that they originated from humans. I think it would be very weird to argue that a depiction of orcs is racist if they were indeed men, but not if they are actually elves.
Furthermore, although racism refers only to humans in the real world, it clearly generalizes to non-human sentients in fictional settings. I mean, if Frodo declared that Dwarves were no better than swine, is that somehow not racist because no humans are involved?
Ok, as a point of clarification here, are you trying to say that Tolkien was racist for creating fictional monsters that are evil, or are you saying that the behavior of fictional character towards those monsters is evil? Because those each merit different arguments.
That’s how art works. Makes you think.