That’s racist against gnolls!
magnet
3301
I think we need to talk about Klingons.
Dave47
3302
Actually, the opposite:
Orcs come from generic fantasy lands in the days of yore, and have swords and bows.
Orks come from outer space / the future, and have guns and motorcycles.
(I wasn’t trying to make a serious point, just express some nerd pedantry that I thought would be appropriate on this particular board. Sorry!)
Timex
3303
Well yeah… but a major theme in that movie was that the orcs weren’t ACTUALLY bad, and the movie was highlighting racism in our society.
(Not particularly well… Bright wasn’t really a good movie. Was kind of a poor man’s “Alien Nation”).
Regardless though, as you say, this kind of stuff didn’t occur in Tolkien or D&D.
Yeah, i mentioned this. THIS could be taken as racist/xenophobic in Tolkien.
But not the orcs.
Was this bring said ironically? Or seriously, that it’s actually racist?
And is it racist… Against orcs?
It wasn’t ironic.
I think the coding in that second paragraph is what some folks object to.
Do I find that racist? No. But Gelatinous Cubes? They’re all kinds of racist!
Of course, one only need read Tolkien’s letters containing his descriptions of the orcs to know he was modeling them on Asians, and the language he uses is pretty damned racist. But never mind.
The Internet owes me a co-pay for having to go to urgent care for treatment after spraining my eyeballs from rolling them so hard.
The only good cube is a dead cube.
A-@#$%ing-men
(to learn more, click here!)
Not the idea of gelatinous cubes. But like, the cubes themselves. They’re always talking about “those people”.
That’s pretty hurtful. My cousin was 1/8th of a Cube.
I’m sure he was a good’un.
ShivaX
3312
Gnolls are so evil that I’ve surprised no one has taken up their mantle yet.
Like… they’re easily the most horrific fantasy race there is, but they have hyena heads so no one cares.
I wonder if Orcs would be seen the same way if they still looked like this:
Instead of this:
To most people.
Also no one talks about the other 80 evil races that exist in D&D. Like… all the the goblinoids.
I suspect a lot of it comes from half-orcs being a thing. So you’re forced into dealing with “orc culture” and “orc psychology” and the like. Which isn’t an issue with say goblins, because no one ever had half-goblins really.
No one thinks ogres are racist. Bigger, stronger, dumber, very violent. They’re basically Big Orcs, but one isn’t likely to be your PC’s parent.
I mostly think WoW is the source of a lot of this. Orcs were “redeemed” and it became something else. Meanwhile you still have entire races of evil things in WoW, but no one cares about them because you’re not playing as them and no one really had to write down millions of lines about them that made them the “good guys” at any point.
Scuzz
3313
What do have against the people of Havana?
PS…you can’t get much more geeky than have page after page discussing the racial inequities involving the treatment of Orcs in fantasy stories. LOL
I love you guys.
magnet
3314
Maybe. Here is his description:
squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types
If you read it quickly, it sounds pretty racist. But on a closer read, he seems to acknowledge that (a) Europeans have a racist stereotype of Asians, and (b) he was using a distorted version of the stereotype.
I think you can argue that it’s more a reflection than an endorsement of racism. As an analogy, if someone made a zombie game and modeled the zombies after “a repulsive version of how the New York elite view rural Southerners”, that’s not necessarily evidence of the author’s own disdain of Southerners.
I take issue with this! Not all Orks ride motor cycles and have guns. Some are just hulking monsters, making war on Dwarfs, Elves, Humans, Ogres, Lizardmen and even Undead, regardless of alignment.
The fact that some of them are trapped in the most ridiculous universe that makes up 40k doesn’t mean we should ignore the sensible orks that survive in Fantasy.
ShivaX
3316
Slander!
(Orks are 40k only, Warhammer fantasy they’re Orcs. Why? Who fucking knows?)
They are Orruks in Age of Sigmar. They also renamed elves and some others to something more copyrightable recently.
Aceris
3320
To return this thread to topic, here’s a stupid thing posted by a legitimately high profile liberal:
