One of the small moves toward anti-racism in Wizards' production of D&D announced recently was the re-examination of classically "evil" races - with orcs and drow in particular mentioned.
Historically, these races were considered evil because, well, that was what they'd inherited from their fantasy forebears. Drow, of course, were just an opportunity to flip the script on the classically good, Tolkienesque elves ("what if elves, but evil!?!") and orcs, while not really invented by Tolkien (I think they date back to Greek myth, though in a very different and less prominent form) were established by JRRT as the go-to menacing, ugly monster-people who would come in and kill you for no good reason.
But let's talk Tolkien and Orcs.
Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and part of Catholic doctrine is that race doesn't have anything to do with how worthy you are of salvation - that you can be a good person regardless of how you were born, and that anyone who chooses to do good works (and believe in God) can be a full-fledged, good Catholic.
Tolkien struggled, then, with the orcs, as he wanted to have vast armies that his big villains could send against our heroes, but he wanted the heroes to be morally justified in slaughtering them. But he also felt that he couldn't just have had Morgoth - the setting's equivalent to the devil, and basically Sauron's old boss - create the orcs wholecloth, because another aspect of his Catholic worldview was that only God could create a race of truly sentient people. In fact, in his setting, the Dwarves were created by an enthusiastic Vala (think somewhere between archangel and minor god) before God (Eru) had finished work on his own creations, the elves and the humans, but not being the one true god, this Vala couldn't actually make the dwarves sentient. Because this deed had not been done out of arrogance, but out of an attempt to contribute to the "music of creation," Eru decided to breathe true life into the dwarves - and without that, the dwarves would never have been anything more than soulless automatons.
Anyway, with the actual creation of people requiring Eru's intervention, Tolkien struggled with the Orcs (and Trolls) until he had an idea - what if the Orcs aren't a separate race? Instead, he decided that the Orcs were actually Elves, but elves who had been warped, tortured, and brainwashed by Morgoth, and later Sauron, turning all the elves' beauty to ugliness and their love of peace and tranquility into bloodlust.
Of course, what Tolkien hadn't thought of was something he actually used for the evil humans of his setting - that there were people who had simply been deceived into working for the big evil bad guy. Tolkien, a product of his time, and certainly not as conscious of racism as we understand it today, made his evil humans vaguely Middle Eastern in vibe, but unlike the Orcs, who had been warped so far that they never had a chance to be good, these ones could, theoretically, be redeemed if they were shown the error of their ways.
If you're familiar with this blog, you'll be aware that, while it's branched out in recent years, it started as a WoW blog. And for all its flaws, one of the things I love most about the Warcraft cosmos is that its "evil" humanoid races are never that simple.
Warcrafts I & II generally played the orcs the way that they were in Tolkien - irredeemable aggressors who just want to destroy. But with Warcraft III, the entire concept of the orcs was transformed. We discovered instead that the orcs of Warcraft were once a very different culture, and that, like the Haradrim in Lord of the Rings, they were tricked into becoming the Burning Legion's puppet. By the Third War, the Horde is working on rehabilitating itself.
And what's great is that this does not, in any way, reduce the amount of conflict. Indeed, it introduces new conflicts. While the Orcs still have to deal with enemies that they've made - either the humans whom they've put on the defensive and who want vengeance, or the demons who wish to regain control of their race - they also now have internal conflicts, where they must decide what the destiny for their people will be. They must reckon between those who wish to wash their hands of the past and move forward - but risk descending into the same old habits - and those who wish to do penance, but potentially fail to act decisively to gain what their people need to survive. Indeed, there's even the conflict of whether to valorize a past that, while not demon-corrupted, was problematic in its own ways, and of course led to their corruption in the first place.
Hell, you want drama? The Orcs in Warcraft are undergoing the same cultural reckoning that we in America are dealing with - having to reexamine our complicity and even active participation in toxic behaviors. I mean, could the parallels get any clearer? The Orcs' capital city is named after a dictator who was responsible for a war of genocide! Thrall, well-meaning though he was, memorialized monsters in his foundation of the nation of Durotar, and there's a vocal contingent (perhaps fewer since Garrosh's day) among the Orcs that continue to insist that they were always the good guys. Sound familiar?
I haven't touched much on the drow here, but at the same time, I feel as if D&D canon has already been shifting away from the notion that they're all bad guys since the introduction of Drizzt Do'Urden in the '80s.
There can absolutely still be evil political structures in place that put members of these races in antagonistic roles, if you really want to get the old-school feel of fighting them. But making that an issue of politics, and fleshing out the cultures of these people to the point where they're not all bloodthirsty monsters makes the worlds you play in far more interesting, not to mention realistic.
D&D's always going to have pure evil monsters for you to fight. No one's saying that we're going to have to sit and sing Kumbaya with the Demogorgon or anything. But the whole premise behind a creature being a humanoid, rather than a fiend or a monstrosity, is that they're ultimately just a person - and people can be good, bad, or far more often, some mix of the two.
While I feel like this change has been implied for a long time, it's good that they're making it official.
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