An Apology to Orcs

[browngirl]

I feel kind of guilty towards orcs sometimes.

From a narrative perspective, whether reading or writing, it can be useful to have characters whose evilitude is pre-established. When reading or watching LOTR or The Hobbit, anytime orcs show up one knows they’re going to be bad news. In “Undaunted” I didn’t need to explain how or why Ori ended up in such a horrible situation, I just had to throw orcs at him.

And yet.

My conception of sentience (and orcs are obviously sentient) rebels against the notion of classifying any group as Always Chaotic Evil (as TV Tropes would put it), not least because in the society where I live I belong to a couple of groups that many people consider to be Always Chaotic Evil. And, because fiction is inextricably entangled with ‘Real’ life, I know that one common idea about Middle-Earth is that the orcs, along with the Southrons and Easterlings, are meant to be the People of Color there. But even without that sociopolitical reason, I would still be philosophically opposed to assuming that any group or lineage is automatically all bad, any more than they could be assumed to be all good. I feel like I should depict an orc or group who aren't bad guys.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this thought yet, since I don’t have any accompanying story ideas. I think I’m going to get a copy of Mary Gentle’s Grunts and see what comes to mind after I read that.

Comments

[caitri.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean--I think at times the urge to "rescue" characters or people is sometimes overwhelming. On the other hand, within Tolkien's world it's so bloody hard!! Years ago when I was first in LOTR fandom I remember a series of stories by "scribe" who had an OFC who was a member of the Haradrim. The character and world represented was largely well done, with some Mary Sue-ish elements (both Haldir and Legolas fall for her, but Legolas ends up getting the girl--though I thought that also added some interesting character development for both elves too), but my biggest problem was that the OFC was also written as...and I've tried to find a polite way to put it and I've failed, brown-on-the-outside-white-on-the-inside. Though she was from another culture her values and so forth were *always* Gondorian/western rather than Haradric/eastern, and there was NO cultural conflict aside from "well everyone else in my family is on the opposite side of this conflict ANGST!" Which irritated me. I think it was such an interesting place to go and was frustrated by the execution.

I read part of Grunts a few years ago, and maybe I should have stuck with it, but I didn't really care for the humor of the situation; I found it at once too parodic and too bleak. "Well these guys are just like other guys, it's HILARIOUS!" I would rather have a more serious treatment on the topic. Have you read Jacqueline Carey's Sundering Duology? It attempts to do something pretty similar, and it comes the closest to succeeding that I've found, though I also found the pseudo-Tolkienism more teeth-grating than most. (Maybe that's because I think Carey has a really beautiful voice of her own, and subsuming it to talk Tolkien, as it were, just felt really really wrong to me.)

So there. All my thinky thoughts. Hopefully not offensive ones.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

I love your thinky thoughts. :) And I know what you mean about the culture clash that should have been there but was averted by giving one character a different culture than she should have had with her background.

[dreamflower]

We never get any orcs in their own culture--the only orcs we see are the ones who clearly are just Bad GuysTM. Perhaps there are whole nations of Orcs, hidden away and oppressed by the more militant Orcs--we'll never know.

Tolkien himself was disturbed by his Orcs, and didn't really know what to think about them; he needed them for the plot, of course, but being the world-builder that he was, he constantly worried himself about their origins and their fate. But we only know about that ambivalence because of HoMe and his Letters--none of it ever made its way into the Story.

I've seen stories in which there are "misfit" Orcs who don't quite fit in with the others (usually played for humor), and I've seen some stories that try to go "behind the scenes" a little. But none of them were very realistic, because we don't have enough detail to go on.

I have recently read a story, however, that gives us a teensy peek at some interesting possibilities: Orcling by pandemonium_213.

It's a childhood story of her OFC, who while on a camping trip with her father encounters an Orc child, and how they interact with one another.

[danae_b]

""We never get any orcs in their own culture--the only orcs we see are the ones who clearly are just Bad GuysTM. Perhaps there are whole nations of Orcs, hidden away and oppressed by the more militant Orcs--we'll never know.""

Maybe you're right about that.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your wise thoughts and awesome rec. :)

[dreamflower]

You are most welcome! Pande is really a good writer--and very good at provoking "Thinky-thoughts" in her readers!

[ron_newman]

didn't Klingons start out as innately chaotically evil, yet by the time of Next Generation, they could be allies?

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country had that as a plot point...the planet that was the source of all their energy exploded, which pretty much killed their ability to wage war and maintain an empire. (It was a thinly veiled pastiche on the contemporaneous nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union.) The Klingon Empire was thus forced to the negotiating table with the Federation.

[yeomanrand.livejournal.com]

Have I already recommended Jim C. Hines' Goblin trilogy to you?

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

!!! Please TELL ME MORE!

[yeomanrand.livejournal.com]

Goblin Quest (http://www.amazon.com/Goblin-Quest-Jim-C-Hines/dp/0756404002/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1367951958&sr=8-3&keywords=Jim+C.+Hines+Goblin), in which Jig the Goblin becomes the unlikeliest of unwilling heroes, and the adventurers are kind of dicks.

Goblin Hero (http://www.amazon.com/Goblin-Hero-Series-Jim-Hines/dp/0756404428/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367952139&sr=8-1&keywords=Jim+C.+Hines+Goblin), in which Jig the Goblin makes a couple of new/old friends and continues the process of being a hero that he REALLY would rather not be.

Goblin War (http://www.amazon.com/Goblin-War-Series-Jim-Hines/dp/0756404932/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1367952139&sr=8-2&keywords=Jim+C.+Hines+Goblin), in which Jig, well, goes to war. And it sucks.

I <3 Jim (http://www.jimchines.com/blog/) anyway, because he's good people, but the Goblin books are kind of awesome for looking at a "traditional" quest from the Other's point of view. And, also, funny as hell if you're a Tabletop FRPG player. Or not -- my dad's never played an FRPG in his life and he loved them.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

Belatedly but no less heartfeltly: THANK YOU.

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure orcs are intended as people of color. Obviously they have black skin which is problematic because it will make people assume we're tlaking about other dark-skinned people. I see them more as a metaphor for the power of sin, or corruption if you prefer: it's what happens when the goodness in us is tortured out of us. And if you look at it geographically, it's not like orcs are strictly from the south and the east, those places where there might be ethnic "others" relative to Europe. They're just as much a part of the landscape of middle-earth as anyone else, and often have been living there alongside the Freefolk since before places like Gondor and Erebor and the Shire were ever settled.

I do think it's problematic that they're presented as always-evil, but I tend to rationalize that with the knowledge that we're only seeing one side of the culture: their warriors. And whether they're all-evil, warriors of any enemy in a place where the land is disputed so attack is possible are all-dangerous.

It also helps to focus on those glimpses we get of something beyond pure evil, like the conversation Sam overhears about what the orcs want to do after the war, outside Shelob's lab, or again Sam's question about the Haradric boy he sees killed in Ithilien (I love that the movies gave that question to Faramir!), or the amnesty Aragorn offers to the people who had fought against Gondor and Rohan after the war. You see even more in the Silmarillion - it's obvious that most of the so-called evil men are being oppressed by "Servants of Morgoth" the Valar couldn't be bothered to deal with.

Not saying there aren't problems here, but this is one strategy I've found helpful to deal with the way orcs and other "evil" folk are presented in Tolkien.

[dreamflower]

I've always connected the color of Orcs to the color of their blood--that whatever extraordinarily painful process Morgoth used to torture other beings into becoming Orcs left them with that taint in their blood, which is literally black--perhaps it's painful yet, even down all these generations.

Also, we can figure that the Haradrim and the Southrons have been deceived by the Enemy, much as the Dunlendings were. So that doesn't mean they are necessarily Evil, though as you say,they remain dangerous. And so long as they remain able to wage war they have to be dealt with as enemies.