Modern entertainment is creatively bankrupted, uninspired, or even just plain morally skewed. What that says about the minds behind these shows, movies, and books, I’ll leave for you to decide. What I want to speak on is a simple topic: orcs.Yes, you read that right, I want to talk about orcs. Specifically, orcs who are just trying to provide for their families. Recently, The Rings of Power has once again been making headlines, this time for testing the waters with sympathetic orcs. To any hardcore and/or longtime Tolkien fans, this notion sounds ludicrous, but it is about what we can expect from modern Hollywood.
It's not just Amazon's troubled billion-dollar rethinking of Tolkien. Dungeons & Dragons also has decided that it's just problematic if there are "evil races," so they've gotten rid of both the evil and the 'race' (now "species").
“Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game — orcs and drow (dark elves) being two of the prime examples — have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated,” Wizards said in a statement. “That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”The company says the current version of the RPG, known as 5th Edition, was designed to include a wide range of ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations and beliefs.
Oh, it does do that. Rather than looking like the Fellowship of the Ring, already diverse with a maia, humans, an elf, a dwarf, and several hobbits, a modern D&D party is going to be a collection of sea monsters, vampires, half-devils, half-dragons, half-gods, genies, hobgoblins, minotaurs, and yes, orcs. And many more!
None of them are evil, though. Not by nature. Not even the ones born of devils in Hell itself, nor the vampires that subsist on blood alone.
Defenders would doubtless say that this is a more morally sophisticated universe, and perhaps note that even Darth Vader proved redeemable. So many shades of grey, so few Gandalfs.
7 comments:
Played it a couple of times when I was overseas. Thought it was a stupid and pointless game then and that was 45 years ago when I was stoned on Hash.
Well, if you were all stoned it probably was stupid and pointless! So might have been anything you did under those circumstances.
I predict that no one will pay to play this game and it will go to ruin.
Those who insist that drows are always evil don't seem to recall Drizzt and his ilk. (Probably because the past isn't worth learning from or even learning about.)
LittleRed1
I ran into this around 15-16 years ago. I was DMing a game with a bunch of guys maybe 15 years younger than me and they seemed uncomfortable with the idea that orcs and other evil aligned creatures were inherently evil. It led to some odd conversations.
I suspect WotC is just playing to their current crop of players. Based on shelf space in my local game shop, D&D is probably still the most popular tabletop RPG out there; I doubt any of this will hurt them.
C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien took different approaches, as well. Tolkien’s Orcs were irretrievably evil. Lewis’s Calormenes were capable of redemption, as demonstrated by Emeth, the good man in The Last Battle, who confessed to Aslan that he’d worshipped Tash. Aslan explained that Emeth had actually been worshipping Aslan all along. The theological implications of this are beyond me, admittedly.
As intended (by some at least)
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