One of Tolkien’s letters describes orcs as“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.”
And I was thinking about, 1.) Look at the legs on these Mongolian wrestlers all decked out for a major national wrestling festival, and also 2.) how Tolkien’s racist description wasn’t enough, and orcs have been depicted as more and more grotesque over time. Canonically orcs more or less just look like humans, but that’s not “other” enough so they keep getting turned in to more and more bizarre looking monsters.
Either way, this is what i’m thinking about when i’m laid up with the 'rona. If y’all like wrestling or buff men in tiny pants check out Mongolian wrestling. From what I understand it’s a hugely popular sport there and has been for like a thousand years.
Fuck.
I already saw Tolkien as a problematic favorite where I acknowledge the
from the author, but this is worse than what I already knew bout him.
I may as well post this comic in tribute to our orc comrades and their class struggle against the bourgeoisie of Rivendell.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/175
Afaik this is about as bad as he ever gets. Like, credit to the guy, his orcs aren’t actually a racial stereotype of anyone, they’re more a metaphor for industrial warfare. LotR has it’s issues; Monarchism, Hobbits as utopian yeomen farmers, all kinds of stuff, but it’s much less egregious than the stories that inspired it and the stories it inspired. Like it’s smack in the middle between Conan and Warcraft, with Conan being straight up Klan levels of racist, and then you’ve got Warcraft’s traditional depiction of trolls as Jamaican stereotypes, native american minotaurs, whatever their orcs are supposed to be.
Games Workshop did weirdly good by making their orcs British soccer hooligans.
They also made their flavor of ontologically evil elves into pasty nordic vikings.
rare Br*tish win
Yeh, dat wuz a gud plan, and dat’s why I’m a proppa git for me orky boyz.
I have never seen anything Warhammer 40K related that wasn’t improved by putting more focus on the Orkz.
Though admittedly on the very few occasions I touch WH40K anything, I tend to go Imperial Guard. I’m an incurable sucker for stories about ordinary people fighting through terrible situations
I remember GW did a scenario pitting a planet’s Imperial Guard against a Space Marine chapter, but they fucked it up by going with the most boring possible motivation of “the planet’s population has been mind-controlled including its Imperial Guard, so the Space Marines have to save the day” rather than one of the countless understandable reasons an element of the Guard would mutiny.
Games Workshop has increasingly leaned into making what was once a Thatcher
-era satire of all things Thatcher into a “these space fascists are actually good guys and you should admire and look up to them” pandering effort to sell more Spehs Mehreens to chuddy enthusiasts.
As a consequence, the setting is in places ponderously tryhard and pretentious and up its own ass, and Da Orkz is a proppa pressa valve to dat muckin’ about.
Just there’s a problem about that, if you think about scale and of what they really do for a second. Suffice to say, even a faction like Culture from Banks books, which had not genociding as a rule, would probably wiped them out.
Books about orks are pretty good though, for some reason they usually tend to be more deep in lore than 19876987th story about heroic last stand or le epic quest for nothing which most of other books in 40k are.
They’re not the good guys, nor did they ever have pretenses of being the good guys. My point is they’re the persistent sense of humor of the sometimes ponderously pretentious 40k setting.
Sure, but tons of people forget that and fun=good is very prevalent opinion among the ork fans, so i got into the habit of reminding people that biological military von neuman rogue machines are nothing good. Then again the fashdom is full of unironic stans of factions like Tyranids, Drukhari or Black Templars, so… Also 40k fun can be cringe as fuck, allow me to unearth the ghastly cadaver of Angry Marines.
Brits. Stolen from Warhammer orcs, which originally were satire on British football hooligans - Warcraft 1 was supposed to be Warhammer game originally but the licence did got revoked as soon as the game started to appear fun, we can’t have that in early Warhammer games. So the Blizzard did a typical Blizzard thing and took them anyway, just without the satire. And this also checks out on many other levels:
KingdomHorde and before you notice there are orcish military bases everywhereTo be fair the early W1 and W2 orcs were mostly bog standard evil horde just with some effort put in, but the more time passed, the more British they became.