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.
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.