Regarding the DnD Orc posts:
What would be a less problematic way of describing a fantasy “race”/“species” that is meant to be “evil” and “vile”, (because maybe they were created by a evil deity to cause havoc etc).
#honestQuestion
you're positing an inherently paradoxical project mate. "how do i construct a fictional Type of Person who is ontologically evil, whose murder is prima facie acceptable or even laudable, while unimpacted by the titanic weight of historical discourses that did the exact same rhetorical work in service of real-world violences?" -- the answer is that you've invented an impossible task!
there is no fantasy of uncomplicated and meritorious ethnic violence that is neatly separable from the historical context those fantasies are produced in. that's just the way it is. genuinely, i feel compelled to ask--not because i want to hear the answer, but because i want you and others to think about this--why is this a fantasy you’re so desperate to salvage?
re: that posed last question -- why this fantasy? -- i recently read this short essay that uses necropolitical theory to analyze the function of orcs and similar 'evil races' in games and thought it was useful.
A recurring anguish in certain circles of fantasy roleplaying involves the never-ending search for ethical, commendable, heroic murder. This often externalized as an issue of the murdered party, the one fantasized murderer ever the silent passive subject; a quest for an intrinsic quality of the murder victim that makes it A Good. This is phrased and re-phrased in variants of the same question: What would be an acceptable target for my character to kill in a dungeon?
for a peek into the etiology of ontological essentialism as it pervades TTRPGs I have to recommend Charles W. Mills’ The Wretched of Middle Earth: An Orkish Manifesto as an analysis of how Tolkien was able to establish orcs as ontologically null for the express purpose of being killed en masse. you can, of course, trace a direct path from the mythos Tolkien set up and the widespread practice of constructing entire populations as essentially evil for the sake of gameplay:
For the genocide of the orcs is, of course, part of the climactic victory over Sauron and Mordor. Yet if it were to be suggested to the average reader of the book that it ends with a great crime, the claim would probably meet with complete bewilderment. The killing of the orcs generates no moral concern (either for the Allies or the vast majority of readers and critics) because, of course, the orcs have been successfully depersonized by Tolkien, rendered as ontological zeros. The pen here prepares the way for the sword. Indeed, a case could be made that LTR should be required reading for courses in the literature of genocide, for precisely because of the celebrated “reality” of Middle-Earth, it becomes possible to watch, in synoptic overview, the construction of an epistemology that makes mass murder possible.
How has this been done? To begin with, there is the denial of history and geographical rootedness to the orcs—almost, one could say, the denial of time and space. The density of detail and cross-referencing which give Middle-Earth its solidity and reality are deliberately withheld from the orcs in keeping with their ontological shallowness. Certainly, there are no genealogical tables, no accounts of culture and history, no etymological speculations about their languages, no maps of their territory. The orcs are defined simply by negation, as the antipode to white culture and civilization.
and:
The average reader does not perceive these inconsistencies, does not feel in any way disturbed by the systematic slaughter of the orcs, because, as I have suggested, Tolkien is in many ways simply retelling an old tale. The racially-differentiated structure of LTR’s moral and juridical codes simply reproduces actual historical earthly norms, going back at least to the Crusades, where “the same behavior, considered objectively, was ‘persecution’ when it was perpetrated against, and not when it was perpetrated by, the Christians.” Similarly, the fantastic kill-ratios and body-counts of LTR—the party in Moria killing thirteen orcs at the cost of a scratch to Sam (FR, 422), Boromir single-handedly dispatching twenty orcs before succumbing (TT, 18), Gimli’s grisly orc-killing contest with Legolas, which he eventually wins 42 to 41 (TT, 188)—are made both normatively acceptable and fictionally plausible by the racially-coded non-personhood of the orcs.
