prokopetz:

Something I think a lot of fantasy roleplaying fans don’t pick up on is that the reason many games’ depictions of orcs and other “monstrous races” get criticised for being racist isn’t just because they’re dark-skinned and evil.

I mean, yes, there’s that, but it’s also that a lot of the tropes that are associated with orcs and such in fantasy RPGs are literally eugenicist rhetoric – and, more specifically, anti-Black eugenicist rhetoric – with the serial numbers lightly sanded off.

Like, you ever notice how common the following elements are?

• Being capable of using complex tool and weapons, but relying on raiding and pillaging to obtain them, not because they’re incapable of making them, but because they’re simply too
  congenitally

  lazy to do so

• Having an intrinsic drive to despoil and corrupt the fruits of civilisation, and in particular, taking pleasure in destroying beautiful things specifically because they’re beautiful
• Being treated as childishly superstitious for believing in evil spirits, even though such treatment makes no sense from a worldbuilding perspective because they live in a fantasy setting and evil ghosts are objectively real
• Reproducing rapidly and reaching sexual maturity quickly, typically at an age when a human would still be a child, with great emphasis placed on the danger of them “outbreeding” civilised peoples if left unchecked
• Lusting for the women of other species, resulting in all manner of twisted half-breeds; “heroic” members of their kind are typically drawn from these half-breeds, who must struggle constantly with their base natures

Seriously, a lot of this stuff is copied and pasted directly from 19th Century eugenicist screeds about the intrinsic inferiority of the Black race – they basically just scratched out the n-word and wrote in “orc”.

(And no, you can’t pass it off as folks imitating Tolkien without realising what they were doing. While Tolkien’s orcs undeniably employ racist imagery and stereotypes, there it’s mostly anti-East Asian stuff, not anti-Black stuff. The incorporation of explicitly anti-Black tropes into fantasy fiction’s depiction of orcs is a more recent development, and at least some of the folks doing it absolutely knew what they were up to.)

That’s an interesting piece about Tolkien at the end (not detracting from how correct this post is!). I wonder how much of the anti-Asian imagery in his Orcs is a result of World War II.