Having an awareness of the hobby that goes back more than three years helps. Shadowrun's been using them as a 100% explicit stand-in for black Americans since 1989. AggieCon had a panel about fantasy races as stand-ins for real ethnicities back in 2015. Ain't new.
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Replying to @HoldenShearer @Smug_Legend
Hell, this goes back to Tolkien and LotR (and he was actively trying to not write racism but did it anyway because of the culture permeating his thinking.) But people gotta freak out at any new information.
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Replying to @ChaKatKimber @Smug_Legend
Yep, his orcs were patterned after "the least lovely ... features of the mongol races" by his own admission. Then you have essentially all urban fantasy pigeonholing them as the inner city uneducated underclass, frequently in violent gangs. Hmm. No symbolism THERE.
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He wasn't actually trying that hard, when a film director wanted to make the Orcs less implicitly racist by making them not human at all (having them be bird monsters) he got mad That's where the quote calling Orcs "Mongol-types" comes from, he was actively insisting on it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @HoldenShearer and
They are NOT human dumbass. They never were. They are Humanoid beings like the Elves. Orcs in LotR are mutated elves marred by the Dark God Melkor. That are Tolkien's variation of old world Demonic beings from Faerie stories and myths. Learn some actual history you buffoon.
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Replying to @KHAOSANIMA418 @HoldenShearer and
Tolkien Letter #210, sent June 1958 to Forrest J. Ackerman, re: Morton G. Zimmerman ("Z")'s film proposal for a Lord of the Rings adaptationpic.twitter.com/E16itFbdDu
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Replying to @arthur_affect @HoldenShearer and
What's more any ACTUAL research into Tolkien himself shows he wasn't a racist and that his life and professed beliefs illustrate the exact opposite. All you have this excerpt.
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Replying to @KHAOSANIMA418 @HoldenShearer and
We're not arguing about Tolkien's whole life or how he was as a human being, we're arguing about whether he made up Orcs based on a negative stereotype of Asian people, which he clearly says he did
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Replying to @arthur_affect @HoldenShearer and
Context matters asshat. This single excerpt is all you have to claim that Orcs are a Racist stand in when EVERYTHING ELSE doesn't support this claim. Not his life , not his beliefs , not his inspirations , nor the damn lore itself.
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Replying to @KHAOSANIMA418 @arthur_affect and
Besides the orcs, there are shifty, 'swarthy' humans from the East in the text itself, dehumanized with no clear history or perspective and depicted as cowardly traitors and cruel conquerors.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
Well the worst is the concept of Half-Orcs, the humans like Bill Ferny who are inherently corrupt and treacherous because they have "Orcish blood" in their ancestry somewhere, and you can tell because of their "squinty eyes and sallow skin"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @DoomguyRT and
The funny thing is that the stupid D&D thing about Half-Orcs being tragic antiheroes "struggling between their two natures" is actively better than LotR Half-Orcs, who are just universally bad people who enjoy being evil (Saruman's thugs in the ending etc)
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