No he didn’t. He describe their appearance to mongels, which is a problematic thing to say by today’s standards, but less so back then.
Yeah, again, the orcs were not designed with a world building mindset. They were a metaphor.
“They’re based on Mongols”
“No their appearance is based on Mongols”
???
Also the nerve to say the Orcs weren’t crafted by Tolkien with world building in mind, Tolkien of all authors.
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Lovecraft and Tolkien were people of another time, today they would be called racists, at that time they were quite normal. Lovecraft would even be called a fascist today. However, looking at it with today’s zeitgeist is not helpful to understand the historical figure behind it.
However, Tolkien’s racism was not really xenophobia, but simply structural in nature due to the education of the time and the colonialist thinking that was still prevalent in the UK at the time.
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Yeah… race isn’t culture…
You didn’t see any orcs in the Tolkien universe practicing some analogue of Lamaism, or practicing traditional Mongolian husbandry.
You think just because people look a certain way, they also must act that way too? That’s racism my dude.
They literally weren’t… They were a metaphor of corruption.
Ah yes, 20th century British Empire, totally a time when there were no revolutions or insurrections anywhere across the British Empire
Ah yes, early 20th century United States, just one generation and a half after the Civil War fought over slavery, where there we no riots or insurrections in Alabama or the South otherwise over racism and Jim Crow Laws.
No, Lovecraft and Tolkien (Tolkien in particular as a Catholic in England shortly after the Irish Civil War and the Anti-Catholic laws applied in Ireland) should have been better men but weren’t. The anti-racist zeitgeist was alive and well back then, they were simply weak and cowardly.
Something being based on something isn’t limited to culture lmao
That’s world building, that’s literally their role in the world, that builds the world’s logic.
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To be fair, there were people who called them racists back then, too. It’s just that those people were disregarded because… you know… That’s just how things were then. 
And I’d also disagree about looking back on past attitudes (and the works they produced) and comparing them to what we do today. It can tell us a lot about who we were, who we are, and where we’re going. As well as just give us loads of context with which to better interpret history.
It’s okay to cast a critical eye on the stuff we enjoy. I mean, what else do we do here on the story forums?
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Lovecraft’s girlfriends, for starters lmao repeatedly
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The difference is, lovecraft was not only a racist, he was a fascist, tolkiens rasism was .differently, he don´t really hated other cultures, he saw them as lesser to his own homeland, yes, his rasism was: he considered his land and himself superior to this “lesser” cultures.
Something that is still partly lived in the isles today, a cultural idea of superiority.
That’s literally just racism. It’s not special racism. Or racism lite. Or diet racism. Or “I can’t believe it’s not racism” ethnocultural supremacy.
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Okay, but saying “Orcs are based on mongels” is hella misleading, because Tolkien only ever said the orcs -look- “mongol-like” NOT that the mongols were a main inspiration for their creation.
No it’s not. That is story telling. World building is the process of developing and detailing a plausible fictional world. The orcs in Middle Earth is probably the least plausible aspect of the world itself, because it was never meant to be plausible. It was meant to be a metaphor.
It is even racism in its pure form, I am not saying that he was not a racist, but his form of racism and the view of the colonial powers at that time was a superiority due to civilization, the division into the 3rd worlds and with England as the center of the first world had been implanted in the children early, however, racism also describes a hatred of people today, Tolkien did not have this. Thats the difference between rasism today and back then
the rasism back then was an expression of perceived superiority in england, but not a deep hatred for the people from these other countries.
Tolkien was a product of his time. I honestly don’t believe he was racist, given the things he has said and done regarding racism throughout his life.
Lovecraft on the other hand, was racist even for his time.
I do love both authors, for the record. Tolkien far moreso, though. I try to not judge art by the artist.
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yeah, tolkien liked other humans, he was not a racist in this form we view them today. But his…“worldview” was very driven by this state of mind from “ethnocultural supremacy.”
and for the record, i like their works aswell and if today for example said someone G.R.R Martin is a Racist, well, fine, i would still read his books. because i like them.
I must admit I am confused, though, given that your desired rewriting of the Alliance would have given the Horde less grievances against the Alliance than they already have.
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Amadis, I understand your position, however, I do think that hatred after all that the Horde has done…would not be illogical behavior that many Alliance members might feel towards the Horde. Racism is only one…possibility of hatred, daelin for example was not a racist, he was more driven by vengeance to punish the horde for what they did, btw. had done.
Ah, more my point was that Tammy says Warcraft III plays out like it did, which involved Jaina overseeing the acceptance of the Horde, including over her own father in the expansion.
No, it wouldn’t? You keep insisting on projecting your ability to see orcs as people onto the humans at the time, who decidedly did not see them as people. You can call the Alliance of Lordaeron ignorant and racist for that—and I would agree, because they were—but that is what happened.
They didn’t have to, but not doing so would have meant losing a lot of the moral complexity that came with doing just that.
No one’s claiming it is.
Funny, wasn’t that exactly what you were doing in referring to the initial Warcraft era as “a dumb idea,” simply because you didn’t personally like the internment camps?
It’s also possible to objectively appreciate a well-written story without personally agreeing with parts of it. It has to be, or there wouldn’t be such things as villains/antagonists to begin with.
Ok, but at the time it was considered the most humane solution by the victors of the Second War.
I would also ask you to consider that that wasn’t necessarily the writers’ perspective—I highly doubt Chris Metzen approves of concentration camps—so much as it was written to be the perspective of the fictional characters. There is actually a difference between the two, believe it or not.
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I edited one of my posts to actually clarify this earlier.
I’m not opposed to the existence of camps or genocide simply for the sake of being camps/genocide. My criticism is the writers (and many players) decision to treat concentration camps as the most “reasonable” or even as a “humane” option instead of treating it like the unmitigated tragedy it is.
So yeah. If we want to keep concentration camps and use them as a black spot on the Alliance and to explain why the Horde would be justifiably angry at them? Sure. But if we’re going explain them away as, “Well what else was the Alliance supposed to do? They were being merciful, considering the alternatives!” every time it gets brought up, then I think that defeats the whole point.
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I mean, the easiest solution to that would have been Quel’Thalas and the others not having left the Alliance or bringing up extermination in the first place to establish said alternative.
The problem is that what’s easy isn’t necessarily realistic.
Quel’Thalas, Gilneas, and Stromgarde all demanded extermination. When they didn’t get their way, they seceded.
There was no scenario, realistically-speaking, in which these nations—ruled by haughty, egotistical, and most importantly, isolationist kings who were used to getting what they wanted when they wanted it—were going to be told “no” by Terenas and still remain members of the Alliance.
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