I’m kind of late to TWW leveling, but just did a questline where Kobolds seem to be a “neutral” group in the Ringing Deeps, and I’m helping a Kobold overthrow a violent Kobold overlord or something.
A similar thread/thought occurred to me when I saw the opening cinematic where the queen of the Nerubians in Dorn was “led astray” by her desire to save her people from starvation or something AND Xalatath’s offer of power or whatever.
I have to ask why? Why is every creature/race being turned into a sympathetic group of potential allies against “individual” villains. Sure, not all void elves are evil, just Xalatath, right? Not all Nerubians are bad, just the few individuals that turned to the dark side or something.
Why not just rehabilitate the burning legion? Oh yeah, that was done with the Eredar/Draenei, and really, it was all just Sargeras’ fault that they were led astray…
I guess my question is why do the writers do this? It just makes everything so bland, when you can have larger
PS: Was it necessary to make this friendly kobold NPC sound like Jar Jar Binks?
Even in WotLK, the living Nerubians were friendly. Nothing about this is new. The only villain Nerubians were the Scourge.
Kobolds were never evil, they were just a nuisance.
In any case, I’d personally rather fight a group of people because they’re a credible threat to me than because their race has been arbitrarily categorized as being one of the ones that gets a red nameplate.
You’re not the first person to complain that Blizzard dares to humanize monster races. I saw someone else complain orcs in Rings of Power. It’s very sus when people demand an entire race be potrayed as evil fodder so they don’t feel bad about massacring them.
Because being inherently evil just because you’re a member of a given race is a trope that even J.R.R. Tolkien started to walk away from in his last years. Paizo did that with their iconic race, Goblins WOTC had done so with Drow.
My understanding is that his portrayal of orcs really bothered him in his later years because of his devout Catholicism and how it clashed with the idea of a race being inherently evil, and so he would say in interviews and later writings and stuff “Of course there were good orcs, I just only showed Sauron’s armies because only they were relevant” to reconcile it.
Kobolds having potential to be neutral has always been an aspect of them. Hell in a lot of quests the heroes are the aggressors against kobolds.‘’
Also somewhat notably the orcs in most of the novels aren’t really depicted as willing minions much of the time.
Wrath cutting out Azjol Nerub was a mistake (I’m pretty sure they could have done without literally redoing Naxx at the time - maybe also toning down the crusade tournament arc which was so annoying)
Forgotten Realms did that with the Drow before TSR went under, btw, it’s just that WOTC re-added a ton of the “always evil” nonsense in 3e for no reason other that they hated the late 2e stuff that was actually cool. Which is part of why PF1 is also riddled with “always X alignment” races. Tiefling didn’t even have alignment restrictions in AD&D 2e (also they didn’t have a monster manual entry before they were a playable race), any implication that they ever did was all post WOTC editions and Pathfinder.
More or less. He came to the conclusion that if orcs had free will and sentience, which he implied they did when he wrote orcs talking with each other, then they could not be inherently evil just because they were orcs, because having free will would mean that doing good or evil would be a choice.
I think Azjol-Nerub being cut was for technical problems that the devs couldn’t work out. I know some devs who worked on Wrath have said that it was painful to make the choice to cut it.
PF1 was drawn directly from D&D 3.5 the first Pathfinder Adventure paths were actually written for 3.5 but the changes made to Goblins actually predate Second Edition.
And with the Remaster, alignment as a mechanic is dead.
Yeah like I said, a lot of the really weird and kinda bad design choices in PF1 were carryovers from 3.5 specifically which were more toned down in D&D 2e (and sometimes altogether absent from it).
I’m still annoyed by the “clerics only allowed to have alignment one step removed” because it completely screwed with one specific setting that operated on the idea that it didn’t matter because it was centered on political intrigue and so you could have an evil bishop of a nominally good deity.
Hell even in 2e FR, Sharrans could be 2 steps removed from NE
I don’t remember reading about him saying there were good orcs, just that he realized (through his Catholic beliefs) that a satan analogue creating a race of inherently damned beings is messed up, and that Eru allowing it would be incompatible with the idea of an all powerful all loving god.
Balrogs and dragons and whatever beings that were ultimately just degraded Maia whose entire state of being was a purposeful rejection of Eru is one thing but creating a soul/mortal just to damn it is horrifcally dark.
Eru is painted into a very bad corner irrgardless of the Orcs. He created Melkor after all and he tells Melkor that every thing he put into the Song in an attempt to discord it still derives from Eru and is part of Eru’s song. Everything that happened was predestined the moment Eru brought Ea into being.
Evil in Tolkien’s legendarium is incapable of creating anything wholly new, instead only ever twisting or mocking that which already exists. Melkor’s attempt at discord still used components of the Song that already existed, and thus still derived from Eru. In regards to the Orcs, I don’t think Tolkien ever quite settled on an origin for them before he died, but one of the origins he proposed was that they were Elves that had been twisted by Morgoth, in which case they would have souls just like Elves and Humans, and to dismiss them as purely, inherently evil would be wrong.
That had problems of its own. Including why no effort was made by the “good” Valar to fix them even after the defeat of the Big Bads. Neither Tolkien ever really addressed, much less, resolved those issues.