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I mean it would still be the Horde’s fault for tresspassing and stealing resources on land they didnt own!
You do realize the forsaken did strike first and kill Garithos(even if he deserved it).
She certainly was never shy about using it as justification for her war. The Alliance did find out later on they were right to stop her then and there. So I’m not sure this is a valid argument.
These two already contradict each other. The orcs are portrayed heroic because it was the gronn/ogres actually were the ones abusing/starting conflict with the orcs. Humans/elves are not the only ones being allowed to justify wholesale slaughter. Nearly every major races(hell even the taurens were allowed to kill centaurs en mass and drives them from Mulgore without anyone debating about the morals of such actions) built their nations/kingdoms on the death of another nation.
This is the only where you might have ground. And even then the entire event did justify them joining them Horde and attacking the Alliance. Or are we gonna ignore how you as a goblin players is allowed to slaughter an entire navy full of Alliance soldiers without much thought about the moral consequences?
In the case of the Drust, they never stopped fighting! That was the reason the Kul Tirans had to fight back as well. I would assume the Kul Tirans gave them ample chances to stop but they never did. We saw as per the druid questline that the Kul Tiras can and would be willing to live in peace in the Drust.
The goblins killed their Zandalari oppressors and drove them off.
The taurens killed and drove off their centaur attackers.
The Darkspear were portayed in a heroic light when Kul Tiras invaded them.
The orcs were potrayed in a if not heroic, at least justified light when they fought the ogres/gronns and took their lands as spoils.
Claiming this is just a human/elven exception is just false. Every nation in Warcraft was built on the bones of a dead empire.
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Which doesn’t seem to apply when Humans/Elves go trespassing and stealing resources on land they didnt own! So Orcs should be able to kill all the Night Elves and settle their land and it’ll all be cool, right?
Wait, so they do deserve it?
So Sylvanas can kill all the Alliance she wants, settle their land, and it’ll all be cool, right?
Orcs killing Gronn/Ogres is treated as monsters killing monsters. That’s why the ones getting killed don’t get much sympathy. You see that a lot…
But only when they Draenei are killed does it become clearly not cool. Only then does all this death become a moral issue and someone become “bad”.
Now it is true that…
Although the game was also quick to let us know that they were driven out by the other Trolls. More of the monsters killing monsters. And then we still mostly get to kill trolls (Darkspear or not) without worrying about sympathizing with them.
I don’t recall the Bilgewater Cartel being given a pass to slaughter all the Humans they want and take their land, and have it be treated as okay.
I mean it would still be the Human’s fault for trespassing and stealing resources on land they didn’t own!
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I think it was more like both tried, but in the orcs case they lost, decided to try again several and lost again several times.
I am saying they attacked first, justified or not. So this is a moot point.
They were certain given a pass, or at least not treated in a negative light, when they went and destroyed an entire Alliance fleet. Hell, their taking over of Aszhara is just generally glossed over.
- I’m not even sure the Drust lived in the area near the first humans colonies/were actually using the place for anything/consider the place sacred, they just saw neighbors and attacked immediately. 2) the orcs never had any intention of living peacefully with the night elves and even when they found out it belong to someone else they decided to go on a war path.
More like she used it as a justification to launch a war that was already disproportionate to whatever actual threat there was. I would also point out that for a time after Legion the Alliance and Horde were at peace again and it was still Sylvanas who decided to restart the conflict.
The main difference between the two is the draenei are relatively innocent. They didnt start a war with the Horde, even when the orcs pushed and prodded and tried to enslaved them they tried to stay their hand.
As oppose to us not sympathizing when we have to kill Defias, Scarlet Crusades, Dark Irons, pirates(who mostly were Alliance races), forces that joined Kael/Elisande?
It is like we are not normally suppose to sympathize with the villains of the story. Crazy thought, n’est-ce pas?
The way I see Blizzard’s attempt at portrating who the “good guys” are in WoW seems fairly simple.
- You normally dont start the conflict.
- If you are forced to start a conflict due to force beyond your control, you have to do it in such a way that is proportionate to the threat.
- Revenge cant be the reason you continue the conflict.
- You at least attempt for peace.
- Your methods should generally lead to as few casualties as possible.
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Zerde is much like Akiyass. When the good, glorious perfect white humans and pretty elves of the alliance genocide those savage, backward people, it is glorious and good!
And than when the trolls, orcs or tauren defend themselves HOW DARE THE SAVAGE DEFEND HIMSELF?! You people scare me, honestly.
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I think arguing about the in-universe reasons why things happen the way they are detracts from the original point that (I think) Tamanii was trying to make in the first place, which is why Blizzard chose to WRITE these conflicts the way they did.
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Now you are just putting words in my mouth. Especially considering I never gave any particular judgement about how the Horde protected itself from non-Alliance threats.(like the afformentioned attempt by the taurens to kick out centaurs from Thunderbluff, even though it was just as much a(stolen) home to the centaurs at that point)
There conduct against the Alliance however is more complicated considering they keep starting wars for their own gains.
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So there’s really no moral judgement to be made, huh? It’s just a “you win some, you lose some” situation? I mean sometimes you succeed in entirely wiping out an entire people, and sometimes you don’t? Nothing else to say on the matter? It is what it is?
Well the fact is that they weren’t given a pass as they never destroyed any Alliance fleet. Them taking over Azshara is often pointed to as yet another wrong doing against the Night Elves. And if we can justify genocide and displacement with the “they struck first” defense, then Bilgewater should actually be able to settle/harvest even more and kill anyone who resist because they deserve it.
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I’m not even sure the Night Elves lived in the area near the first Orc lumber camps/were actually using the place for anything/consider the place sacred, they just saw Orcs and attacked immediately.
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the Humans never had any intention of living peacefully with the Drust and even when they found out it belong to someone else they decided to go on a genocidal campaign.
So was Sylvanas justified in attacking Teldrassil because it was Genn “struck first?”
Or is she not justified because it was really she who “struck first”?
If “they struck first” is really moot in relation to who deserved it or was/wasn’t justified, why do you keep basing all of your arguments about who is in the right/wrong based on who initiated aggressions first?
Well of course they shouldn’t have. I mean it would still be the Draeni’s fault for trespassing and stealing resources on land they didn’t own!
Yeah, as it’s made explicitly obvious that Defias, Scarlet Crusades, Kael/Elisande made the grave mistake of also attacking Humans/Elves, which is why they’re super terrible. But we’re also assured that these aren’t necessarily the work of HUMANS/ELVES because Defias and being controlled by Onyxia and the Scarlet Crusade by a demon. And Kael/Elisandre are traitors to their people.
This was also a huge mark against the Dark Irons, at least until they joined the Alliance, but now their ruthlessness and tendency to unleash fire elementals on innocents are A-okay.
I don’t know why you included pirates, as they are rather racially diverse in WoW and not restricted simply to humans and often flip flop between good/bad.
Yeah, what you’re trying not to acknowledge is that the trend in who ends up being the villains and how far they can go before getting branded as such is based largely on who their victims/opposition are. Not what crimes they actually commit.
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^It’s this.
Seriously Zerde, you aren’t going to convince anyone by repeating ‘but the game says!’ as an argument. Everyone already knows what the game says and they don’t like or agree with it because it’s both transparently two-faced and ugly as hell and hugely inept at covering its rear about it. Yeah, no fooling, ‘the game says genocidal colonialisms x through z were bad and genocidal colonialisms a through c were actually good and fair and weren’t even genocides or colonialisms at all!’; that’s precisely the issue people have with it.
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Except there is nothing stating the Drust at the time considered the land the colonist landed on as sacred/used it where as we have a ton of lore stating all of Azshenvale was sacred to the night elves. But if you want moral judgement, the Horde lost any possible moral ground the moment they decided to drink demon blood(especially considering they were warned by darkspear witch doctors) and continued to attack Asshenvale long after it was established as truly belonging to the night elves/not even attempting to negotiate for it.
They were close enough that there were wisps posted near the woods they were destroying.
Except the Drust attacked unarmed civilians. And more important it was even stated in the quested the humans wanted to live in peace and the Thornspeaker backs up that claim.
I’m going with she wanted a justification to go to war, Genn’s attack just happened to be a perfect excuse. The fact both sides were at peace just make her true intentions more villainous.
I gave you my criteria early as to who I think Blizzard considers a “good guy” in the faction wars/wars in general. It just the “who struck first” is usually one of the biggest factors in it.
Except no one owned the land the draenei settlement on. And even if someone actually “owned” it, it would be the ogres, not the orcs. Who started a war just for the sake of starting conflict.
Are you even hearing yourself? non-humans vs non-humans is somehow just monsters vs monster and when it is humans/elves vs humans/elves it is still a biased because apperently it not at all about what actions the Scarlet/Defias/etc are committing and purely because they are attacking humans/elves.
I’d also point out for the longest time the Horde justified their actions because they were under the influence of demon blood and have not actually done anything to atone for their actions.
i also added pirate because of they happen to be humans most of the time, at least the most powerful one usually are(just look at Freehold or the pirate rep for the Uncrowned).
Not to mention we already have you outright admitting the Kul Tirans were villain batted when they went and started a war against the Darkspear. The one example we have of a human starting a conflict with a “monster” race.
- Tamanii has just been applying this to humans/elves when in fact EVERY RACE in Warcraft has benefit from a degree of colonialism. Singling out the humans/elves as somehow being the only one to benefit from the lack of empathy we have to most of the villains races is insanely blind.
- As for genocide, again, that seems loaded in the sense the most if any genocide done was truly a last resort deal as oppose to Sylvanas attempt at using genocide as a first solution. That you had no choice but to fight them to the death because they were never going to surrender/leave you alone.
- As for it being fair or good, maybe it wasn’t fair, maybe it wasn’t good, but neither is letting another race wholesale slaughter people who were not even interested in fighting(as in the drust case) or attacking a people who was only trying to look for a new home(as is the case with the high elves). Nor is it fair to blame Aszhara and her night elf empire as to the loss of the troll lands if we don’t even know who actually started a conflict. Azeroth is an unfair world just as much as our world. All anyone can ever do is do the best they can and hope history remembers them in a kind light.
Slight correction mostly because I misremember this quest(I assumed you destroyed the ships apparently not) , but one of the main quest was the goblin player being able to kill 50 soldiers who had capture Thrall. The quest was quite clearly this was a justified action.
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You’re still not getting it, and I think these last sentences are the key: Azeroth is not real, and neither is its history. It is fiction. Artificial. Every single sentence of it is put together by human hands for a purpose, by authors, and people are objecting to the story this fiction tells, which your three examples above are perfect case studies of. People feel that stories like those, of ‘sanitized’ colonialism, are overtly shaped by gross historic biases - which is not a shocking accusation, since the mishmash genre the game itself is a mishmash of has housed racism comfortably for as long as it has existed*.
- As for genocide, again, that seems loaded in the sense the most if any genocide done was truly a last resort deal as oppose to Sylvanas attempt at using genocide as a first solution. That you had no choice but to fight them to the death because they were never going to surrender/leave you alone.
Your defense of the game’s story still seems to ignore this, since it keeps coming back again and again and again and AGAIN to explaining how ‘the game has shown it so this genocide really wasn’t even genocide, was the only way forwards, and was therefore okay, and that genocide was bad, so how can we equivocate between the two?’
Zerde, those portrayals are precisely why people are fed up with the story. There are centuries of media for us to look at for stories about how ‘alas and alack, the noble and relatable daring explorers ventured into the fruitful new lands, were unfairly attacked by savages without provocation, and had no choice but to defend themselves because they were so evil and wicked that they would not stop unless killed, what senseless violence, oh well, to the victor go the lands, which the savages weren’t even REALLY using all of.’ When we see a new one people can recognize it and be disgusted for what it is, no matter how thoroughly the game tells us that this time the savages were like, SUPER evil and wicked, and DEFINITELY weren’t using all that land.
- Tamanii has just been applying this to humans/elves when in fact EVERY RACE in Warcraft has benefit from a degree of colonialism. Singling out the humans/elves as somehow being the only one to benefit from the lack of empathy we have to most of the villains races is insanely blind.
It’s not just about who gets no empathy, it’s about who gets empathy at all. Societies that the reader are intended to empathize with get written as heroic underdogs or unjustly-persecuted peaceful types, while their enemies are written as bloodthirsty monsters whose murderous and unprovoked attacks forced their victims to defend themselves.
And those societies the reader is intended to empathize with are those that appeal most closely to the sensibilities of an American audience.
And those societies the reader is NOT intended to empathize with are those that are written as ‘uncivilized,’ ‘barbaric,’ and ‘savage.’
And this is, again, why people are angry with how the game is written. Because they know about the ugly side of history, and seeing the fiction of this game putting a bloody-handed old chestnut of a story in a pretty new dress pisses them off.
*Like kindly ol’ professor Tolkien and his orcs, which resembled ‘the less lovely mongol-types,’ and their wicked allies from exotic Far Harad, ‘black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues;’ or Robert E. Howard and his views on evil depraved savages, soft effete civilized men, and manly iron-thewed barbarians; or HP Lovecraft whose guiding terror was ‘what if white people are NOT the center of the universe?’ writ large, with squamousness.
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It is fiction! And it is precisely that reason why it can and possibly should be allowed a certain degree of sanitizarion of things.(that is not to say we cant at least debate the implication of its addition) Or do you want to talk about how Warcraft glorifies our use of violence to resolve every conflict? How we parade killing someone and beheading them? Or how Warcraft gives the Horde a pass for using BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS with barely a shrug of thought? Or how Warcraft allows say the Horde to say honor and name place after War criminals(Grom) slavers(Kargath) or people conplicit in genocide(Durotan)?
And this is because real life humans have a shared history of being violent. That nearly every great major nation in the world(even asian and african and south american ones) had in their past experienced period of expansionism and war. Western civilizations were not the first conquerors.(although one can argue they have been the most sucessful/most influential for the modern world)
Lovecraft we know is racist. And even then it would be next to impossible if not undesirable to expunge what he added to literature.
Tolkien, is more of a unknown. At worse I think his literature was a product of the culture that was prevalent at the time.
Tolkien wasn’t the first to make evil and monstrous fantasy beings seem racially “other”. George MacDonald’s goblins in The Princess and the Goblin are equally (and uncomfortably) a product of 19th-century anxieties about race and evolutionary degeneration. As award-winning black fantasy author NK Jemisin has commented, “Orcs are fruit of the poison vine that is human fear of ‘the Other’.” Does that mean that Tolkien was racist? Well, it’s more complicated than that.
Literary texts are not created in a vacuum. They are part of a tradition. They respond to other texts and their expectations. Tolkien’s early work was an attempt to write a mythology, so monstrous beings would be very much expected. George MacDonald had already taken goblins from European folklore and made them the enemy of his “good” characters, and Tolkien borrowed the term “orc” from demonic beings in Beowulf.
That Tolkien’s monsters (like MacDonald’s) also responded to anxieties, concerns, and even “scientific” debates of his time about racial characteristics is not unexpected, but adds a layer of complexity to the orcs. Though Tolkien denounced “racialist” theories, refused to declare origin to secure a German translation of The Hobbit, and railed against Germany, it doesn’t mean that some prejudices bequeathed by his late-Victorian/early-Edwardian upbringing didn’t creep into the worldview we see in Middle-Earth.
Ideology is a powerful thing and its role in literature is complicated. There are authors who write with a social or political agenda. And there are authors who don’t, but their worldview, beliefs and values are implicit in the texts they produce. I believe Tolkien’s racial prejudices are implicit in Middle-Earth, but his values – friendship, fellowship, altruism, courage, among many others – are explicit, which makes for a complex, more interesting world.
Ultimately, the idea that the humans of the alliance(or even the Alliance itself) is suppose to represent just a western civilization is an outdated/misguided one. The humans and elves(and the Alliance) are just suppose to represent people who dont want to go to war but due to circumstances beyond their control are forced to(this is more correct intepretation especially considering all the new skins being added to the two races) .
It not suppose to emapthize generally with people who start wars, period. Hence why Daelin is considered a dark mark on its past. Why the Jaina who wanted to drown Ogrimmar is coded as being “wrong”.
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We need to be able to separate the art from the artist. A strong case can be made in the way of Lovecraft being a racist. Yet, his contributions to Horror (The birthing of cosmic horror) is still my favorite genre of horror.
Though, anyone who wants to claim Tolkien is a racist just doesn’t understand his work at all. He was heavily inspired by World War 1, which can be said to be the first industrialized war. His novels, and the creation of Middle Earth as a whole, was commentary about the dangers of industrialization, and the corruption of power.
Tolkien used racism as a literary device to divide his imaginary cultures, to allow them to exceed their high moral potential and face the temptation of believing in their own superiority. When these “superior castes” cross that line they must pay a terrible price for their moral failures. The man himself was avidly against racism of any kind, and his work reflects that.
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It’s not that I demand a moral judgement. It’s that WoW often insists on it, but restricts to when, as Drakyn explained, ‘uncivilized,’ ‘barbaric,’ and ‘savage’ races are the one doing it to what Blizzard frames as the more civilized, sophisticated, and elegant races, which in WoW, is generally Humans and Elves (and those friendliest to them).
This is in contrast to the Orcs who had no way of knowing Night Elves owned the land. They didn’t know what Wisps were. They didn’t even get a chance to make overtures before being attacked.
And even if the land was not being utilized in the ways that the settlers considered recognizable, you are aware that the “But the natives clearly weren’t utilizing the land,” is an age old colonial justification, right?
Because the humans’ plan was to settle Kul Tiras and utilize its resources. No matter what. And to many Drust this was unacceptable. And they were all killed and their land settled anyway. Where are all the Drust that wanted to live in peace?
What if the Drust hadn’t responded to violence, but just all said, “No. You can’t stay here.” You’re telling me that instead of settling anyway and killing them all, the Kul Tirans would have replied with, “Okay,” packed back up on their ships, and sailed somewhere else?
Also, there you go with the “They struck first” a viable justification. I thought you were done.
No, the bigger factor are the races involved. You can usually determine who’s going to be the bad good guy or bad guy in a Blizzard narrative based on how they relate to each other in terms of looks/technology/aesthetics/relations to characters long before you actually learn about the details of their interactions. The “who struck first” business is just retroactive justification that only applies when the designated bad guys do it.
That’s why you can’t square it away with Sylvanas and hem and haw with, “Well she thinks she was justified, but really wasn’t.” and refused to acknowledge Blizzard clearly framing her actions at Teldrassil as unambiguously wrong.
Yeah I know. It’s always annoying when Blizzard does it. That’s kind of the point of this whole argument. The lives of non-Humans/Elves (and whoever they associate with) tend to be treated as lesser and their loss less tragic when it comes to this sort of stuff. And the story doesn’t got to as many lengths to try and justify their actions or paint them as innocents or their problems as the result of a few bad apples.
Yeah, see the “Horde” wasn’t some minor splinter group of Orcs. For the longest, it was treated as the entirety, if not majority of the Orcish people. And then when we went to Draenor and met the uncorrupted Orcs, Blizzard decided to make the majority of them genocidal villains who were going to repeat many of the same genocides too.
Yeah, Freehold has plenty of Vulpera, Dwarves, even Hozen, even some Saurok!
If your argument is that the Fleet Admiral Tethys being one of Uncrowned Council as they strive to save the world is an attempt to demonize humans as a whole through associations with piracy- then you’re really grasping, which shows just how poor a job Blizzard does with acknowledging any bad humans as anything more than a few bad apples.
Wait, just 50 soldiers? But they shot first against innocent civilians. By the laws of Blizzard writing and previous precedent, that means the Goblins are entitled to settle wherever they want and the Humans cannot resist, lest they be exterminated.
Oh yeah, I’ll totally admit to that. I’m not being contrarian and do like to give Blizzard credit when it gets things right. This is indeed about the closest Humans come to being portrayed as bad for trying to exterminate the indigenously coded peoples. Not just some bad people who turned against Stormwind/Alliance and went rogue and were secretly being manipulated by a supernatural evil and later argued to have been peaceful and right all along.
It’s part of the reason why WC3 is considered a lot more nuanced and better written than much of the stuff Blizzard’s done before and since. It’s pretty much the apotheosis of Blizzard treating indigenously coded people as something more than monsters and working to elicit pathos from their suffering at the hands of the Humans/Elves. WC3 is where so many people fell in love with the Horde for the first time because it’s the closest they ever came to being humanized.
Blizzard should do more of that. Not come up with more stories that undermine all that and boil down to “Proudmoore was right, actually” like they generally have in the decades since.
Now imagine how messed up it’d be if Darkspear used that “first strike” as an argument as to why they should be able to settle Kul Tiras and kill any humans who protested, and even those who didn’t.
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I’m sorry, are we talking about a different game here? “A pass” and “barely a shrug of thought”? The use of Blight is displayed as an unequivocally evil and bad thing bar one single quest in Desolace, its creators are written as unhinged and murderous traitors, and it’s specifically assigned to the faction whose entire role in the fiction is ‘the Other.’ Hell, every specific ‘sanitized’ misdeed you’ve named here is assigned to that same faction! The faction whose role is specifically to be ‘the people who are weird, and wrong, and possibly evil or maybe just dumb and so damned crazy.’ Bad things they do are the OPPOSITE of sanitized, they’re dredged up and rubbed in their faces forever!
I absolutely agree that the game DOES valorize violence as a method of solving problems, to an unseemly and unpleasant degree. But lordy, the specific examples you picked were awful, awful, awful.
And this is because real life humans have a shared history of being violent. That nearly every great major nation in the world(even asian and african and south american ones) had in their past experienced period of expansionism and war.
The message WoW isn’t putting out isn’t that ‘everyone does colonialism and genocide and those things are unequivocally bad.’ It’s ‘colonialism and genocide are unequivocally bad AND also what the good relatable societies do isn’t colonialism and genocide; the backwards people living in these lands weren’t really using all of them and they started to savagely attack the good relatable people for no reason instead of sharing so they had no choice but to heroically ‘push them back’ ah well.’
Now that? THAT is sanitizing. And it’s sanitizing in the ugly sort of way that we’ve seen play out in every self-serving history textbook ever penned - in particular, the ol’ ‘our peaceful settlers are being unjustly brutalized by the natives!’ yarn the game spins over and over is spot out of the USA’s history, where squatters would not only move onto occupied lands but right into people’s houses and then come crying for the US army to come in and seize the land for white settlement when someone took offence to their theft.
Lovecraft we know is racist. And even then it would be next to impossible if not undesirable to expunge what he added to literature.
Tolkien, is more of a unknow. At worse I think his literature was a product of the culture that was prevalent at the time.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/was-tolkien-really-racist-108227
Tolkien wasn’t the first to make evil and monstrous fantasy beings seem racially “other”. George MacDonald’s goblins in The Princess and the Goblin are equally (and uncomfortably) a product of 19th-century anxieties about race and evolutionary degeneration. As award-winning black fantasy author NK Jemisin has commented, “Orcs are fruit of the poison vine that is human fear of ‘the Other’.” Does that mean that Tolkien was racist? Well, it’s more complicated than that.Literary texts are not created in a vacuum. They are part of a tradition. They respond to other texts and their expectations. Tolkien’s early work was an attempt to write a mythology, so monstrous beings would be very much expected. George MacDonald had already taken goblins from European folklore and made them the enemy of his “good” characters, and Tolkien borrowed the term “orc” from demonic beings in Beowulf.
That Tolkien’s monsters (like MacDonald’s) also responded to anxieties, concerns, and even “scientific” debates of his time about racial characteristics is not unexpected, but adds a layer of complexity to the orcs. Though Tolkien denounced “racialist” theories, refused to declare origin to secure a German translation of The Hobbit, and railed against Germany, it doesn’t mean that some prejudices bequeathed by his late-Victorian/early-Edwardian upbringing didn’t creep into the worldview we see in Middle-Earth.
Ideology is a powerful thing and its role in literature is complicated. There are authors who write with a social or political agenda. And there are authors who don’t, but their worldview, beliefs and values are implicit in the texts they produce. I believe Tolkien’s racial prejudices are implicit in Middle-Earth, but his values – friendship, fellowship, altruism, courage, among many others – are explicit, which makes for a complex, more interesting world.
You’ve given me multiple paragraphs justifying how Tolkien maybe kind of sort of wasn’t a REAL real racist just casually racist or had a nodding acquaintance with racism and that if this came through in his writings it was just part of a long literary tradition, when my entire point was that the genre WoW’s working in - generic mass-market fantasy - happily adopted all those bouncing baby Issues he and others left in their writing and passed them on without a qualm. As part of, well, founding a long quasi-literary tradition of writing your happily-otherized fantasy monsters as slurs on nonwhite humans.
Which led - again - to WoW, whose authors wrote a world with noble civilized empires growing in the untended soil of lands whose savage inhabitants weren’t using it anyways and attacked first and that’s why it was totally okay for them to get killed and have their stuff taken.
Which - again - is disturbing given what we know of history, and only grows moreso the more strenuously the story tries to justify itself internally with more and more information being written about how actually THIS was the one, the only, the most true and moral and justified Little Colonialism That Wasn’t.
I am unconcerned with how intentional Tolkien or any of the other founders of knockoff fantasy were in their racism, just that they produced it in their writing and others happily picked it up and spread it everywhere. Like WoW.
It not suppose to emapthize generally with people who start wars, period. Hence why Daelin is considered a dark mark on its past. Why the Jaina who wanted to drown Ogrimmar is coded as being “wrong”.
Daelin circa wc3 is practically the only time this is engaged with, and even then he’s written as ‘a good guy who became lost in rage following a family tragedy,’ and his society is not portrayed as fundamentally flawed as a result of his failings. Jaina’s big lesson she learns from BFA is ‘forgive myself, and take up power and authority with confidence that I can make things better.’ Written as Grom and Garrosh Hellscream this family ain’t, and Kul Tiras CERTAINLY isn’t written like WoW orc clans. If it were the lord admiral would’ve been abolished as a position by expansion’s end, since it would be portrayed as an inherently warlike and ambitious position that would only encourage the bloodthirsty desires of the warlike nation, which needed to humble itself before the world and repent for its eagerness to be misled into savagery.
“Tolkien didn’t think of himself as a racist, and despised ww2 germany” and “Tolkien wrote a racialized universe in which all beings were were defined by a fundamental hierarchy, which came with correspondingly heavier obligations and duties for the 'superior castes’” are not mutually exclusive, either with each other or with the statement “Tolkien was racist.”
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Just say Troll, man.
If you are looking at hunched over, tusked, warty cannibals’ and interpreting that as a code for a real ethnic group, that’s… Not good. Don’t do that.
But he wasn’t though, is my point.
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I have bad news about racist caricatures, my dude: they involve taking ethnic groups and ghoulishly mocking them as inhuman. Trolls are a giant ball of ‘savage native’ racist slurs and stereotypes straight out of pulp adventure novels mixed with real indigenous signifiers like (bad) Caribbean accents, vodou/vodun, and quasi-mesoamerican pyramids. Recognizing a racist caricature for what it is doesn’t grant you membership into the white hood club.
But he wasn’t though, is my point.
He certainly didn’t believe he was, even as he wrote a story about the heroic angles and saxons defeating the vile hordes of darkness that looked sort of but not really like ‘mongol-types’ and their wicked men allies, who were black and thus looked like half-trolls, or their other wicked men allies, who were all from the exotic and remote south and east instead of the noble west and thus were exceptionally prone to falling under Sauron’s sway. Or when he placed it all within a personally-devised cosmology designed around a rigidly fundamental hierarchy of existence within which all beings were precisely and measurably fixed by birth via their ethnic groups.
People can be mistaken about themselves.
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Whatever you say man. If you want to look at a monstrous race and equate that to a certain ethnic group, that’s on you.
I mean, I have explained this. Tolkien opposed every form of racism. The white-skinned cultures in his novels were not inherently good, and many of them even opposed the Valar. Saron himself was white-skinned.
Tolkien used race as a literary device, specifically as commentary on the evils of racism. Do the most mild of literary research, or stop looking at everything through the lens of race. You might be enlightened on some things.
Edit: Also, the fact that you read “Half-troll” as a descriptor for a fictional race of people, and you interpret that as “Black people” that is also on you, bro.
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A profoundly blatant and shameful cop-out that conflates identifying racist coding with endorsing it. What else can you apply this to? “Oh, so you saw Bob stab that guy and now you’re calling it ‘murder’? Wow, sounds like SOMEONE knows a lot about what crimes look like. Hmm, I’d best keep my distance from you. Just sayin’.”
I mean, I have explained this. Tolkien opposed every form of racism. The white-skinned cultures in his novels were not inherently good, and many of them even opposed the Valar. Saron himself was white-skinned.
Tolkien used race as a literary device, specifically as commentary on the evils of racism. Do the most mild of literary research, or stop looking at everything through the lens of race. You might be enlightened on some things.
A little more condescension on this, please. It’s not quite thick enough to butter my toast with.
Tolkien absolutely did not make the white skinned people in his setting ‘inherently good.’ He most definitely didn’t like racism or germany’s flagrantly bigoted policies.
He also explicitly related his fictional avaracious dwarves* to jews**; said his orcs looked like ‘the less lovely mongol-types;’ wrote black men as looking like ‘half-trolls;’ and designed an entire universe where what ethnic group you were born into fundamentally determined your stature and authority physically and metaphysically.
The point on which we are not agreeing seems to be this: you say Tolkien can’t be racist because he didn’t believe he was racist and opposed other racists. I think Tolkien’s racist because his big literary project that he personally toiled for decades on was based around a cosmology that decreed inherent ‘racial superiority’ as being important (his sorting of everything under the sun into degrees of inherited and inbuilt power and authority based on their metaphysical distance from Valinor as categorized by ethnicity and bloodline; elf, man, and otherwise) and had nonwhite peoples exist only to serve satan or be a point of visual comparison for his inhuman monster-armies.
Action or intent.
Edit: Also, the fact that you read “Half-troll” as a descriptor for a fictional race of people, and you interpret that as “Black people” that is also on you, bro.
For THIS lovely late present, have The Return of the King Volume 6, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields
“[…]Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Khand, Southrons in scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.”
I await your explanation of how when Tolkien says ‘black men’ he obviously doesn’t mean ‘black men.’ Because that would be racist, and how could an Oxford don born in 1892 possibly be racist if he says he isn’t?
*‘Dwarves are not heroes , but a calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.’
** " “The dwarves of course are quite obviously - wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.”
“[…]at once natives and aliens in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue…”
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Hey man, I am not the one who plays and apologizes for the faction of racist caricatures. I just find it odd that you think that way and still shamelessly endorse it with the same breath.
I mean, everything you are spouting is just the regurgitation of white supremist propaganda, you understand that, right? This entire argument was started by white supremist groups in an attempt to say the LotR trilogy was pro White Supremacy and Nord Supremacy in it’s intention. Which is fundamentally not true. Tolkien opposed all forms of Racism, not just European Racism in WW2, but in Asia and South Africa as well. He was very vocal about it, and LotR supports an anti racism message as one of it’s core messages…
Which is certainly fitting for you. Someone who is going to perceive everything through the lens of race, and interpret dated, near 100 year old language as malicious, racially charged slurs. It would make sense the one equivocates Hunched over trolls, and creatures meant to embody the ugliness of racial superiority and over industrialization as representations of real ethnic groups, would be parroting white supremist talking points…
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