Black Hat Brigade: Episode 15
Oct. 2nd, 2015 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastSetting: Deep underground caverns. Orcs have made this a workspace. The darkness is cut by the red light from flowing molten metal. Orcs pull chains, pound hammers, pour molten metal into casts. The sound is present, but fades into the background.
Camera tracks low along a path, then, the road moves away from screne, the camera pans up a set of walking paws to a hyena.
Banzai: I like it. It's warm, cozy, not too bright. There's a lot of metal smell around here. But, I can smell food cooking... that's not how I most like it, but it smells good.
Camera pans up farther along the form of a woman in black leather armor. She bares a black bow over one shoulder and a black quiver over another.
Susan Pevensie: A matter of culture, perhaps. I find myself on edge. There is no reason why they should set their space for my comfort.
Camera pans down to a small, greenish, animated ogre.
Toadwart: Definitely about culture. To the Ancient Egyptians, black would have been the color of fertility and health, generally of good things. To the Ancient Romans, red sometimes indicated an honorable soldier. The bright shining white European culture would have seen to indicate goodness and cleanliness would be, to a more Hindu influenced culture, all about death.
Toadwart: To those of us who may live most of our lives underground, darkness cut by the red of carefully tended hot coals, or molten metal... That can just mean home.
A pale white orc strides to the group.
Azog: You have sought my audience and here I am. I am Azog, the Defiler.
Susan: I doubt that.
Azog reaches for a weapon: You doubt that I am Azog? Should I prove it to you?
Susan: I doubt that you are The Defiler. It simply doesn't strike me as the title a people would give one of their war-heroes. Most cultures around the world only consider defiling something that can happen to that for which they care, so most don't consider a defiler something good.
Azog snorts a laugh: Have you read the books? Watced the movies? In this canon, orcs are an evil and calous people. We maintain leadership through terror. I would want each of my people to be terrified of what I could do to them.
Susan: As a leadership dynamic, that lacks all credibility.
Banzai: If a hyena matriarch treated her cackle like that, the other members would just leave.
Toadward: Even with a formal army, that's a nightmare for moral. No matter what the punishment is, there would be an epidemic of desertions.
Azog: We're a work of fiction. We don't have to be realistic. You're just overthinking matters.
Susan: No. That excuse is not acceptable. As we treat persons in fiction, so we tend to treat persons in reality. Treating good and evil as a mere matter of team drags down political discourse. A cultural acceptance of racial evils in fiction reinforces a readiness to treat people as racial evils in reality.
Banzai: Even if the fictional didn't objectively matter to the real, we should at least be allowed to have our lives matter to ourselves.
Toadwart: Do you like existing just so that protagonists can feel good about killing you?
Susan: How many of your orcs have you killed just for the sake of making sure that readers and/or viewers can cheer when you die?
Azog: Hey, we aren't a total racial evil. Tolkien admitted that we can't be all evil. It was the natural consequence of his Christian faith.
Susan: Yes, the natural consequence of his own Catholicism. Someone else's Catholicism might lend them an entirely different thinking on the matter, that we shouldn't go reinforcing. Besides, even if Tolkein imagined some good orcs that he never got around to writing about, that would be good orcs as "the exception". Your people would still not be allowed to exist in their own right, as opposed to in relation to the "good" races.
Azog: What do you want? From the very beginning of our canon, we were always an evil race.
Susan: Warcraft I and II started out with orcs as an evil race. Warcraft III, along with the stories of Thrall and further tales of the Hoarde, were able to flesh out a rich culture with shamanistic faith, and a history that brought them into the control of an evil, rather than being an evil unto themselves.
Banzai: Toadwart and I are both from canons that identified us as parts of racial evils. You don't need to change sides. We didn't have to.
Toadwart: We just needed fuller exploration of who we are, as individuals and as peoples, a reason why, even while the humans and Gummie Bears saw us as evil, we could see ourselves as good... or at least as doing what we needed to do.
Susan: And, that exploration matters. It's not over-thinking, it's thinking. It's a practice in empathy that real world cultures desperately need, so that political discourse can have nuance and that immigrants and refugees need not be "swarms".
Camera tracks low along a path, then, the road moves away from screne, the camera pans up a set of walking paws to a hyena.
Banzai: I like it. It's warm, cozy, not too bright. There's a lot of metal smell around here. But, I can smell food cooking... that's not how I most like it, but it smells good.
Camera pans up farther along the form of a woman in black leather armor. She bares a black bow over one shoulder and a black quiver over another.
Susan Pevensie: A matter of culture, perhaps. I find myself on edge. There is no reason why they should set their space for my comfort.
Camera pans down to a small, greenish, animated ogre.
Toadwart: Definitely about culture. To the Ancient Egyptians, black would have been the color of fertility and health, generally of good things. To the Ancient Romans, red sometimes indicated an honorable soldier. The bright shining white European culture would have seen to indicate goodness and cleanliness would be, to a more Hindu influenced culture, all about death.
Toadwart: To those of us who may live most of our lives underground, darkness cut by the red of carefully tended hot coals, or molten metal... That can just mean home.
A pale white orc strides to the group.
Azog: You have sought my audience and here I am. I am Azog, the Defiler.
Susan: I doubt that.
Azog reaches for a weapon: You doubt that I am Azog? Should I prove it to you?
Susan: I doubt that you are The Defiler. It simply doesn't strike me as the title a people would give one of their war-heroes. Most cultures around the world only consider defiling something that can happen to that for which they care, so most don't consider a defiler something good.
Azog snorts a laugh: Have you read the books? Watced the movies? In this canon, orcs are an evil and calous people. We maintain leadership through terror. I would want each of my people to be terrified of what I could do to them.
Susan: As a leadership dynamic, that lacks all credibility.
Banzai: If a hyena matriarch treated her cackle like that, the other members would just leave.
Toadward: Even with a formal army, that's a nightmare for moral. No matter what the punishment is, there would be an epidemic of desertions.
Azog: We're a work of fiction. We don't have to be realistic. You're just overthinking matters.
Susan: No. That excuse is not acceptable. As we treat persons in fiction, so we tend to treat persons in reality. Treating good and evil as a mere matter of team drags down political discourse. A cultural acceptance of racial evils in fiction reinforces a readiness to treat people as racial evils in reality.
Banzai: Even if the fictional didn't objectively matter to the real, we should at least be allowed to have our lives matter to ourselves.
Toadwart: Do you like existing just so that protagonists can feel good about killing you?
Susan: How many of your orcs have you killed just for the sake of making sure that readers and/or viewers can cheer when you die?
Azog: Hey, we aren't a total racial evil. Tolkien admitted that we can't be all evil. It was the natural consequence of his Christian faith.
Susan: Yes, the natural consequence of his own Catholicism. Someone else's Catholicism might lend them an entirely different thinking on the matter, that we shouldn't go reinforcing. Besides, even if Tolkein imagined some good orcs that he never got around to writing about, that would be good orcs as "the exception". Your people would still not be allowed to exist in their own right, as opposed to in relation to the "good" races.
Azog: What do you want? From the very beginning of our canon, we were always an evil race.
Susan: Warcraft I and II started out with orcs as an evil race. Warcraft III, along with the stories of Thrall and further tales of the Hoarde, were able to flesh out a rich culture with shamanistic faith, and a history that brought them into the control of an evil, rather than being an evil unto themselves.
Banzai: Toadwart and I are both from canons that identified us as parts of racial evils. You don't need to change sides. We didn't have to.
Toadwart: We just needed fuller exploration of who we are, as individuals and as peoples, a reason why, even while the humans and Gummie Bears saw us as evil, we could see ourselves as good... or at least as doing what we needed to do.
Susan: And, that exploration matters. It's not over-thinking, it's thinking. It's a practice in empathy that real world cultures desperately need, so that political discourse can have nuance and that immigrants and refugees need not be "swarms".
no subject
Date: 2015-10-02 08:03 pm (UTC)Susan as the nucleus of this just makes me very happy.
(Also due to something I saw on tumblr, I cannot help but think of Azog as "Azog the Beautiful," due to the emphasis of the orcs using scarification as personal decoration - that is one highly ornamented orc.)
no subject
Date: 2015-10-02 08:28 pm (UTC)So, I don't want to take all the credit for having different arguments.
But, yeah, here is me making the case that this really matters and that, when we engage in these kinds of deconstruction conversations, we're not just "overthinking" things. This stuff matters and deserves to be considered.
All have to do a search for "Azog the Beautiful".
no subject
Date: 2015-10-02 08:43 pm (UTC)And, yes - Lion King is a particularly grey example of this, in that it takes minimal thought or empathy to see other sides of the story. (The jungle: probably glad to see the feline superpredator take off.)
Re Azog: It was probably on the blog of misbehavingmaiar - some of which is nsfw, if I recall. ^^
no subject
Date: 2015-10-02 08:57 pm (UTC)