Some musings on orcs

Before I begin: as it happens, of recent I have precious little time on my hands that can be devoted to random personal projects. Which, in my case, includes blogging. Quite unfortunate if you’ve just taken it up, but, oh well.

So, orcs. Over the last few years there’s been a lot of talk about the orcs being racist. In case you missed it: usually, the claim was that their depictions, sometimes in gaming, sometimes in sources which inspired it, are a reflection of a bunch of really outdated depictions of non-European peoples. (One longer essay on the topic can be found here; at the moment I can’t find all the blog posts on it that I have read back in the day, and which I surely could find if I spent an hour digging through browser history, and… oh, yeah, right.) Anyway, my point here is not to comment on it; much has been said, and I don’t think I can add anything meaningful to that conversation. But I had some musings that were tangential to it.

See, I’ve been reading some articles on the evolution of sapience, the Neanderthals, and the similar. And it’s like, it’s not always described as an increase in intelligence, per se. Sometimes it’s presented in terms of unlocking some sort of capacity for abstract thinking, or ability to track social relationships, or even articulated speech, although that last one is hard to dismiss if we want to depict a functioning society. (But for small bands of monsters in some dungeon, though…)

Yeah, it got me thinking. I was like, a part of the claim about the orcs’ inherent racism is that the orcs are depicted as stupid because the real peoples which the orcs are meant to ridicule, were perceived or depicted as stupid, right? But, it’s specifically about stupidity, isn’t it? What if, like I’ve been reading, there’s more to intelligence than just smart and stupid?

So I had that idea: consider a possibility that you live in a society where everyone but you has some sort of savant skills. You may not be able, say, to instantly give the exact count of toothpicks in a pile or multiply three-digit numbers in your head, but does that mean that you are dumber? Now, conversely, imagine a society where nearly everyone has dyslexia. How would it look like? Would it rely on visual aids, oral memorisation? Whatever form it would take, it wouldn’t be that they are dumb. What if the stereotypical -2 to INT was about that kind of stuff?

I began to visualise it in my head, too. “See that orc warrior over there, squinting over these few coins in his palm, trying to count them again and again, he’s not dumb. Don’t make that mistake. Sure, he’s got a problem with his letters and numbers, but ask him for directions, and he’ll tell you of every blade of grass between here and the place you want to get to.”

And then, as I was typing that, it hit me. First, that I’m just reinventing INT and WIS. Kind of a downturn, but no big deal. And then, the big deal. What if I’m just moving the goalposts, or how do you call it. If I’m merely picking the orcs from the “racist stereotype” box and moving them to “neuroatypical stereotype” box.

Yeah, I probably was.

And that’s not even mentioning the awkward feeling that I might just accidentally come off like it’s all fine to give -2 INT to your homebrew fantasy race that coincidentally happens to look like some disenfranchised minority, as long as you sprinkle it with a bunch of vaguely neuroscience-sounding terms.

And so, my hopes for gloriously becoming the new darling of the world of fantasy roleplaying and fiction were dashed against the rocks. Oh well. But still, perhaps somewhere in there lies an opportunity for some interesting storytelling.