You can't deny Orcs are People of Color. There's dark greens, sickly pale greens, greyish greens, lime greens...
You know, if
black people were just white people who were cursed and forced into a twisted form by a high magic to poison their minds and bodies and turn them into thralls forever. I can really see the analogues to slave society.
Okay, not really, but this is a game that works in the gray area and
that can really confuse and bother some people. Tallion isn't evil. Tallion is vengeful. Cerebrimbor isn't evil. He's
really vengeful. And I believe Cerebrimbor says something along the lines of "If we do not snub out this evil [Sauron's beginnings in mordor], the world will have to", he knows that what he is doing is morally questionable, but most ancient elves couldn't give a damn about morality. He doesn't care that he's the physical embodiment of fear and darkness, he's going to utilize those powers for a good [in his mind, which is also linked to revenge] reason. Pragmatism wins the day.
They're not there to 'enslave orcs'.. He dominates them. There is no ulterior motive to his domination besides the relatively short-term target of getting a thrall to a warchief position or other spot that is useful in the next plans. The player is the one who can decide to brand willy-nilly, which is fun, but that isn't what Tallion nor Cerebrimbor act as if the branding is for.
The game isn't even close to an analouge about slavery. Then there's also the fact that calling Tallion a modern oppressor for dominating Uruks [the especially evil and sauron-dominated Orcs] temporarily completely ignores that the Uruk and by extension the Black Hand are the most oppressive, genocidal, slave-based, bloodlusted force in the world since Morgoth was around. There's literally very few atrocities you could claim that Sauron's Banner
hasn't commited. The article pretends as if the Uruk society doesn't consist entirely of war, preparing for war, and taking slaves. But that's fine since not alot of people like to actually read about the stuff that they want to stand on a soapbox over, especially in video game lore that actually has stuff you can look into and/or read.
So to fight fire with fire is the most applicable scenario. The article is simply ridiculous, and you can tell the author is.. questionable, by calling Watch Dogs and it's game world immersive, with it's empty NPCs and constantly repeated scripts..
Only one bringing politics into this is you. It's a piece about NPC design in games. If you don't want politics in games, well then don't project yours onto everything.
Lol. You didn't even read the article if that's seriously what you think.
Slavery
An aside: It’s 2005 and I’m in third year of an undergrad program. My professor is teaching Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. She compares the German philosopher’s work tracing the origins of “good” and “evil” to the dictionary scene in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, where Malcolm is taught to see the way that “white” and “black”—the colors—are used to connote aesthetic and moral desirability. Blank faces. So she asks if anyone’s seen it, and I raise my hand, and then we all realize that I’m both the only one with my hand up and the only person of color in the room. We all laugh and move on.
Years later I read that, in one of Tolkien’s fictional languages, “Mordor actually has two meanings: the Black Land or the Dark Land.” The wiki’s editors add further linguistic context: “Mordor is also a name cited in some Nordic mythologies referring to a land where its citizens practice evil without knowing it.” I wonder about the symbolic work done through a mythology of a land of naïve evil.
In Mordor, the “evilness” of the Orcs serves a clear purpose: it attempts to justify the horrific behavior of Talion, who spends the latter half of the game using his ghostly powers to enslave Orc after Orc.
There is simply no dressing this up any other way. Talion places his hand on an Orc’s face. His ghostly inhabitant takes control and shouts about power. The Orc’s eyes glow blue and he immediately comes under your sway. If he is a normal foot soldier, he begins to fight for you. If he is one of the captains or war chiefs, you can then issue a specific command: go fight another Orc captain, or build up your reputation and enter the service of a chief, for instance. These characters address this act in passing, but there is no critique here. You play as the hero Talion, who enslaves the Orcs.
Keep telling others they're the ones shoehorning political and societal views onto an 'article' about 'NPCs' where the author directly implies he's bringing up a political argument, which
I must also mention again leads into a completely mislead and uninformed argument about how the Uruks of Sauron being dominated is analogous to slavery. The author should be complaining about the imprisonment,
enslavement, torture, and genetic modification [mostly getting rid of their ability to freely reason] of the people who became the Orcs and the Uruks by the dark hand if he actually gave a shit about the lore itself to know what he was talking about, but no.
I mean, if anyone wants to make an intelligent argument in this vein you can. I enjoy LOTR debates. But saying "Tallion is a [white cis scum oppressive] enslaver" is an objectively wrong account of SoM and of the concept of gray areas of morality in general. It sounds like it's written by a liberal arts grad student.. and it was.
Now, who wants to actually make this debate? I'm up for it. Less so the slavery aspect, more so the questioning of the actual process to deal with the thralls of Sauron. Sure, it shouldn't just be genocide against Orcs/Uruks, but I have reasonable belief that the ancients have tried many methods to.. remove the influence of Sauron/Morgoth from their minds. If it were as easy to turn Orcs back to completely free-willed people as it were to try to wipe them out I'd argue we should save all the orcs, but evidence isn't in that direction.. So far, Tallion dominating orcs to allow them to their own devices is actually one of the best outcomes you could have as a footsoldier of Sauron.. none of *my* warchiefs have died, and they still hold feasts, hunts, etc.. I am open to the idea of helping them, but.. it is a multiple-thousand year war, too, so things aren't as easy.
Then again, this is all ignoring the religious implications of LOTR backstory as well, but hey.
E: It also bothers me the author just calls Uruks 'orcs'.. They're completely different..
Author
Topic: Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor (Read 49560 times)