It wasn't woke, but it was still stupid that they went from the horde of savage barbarians to "fairly reasonable shamanistic dudes who happened to be possessed by demons". There should've been more in the way of internal strife between Warcraft 2 and 3 that transformed the Horde, but nothing like that really happened. Which made the Orcs the most boring faction in the entire game.
Some people have taken the piss in the past for me saying this, but I think that geeks represent the last sub-culture in the West that longs for the medieval spiritual perspective, which they channel into love of adventure fiction, science fiction and magic. Contemporary mindsets just cannot understand the medieval; hence why some just don't "get it" and pooh pooh fantasy, preferring some film about money and cars. They seek to "humanise" things, injecting 'irony', when the things were earnest and symbolic. Orcs were not a race. Orcs were a mytho-psychic symbol. Thus humanising them utterly misses the point entirely, to a massive and stupendous degree. A modern egalitarian raised on Marxist 'historical materialist' assumptions as most Hollywood writers and English lit students are, just cannot see anything symbolic beyond the material.I broadly agree but I do not think the issue itself is the focus on character psychology. In a long running series its basically impossible to not tackle it unless you keep constantly swapping out characters. In fact in a long running I would be just straight up detrimental to no pay at least lip service to it.
The real problem is that said psychological focus is used in service of a deconstructive or rather destructive goals.
To give a simple example of what I mean:
Modern writers call this "trope deconstruction" or more recently "subversion of expectations" but what they end up doing is just destruction. Because to de-construct you first need to understand the construction itself. In writing this would be successfully being able to take a trope and build stories around it and understand why and how said tropes even exist. Only after that you can start deconstructing anything. Without that first step you are just destroying the old trope without really replacing it with anything.
To be more specific, take the orcs. The classic trope of orcs is a set of characteristics that ultimately paint the orcs as a force of nature that is about as strong as the humans. They are still wild, unpredictable and naturalistic as a typhoon but they exist in a way that the hero of the story can realistically tackle. This then further informs the attitude of the broader fantasy world towards them, their look and the way they are used in the story.
To deconstruct this you would have to keep all the existing characteristics but slot them into a different or broader context. For example you could make the point that orcs are objectively evil and animal like but as an active part of the ecosystem that helps prevent other problems from growing out of control(in case of D&D lets say it the giant wolf population). Or you can make the point that without them there is nothing uniting the many different fantasy races together and a much worse conflict would arise without them. Or you could take a moralistic stance and argue that if you cross the threshold of genociding one race what is there to prevent you from genociding another and another?
What the comic and most modern writers do however is that they flush the whole concept of an orc and just make them into regular dudes who just happen to be green and (sometimes) ugly. This just completely removes the trope. Nothing is deconstructed because now that orcs are no longer savage beast but just green dudes a world and narrative built around the assumption that they are beasts no longer works. Sure they are now more complex and "psychological" characters but that is at the expense of everything else. "Expense" because once the writer is OK with breaking one building block of his narrative there is nothing keeping him from doing the same with all the other blocks.
The addition of psychological focus is not the problem. The reason why and how is.
The end result is a work of fiction that is dysfunctional both internally and externally. Internally its a mess of contradictory plot points/ideas and externally in the author's head its a dunk on something that exists entirely outside of the work itself(and mostly also the perspective reader).
It need not even be reasoned in such cause and effect material ways. A barrier exists between the mundane profane world and the mythic. Like how the Celts saw the otherworld as being a place that could be accessed through caves and lakes. In Star Wars, some characters are human, and some like the Emperor, are not actually human but symbolic and on the other side of the veil.
Yes, this is a big part of it.
Make Sword and Sorcery Great Again!Some people have taken the piss in the past for me saying this, but I think that geeks represent the last sub-culture in the West that longs for the medieval spiritual perspective, which they channel into love of adventure fiction, science fiction and magic. Contemporary mindsets just cannot understand the medieval; hence why some just don't "get it" and pooh pooh fantasy, preferring some film about money and cars. They seek to "humanise" things, injecting 'irony', when the things were earnest and symbolic. Orcs were not a race. Orcs were a mytho-psychic symbol. Thus humanising them utterly misses the point entirely, to a massive and stupendous degree. A modern egalitarian raised on Marxist 'historical materialist' assumptions as most Hollywood writers and English lit students are, just cannot see anything symbolic beyond the material.I broadly agree but I do not think the issue itself is the focus on character psychology. In a long running series its basically impossible to not tackle it unless you keep constantly swapping out characters. In fact in a long running I would be just straight up detrimental to no pay at least lip service to it.
The real problem is that said psychological focus is used in service of a deconstructive or rather destructive goals.
To give a simple example of what I mean:
Modern writers call this "trope deconstruction" or more recently "subversion of expectations" but what they end up doing is just destruction. Because to de-construct you first need to understand the construction itself. In writing this would be successfully being able to take a trope and build stories around it and understand why and how said tropes even exist. Only after that you can start deconstructing anything. Without that first step you are just destroying the old trope without really replacing it with anything.
To be more specific, take the orcs. The classic trope of orcs is a set of characteristics that ultimately paint the orcs as a force of nature that is about as strong as the humans. They are still wild, unpredictable and naturalistic as a typhoon but they exist in a way that the hero of the story can realistically tackle. This then further informs the attitude of the broader fantasy world towards them, their look and the way they are used in the story.
To deconstruct this you would have to keep all the existing characteristics but slot them into a different or broader context. For example you could make the point that orcs are objectively evil and animal like but as an active part of the ecosystem that helps prevent other problems from growing out of control(in case of D&D lets say it the giant wolf population). Or you can make the point that without them there is nothing uniting the many different fantasy races together and a much worse conflict would arise without them. Or you could take a moralistic stance and argue that if you cross the threshold of genociding one race what is there to prevent you from genociding another and another?
What the comic and most modern writers do however is that they flush the whole concept of an orc and just make them into regular dudes who just happen to be green and (sometimes) ugly. This just completely removes the trope. Nothing is deconstructed because now that orcs are no longer savage beast but just green dudes a world and narrative built around the assumption that they are beasts no longer works. Sure they are now more complex and "psychological" characters but that is at the expense of everything else. "Expense" because once the writer is OK with breaking one building block of his narrative there is nothing keeping him from doing the same with all the other blocks.
The addition of psychological focus is not the problem. The reason why and how is.
The end result is a work of fiction that is dysfunctional both internally and externally. Internally its a mess of contradictory plot points/ideas and externally in the author's head its a dunk on something that exists entirely outside of the work itself(and mostly also the perspective reader).
The way the gentleman in the video puts it is that balanced fantasy contains both contemporary people like Han Solo, and pure archetypes like Emperor Palpatine:
Also a person attains apotheosis into an archetype by actually moving along the spectrum from an "all too human" contemporary into a living symbol, as Luke Skywalker did. He starts out as a whiny contemporary not wanting to stay on the farm for another season, and becomes a stoic demi-god. But what motivates people to again and again "humanise" Orcs, is that some people in life just cannot see or understand anything beyond materialistic conditions. They attribute everything to social circumstance, so cannot conceive of a symbol of entropy itself, like Sauron or Palpatine or the Orcs. So you get "noble savage" Warcraft 3 Orcs that were simply "misled" etc. Tolkien Orcs are pure archetype, they don't actually have existence as a material race; they are a pure symbol.
I agree that deconstructionism is a major problem, but have a completely different idea about why, and it's value. To destroy is always easier than to create. Deconstructionism, I suspect, was purely in most cases, a weapon for casting people's morals into doubt, to ferment resentment for a host of reaons. In genuine works that reach toward a supra-human truth, such as Star Wars and Tolkien, the deconstructionism is usually mistaken, a simple inability to see the symbolic, and to reduce it to human proportions by myopic people. The healthy form of "deconstructionism" is just called "honesty".
It need not even be reasoned in such cause and effect material ways. A barrier exists between the mundane profane world and the mythic. Like how the Celts saw the otherworld as being a place that could be accessed through caves and lakes. In Star Wars, some characters are human, and some like the Emperor, are not actually human but symbolic and on the other side of the veil.
You don't need to say Orcs are evil "because... XYZ" (they were corrupted, they were possessed by demons, they were infected by a dark plague). You don't need to explicitly say what character is on either side of the veil, you just need to know who is, and treat them as a different catagory of thing, a spiritual being despite them being materially justified in an apparently materialist setting.
Yes, this is a big part of it.
All peoples and societies have idols they can't stop worshipping. For the modern, it's egalitarianism that has the biggest hold. People would turn to worshipping another idol in it's place perhaps, but right now, an inability to treat say Orcs as a symbolic evil race, is rooted in an extreme idolisation of the concept of "equity" above truth-reality, to the point where anti-egalitarianism, in any realm, constitutes a massive threat to their ego-identity.
There’s no such thing as deconstruction. That’s nonsense made up by tv tropes.I broadly agree but I do not think the issue itself is the focus on character psychology. In a long running series its basically impossible to not tackle it unless you keep constantly swapping out characters. In fact in a long running I would be just straight up detrimental to no pay at least lip service to it.
The real problem is that said psychological focus is used in service of a deconstructive or rather destructive goals.
To give a simple example of what I mean:
Modern writers call this "trope deconstruction" or more recently "subversion of expectations" but what they end up doing is just destruction. Because to de-construct you first need to understand the construction itself. In writing this would be successfully being able to take a trope and build stories around it and understand why and how said tropes even exist. Only after that you can start deconstructing anything. Without that first step you are just destroying the old trope without really replacing it with anything.
To be more specific, take the orcs. The classic trope of orcs is a set of characteristics that ultimately paint the orcs as a force of nature that is about as strong as the humans. They are still wild, unpredictable and naturalistic as a typhoon but they exist in a way that the hero of the story can realistically tackle. This then further informs the attitude of the broader fantasy world towards them, their look and the way they are used in the story.
To deconstruct this you would have to keep all the existing characteristics but slot them into a different or broader context. For example you could make the point that orcs are objectively evil and animal like but as an active part of the ecosystem that helps prevent other problems from growing out of control(in case of D&D lets say it the giant wolf population). Or you can make the point that without them there is nothing uniting the many different fantasy races together and a much worse conflict would arise without them. Or you could take a moralistic stance and argue that if you cross the threshold of genociding one race what is there to prevent you from genociding another and another?
What the comic and most modern writers do however is that they flush the whole concept of an orc and just make them into regular dudes who just happen to be green and (sometimes) ugly. This just completely removes the trope. Nothing is deconstructed because now that orcs are no longer savage beast but just green dudes a world and narrative built around the assumption that they are beasts no longer works. Sure they are now more complex and "psychological" characters but that is at the expense of everything else. "Expense" because once the writer is OK with breaking one building block of his narrative there is nothing keeping him from doing the same with all the other blocks.
The addition of psychological focus is not the problem. The reason why and how is.
The end result is a work of fiction that is dysfunctional both internally and externally. Internally its a mess of contradictory plot points/ideas and externally in the author's head its a dunk on something that exists entirely outside of the work itself(and mostly also the perspective reader).
Tolkien wrote idealistic fantasy. Martin wrote nihilistic fantasy. Leftists write bad fantasy. It’s that simple.
So Warcraft 3 was woke and bad back in 2002 when it did exactly this? I guess that would make sense.
Say what you will about Joseph McCarthy, but he was right and genuinely had reasons to fear the overtaking of american Media...There’s no such thing as deconstruction. That’s nonsense made up by tv tropes.I broadly agree but I do not think the issue itself is the focus on character psychology. In a long running series its basically impossible to not tackle it unless you keep constantly swapping out characters. In fact in a long running I would be just straight up detrimental to no pay at least lip service to it.
The real problem is that said psychological focus is used in service of a deconstructive or rather destructive goals.
To give a simple example of what I mean:
Modern writers call this "trope deconstruction" or more recently "subversion of expectations" but what they end up doing is just destruction. Because to de-construct you first need to understand the construction itself. In writing this would be successfully being able to take a trope and build stories around it and understand why and how said tropes even exist. Only after that you can start deconstructing anything. Without that first step you are just destroying the old trope without really replacing it with anything.
To be more specific, take the orcs. The classic trope of orcs is a set of characteristics that ultimately paint the orcs as a force of nature that is about as strong as the humans. They are still wild, unpredictable and naturalistic as a typhoon but they exist in a way that the hero of the story can realistically tackle. This then further informs the attitude of the broader fantasy world towards them, their look and the way they are used in the story.
To deconstruct this you would have to keep all the existing characteristics but slot them into a different or broader context. For example you could make the point that orcs are objectively evil and animal like but as an active part of the ecosystem that helps prevent other problems from growing out of control(in case of D&D lets say it the giant wolf population). Or you can make the point that without them there is nothing uniting the many different fantasy races together and a much worse conflict would arise without them. Or you could take a moralistic stance and argue that if you cross the threshold of genociding one race what is there to prevent you from genociding another and another?
What the comic and most modern writers do however is that they flush the whole concept of an orc and just make them into regular dudes who just happen to be green and (sometimes) ugly. This just completely removes the trope. Nothing is deconstructed because now that orcs are no longer savage beast but just green dudes a world and narrative built around the assumption that they are beasts no longer works. Sure they are now more complex and "psychological" characters but that is at the expense of everything else. "Expense" because once the writer is OK with breaking one building block of his narrative there is nothing keeping him from doing the same with all the other blocks.
The addition of psychological focus is not the problem. The reason why and how is.
The end result is a work of fiction that is dysfunctional both internally and externally. Internally its a mess of contradictory plot points/ideas and externally in the author's head its a dunk on something that exists entirely outside of the work itself(and mostly also the perspective reader).
Tolkien wrote idealistic fantasy. Martin wrote nihilistic fantasy. Leftists write bad fantasy. It’s that simple.
So Warcraft 3 was woke and bad back in 2002 when it did exactly this? I guess that would make sense.
Woke and bad has its roots in the 70s really - with antecedents going back to Communism and even earlier. But the 70s was when all this bullshit started cropping up in academia, then the 80s was when it started being taught from there, then the 90s were the public arm of it, the "softening up" to encourage the public to be okay with certain aspects (e.g. gays, etc.). Then the Noughties was when it started to seep through to school education.
It's been brewing for a while, yes. Even with games, it started creeping in about the late 90s, at first under the guise of "okay this is a faggot, but look how heroic and interesting a person he is!" and that general kind of idea (as well as under the guise of the more traditional liberal "why can't we all just get along?") At first one was willing to accept the odd faggot or girlboss as an interesting exception, so long as the game was otherwise a good 'un.
"Beloved"?
I wanna highlight some other stuff, while I have the topic of sci-fi/fantasy fiction on my mind. Let's cover another angle in this perfect storm of illiteracy. That fiction has become increasingly an anti-male environment. So a writer will increasingly have a different mindset to the one required for appreciation of the genre's roots in pulp, more concerned with genres like "romantasy". Rather than have genres for different sexes, the totalitarian universalism of the egalitarian idol dominating the West, means that all genres must become "romantasy".
The publishing industry was already a female-dominated industry. Around 80% of books are sold to women, and 80% of publishing staff are women. That wasn't always the case; straight men used to be huge readers, so what changed? Nothing is written for them anymore. Not content to let men have one enclave, say science fiction, they had to colonise this catagory that appealed to males. Thus you ended up with the Hugo Award, once won by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Herbert, Niven, etc, being 100% female or trans nominees in 2020 and 2021:
Yes, you read that right. Not 50/50 "egalitarian". Not 75%. 100% fucking percent. Yep, literally in the most male appealing literary genre, the nominees were 100% women or trans, two years running. And feminists have the gall to say that men are 'aggressive' or 'imperialists'. Until every surface of every building is plastered with women and minority self-obsession, true egalitarianism has not been achieved. I know of no more totalitarian phenomenon in our time than a liberal woman.
The result, summarised by this judgemental headline:
This is a Tweet by fantasy author John A Douglas:
He illustrates by looking at the average book shelf in a Target store:
Actually men probably are under-reported as readers, because they are now seeking older fiction from used book stores, that are not counted in official book sales. A science fiction fan ends up reading books last officially printed before 1970. A pulp fan ends up reading books that perhaps haven't even been in print since 1950. A Star Wars or Star Trek fan is reading old Expanded Universe books last published in paperback form in the 1990s.
What effect does all this have on literacy, and video game writers not being well-read in fantasy and science fiction? An 80% female market?
Saruman's Uruk-hai are the product of eugenics. Other Orcs are the descendants of tortured/mangled Elves. Essentially the product of Sauron's hatred, whereas Saruman was very precise in his own designs.
Read the Silmarilion et al. Morgoth deliberately engineered them, along with many other creatures like dragons, werewolves, vampires, etc., as bioweapons. This involved torturing innocent people and animal cruelty, which is what makes it evil. Morgoth is Satan meets Doctor Moreau.
OK, it was a long time since I read the books, but the original point still stands that Saruman's Uruk-hai are superior to the ones created by Morgoth.
I heard good things about Imaro, but have not read it.
More pertinent, who wants to read about ooga booga muh dik for an entire book?
Have you even seen the level of negrophilia and nigger worship in the West?
The question was about honestly depicting African history and culture, not "we wuz Kang Arfur".
Waves of mud hutt dwelling, spear chucking, cannibal subhumans?
How would you account for white woke liberals in this context? They sure bring down the European average.
