Fantasy Tropes/Cliches that Annoy You

[Max_Killjoy]

We had this exact discussion before, and it didn't get across, but I'll try to explain this concept one last time.

If 1) Orcish Culture is Evil

And 2) just about every orc (With a handful of notable exceptions) is the product of Orcish Culture.

Then assuming that every Orc you meet is Evil is perfectly reasonable within the narrative, it is ALSO the textbook definition of racial prejudice.

The objection people have is to a world where textbook racism IS perfectly reasonable.

We're not saying that the random peasants shouldn't assume that Orcs are evil in a world where 99.9% of orcs are evil. We're saying that the Writer shouldn't have written a world where 99.9% of Orcs are Evil.

Acceptable ways to do it

1) Orcs are NOT people. They're the physical embodiment of hate or something, dark sorcerers create Spawning Pits that produce fully-grown Orcish warriors. If literally every orc in the world is a bloodthirsty raider, then explain that.

2) Orcs ARE People, with everything that implies. They may have an aggressive and martial culture, but it's not inherently Evil. Orcish society exists as something more than an excuse to send bloodthirsty raiders at innocent human settlements. Orcs can be kind, cruel, noble, brave, ect. Better yet, have multiple Orcish cultures, or have multiracial cultures that include Orcs.
Sure, Orcs living in the Badlands might be raiders, but Orcs on the coast fish and sail and make wonderful Scrimshaw. Orcs in the city just want to get a decent wage for a days work.


It's also fine to have people WITHIN the narrative assume that all Orcs are Evil, because Racism is a thing, the key is to make sure your narrative doesn't agree with them.

First, as a writer, if my entire story takes place in a scale and scope that only exposes the characters to a single orcish culture out of many, and that particular orcish culture encourages its members to be brutal, merciless, domineering, etc, and take whatever they want from anyone who can't stop them, especially those non-orcs over there who are all weak and soft and inferior because they're not orcs (ironically, this is a racist orcish culture), then I do not have any reason or responsibility within that story to include some other orcs who are different. That's another story, somewhere else, and/or with a different scale and scope.

Second -- and this is where I turn some against me I'm sure -- a culture can be evil. There are evil cultures that encourage evil actions and produce evil people, in real life as much as in fiction. I cannot give IRL examples, obviously.

To me, it only treads on "racial ground" if an orc that was, say, raised by non-orcs still ended up behaving in exactly the same way as those orcs, with no mitigation at all, because orcs are "evil by blood" or some such.