A take going around says evil by nature is bad. Orcs born evil? No. But evil by nurture is okay! Orcs weren't born that way, it's just that their entire culture is evil. And… no. That's just as bad in only a slightly different way. 1/11
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 17, 2021
This “entire culture is evil” take isn’t the way to escape bioessentialism in fiction and worldbuilding. Besides being another shallow, cardboard villain take, it’s been the propaganda tool of errant groups for eons. It’s been the tool of countless errant regimes. 2/11 Regimes who use such propaganda, to flip this on its head, could be characterized as evil for this objectification, which they use and have used to justify serfdom, racism, marginalization, slavery, and genocide. But the regime is a temporary element of culture. 3/11
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 17, 2021
No culture can be entirely classified by its worst elements, especially if those elements are temporary or changeable. Especially if the majority of the people involved are subjected to rather than willing participants in those elements. 4/11, again, illustrate the point. The regime, its policies, and its misdeeds by no means and in no way allow anyone with intellectual integrity to classify the entire Germanic culture as evil. We could use imperial Britain in a similar vein. Or colonial USA. 5/11
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 17, 2021
Similarly, in fiction, the demon-worshiping drow predominant in D&D don’t, despite the extant shallow worldbuilding, need to make the entire drow culture evil. Same with orcs, goblins, and what have you. That shallow worldbuilding isn’t doing anyone any favors. 6/11 No, that shallow worldbuilding makes drow (or orcs, or what have you) less interesting, their "culture" a cardboard cutout. It also means the heroes in conflict with these people can make no meaningful connections with them or aid progressive countercultural elements. 7/11
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 17, 2021
Heroes can’t connect with any drow or orcs, you see, because all fight to maintain their “evil culture.” You know, the same way every citizen under every evil regime in history fought to keep it intact because they wholeheartedly believed in it. The malarkey is obvious… 8/11…because it's a claim that a culture lacks progressive and positive elements. But people and their culture don't work that way. This isn't to say that culture can't have a lot of problems. (Ours does.) But those problems don't make a whole culture evil. Lean, maybe. If… 9/11
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 17, 2021
…we’re going to bother with the shorthand that is good and evil in any case. But I digress. The point is that eliminating cultural essentialism from fictional design should be held as important alongside eliminating bioessentialism. We creators can and should do better. 10/11 Doing so is better for creating convincing, complex, nuanced fiction. That sort of fiction is better, more useful, for play because you can have your villains alongside believable, complicated people, among whom heroes can find allies in what might seem like unusual places. 11/11
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 17, 2021
PS-All this talk about evil belies the fact that you don't need evil to have conflict. Conflict is what drives stories. And that makes the use of essentialism even worse.
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 18, 2021
The original sense was that orcs were metaphysical servants of the Shadow thread in creation, controlled by Melkor and later Sauron. Makes some kind of sense. Who knows how they might change in the Fourth Age?
In fictions that remove that context, different ball game. A lot of modern fantasies remove that context or make the people willing participants in their corruption, as with the drow of the Forgotten Realms. "Metaphysical servant" is a misnomer because "servant" suggests free will that's not there. It reduces people to puppets.
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 18, 2021
And if the people are puppets, do they have a culture beyond this puppetry? Can they escape the puppetry? Or are they supernatural slaves? And then, the real villain is the entity at the top. As you say, what happens when that being goes away?
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 18, 2021
