One of Tolkien’s letters describes orcs as“squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”

And I was thinking about, 1.) Look at the legs on these Mongolian wrestlers all decked out for a major national wrestling festival, and also 2.) how Tolkien’s racist description wasn’t enough, and orcs have been depicted as more and more grotesque over time. Canonically orcs more or less just look like humans, but that’s not “other” enough so they keep getting turned in to more and more bizarre looking monsters.

Either way, this is what i’m thinking about when i’m laid up with the 'rona. If y’all like wrestling or buff men in tiny pants check out Mongolian wrestling. From what I understand it’s a hugely popular sport there and has been for like a thousand years.

  • PolandIsAStateOfMindEnglish
    10·
    15 days ago

    whatever their orcs are supposed to be.

    Brits. Stolen from Warhammer orcs, which originally were satire on British football hooligans - Warcraft 1 was supposed to be Warhammer game originally but the licence did got revoked as soon as the game started to appear fun, we can’t have that in early Warhammer games. So the Blizzard did a typical Blizzard thing and took them anyway, just without the satire. And this also checks out on many other levels:

    • were opressed for few years but cannot shut up about that ever
    • speaks about honor and freedom all the time but constantly do mass murders and pretends its some oopsie factions just coincidentally in power at the time
    • more or less coerce other people into joining and then colonises them in the United Kingdom Horde and before you notice there are orcish military bases everywhere
    • promote rapacious capitalism and widespread environmental destruction
    • speaking of environmental destruction they destroyed one world already, also doing genocide
    • served demons
    • have legends about being noble people before getting coerced into demonic servants and genocide by coincidentally small clique and rest having no agency whatsoever, which breaks under some scrutiny
    • their architecture is incredibly shitty and their cities looks like dumps

    To be fair the early W1 and W2 orcs were mostly bog standard evil horde just with some effort put in, but the more time passed, the more British they became.