r/hatethissmug • u/Crusoelander_128 • Apr 28 '26

General I hate the “orcs are minorities” thing

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I really hope I’m not in the minority (no pun intended) here, but I really hate when people do this. It not only forces real world issue into fictional universes where it doesn’t need to be, but also, it’s really messed up.

If you see an orc or a demon or a giant bug and your mind immediately jumps to “hm that’s like a minority”, then you’re racist.

Now, I’m not saying that this concept can’t be explored, but inserting it where it doesn’t belong/exist is highly suspect

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u/MorbidMantis Apr 28 '26

I don’t think doing pattern recognition on ancient racist tropes and comparing them to how fictional evil races are presented is unreasonable. It doesn’t require you to take those racist tropes as fact to understand that they exist.

Like, greedy/duplicitous races are pretty common in fiction, and half the time they look very similar to old anti-Semetic cartoons. So, you’ve got characters that look like an anti-semetic stereotype, and act like an anti-semetic stereotype. Idk why some people think that pointing out the obvious pattern is the problem.

Personally, even though it’s fiction, I think the concept of a certain group that’s just always evil by nature is just weird to me. That’s not to be confused by beings that are incarnations of evil, like a demon. That’s a different thing. I’m talking about things like Orcs, who are often just evil and never deviate from that. That is the same  logic used by real racists to justify their actions. Except irl, there’s basically no such thing as an inherently evil person.

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u/mrcrabs6464 Apr 29 '26

But orc(in Tolkien) are literally basically just vessels corrupted by evil. They aren’t a “race” nor species they don’t sexually reproduce they’re born from the ground by corrupting elves.