Let’s work with a counterfactual here: let’s say their reasons are valid, and it’s cool to take something which looks exactly like racism and put it in your game because a wizard did it/it’s a satire/there’s this one good half-orc who was president or something. None of those reasons negate the visceral reaction of fear, pain, and panic I’ll suffer as a person of color who experiences racism. It’s like flinching away from a blow even if I’m certain it’s a feint. I don’t decide; my muscle memory and subconscious do.

If you don’t feel that fight-or-flight flinch, either you’re blessed with resilience, or you haven’t experienced those racist stimuli in the context of racism before. In the moment, if I’m with strangers and we’ve never discussed the topic before, I don’t know who means well and who’s a real threat (cw: sexual assault discussion). The flinch reaction doesn’t factor in the reasons for a racist-seeming expression or the knowledge that we’re pretending. It lives in the same realm of unconscious bias where my own racist preconceptions live as well. It’s a thing racism does to us which we cannot undo, any more than we can cease to be racist. So even if I believe the setting’s author didn’t intend orcs to read that way … it doesn’t matter. I play, I flinch.

Under the circumstances, many people of color will simply bow out. “No hard feelings. It just isn’t for me,” we’ll say after the game. Maybe we won’t realize what happened or why until we postgame the incident with other PoC later on. Maybe we never will.

Reclamation and Rehabilitation

You probably know several people of color who love to roll orcs, though. If you didn’t before, you know one now, and it is I. But why would I volunteer to play as an offensive stereotype of myself?

The impulse comes from empathy. I see the way the game describes orcs and, as sure as I flinch, I empathize. “I’m sorry they did you like that,” I say to them, in my heart. “I don’t believe you’re evil or ugly or stupid. They said that about me too. Maybe we can work together to prove them wrong.” That last sentence, that action, comes from experience. I know how it might play out if someone who doesn’t care plays that orc (or, for that matter, a person of color). So I make myself vulnerable to this racist signifier and take it upon myself, because now I control the narrative around that signifier. I reclaim it.

Beyond reclamation, though, I believe gamers and game designers of all races can characterize orcs—either as individual characters, or as a species—who fight, rather than propagate, racism in fantasy fiction. You can already see the principles below in play in works like Carly M Ho’s Thousand Cousins. Some of the rules apply to game design specifically; others, to fiction as well. You may recognize some of these principles from my previous articles about race and history. The guiding rule is: Since we cannot reliably extricate orcs from racial associations, we must characterize them with the same compassion, respect, and attention to stereotype we extend to people of color.

In other words, we must personify and humanize orcs.

Center Their Stories

Allow orcs to star in the narrative, as main characters or player characters. Give them the complexity and likability due to main characters. Give them rich relationships, messy and loving families, diverse cultures, and cute pets. Give them religions or schools of thought which knit their society together and help them strive to be better people. Give individual orcish heroes distinct narratives from one another that sometimes are and sometimes aren’t about their orcish nature. Give orcish antagonists inner lives and compelling causes. When they die, give their deaths meaning and pathos apart from their relevance to non-orcish main characters.

Diversify Orcish Culture

This is that planet of hats we talked about in “Less of a Question, More of a Comment.” There should be different kinds of orcs with different cuisine, different clothing, different weapons, and different languages. Maybe they even look different or have different skin colors. You’ve read “May I play as a character of another race?”, right? What about “Best Practices for Historical Gaming”? Check those out. Bring that knowledge here. I’m not saying it’s gotta be rainbow orcs all the way down (although I do sincerely hope someone writes a minigame called Rainbow Orcs All the Way Down), but you can handle two or three distinct orcish cultures, right? Of course you can.

Orcish Culture Hard Mode: Lean Into Real-World Cultural Signifiers

Okay, Tolkien. You want Orcs to look like Asians? Let’s do this. Associate orcs explicitly with real-world human cultures. Represent those cultures positively, accurately, and respectfully. You want some Mongol-types? Give them nomadic settlements, sturdy tents, herds of livestock, gigantic floofy dogs, and throat-singing virtuosi. When you have your nonviolent signifiers down, then give them some martial culture: visionary generals, eagle wrestling, horse archery, and a weird overrepresentation in the traditional wrestling league of the orcs who live on the island to the east.

Eschew Ability Score Modifiers

When you cap orcs’ intelligence or charisma below humans’ or elves’ but give them bonuses to strength and constitution, you feed the narrative that orcs are a martial race. They’re inherently better suited to jobs or classes focused on physical violence, while other races or species outperform them at intellectual or social classes and pursuits. When I run D&D, I drop ability score modifiers from every racial traits listing and give all characters three bonus ability score ranks (either +2 +1, or +1 +1 +1) after point-buy. In Burning Wheel, I remove caps to Perception and Will for orcs and kerrn. Next time you play one of these games, mention these racist dimensions and ask your GM to implement this variation for this reason (and pay real good attention if they say no). Now, every race has a wide diversity of choices with regard to character class, and we don’t have some races who are inherently better soldiers or athletes or musicians than others. The system won’t fight you when you roll up genius orc wizards, unstoppable gnome barbarians, and incomprehensible goblin performance artists.

EDIT: I’ve gotten some excellent questions on social media and elsewhere asking how I feel about weirder racial abilities like breath weapons or poison resistance. I consider many of those traits less fraught because they’re harder to tie to human characteristics which show up in racial stereotypes. Some exceptions exist: for example, a species with a prehensile tail sounds pretty dope, but if you code them as African you’re recreating the monkey stereotype. Remember, we’re not concerned with orcs’ martial prowess in and of itself; we’re concerned because it maps to real-world systems of harm and misinformation. So as you create, remember to step back and check whether you accidentally replicated real-world signifiers and stereotypes.

Present Real People of Color as Well as Their Fantasy Analogues

Are you presenting fantasy races as analogues for real-world racism? Okay, cool, but don’t just have it sit there. Actually say something helpful about racism, like maybe start with “racism is bad” instead of just leaving it to your players to decide they do or don’t like it. Also, make sure your world also has real Black and Asian people in it in addition to fantasy monsters who represent us. No greenwashing, OK? Scarlett Johansson is already getting our parts, don’t make us compete with orcs as well.

Deny Inherent Moral Character

Look, at some point in the future we can argue about demons and evil spirits or whatever, but until we do: never invent groups of sentient beings who are born evil and destined for villainy and its violent, cruel wages. Just like how no one’s born a warrior, no one’s born evil. It’s boring, unrealistic, and encouraging of similar attitudes toward marginalized people.

Tie Characteristics More Closely to History and Environment

If you’re going to generalize about a group, don’t just say “this group has this trait.” That framing takes the trait out of context and makes it feel inborn and absolute rather than a product of history and environment. If this orc is good at fighting, why is she good at fighting? What happened in her upbringing that led her to the martial arts? She learned them from her parents? Okay, what historical and cultural factors influenced them? All the orcs in this family are good fighters? What global forces and outside attackers caused them to value physical fitness and martial heroism? Content needs context.

Decolonize Violence

Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. —Frantz Fanon

This is the really important one.

There’s this nagging voice in many of our heads right now, mine included, that we don’t know whether or not to heed. It says, “But violent orcs are fun and empowering to play sometimes.” Fine. Don’t say Mendez never gave you anything.

We’ve established that giving orcs inherent, inescapable violent advantages perpetuates histories of harm; but an orcish pacifism would still highlight violent stereotypes through conspicuous negation. We may have orcish martial traditions, as long as we avoid setting those traditions above and beyond other peoples’, thus regressing orcs to the martial race myth. We must give orcs the agency, the choice to opt into or out of violence, in moderation as well as extremes.

When we play as orcs and we opt into violence, then, let us do so to upend imperialist instruments of subjugation. If the colonizing mind’s predatory, dehumanizing tendencies created orcish violence, let us redirect that violence into liberation. They tried to give us orcs who were uncivilized; we will return to them orcs who are decolonized. If orcs originate in settler-colonial fantasies, who better than orcs to comprehend the following:

Orcish violence is the violence necessary for decolonization.

Orcish anger is the righteous indignation of the downtrodden and unheard.

Orcish hatred is the hatred of systemic oppression.

As orcs, let us understand violence: how to fight, why to fight, when not to fight, how to attack, how to defend, how to hold the line, and how to sneak and sabotage. We know the toll battle takes on mental and physical health, and how to support the wounded and traumatized. We study war’s technological and logistical dimensions. We teach the physical and intellectual skills they know to others—to anyone who would take up arms against the oppressor. We fathom the moral weight of what we do. We may strike our enemies down, but we will never dehumanize them as the imperialist dehumanized us.

We’re done with orcs as inhuman natives. We’re done with orcs as chattel-gladiators and animated punching bags whom we drive ahead of us so we can kill them. Every orc is a person the way every human is a person. Orcs can get it wrong and go too far and fall to evil just like humans can and do. But the orc as a symbol of decontextualized violence is over. The horde is the community. The axe is the tool that breaks chains.

Orcs punch Nazis.