I want to start this article by giving you a little snippet of a report from IGN about the upcoming third season of "Rings of Power," Amazon's bastardization of J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings universe.
IGN gleefully tells you about an upcoming character in "Rings of Power": a redeemable orc:
In Rings of Power, Orcs are not simply rampaging monsters. They are more complex, with distinct personalities and deeply personal motivations. Fans even got a glimpse of an Orc family last season when we met the Orc Glûg, his wife and child. Of course, Sauron viciously kills Glûg to sow distrust among the other Orcs and turn them against Adar. But that tragic ending underscores how in the Second Age, the Orcs are more than just mindless cannon fodder.
The expansion of the Orcs as a more complicated aspect of Middle-earth continues in Season 3 as we are introduced to the character of Marnûkh, an Orc unlike any we’ve ever seen in a Tolkien adaptation. He appears in Rivendell claiming to be a defector from Sauron’s army who wants to help the Elves fight back. “He claims to know all kinds of things about Sauron's strategy and reveals to the Elves that Sauron is trying to make the One Ring,” says McKay. “And if he succeeds, he will defeat everyone, including the Orcs, because the One Ring will now make them subservient to him, slaves to him forever, and there'll never be another Orc rebellion like Adar, who died last season, led.”
Marnûkh is a character meant to challenge long-held perceptions of Orcs. He’s such a departure from past depictions that within the production, Marnûkh has picked up the catchy nickname, “the Orc with an arc.”
I've been screaming from the rooftops that modern culture has been trying to de-villainize the villains in stories for some time, and this is another drop in the bucket, but it's an egregious drop because it suggests that orcs are redeemable and capable of moral consideration.
To be clear, Tolkien was of the mind that everyone and everything should be able to find redemption. His Catholicism made this something he thought should be done in some way; the issue is that he never cracked the code of doing that with the orcs. The orcs served a very specific purpose in his stories, and as such, their redemption was never something he could get around to in his universe.
And Tolkien was a master storyteller and creator. He could also argue morality better than most, and the proof of that isn't just in his stories; it lived within his friend Jack Lewis, an atheist who would convert to Christianity with the help of Tolkien and would later go on to be known as C.S. Lewis, the creator of some of the most foundational writings of modern Christianity.
One has to wonder: If Tolkien hadn't gotten around to redeeming orcs yet because he was too busy trying to crack that code, then how do these sub-par writers at Amazon think they're going to do it? The answer is hubris, a false sense of moral superiority, or both.
Let me lay out for you a quick list of problems this redeemable orc Amazon has written opens up.
If Orcs have always been capable of redemption, then this would've hardly been the first one. Orcs, understanding something that goes beyond their own self-interest, would've awoken to the fact that there is something larger and grander to fight for that didn't involve fear or reprisal from a powerful entity. They would've recognized an idea or value that was larger than the most powerful dark lord in the world.
If that was the case, then the orcs would've created pockets of resistance that would've, over time, melded into communities, especially in times of peace when there was no dark lord ordering them about.
These communities would've likely grown into small civilizations with their own armies, and that would've created territories. Over time, these moralized and "good" orcs would've likely created alliances with other races that involved things like trade and even military agreements.
These military alliances would've become incredibly handy when a dark lord like Sauron popped up to declare war, because that would've created an entirely new front to fight again, which would've split his forces further and made his conquest far more complicated. Sauron would've gone from a major threat to desperately fight against to a force that could be managed with the right tactics and cooperation between races, including the massive number of orcs that would've likely been there by the time he came to power.
And if that's the case, then Sauron isn't that dangerous. Dangerous still, but not the overarching threat against Middle-earth he is in Tolkien's story. "Good" orcs may have readily shown up to fight because, in a way, they have the most to lose if Sauron wins. They would probably fight more ravenously than all the other races because they would refuse to go back into darkness.
It doesn't work. A "good" orc, even one, collapses the entire story because it gives orcs moral options that Tolkien did not give them because he hadn't yet figured out how without breaking his world's logic. Something that these Amazon writers are doing without pondering too much about how this would affect the story.
It almost seems to me that the writers are just trying to introduce some sort of novelty into their failing show to get people to tune in, but novelty alone does not make for good writing. A gimmick can only get you so far, and if there's a gimmick that's been played out way too much lately, it's the "The villains aren't actually all that evil" go-to.
It's tiring, not just because it's overused, but because it puts the burden on the viewer to reanalyze their own prejudices and accept something evil on the off chance that it could, through some miracle, be redeemed. We're instructed to do this as a society by these moral busybodies as the knife plunges.
