Rings Of Power And Orcs. I Get Wanting To Show That Villains Can Be Redeemable, But That’s Possible

Rings of Power and orcs. I get wanting to show that villains can be redeemable, but that’s possible if and only if said villain wants and pursues redemption and recognizes where they’ve been wrong. LOTR and every related work prior to RoP consistently showed us orcs who firmly believed it was their right to torture and eat people. Saruman’s main obstacle in using them was that they couldn’t get along; they were killing each other for the opportunity to dismember and eat Merry and Pippin. There’s a lot of work to do before you can make people sympathize with orcs and RoP was not equipped to do even a fraction of that work.

Not to mention it didn’t need to be done. LOTR was already full of nuanced race relations, redeemable villains, and characters making themselves better or worse via their own free will. I would venture a guess that this is why Tolkien made the orcs so intensely reprehensible in the first place—in a world where Gollum, who attempts murder onscreen multiple times and explicitly states his desire to eat more than one of our beloved protagonists, is a sympathetic and redeemable character, you need a very concrete reason to see orcs as consistent, clear-cut villains. I would say we definitely have that. The orcs engage is gruesome violence and they like it that way; we never see an orc who wants to do things differently, therefore by their own choice, none of them have been redeemable.

Gollum is very nearly the same, except for a few moments where he shows disgust for what he’s become and a desire for something good and lovely, like sharing a meal with friends. It only takes a little bit to make him redeemable and it’s a clear picture of how real-life redemption can be accomplished from the measliest of starting points.

But you have to have that starting point, and I don’t think it’s unrealistic or in any way bad to have characters who don’t embrace that starting point, especially when there’s another character right next to them showing that their actions could have been forgiven if only they had any remorse.

the reason "robot racism" is often a really stupid metaphor is the same reason that like. discrimination against demons or vampires or whatever doesn't work, is because there's often a pretty justified reasons humans are scared of vampires or robots or whatever, in a way that doesn't apply to real life minorities, like a fantasy author will be like "the reason vampires are discriminated against is because most of them and kill and eat people for fun and pleasure, and so humans respond by trying to kill them, isn't that so sad" and like no that's a perfectly fine reason to not trust vampires i think.