Annotated 24-2
Yeah, that’s right, it’s chapter 24 and we’re still rolling out characters who will have at least secondary significance to the overall narrative, sometimes two of them in two pages. That’s just how we roll.
So here’s the thing about the orcs, to me, as we present them here. They are not equal in intelligence to humans, which makes it not only strategically easier for (ahem) The Silver Centurion to try enslaving them, it also makes it emotionally easier. He can tell himself it’s no different than yoking a cow.
But just because none of them are going to be snapping off sassy one-liners or designing a flag, that doesn’t mean they don’t meet the definition of a civilization. Human/sentient rights shouldn’t be alienable by an intelligence test.
You know, I kind of wonder what effect it would have had on the comment section had it be clear to the audience at this early date that not only Gastonia, but specifically Ardaic, had set out to enslave the orcs just as Harky did.
Wait a few days…
I have to ask: how much of the helmet’s resemblance to Ardaic’s mustache was deliberate?
I’m gonna defer to John on this… I think we had a general note that SC COULD BE Ardaic and he ran with it. Not sure, though. I’ll look it up if John doesn’t weigh in.
yeah… pretty much. I think I might have ran too far with it. :-\
I thought it might be a subtle hint, it turned out none too subtle, didn’t it?
I actually love it. Especially near the end of the series when he lends his Silver Centurion necklace to someone and I was totally thrown off because WAIT I THOUGHT IT WAS ARDAIC NOOOO *re-read archives and question my whole theories about the comic* And then it really was Ardaic after all. It turned out awesome.
Well, my initial reaction went about like this: “That guy looks familiar….” “Ardaic…?” “No, it’s gotta be a bluff.” And subsequently, much of what Sahara said.
Would it be ok to be treated like that if they were cows, though? Or maybe chimpanzees? They kinda resemble those.
Hoo boy
They are sapient. Take a good look at the previous page: they live in a community that cares for the old and infirm as much as for the young, create clothes to wear and complex abodes to dwell in. Going by Brunhilde’s instructions, they understand spoken language. You’re dissing humanoids by their looks and comparative level of technological advancement; Gastonia welcomes you to its army.
I’m not sure “genotypic IQ” is a valid measure of a species’ worth or rights to begin with. That’s akin to equating a vehicle’s height with intrinsic value.
To clarify a bit and make this more relevant to your comment:
1. A vehicle serves multiple purposes, and can even if it’s derelict and unusable for transportation. The height of the vehicle implies none of that functionality, by itself. Thus, by my comparison, I’m insinuating IQ (especially that of the
modelsubspecies in question) is similarly not indicative of utility, worth, or appropriate social strata.2. This would seem to indicate that incorporating Orcs or not is the wrong question; the question should be how, as you seem to agree. This does not, however, mean that the wrong question creates problems, because it shouldn’t even have been the first question asked; it’s entirely out of order in every logical sense. We include cats, dogs, and other pets in our society; we don’t ask if they should get political status at all, except perhaps as property (or, to choose more generous, albeit hypothetically-more-appropriate phrasing, as wards of the average pet-haver, which comes with certain implied compulsions and responsibilities if you ask anyone who cares for one and is not derelict in their caretaking role).
3. If such a line between “person” or “chimp” isn’t clear, then perhaps that’s a good indicator that an exclusive designation is inherently too unwieldy to fulfill a role as precedent for treatment, and that – again – the question this was posed as an answer to is the wrong one to be asking. We should ask, at the very least, how, and not whether, integration might be appropriate – even in a hypothetical scenario like this.
I mean just because they usually have six kids, doesn’t mean they will if their circumstances change. Humans also have large numbers of births per family, when several of their children fail to make it to adulthood, but tend to have far fewer when they live more comfortably and more of their children live longer. (families during some periods having up to 14 kids!) It’s entirely possible this is true of orcs, I can’t speak to chimpanzees, though as the ones in captivity aren’t having population explosions I’d guess it’s true for them as well, but that could be because of humans controlling population.
I’m not sure the government would need to sponsor them, there’s tons of labour in this society given the tech and dependency on farming, there’s no reason orcs wouldn’t find a place in the work force, particularly if the state were to just to start integrating them into certain areas. It really depends on the orc’s ability to learn. Basically if they make good slaves (which chimps and cows do not) then they can make good paid workers, a slave still needs to think, and solve complex problems or else every stage of production they are part of needs minding and then you end up with such an inefficient work chain, why bother having them? They don’t need to know why they’re doing what they’re doing, but they can’t be like ants/automatons and get thrown off by simple change to the task, or like chimps and have no ability to concentrate on complex chains of thought for any length of time. I mean if they can build those houses, and make those clothes, they are at least on early human levels of intelligence (which makes them leagues above the intelligence of the chimp) I mean these folks must have fire.
The cognitive differences must not be so great, it would be more of a difference in how they think, rather than if they do. Literally every other race depicted falls into fighting behavior when threatened, except the orcs. That difference alone implies some very different models of behavior to anything we can easily predict. These guys act very different from humans. There would never be an orc uprising, even chimps will become aggressive when threatened(actually chimps are really aggressive).
As to your suggestion of whether the state should continue to feed them if they keep having children but can’t find work. I mean does Gastonia feed humans or elves who can’t find work? The problem is: why can’t they find work? There is tons of work in this pre-automated society, even if their entire race was just moving things from one place to another, an entire people of porters, they could be sustained on that. I mean as hunter gatherers their population didn’t explode, and they didn’t fall into raiding or acquisitional behavior when their resources became too little to support them, even though there are tons of other peoples around to take things from (unlike in our own development, where it was just us or people in a slightly better or worse situation, and we did fall to raiding).
Basically the orcs as depicted are extremely passive, I think they must just stop having kids when things get lean or their space gets too crowded, otherwise if they were at all successful their growth (just at human rates) would cause pressure that pushed them into other spaces and caused conflict. But other than as free labour, they seem to be completely conflict averse, and not interact that much with the other races. Frankly these guys are really weird, and I’m not sure how they’ve survived so long without any real aggression.
Believe the orcs look is influenced by early artistic depiction of Tolkien’s Orcs, seen a few works by artist that gave the Orc guerillas like build. Not as intimidating as the movies but less cartoonish than the D&D depiction.
Well, if we choose to interpret these questions generously – it’s not really right to do that to the animals we treat as livestock or zoo fodder, either.
I’m talking about enslavement, of course.
As far as using these animals the way that we already do, though… I can’t speak to the zoo aspect, as we are, so far as I know, the only species that keeps others in captivity for their own good, let alone for our own amusement/education.
Keeping livestock (which is to say, domestication and subsequent mutual exploitation), on the other hand, is an example of behavior in the range between commensalism and straight up symbiosis, so at least from that perspective, it’s not strictly the sort of interspecies dynamic that only humans engage in. To give you an example that’s a little more commensal than the way we treat cattle, industrially, look at honeybees.
We generally treat domesticated honeybees with great care, ensuring that they are safe from predators and disease (at a herd, er, hive level), provide them with all of the resources we possibly can, and when they have performed the behaviors we exploit, we harvest their honey without causing any significant harm to them. This is akin to the level of mutually-beneficial relationship we’d ideally have between citizens and government (in more generous schools of thought, anyway – and we can consider anyone who isn’t living a tribal lifestyle in relative anarchy, or behaving like a tyrant, to be a “domesticated” human, by the way).
I’ll spare you my personal definition of commensalism, but you can find the general concept defined on Wikipedia. We’re hardly the only species to do it, so setting aside the morality of farming, it is at least not a completely unprecedented phenomenon.
I think you guys are interpreting Cori’s question incorrectly. I think they were questioning our treatment of cows and chimpanzees, rather than the Gastonian’s treatment of the orcs.
I replied as if that were the case, myself, but I’m not making that assumption personally.
My response above, on the other hand, was simply covering an interpretation that was not already addressed by others, and was slightly more generous in terms of assessing the character and intent of the questions (as “not insincere or untoward”, specifically), rather than assuming they were a criticism of the creative intent and subtext employed by our writers and artist (which, to offer my opinion, I think would be misplaced at this point – this was addressed earlier in the commentary accompanying the rerun).
Frankly, it doesn’t matter too much, since either that interpretation or another are really non-sequitur relative to the content of the page, as well as the immediate plot arc. But I went with the interpretation of the question that was more interesting to consider, since it’s a moral question, and also not unimportant to discuss from an anthropological and biological standpoint.
I was more just poking at T’s remark of being “emotionally easier”. And, particularly, the “sapient” part, hence the chimp comparison.
TBH, just trying to stir things a bit, comment section has been too clean, too quiet.
Apparently the comment chain I replied to regarding this was removed? I hope I didn’t say anything that caused offence. Long story short, I think the Orcs are a very unique depiction of the race, one we don’t see in fantasy that often. They are intelligent enough to do most of the basic things people do, but seem to have no aggressive drive. This means they are likely to get pushed around, and menaced by other peoples, but if treated well I think there’s a lot of good things they could bring to Arkerra’s societies. Basically they (and we) might learn a thing or two from a people who don’t have an angry bone in their body, and just want to live in peace. Even if they aren’t as “intelligent” as us.
Wasn’t you. Somebody else requested a deletion of their own post.
Thanks for letting me know.
I think the questioning was more about how easy it is for someone to reduce another being to a “ressource” if this other being is considered different and specially inferior. In a more broad sense… the morals applied to the handling of domestic animals are those of humans, not those of the animals themselves (if they had one). I think of that every time that I hear the phrase “to humanely dispatch” something.
as far as a helmet can have an expression, second to last panel looks like
„well shit, that stung“
and in the last panel he might as well have said „you made my head hurt from cognitive dissonance, therefore I kill ya!“
Ironic that you’re argument for the orcs here runs so counter to your argument against the kobolds. It makes it all the more clear your arguments were meant to avoid accepting the mistake you made rather then actual desire or intent.
‘Sapient rights shouldn’t be alienable by an intelligence test.’
‘But also these kobolds are so stupid they can’t even farm and only know how to wear pants and use tools so…’
My desire and intent was always to treat kobolds as somewhat humanoid but not entitled to more rights than a fox in the henhouse, which was the only role they took on in any appearance they made, whereas orcs’ enslavement was presented as a civil-rights issue from the very beginning. Flo and Erica may’ve felt differently at the start; Flo definitely did by the end. So we did make the mistake of thinking we were on the same page until it was too late to do anything about it. Had I anticipated how the discussion would go, I would’ve pushed for the kobolds not to use clothes and tools, not because I think those are proof of sapience but because they affected many others’ interpretations. So I could call that a mistake, too.
I’ve got to come to the same bottom line I reached the last time this came up, and the time before that. By my lights, there is not enough material about the kobolds to prove their sapience*– but there is definitely not enough to disprove it, either. As you argue elsewhere, just running around and stealing human stuff without creating anything themselves is a role sometimes assigned to native societies in colonial fictions or accounts. So it basically comes down to what you choose to believe. And I can’t really stomach the idea of our heroes blithely butchering kobolds the way they do every time kobolds show up if they’re actually participating in genocide of a bunch of sapient beings. I prefer my heroes to be the ones opposing the genocides, thanks!
*You’re right about this word, by the way.