News and Views: One Of Those Freaks, or Orcs Orcs Orcs
Originally Posted February 2004.
Thanks to the Lord of the Rings movies, the fantasy creatures called orcs have never had a higher profile than they do now. There was even an orc reference on, of all things, the TV show Will and Grace, where usually the only trolls that appear would be old men with gold medallions trying to pick up one of the show's gay protagonists, Will or Jack. In a recent episode, Will wound up talking with someone about the Return of the King movie. As part of this, Will said, "When Theoden's daughter Eowyn stabbed the Witch-King, I screamed like an Uruk-hai."
The other character said, "Hey, I liked the movies, but I'm not one of those freaks."
Which freaks? Orcs? Extreme Tolkien fans? People highly into Freudian swords? The mind boggles. I qualify as two out of three of those and I'll let you guess which two. This snippet piqued me because I'd just spent several weeks mulling over orcs, writing the content for this update. There are two pieces:
The Unnatural History of Tolkien's Orcs- I originally started this essay as a minor orc FAQ. What pushed me over the edge into writing this in-depth analysis was the need to clarify what, exactly, Tolkien's orcs mean in contrast to all the fanon and fantasy-writing expansion on orcs.
A Question of Breeding - This slightly mellow piece of fanfiction had its beginnings in a Gandalf quote. Wondering who might have told Saruman about the orcs brought me around to two guys I've written about a great deal, Elladan and Elrohir, for a genfic ride around Eriador. After taking counsel with Saruman, they start to doubt their own quest against the orcs…Radagast and Gandalf then offer their own perspectives on the orc conundrum.
There are also some new Links and some new darkfic recommendations. The .PDF formats of both Unnatural History and Warm Beds are Good can now be read byaccessibility software reading for the blind. (If this isn't the case, please let me know!) You still can't print Warm Beds, but you can print Unnatural History at a low resolution. I apologize for any past inconvenience. And, as a last note, I've put up a new Guestbook. If you entered something there in the past, I saved the old one for myself.
Next up from me is slash, a touch of het, and more slash. The long story "Cair Andros Fire" is finally going to be finished, and I'm also working on a zine project. The zine will collect all the standalone Ansereg stories, and three new stories with a similar theme, into a print or CD volume. Like the t-shirt project, it's just for fun, and I'm doing my best to make it a quality piece of fan insanity.