Orc females

[Fettju]

did OP read my post about the ideals of femininity from divine females, as in goddesses?

Yes, but I need to read more about that myself first. There is the divine female, and there are female goddesses.
Durga for example just seems to happen to be female, while what she does any male could do. Maybe she is a representation of a woman who has lost her children or something.

And many gods are representations of ideals that are required in society for it to work. Giving birth and nurturing children and fighting for them, are all societal "jobs"

 

[Fettju]

In some myths nymphs are pretty animalistic and savage

Yes this was my idea

 

[Queshire]

Anyways, since how other cultures handle femininity was asked....

Yin, as in from the Yin Yang symbol is the feminine half or more precisely the feminine is Yin. It's associated with, well, a lot of things actually since the whole point is that everything in existence can be aligned with Yin or Yang.

Fire is Yang, Ice is Yin. Light is Yang, Darkness is Yin. Life is Yang, Death, ghosts and the undead is Yin.

It's not just an all or nothing thing either. There was a story I read recently where yin aligned metal magic is based off of wealth, gems and precious metals while yang aligned metal magic deals with stuff like swords, spears and other weaponry. Also the person that used the yin metal magic was a dude so it's not like it's gender locked.

Of course it's not my religion or my culture so I'm probably making a hash of things, but it's an interesting subject.

 

[pmmg]

But would someone wild be a product of a culture?

I dont know. I feel like we are just spinning our wheels. Give me feminine without any female qualities. There’s only so much to suggest.

 

[Queshire]

But would someone wild be a product of a culture?

I dont know. I feel like we are just spinning our wheels. Give me feminine without any female qualities. There’s only so much to suggest.

*shrug* Well what does it imply when it's such a difficult question?

 

[pmmg]

I dont know. I dont find the question difficult. I am not sure the circumstance where I would be approaching such a character without an understanding of how I would write a woman who was wild, and still had feminine qualities. I think the question is made difficult because the OP'er is rejecting the answers that are already apparent.

But...he is free to look for whatever he wants.

 

[Queshire]

Fair enough

 

[Finchbearer]

I think queshire you raise some interesting points about the yin yang contrast, which is what I was saying femininity is made up of, those dual embodiments, which I think presents itself more extreme in the feminine, that is to say femininity can look like extreme light and extreme darkness at the same time.

Other people have emphasised on a female instinct to nurture, I assume because we instinctually carry our young, give birth to them and then (biologically) feed and look after them, but that is not to say that masculinity can’t come with a nurturing side to it. And the other suggestion that females tend to shy away from aggression or fighting, I also think that this isn’t always true, look at the animal world, it’s all over the place, female spiders are man eaters, literally. In the mammalian world females are inclined to become aggressive but it’s more about keeping their place in the group, killing prey and defending their young. If we look at cultures where human women are shieldmaidens or warriors in their own rights, then we can assume that female orcs also have this capability, I would think they do!

 

[Fettju]

But would someone wild be a product of a culture?

I dont know. I feel like we are just spinning our wheels. Give me feminine without any female qualities. There’s only so much to suggest.

There is the psychological and archetypal aspect. Only finchbearer has brought any of that up with the divine feminine.
The wild woman seems to be an archetype when you google it.

 

[Fettju]

cultures where human women are shieldmaidens or warriors in their own rights

But that didn't really exist though. They found one "viking" grave where a woman was buried and it looked like a warrior grave.
The women in the pre-modern world were required for the race to survive, otherwise another race would came and exterminate it. Women are weaker, while men and women have the same agility and quickness, so a man will always win in a battle.

That is the reason I want to find something else. I might have it with the nymph idea. Or the chimps where females change packs while the males stay.

 

[Fettju]

the answers that are already apparent

They are not apparent though. The only apparent would be: no orc females. With some inventive thought another answer might be there

 

[Fettju]

The Gollum thing is very good. And it leads to the nymph. If there is not another path from there?

 

[Queshire]

Ok, Archetypes. Let's talk about archetypes. There is an earlier theory about archetypes than Jung's in the case of Plato's Theory of Forms. Indeed, Jung acknowledged that his work was influenced by Plato.

Plato's Theory of Forms posits that there's basically an archetypical form of, well, everything and that everything we interact with in the real world is at best a dull reflection of that archetype. It's why you can look at one chair and "yep, that's a chair" and then look at an entirely different chair and go, "yep, that's also a chair." This even applies when they're as distant as one chair being a bean bag chair and the other being a king's throne.

There's two implications with this that largely seem to be overlooked in my opinion.

The first is that while Plato's Theory of Forms is largely used to look at physical objects the theory itself can be easily applied to less physical objects. It's easy for us to imagine say, an archetypical Rage, but think about when you've been angry in real life. It's always shaped by your circumstances and you probably still have other emotions knocking around in there as well. It's not an archetypical rage, but a dull reflection of that archetype.

Secondly there is something of a hierarchy when it comes to such archetypes. Physical chairs are a dull reflection of the archetypical Chair but the archetypical Chair is a dull reflection of the archetypical Furniture and the archetypical Furniture is a dull reflection of... I dunno. The archetype of the Home?

So the greater archetype of the Feminine would include all aspects. It would include both the wild, and as far as this thread is concerned, civilized. To remove the influence of the civilized would make it necessary to go a step down. Basically you're going from the archetype of Furniture back to the archetype of Chair. Of course, there's plenty of furniture that very clearly aren't chair. Most people would agree that a Bed or a Table isn't a chair, but there's also plenty of border cases. Is a park bench a chair? An ottoman? A stool? Similarly, to try and hit what you want you're probably going to have to compromise here or there.

I mean, even with the nymph style idea you want requires compromise. Growing plants, such as raising flowers, or raising animals, such as with the little birdies being fed, is the type of stuff that led to agriculture and the ability to actually grow our food is commonly cited as what made it possible for humans to be able to actually create cities. (And cities, of course, means civilization.)

 

[Queshire]

I think queshire you raise some interesting points about the yin yang contrast, which is what I was saying femininity is made up of, those dual embodiments, which I think presents itself more extreme in the feminine, that is to say femininity can look like extreme light and extreme darkness at the same time.

Ehhhh... with yin and yang I'm not sure if thinking of it as dual embodiments is the best way to go about it. As far as I understand the concept it's more like a person (or really anything) is a big ol' pot of soup with varying portions of yin to yang and sometimes you get chunks where they lean more heavily yin in one aspect of their existence or yang in another.

Also the whole thing won't necessarily stay the same throughout one's entire life as yin can create yang and yang can create yin.

 

[Fettju]

an archetypical Rage, but think about when you've been angry in real life. It's always shaped by your circumstances and you probably still have other emotions knocking around in there

It would include both the wild, and as far as this thread is concerned, civilized. To remove the influence of the civilized would make it necessary to go a step down.

Yes. As e.g. even men have female archetypes in them, all are both.
But in this instance, the archetype of wild has been kicked out of the human soul and become the orc.
So the wild is on top of the feminine in the hierarchy. The wild is the controlling aspect, and it is the opposite of civilized.
The orc female cannot be wild if she is among the males, because as they challenge each other over everything, they would challenge her, and there is also the sexual aspect.

I don't know if I express myself well enough or if it is that it is an idea that cannot come to life.
The wild -> the feminine, in that order. So the wild is the imperative.
Civilized = tamed.
Wild -> the masculine is not a big mystery, there are heaps of cultures and subcultures where men are allowed to run free, and we know what that is like.

If the female orc does what human females always do in a traditional society, she is not wild. So she must be doing/being something else.
The closest so far is a female Gollum where the ring is not the object of obsession, she herself is. And as weird obsession is more a masculine thing, it will not be a sickness in her as it is in the male.
Put a female Gollum in a forest, what would she nurture? Nurturing is a civilized drive only if it is directed towards children men the tipi the clothing etc

 

[Queshire]

I mean... there's a decent number of examples of what you want. That's especially true when you start looking at myth & legend. Baba Yaga and the goddess Artemis stick out to me.

 

[Fettju]

I mean... there's a decent number of examples of what you want. That's especially true when you start looking at myth & legend. Baba Yaga and the goddess Artemis stick out to me.

I mean...write the examples here then

 

[Fettju]

Baba Yagá is old, bony and wrinkled, with a blue nose and steel teeth, she has one normal leg and one bone leg, which is why she is often given the nickname "Baba Yagá Bone Foot".
Not really what I imagined

 

[Queshire]

Unless your orcs are immortal they're going to end up aging into old grannies if they survive long enough.

 

[Rexenm]

Yes, there is that...

The ideas of water sprites, are more flowing than the other sprites, but this may be a sort of Moses and the rock contingency. If it were an orc effort, then maybe it would be appealing, for a water sprite. Or perhaps every thought counts, as in oasis and mirage. As far as I am concerned, a female orc, tired out, afraid of dying, especially since, really, she is afraid of the masculine, is an oasis, in the sun, when I was a young warthog.