Orc babies, anyone?

[Finchbearer]

Simon Tolkien is a consultant for Rings of Power so we have to assume that orc babies were passed in the writing room…

What I do like is that we are getting to see parts of the world not shown on screen before. That would be fun to see as a creator, how other people interpret different parts of the lore, and show them visually. I just can’t imagine orc mother and baby going inside a house and being domestic. It doesn’t tie in with any of my ideas around orcs. I suppose I would have thought the women and children raise eachother, and the men and boys have a more brutish culture.

 

[Queshire]

It doesn’t tie in with any of my ideas around orcs. I suppose I would have thought the women and children raise eachother, and the men and boys have a more brutish culture.

Orcs in general or specifically LotR Orcs?

 

[pmmg]

Well...I dont know the input of Simon Tolkien, but he is not JRR.

JRR is not around to ask anymore, so it is slipping away. I am not sure this is relevant to the question. Just because someone is doing it with Tolkien's work does not change that it may be against his wishes, or that he would or would not approve.

There have been many changes to orcs by many people. The idea of Orc families has been around for quite a long while. And the idea of good peaceful orcs have been too. So, this is not new to the fantasy community.

If in the future, someone was to do this to my work, I would be very distrustful of them, and not want them to change the meaning or the messages. Amazon would never get approved for my work. If someone who has control after me, takes the money, and lets them in, I will haunt them.

 

[Queshire]

So the origin story of LotR's Dwarves shows that only Eru, LotR's version of god can grant souls. The Dwarves were first created by someone else and without souls they were basically little more than fleshy action figures. Eru did end up granting the Dwarves souls as a gift and that's how we get the Dwarves we see in the series.

That begs the question of why Eru would grant souls to beings as evil as Orcs? The answer Tolkien came up with was that he wouldn't. Thus they became corrupted forms of Elves; beings that already had souls, with later generations of Orcs descended from the original ones.

That matter is why Tolkien changed his mind so much about the origin of Orcs.

However, by all regards Tolkien's faith was rather important to him and the idea of beings with souls that were truly irredeemable never quite sat right with him.

I don't know if he ever ended up coming up with a solution to that which he was fully satisfied with, but there's an argument to be made that one way to resolve the contradiction is to have them not be truly irredeemable.

 

[Finchbearer]

Orcs in general or specifically LotR Orcs?

Specifically LOTR

 

[pmmg]

The example is of the Orcs of LOTR, sparred by depiction in the ROP show, but the question is really one to all authors about their creations and how others might wish to put their own spin on it. For a reader, I am good with whatever they want to glean from it, from other creators who wish to make a run with my work...I am not. I want to know there will be an effort to remain true to it, and hold onto what it was about. Deciding my world would be more interesting if they showed my baddies as being good, would not be the direction I would want them to go. It would not be much different than re-writing star wars so the storm troopers were not clones, and dark side was not bad. If its not, it recasts the entire thing, in the light of who are the good guys and who should we really be rooting for?

Taking the black and white and making it grey....sure, we can do that, but if I wrote it black and white, Its not because I want it grey.

I don't think the orcs are a great example of this, as they have been interpreted that way many times already. ROP is late to the game.

 

[Prince of Spires]

But if a creator was to take your work and change the message of the work in a big way, would you be happy to take the pay cheque?

For me it comes down to 2 things really. The size of my bank account before they offered me the cheque, and the size of the cheque.

While money isn't everything of course, if right now someone comes to me and offers me $10 million, then they can do whatever they want with my IP. If on the other hand, I already have that $10 million, then I would probably be a bit pickier...

Of course, there's another side to this as well of course. Like Mad Swede said, I wouldn't sell the actual IP or rights to the characters. So if someone creates something that totally does not match my vision, I would probably write a novel that completely contradics said creation and explicitly make it not-canon. Which is of course in the end what Rings of Power is. It's just glorified fan-fiction with a big budget.