So women ruin everything basically.
Japanese women don't seem to force their egotism into men's interests or hobbies (like shonen or seinen publishing exist as distinct catagories from women's manga genres), so it seems Western civilization has a specific problem with the idol of egalitarianism, and perhaps, dare I say, a greater lack of self-awareness displayed in trying to invade something they don't even honestly want or care for, just out of envy that a men's space exists. Then again, maybe I have a romanticised view, and it's being slowly eroded.
Tolkien's orcs are the result of deliberate eugenics experiments to create obedient soldiers without moral qualms, and even then the dialogue between minor orc characters shows they don't like being enslaved this way.
Principally, they are a symbol. I worry that this is materialising them again, albiet for a more understandable reason. Tolkien merely justified them in material terms, talking about their creation by Morgoth from Elves, because he wasn't into making the metaphysical obviously metaphysical like C S Lewis, but preferred grounding it in contingent history, for people to subconsciously understand on the level of symbolic. Exactly what George Lucas did with Star Wars, which is why I see him as America's Tolkien.
We don't really need to give Orks a eugenic origin any more than a sociological one. It is enough to say they were wrought and mishapen by evil.
Speaking of George Lucas, that is someone that it's easy to under-estimate, or under-appreciate. A lover of pulp. Grew up on Flash Gordon, Commando Cody and the like. Thoroughly embedded in the pulp roots of sci-fi, that he didn't disown or feel embarrased by, but continued to venerate throughout his work. Ended up making one of the most balanced works of science fantasy, between the "elevated" contemporary, and the mythology and metaphysical. In the process inventing much of the technology of modern cinema, such as digital editing, fighting studios every step of the way, who didn't understand the point.
Like JarlFrank said, to really drill down into the fundamentals and understand the origins of the entire fantasy fiction landscape, you have to go to the oldest source material; epics like Gilgamesh, the Illiad, the Ramayana, the Norse sagas, the medieval romances, pulp authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E Howard, H P Lovecraft, C L Moore, Clark Aston Smith. But it isnt enough to read something by rote, without understanding. I think preliminary to that, video game writers have to do some deep spiritual soul searching. Dig down, past social expectation and programming to examine what really makes something great.
It's with that, that appreciation builds for the seemingly archaic ideas in older works. A guy at work was telling me the other day that he read Lovecraft and couldn't see the big deal. I casually mentioned
"well, I guess he was the first to use the idea of ancient alien, and cosmic indifference". The guy hadn't even considered that the beings like Elder Things were extraterrestrial life of eons past, and seemed to have never considered their context as having been the first to explore cosmic ideas.
So many people will bounce off an idea thinking it's passe, not realising the huge conceptual leap stories like Conan or At the Mountains of Madess represented.
