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Well met, my fellow wielders of pen and sword, lovers of fae and fantasy! And speaking of sword-wielders...
King Agnul looked out over his evil fantasy domain.
So much evil!
He surveyed with evil pleasure his evil towers, his evil stones, but most importantly, his evil followers, shaggy beasts resembling humans in their form, but distorted and foul beyond imagining: the Ukmoni that he had enslaved to his will. With these, he could conquer the world.
Our trope of topic today is one that, for lack of any official title, I'm calling the Orc Trope; or, in keeping with the evil theme, Insanely Evil Armies That Are Evil.
Most of you, probably, have read The Lord of the Rings or watched it. For those who haven't, the orcs of J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium are corrupted Elves who serve their equally corrupted master and make him a formidable army. They are notable for their ruthlessness, their irredeemability, and their hatred of good. In general, they're pretty disgusting beings.
Well, fantasy writers of many subsequent ages have seized upon this. "I, too," they say, "will invent a depraved, non-human race that can make a convenient army for my evil mastermind and stand in the way of my heroes. Since they're so depraved already, I don't even have to worry about why they're serving the antagonist, right?"
(The answer here, by the way, is wrong. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. But we'll get to that.)
Published examples of this trope are manifold. You have the Wargals in John Flanagan's The Ranger's Apprentice, the rodents collectively dubbed "vermin" in Brian Jacques' Redwall series, and the Fangs in the less well-known Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson. Like any trope, this one is not all bad. But that's why we're here, of course – to examine not only what this trope has that we should avoid, but also what it has to offer.
The Orc Trope has been a popular one partly, I feel, because it provides an enemy that can be killed without regret. It sets up the classic good vs. evil scenario, where the lines are far more plainly drawn than they often are in our own world, and that is why younger children will often enjoy these types of books – the ones where they know who to root for, and who will win. It is also, incidentally, why I think the trope has grown less popular of late, as our generation gravitates toward a world of greys where truth is uncertain. At any rate, it is still prevalent enough, especially among novice fantasy authors – not exempting my past self, ehehe... Because let's be honest, writing about humans killing other humans takes either gross naivete or genuine grit.
When you take this pure good/evil division, though, you make the complexity of your story one-sided. After all, your heroes have a mix of good and bad traits, don't they? A rounded character? They should. But for your "bad-guys", all you have is a flat plane of evil. Some of the deepest and most rendingly beautiful stories are the ones that come out of a struggle where good is known, and bad is known, but they are impossible to separate in any of the characters. It's when you wrestle with deep issues that you get deep stories.
