Thoughts on the OOTS goblin predicament

[hamishspence]

But beyond those admitted points, I don't think orcs in the story are presented with the usual trappings of "the other tribe". On the contrary, they speak like British enlisted men circa 1916, they gripe about their bosses, and they're convinced their enemy is evil; they feel very much "us".

That's the "in real life, they are on both sides" bit coming into play -

he took the way people he disliked "on his side" behaved, and made that "the other side".

[Jason]

I'm perfectly willing to embrace the death of the author, but this is not that. The text is the text, saying that readers are likely to interpret it in a certain way and therefore the text itself is in some way "bad" is a further leap, not one I'm willing to make. If you cut out the author you're left with a bunch of lexemes and their reflection in the reader's soul, and since I didn't personally derive that meaning from the story, I can't coherently criticize it for having that effect on others. I could criticize the way others interpret it, or say that the text combined with a certain type of viewpoint in the reader provokes a bad reaction, etc.

The school of thought that says "others are likely to misinterpret this author," is a rather self-congratulatory one. It is the same school that would abandon The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because in illustrating one boy's moral awakening to the evils of slavery and racism it must of necessity depict a society that contains both slavery and racism. The use of the language and idiom of the time are sure to offend a modern reader, goes this school of thought, or induce some modern reader to use the hurtful language in the book. Therefore it is better not to read the book yourself, and not to allow others to read it.
People who read Lolita might do so to indulge or justify their own pedophilia. People who read A Clockwork Orange might decide they should enjoy a little of the old ultraviolence themselves. And people who read The Lord of the Rings might decide they are justified in killing people that don't look like them.
It's a school of thought that assumes the worst of the reader while thoroughly patting itself on the back for its own enlightened approach.

[mjasghar]

From experience it’s usually useful idiots being used to create a reaction in larger society in order for those using them to present themselves as the solution. Which in itself is a classic fantasy trope.

[brian 333]

In LoTR there were no 'good guys' raiding 'peaceful goblin villages'. The closest we get to that is when Thorin & Co. find that their convenient shelter is a goblin trap and they have to get out while goblins try to kill them.

In fact, I can find zero instances of the good guys killing orcs because they look different.

The orcs are not ugly so the good guys can kill them. They are ugly because Melkor used his powers to corrupt and pervert elves. He made caricatures of them in the image of what they hated most. Elves love life, so make them worship death. Elves love freedom, so make them slaves and slavers. Elves love to garden and build so make them despoil and destroy. Elves love beauty, so make them ugly.

If you take away that Tolkien wrote anything that says it's okay to kill because ugly, then you missed his point by a long mile. He was saying that corruption makes what was beautiful ugly. And that lesson was hammered home in The Scouring of the Shire where the hobbit paradise was in ruins. Grima Wormtongue was the epitome of this lesson.

[Lemarc]

The school of thought that says "others are likely to misinterpret this author," is a rather self-congratulatory one. It is the same school that would abandon The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because in illustrating one boy's moral awakening to the evils of slavery and racism it must of necessity depict a society that contains both slavery and racism. The use of the language and idiom of the time are sure to offend a modern reader, goes this school of thought, or induce some modern reader to use the hurtful language in the book. Therefore it is better not to read the book yourself, and not to allow others to read it.
People who read Lolita might do so to indulge or justify their own pedophilia. People who read A Clockwork Orange might decide they should enjoy a little of the old ultraviolence themselves. And people who read The Lord of the Rings might decide they are justified in killing people that don't look like them.
It's a school of thought that assumes the worst of the reader while thoroughly patting itself on the back for its own enlightened approach.

This seems tangential. If you claim the death of the author, as Ionanthus did and I complied with, then there is no "misinterpreting this author". There is only the interplay between the text and the individual reader with their individual circumstances and influences.
Edit: in other words I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, if you're addressing me.

[Ionathus]

I'm perfectly willing to embrace the death of the author, but this is not that. The text is the text, saying that readers are likely to interpret it in a certain way and therefore the text itself is in some way "bad" is a further leap, not one I'm willing to make.

First off, I never said the text itself was bad. I said it contained a thoughtless stereotype. In a monumentally influential work like LotR, that stereotype spawned countless portrayals inspired by LotR that copied its tropes & surface-level aesthetic wholesale. Tolkien's narrative choices regarding the orcs are unfortunate in isolation: they turned into something much more harmful when people started copying him.

If the goal is for all the antagonists and their minions to be nasty folk it's important that they don't all share distinctive visual traits. It's difficult for people to not make connections based on visual cues.

If all nasty people are ugly in a story then a sizeable amount of the audience will read it as "Ugly=Evil". Same for skin colours and other traits that would make them stand out from the Good Guys. Of course, floating cubes wouldn't have this issue, but primarily because "Cube=Evil" doesn't really have any downsides to it (as long as you don't go around calling people blockheads).

Basically, for the sake of avoiding the audience making unfortunate connections the bad guys either have to be universally completely alien, or you can't rely on visual cues to separate them from the Good Guys.

Incredibly well said. That's the key point to me: giving every single one of your minions defining visual traits is the point where it starts to get uncomfortable.

And one of Tolkien's letters makes it clear what's intended to be implied:

Yikes. That is...actually much worse than I thought. Originally I thought he just did it unintentionally but the fact that he was aware of what he was doing makes me much more uncomfortable about it.

The school of thought that says "others are likely to misinterpret this author," is a rather self-congratulatory one. It is the same school that would abandon The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because in illustrating one boy's moral awakening to the evils of slavery and racism it must of necessity depict a society that contains both slavery and racism. The use of the language and idiom of the time are sure to offend a modern reader, goes this school of thought, or induce some modern reader to use the hurtful language in the book. Therefore it is better not to read the book yourself, and not to allow others to read it.
People who read Lolita might do so to indulge or justify their own pedophilia. People who read A Clockwork Orange might decide they should enjoy a little of the old ultraviolence themselves. And people who read The Lord of the Rings might decide they are justified in killing people that don't look like them.
It's a school of thought that assumes the worst of the reader while thoroughly patting itself on the back for its own enlightened approach.

You have misunderstood. I am not saying "others are likely to misinterpret this author." I am saying "others have misinterpreted this author." Entire decades of LotR fans have taken that portrayal of orcs and put it in their own fantasy novels, their own movies, their own roleplaying games (as both designers and DMs). Tolkien's mark on modern fantasy is undeniable, and the convention he constantly reinforced of "Beautiful=Good" and "Ugly=Evil" is stamped on the entire genre as a result.

And by the way, characterizing viewpoints you don't agree with as arrogant and self-congratulatory doesn't help your point.

In LoTR there were no 'good guys' raiding 'peaceful goblin villages'. The closest we get to that is when Thorin & Co. find that their convenient shelter is a goblin trap and they have to get out while goblins try to kill them.

In fact, I can find zero instances of the good guys killing orcs because they look different.

The orcs are not ugly so the good guys can kill them. They are ugly because Melkor used his powers to corrupt and pervert elves. He made caricatures of them in the image of what they hated most. Elves love life, so make them worship death. Elves love freedom, so make them slaves and slavers. Elves love to garden and build so make them despoil and destroy. Elves love beauty, so make them ugly.

If you take away that Tolkien wrote anything that says it's okay to kill because ugly, then you missed his point by a long mile. He was saying that corruption makes what was beautiful ugly. And that lesson was hammered home in The Scouring of the Shire where the hobbit paradise was in ruins. Grima Wormtongue was the epitome of this lesson.

"The good guys kill orcs on sight because they look different" and "the orcs are never peaceful or neutral, they always attack on sight and cannot ever be reasoned with, and by the way they all look different" are functionally the same when we are talking about the implications of the story.

I am not saying that Tolkien's work was explicitly arguing that it's okay to kill ugly things. I am saying that his writing and descriptions subconsciously enforced that idea.

[danielxcutter]

I am not saying that Tolkien's work was explicitly arguing that it's okay to kill ugly things. I am saying that his writing and descriptions subconsciously enforced that idea.

And that the works afterwards that copied his homework forgot about what nuance there was in the first place, from what I’m reading?

[Fyraltari]

Incredibly well said. That's the key point to me: giving every single one of your minions defining visual traits is the point where it starts to get uncomfortable.

I would say it's questionable when that's the case and none of the people with said traits is framed as a good person.

With that said I've always been curious about Elrond's statement that "all races fought on both sides of the War of the Last Alliance save for Elves." Either Elrond is wrong, counts Orcs as Men or some Orcs fought alongside the Free People at the End of the Second Age.

Yikes. That is...actually much worse than I thought. Originally I thought he just did it unintentionally but the fact that he was aware of what he was doing makes me much more uncomfortable about it.

Yeah, he wanted the orcs to be ugly so he decided to base their physical appearance on what was deemed ugly in his time and place. At least he acknowledges that's a european standard of beauty rather than some objective truth but it's still pretty bad. He could simply have had them be generally ugly if he really wanted to go that way.

Tolkien's mark on modern fantasy is undeniable, and the convention he constantly reinforced of "Beautiful=Good" and "Ugly=Evil" is stamped on the entire genre as a result.

That, I think, is attributing too much importance to Tolkien. "Beauty=Goodness" was a near-universal trope of fantasy literature (and, honestly all media) looooooong before Tolkien was even born.

[Ionathus]

And that the works afterwards that copied his homework forgot about what nuance there was in the first place, from what I’m reading?

Yes, exactly. No matter how well-thought-out and morally nuanced his own writing was (and I still don't buy that there was quite as much nuance as some claim), we still wound up with the most influential modern fantasy story having these very Black and White morality tropes to the casual observer.

"Orcs are evil, and the main way to distinguish them from other races is their ugliness/skin color/cosmetic differences (and both their evilness and their cosmetic differences are a result of Melkor doing something bad in that Other Book that only the super fans even try to read)." If the problem is that people frequently gloss over that bit at the end in parentheses, it doesn't really matter how good the parenthetical explanation is. A writer's job is to be clearly understood while they are telling their story. Appendices and author interviews and DVD commentary are all well and good, but they are for the most dedicated consumers, not the public at large.

The cultural understanding, as a whole, will not read the parentheses. You have to make sure the main story holds up. Tolkien's orcs can't really stand up on their own in that regard.

ninja edit:

That, I think, is attributing too much importance to Tolkien. "Beauty=Goodness" was a near-universal trope of fantasy literature (and, honestly all media) looooooong before Tolkien was even born.

Yes, fair point. I didn't mean to imply he pioneered the concept. But there are plenty of other fantasy works that don't fall into that dichotomy, and it's unfortunate that the most famous modern fantasy work (by a large margin) reinforced the Beauty=Goodness trope so thoroughly.

[danielxcutter]

Yes, exactly. No matter how well-thought-out and morally nuanced his own writing was (and I still don't buy that there was quite as much nuance as some claim), we still wound up with the most influential modern fantasy story having these very Black and White morality tropes to the casual observer.

"Orcs are evil, and the main way to distinguish them from other races is their ugliness/skin color/cosmetic differences (and both their evilness and their cosmetic differences are a result of Melkor doing something bad in that Other Book that only the super fans even try to read)." If the problem is that people frequently gloss over the bit in parentheses, I won't really be convinced regardless of how good the parenthetical explanation is. A writer's job is to be clearly understood while they are telling their story. Appendices and author interviews and DVD commentary are all well and good, but they are for the most dedicated consumers, not the public at large.

The cultural understanding, as a whole, will not read the parentheses, so you have to make sure the main story holds up. Tolkien's orcs can't really stand up on their own in that regard.

To be fair, we do have the benefit of hindsight and there’s no way in hell that he’d have realized what would result from his works. And bluntly, a lot of fantasy works have even less reason for Evil species than Tolkien’s.

But yeah, it’s really unfortunate about how it turned out in the end.

[Fyraltari]

"Orcs are evil, and the main way to distinguish them from other races is their ugliness/skin color/cosmetic differences (and both their evilness and their cosmetic differences are a result of Melkor doing something bad in that Other Book that only the super fans even try to read)." If the problem is that people frequently gloss over the bit in parentheses, I won't really be convinced regardless of how good the parenthetical explanation is.

Besides it's only an in-universe explanation and as such doesn't matter. The real reason is "the author wrote it that way." Like, that wasn't an organic development of his worldbuilding, Tolkien himself said that the reasons Orcs are how they are is because he needed his Dark Lords to have vast armies of servants. He then spent his entire literary career failing to square that circle.

Also, I recommend The Silmarillion, it's a really good book.

[Worldsong]

With that said I've always been curious about Elrond's statement that "all races fought on both sides of the War of the Last Alliance save for Elves." Either Elrond is wrong, counts Orcs as Men or some Orcs fought alongside the Free People at the End of the Second Age.

Or he didn't consider orcs to be people.

[Ionathus]

To be fair, we do have the benefit of hindsight and there’s no way in hell that he’d have realized what would result from his works. And bluntly, a lot of fantasy works have even less reason for Evil species than Tolkien’s.

But yeah, it’s really unfortunate about how it turned out in the end.

I can believe that he didn't expect to become the most famous & influential fantasy author in history, sure. I also don't 100% blame him for not noticing all the cultural baggage and assumptions he was subconsciously putting into his stories. We all do that, regardless of time period, as our values shift. I do think that he could've been a bit more thoughtful about it, especially because according to lots of other posters' quotes and snippets from other essays, it sounds like he realized the implications after publication and tried to backpedal on some of it.

But ultimately, I don't mean to make judgments on Tolkien as a person. I just think we should examine what he wrote, and ask whether some of it (e.g. portrayal of orcs) is really all that appropriate these days. And if we examine that portrayal and conclude that it doesn't hold up, I think we should let that inform how we interact with everything that the portrayal inspired...including our assumptions about D&D.

[Last_Riot]

But how many goblins would have agreed to do that if the Azurites didn't have a history of slaughtering them?

Did you read How the Paladin got his Scar?

Because from that, it's pretty obvious that 1) the hobgoblins would have been fine with attacking Azure City, 2) Many of them actively wanted to do so, and 3) the only one actively working to stop it, the then Supreme Leader, was largely doing so to build up his nation first, essentially maximizing his odds of successfully invading.

Xykon and Redcloak made it happen then. The paladins gave additional grievances which could have been used as justification. But even if you remove Team Evil and the Sapphire Guard from the equation, odds are that the Hobgoblin nation would have invaded Azure City sooner or later. And given that this specific Supreme Leader displayed his skills in taking advantage of Fenris' design of rapid procreation, the threat he posed would just have continued growing, and growing, and growing. And being depicted as a kind of outcast or maverick by his focus on infrastructure, if for whatever reason he was never to invade during his lifetime, his successor would have certainly done so, either due to his more traditional hobgoblin mentality or due to his failure to match his predecessor's ability to scale up infrastruture to meet the demographic boom.

[Ionathus]

Besides it's only an in-universe explanation and as such doesn't matter. The real reason is "the author wrote it that way." Like, that wasn't an organic development of his worldbuilding, Tolkien himself said that the reasons Orcs are how they are is because he needed his Dark Lords to have vast armies of servants. He then spent his entire literary career failing to square that circle.

Also, I recommend The Silmarillion, it's a really good book.

Emphasis mine: agreed.

I also don't understand why he needed the vast armies of servants to be Orcs. Why couldn't they all just be Men and Dwarves and Elves who were still physically the same, but mentally/spiritually corrupted, or in it for personal gain, or following out of fear? Wasn't that one of the core lessons of LotR - that everyone must fight against the controlling power of Evil? I picked up on that theme as a child watching the movies, long before I noticed the icky implications of the orcs.

[Fyraltari]

Or he didn't consider orcs to be people.

While that would be covered by "Elrond was wrong" I think I recall context making it explicit he counted animals and trees in those races.

Did you read How the Paladin got his Scar?

Yes, I have. Fun facts: history didn't begin in that book and "Azurite" doesn't mean "the Sapphire Guard".

Xykon and Redcloak made it happen then. The paladins gave additional grievances which could have been used as justification. But even if you remove Team Evil and the Sapphire Guard from the equation, odds are that the Hobgoblin nation would have invaded Azure City sooner or later. And given that this specific Supreme Leader displayed his skills in taking advantage of Fenris' design of rapid procreation, the threat he posed would just have continued growing, and growing, and growing. And being depicted as a kind of outcast or maverick by his focus on infrastructure, if for whatever reason he was never to invade during his lifetime, his successor would have certainly done so, either due to his more traditional hobgoblin mentality or due to his failure to match his predecessor's ability to scale up infrastruture to meet the demographic boom.

And they most likely would have been crushed like they apparently almost always are. Then barely won the battle shown in-comic when they had two extremely high level leaders and their ennemies were in a succession crisis and taken by surprise, so I really don't think the hobgoblins of Gorge Ravine had any real shot at taking Azure City whatever the general told himself.

Funny, it's almost like sheer numbers aren't the only thing that matter in a war.

[hroþila]

Did you read How the Paladin got his Scar?

Because from that, it's pretty obvious that 1) the hobgoblins would have been fine with attacking Azure City, 2) Many of them actively wanted to do so, and 3) the only one actively working to stop it, the then Supreme Leader, was largely doing so to build up his nation first, essentially maximizing his odds of successfully invading.

This is not true. The original Supreme Leader in HtPGHS wanted peace so that he could build up his nation for the next war, but Redcloak's predecessor explicitly said he was interested in peace for its own sake, not to build up for war.

[Last_Riot]

I didn't mean the Tolkien example as "look at all these unjustified murders the Fellowship does!" -- in those stories, the heroes are definitely justified in fighting back in self defense.

I meant it on a more storytelling level: when he was writing the story, JRR Tolkien chose to have every orc or goblin the heroes ever meet immediately try to kill/capture them. They are always portrayed as bloodthirsty enemies, they can never be talked to or negotiated with, and they (apparently) will never be redeemable. This despite the fact that they walk on two legs, have similar physiology, and heck, are even capable of speaking human language! Physiologically, they are human in every meaningful way except for cosmetic differences (skin color, fangs/claws, and slight size/strength differences).

Did you know that life keeps evolving into crabs? Look it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

Despite similarities, these species are actually quite distinct, both genetically and in origins.

It's not much of a stretch to imagine a world where a similar process generates humanoids (instead). Or, as in most cases, where some deific or magical interference does so.

Just because orcs and humans are bipedal and capable of the same speech, doesn't mean that they are essentially the same thing. Angels and demons are typically depicted as humanoid, even if their essence is not described as being anything remotely humanesque.

I don't remember what the novels say, but in the movies the uruk-hai are bred in mud, basically. There's no mother, there's society, just an all-male tailor-bred army created by a powerful wizard. To call them "humans with only cosmetic differences" is willfully dishonest.

LotR and most derived fantasy are ligh-years away from depictions in some other works, such as Bright. If you wanted to argue about humanoids coding for human enthicities, you've got your buffet in that movie, and I'd entirely agree with you if in Bright they started killing orcs for being orcs and the movie tried to frame that as being totally fine (they kinda do that with the pixies, but it's not clear if those are sentient). But while Bright does do clear coding, it doesn't go that far. And LotR doesn't even do that. Orcs are orcs. They aren't a stand-in for some human ethnicity or race. Tolkien isn't saying, by any measure, that it's fine to just kill off whatever ethnic groups, but showing some analogy using orcs.

A normal rational person is quite capable of thinking that it's fine for fantasy to depict evil races, without thinking the same arguments can be applied to actual human groups, because they fundamentally differ. We can't commune to our God(s) to be told that, yea, that group over there was actually created by an evil god, and made to be inherently evil, for his evil purposes.

Instead, we are all human, we all share the same species, and the same origin. And we don't actually have any similar species out there to which these fantasy relations could possibly code for. And we aren't likely to bring Neanderthals back any time soon, nor any of the other extinct species of our genus. There just isn't an equivalent "fundamentally different yet eerily similar" species in the real world like those fantasy examples. And while we lack other human-like sentient species in the real world to compare to and draw inspiration from, there is quite a diversity among animals, some of them being surprisingly vicious and violent, and would be considered evil by human standards. Decapitation of your mate. Eating your children. Eating others' children. Killing others' children and forcing them to raise your child. Eating others from the inside out.

If you were to give sentience to a parasitic worm, do you think it would be default cease being parasitic? If, instead of facing extinction, it decided to continue being parasitic, knowing full well the harm it causes, would this not be considered evil? What if it's biological cycle actually required it to grow in babies, and caused all kinds of injuries upon the host? A human knowingly debilitating babies would be considered pretty evil. Even if his life depended on it, I can't imagine anyone giving such a person a pass. So why shouldn't we recognize this sentient parasite as evil?

And if we can imagine some cases of sentient evil species, why not others? Even if these others may bear greater physiological resemblances to humans?

There are multiple reasons for an author to go with all evil races, or for games to yield them. It's not just a question of racism and coding, and it's not some kind of "gateway drug" to real life racism.

[Last_Riot]

Yes, I have. Fun facts: history didn't begin in that book and "Azurite" doesn't mean "the Sapphire Guard".



And they most likely would have been crushed like they apparently almost always are. Then barely won the battle shown in-comic when they had two extremely high level leaders and their ennemies were in a succession crisis and taken by surprise, so I really don't think the hobgoblins of Gorge Ravine had any real shot at taking Azure City whatever the general told himself.

Funny, it's almost like sheer numbers aren't the only thing that matter in a war.

You and I really don't interpret that battle the same, then. Because the way I see it, the hobgoblins frigging steam rolled Azure City. And Team Evil contributed almost nothing. Xykon killed some paladins who weren't actually defending the city, and Redcloak killed the High Priest who probably wouldn't have changed much anyways.

Team Evil did prevent the early warning from taking place, but there's nothing to show that such a thing would have actually made any difference. What more did you want Azure City to do, which surprise prevented? They already had walls, and these were breached. A few extra days of crafting consumables for the battle would not have sufficed to change the outcome. And a call to allies, even if answered, would probably not have yielded the required forces fast enough. The hobgoblins did not siege Azure City. They basically just walked in. The broke one wall, then opened the gate to the second wall, and zerg rushed within. AC tried to fortify chokepoints with high level PCs and buffed up soldiers, it was gravely insufficient.

If that hobgoblin army took the city with such haste and ease on its own, I fail to see how an army twice the size would fare any worse. Not to mention that during this time, their logistics would have continued improving, so better diets, better education, better training, etc. Time left to their own devices is not just time spent breeding, but also time spent not dying at lvl 1, and progressing to gain more levels, and craft better gear, and gather better intel, and so on.

Fact is, the Supreme Leader lead to drastic growth of his settlement, which itself enabled the invasion, which would have been prevented if O'Chul had not stopped the Sapphire Guard. Without them, maybe it could be argued that the Supreme Leader would never have made his coup, to he's said to have been planning it for three years by then. But even if he didn't take over, his predecessor was fine with building up strength for later invasion.

This is not true. The original Supreme Leader in HtPGHS wanted peace so that he could build up his nation for the next war, but Redcloak's predecessor explicitly said he was interested in peace for its own sake, not to build up for war.

I did misremember some details, but the rest of the points remain, the peace was only going to last for his lifetime, until he's deposed or dies of old age. Unlike Redcloak, he doesn't have a life-stretching artifact, his life expectancy is not very long. He's the only goblin of that settlement to be depicted as having a genuine interest in peace.

[Fyraltari]

Emphasis mine: agreed.

I also don't understand why he needed the vast armies of servants to be Orcs. Why couldn't they all just be Men and Dwarves and Elves who were still physically the same, but mentally/spiritually corrupted, or in it for personal gain, or following out of fear?

I think the idea was that to have armies the Dark Lords couldn't really rely on individuals deciding to serve them of their own volition. For religious reasons I am not allowed to discuss here he didn't want the Elves to be susceptible to the corruption of the Dark Lords (which didn't stop Eöl from being a prick all on his own, mind).

Do note that there are human kingdoms under Morgoth/Sauron's dominations who provide armies later on (in fact, one of my favourite theories is that Sauron intended to genocide the orcs once he had won the war and just rule over Men). And it's noted once or twice that that's kind of the fault of the Elves for writing off all of Mankind except for the Edain as a doomed cause after the First Age leaving those Men no real defense when the servants of the Dark Powers took over.
The Orcs' apparition was also several millenia before the Men's.


Also Tolkien's conception of his universe changed a lot over the years. Initially it was much more whimsical (the world was a ship) with Elves eventually evolving into, well folklore-elves: nature spirits, Santa Claus' workers all that and the Orcs eventually evolving into boogey-men and monsters that scare children in the night.

Then he got more serious about it but never really settled on an origin for the orcs: animated statues, degraded Umaiar (think demons), uplifted animals, corrupted Elves, corrupted Elves and Men, just corrupted Men were all ideas he toyed with. The last one was the last he came up with before he died but it necessissated huge changes in the established timeline to account for it and he died before writing them so The Silmarillion (edited and published by his son) went with "corrupted Elves" more for simplicity's sake than anything else.

As for the dwarves initially they were part of Morgoth's armies, then he made them more "neutral", as in arms dealers selling weapons to both sides and after the success of The Hobbit made them more heroic but still corruptible like Men.

Wasn't that one of the core lessons of LotR - that everyone must fight against the controlling power of Evil? I picked up on that theme as a child watching the movies, long before I noticed the icky implications of the orcs.

Yes, which is why I am more forgiving of that kind of thing in Tolkien's writings than in say Lovecraft's or Howard's. It seems more a bug than a feature.

[Worldsong]

While that would be covered by "Elrond was wrong" I think I recall context making it explicit he counted animals and trees in those races.

Fair enough. Although in that case there's still the possibility that he intentionally left the orcs out because he wanted to make a point about the elves being the only ones to staunchly be on one side and including the orcs would have muddied the message.

But yes, it's entirely possible there were orcs on both sides.

[Ionathus]

I don't remember what the novels say, but in the movies the uruk-hai are bred in mud, basically. There's no mother, there's society, just an all-male tailor-bred army created by a powerful wizard. To call them "humans with only cosmetic differences" is willfully dishonest.

LotR and most derived fantasy are ligh-years away from depictions in some other works, such as Bright. If you wanted to argue about humanoids coding for human enthicities, you've got your buffet in that movie, and I'd entirely agree with you if in Bright they started killing orcs for being orcs and the movie tried to frame that as being totally fine (they kinda do that with the pixies, but it's not clear if those are sentient). But while Bright does do clear coding, it doesn't go that far. And LotR doesn't even do that. Orcs are orcs. They aren't a stand-in for some human ethnicity or race. Tolkien isn't saying, by any measure, that it's fine to just kill off whatever ethnic groups, but showing some analogy using orcs.

A normal rational person is quite capable of thinking that it's fine for fantasy to depict evil races, without thinking the same arguments can be applied to actual human groups, because they fundamentally differ. We can't commune to our God(s) to be told that, yea, that group over there was actually created by an evil god, and made to be inherently evil, for his evil purposes.

Instead, we are all human, we all share the same species, and the same origin. And we don't actually have any similar species out there to which these fantasy relations could possibly code for. And we aren't likely to bring Neanderthals back any time soon, nor any of the other extinct species of our genus. There just isn't an equivalent "fundamentally different yet eerily similar" species in the real world like those fantasy examples. And while we lack other human-like sentient species in the real world to compare to and draw inspiration from, there is quite a diversity among animals, some of them being surprisingly vicious and violent, and would be considered evil by human standards. Decapitation of your mate. Eating your children. Eating others' children. Killing others' children and forcing them to raise your child. Eating others from the inside out.

If you were to give sentience to a parasitic worm, do you think it would be default cease being parasitic? If, instead of facing extinction, it decided to continue being parasitic, knowing full well the harm it causes, would this not be considered evil? What if it's biological cycle actually required it to grow in babies, and caused all kinds of injuries upon the host? A human knowingly debilitating babies would be considered pretty evil. Even if his life depended on it, I can't imagine anyone giving such a person a pass. So why shouldn't we recognize this sentient parasite as evil?

And if we can imagine some cases of sentient evil species, why not others? Even if these others may bear greater physiological resemblances to humans?

There are multiple reasons for an author to go with all evil races, or for games to yield them. It's not just a question of racism and coding, and it's not some kind of "gateway drug" to real life racism.

Emphasis mine, to delineate my answers.

I am not arguing that LotR was specifically coding the orcs for human ethnicities. Nor am I saying that normal rational people will go out and Do A Racism because of what they read, like it's some kind of mind control. I am saying that any time we tell a story where an entire group of human-like intelligences are universally unlike the heroes, where they are scary or unknown or vicious and no further thought is put into exploring that distinction, we are reinforcing the concept of The Other.

And every time we reinforce the concept of The Other, we reinforce the idea that an entire group of people can be completely unrelatable to us. And if we see them as completely unrelatable, we don't need to try to relate to them and we don't have to treat them like we'd treat our In-Group. And because humanity only has each other to interact with on that level, every time we reinforce the concept of The Other in our fiction, those concepts are at risk of bleeding through into our own interactions with Out-Groups in the real world. Even if that alone doesn't turn people into racists, it can still affect our subconscious assumptions, and I think humanity is all the poorer for it.

If we gave sentience to a parasitic worm, that would be a fascinating story. I would love to read that story and see what people's thoughts are about it. But that's rarely, if ever, the story that happens in fantasy. Stories with Orcs or similar "universally evil humanoids" almost never explore the race's mentalities, their life experiences, the ethics behind fighting or negotiating with them.

To flip your comparison on its head: if you wrote a story about a parasitic worm being given sentience and then having to decide whether it was moral to continue existing, given its brutal lifecycle, you would have already put more thought into the ethics of an alien intelligence than 100% of the people who simply chuck "default" orcs & goblins & kobolds into their D&D worlds, run them like Always Evil humans, and expect their PCs to just kill and not ask any questions.

[Fyraltari]

You and I really don't interpret that battle the same, then. Because the way I see it, the hobgoblins frigging steam rolled Azure City. And Team Evil contributed almost nothing. Xykon killed some paladins who weren't actually defending the city, and Redcloak killed the High Priest who probably wouldn't have changed much anyways.

Team Evil did prevent the early warning from taking place, but there's nothing to show that such a thing would have actually made any difference. What more did you want Azure City to do, which surprise prevented? They already had walls, and these were breached. A few extra days of crafting consumables for the battle would not have sufficed to change the outcome. And a call to allies, even if answered, would probably not have yielded the required forces fast enough. The hobgoblins did not siege Azure City. They basically just walked in. The broke one wall, then opened the gate to the second wall, and zerg rushed within. AC tried to fortify chokepoints with high level PCs and buffed up soldiers, it was gravely insufficient.

Okay, let's break this down. You've read GDGU, right? So you know that the Azurite military forces aren't concentrated in Azure City but also present in in places like Blue River fort and presumably Robinsegg and other places so that's more troops they could have gathered had they had early warnings. Also had Shojo not die literally the day before the attack, the nobles wouldn't have withdrawn their own forces so that's a lot of soldiers and ninjas that would have been present to the battle. Also, also had Julio not destroyed the City's catapults, they would have had catapults. Ah and there's the death of the only wizard who can cast teleport.

What did Team Evil contribute to the battle? I would be remiss if I didn't mention the vast numbers of undead, especially the three Xykon stand-ins and the undead dragon who were dnagerous enough to present a challenge to the Order and kill a whole lotta soldiers. There's also the fact that had the entire reasons the paladins were stationned in the throne room away from the battle proper was because the good guys knew Xykon was after Soon's Gate. Had this been a simple human-goblin war, they'd have been on the battle lines leading the troops and providing much needed stopping power against the hobgoblins. Xykon and Recloak killed Sangwaan and thr high priest who, as high-level characters would have provided invaluable spells. Redcloak also provided numerous summoned units such as the Chlorine Elemental, the Mammoth mount and The Titanium Elementals who breached the walls.

Yeah, 'coz your claim that the hobgoblins breached the walls on their own is wrong. Redcloak did that.

And the hobgoblins still suffered huge losses.

So what would have happened if the hobgoblin army had attacked without Team Evil? To get inside Azure City they'd have to rely on normal, rocky boulders that would need to be fired in range of Azure City's own catapults. And even if those catapults arzn't precise enough to take out the hobgoblins siege engine? The wizard can just teleport in with a strike team of paladins to take them out. Without a way to break the walls the hobgoblins could then try to scale them and be greeted by more soldiers than there was at the actual battle lead by some more paladins which is a losing battle (hell even the goblin ninjas would have to contend with the Azurite ninjas) or besiege the city. Except they don't have any ships and Azure City is built on a shoreline meaning that the Azurites can still fish and trade for more food (if needed) while sending troops to harass the hobgoblins' supply lines.

So, no I don't think a bigger army of hobgoblins would have compensated for the lack of Team Evil.

[hungrycrow]

Okay, let's break this down. You've read GDGU, right? So you know that the Azurite military forces aren't concentrated in Azure City but also present in in places like Blue River fort and presumably Robinsegg and other places so that's more troops they could have gathered had they had early warnings. Also had Shojo not die literally the day before the attack, the nobles wouldn't have withdrawn their own forces so that's a lot of soldiers and ninjas that would have been present to the battle. Also, also had Julio not destroyed the City's catapults, they would have had catapults. Ah and there's the death of the only wizard who can cast teleport.

What did Team Evil contribute to the battle? I would be remiss if I didn't mention the vast numbers of undead, especially the three Xykon stand-ins and the undead dragon who were dnagerous enough to present a challenge to the Order and kill a whole lotta soldiers. There's also the fact that had the entire reasons the paladins were stationned in the throne room away from the battle proper was because the good guys knew Xykon was after Soon's Gate. Had this been a simple human-goblin war, they'd have been on the battle lines leading the troops and providing much needed stopping power against the hobgoblins. Xykon and Recloak killed Sangwaan and thr high priest who, as high-level characters would have provided invaluable spells. Redcloak also provided numerous summoned units such as the Chlorine Elemental, the Mammoth mount and The Titanium Elementals who breached the walls.

Yeah, 'coz your claim that the hobgoblins breached the walls on their own is wrong. Redcloak did that.

And the hobgoblins still suffered huge losses.

So what would have happened if the hobgoblin army had attacked without Team Evil? To get inside Azure City they'd have to rely on normal, rocky boulders that would need to be fired in range of Azure City's own catapults. And even if those catapults arzn't precise enough to take out the hobgoblins siege engine? The wizard can just teleport in with a strike team of paladins to take them out. Without a way to break the walls the hobgoblins could then try to scale them and be greeted by more soldiers than there was at the actual battle lead by some more paladins which is a losing battle (hell even the goblin ninjas would have to contend with the Azurite ninjas) or besiege the city. Except they don't have any ships and Azure City is built on a shoreline meaning that the Azurites can still fish and trade for more food (if needed) while sending troops to harass the hobgoblins' supply lines.

So, no I don't think a bigger army of hobgoblins would have compensated for the lack of Team Evil.

People don't realize that attacking walls with mundane equipment is very, very difficult. Even catapults would take a while to bring down a good stone wall, taking return fire the whole time as you said. Climbing the walls, or storming a breach, would be suicidal for everyone involved no matter how much they outnumber the defenders. You essentially need high-level dnd shenanigans to make a dramatic assault like this possible. Without that, an army would probably try to starve the defenders out or bribe their way past the defenses, neither of which seems like an option for a hobgoblin army.

[pendell]

People don't realize that attacking walls with mundane equipment is very, very difficult. Even catapults would take a while to bring down a good stone wall, taking return fire the whole time as you said. Climbing the walls, or storming a breach, would be suicidal for everyone involved no matter how much they outnumber the defenders. You essentially need high-level dnd shenanigans to make a dramatic assault like this possible. Without that, an army would probably try to starve the defenders out or bribe their way past the defenses, neither of which seems like an option for a hobgoblin army.

They had blasting powder which they used to take the outer walls both in the novels and in the books. This is precisely the same technology used in 1453 to reduce the greatest fortress-city in the near east, Constantinople/Istanbul. The armies of Sauron and Saruman were not using middle ages technology for their city assaults. They were using renaissance-era explosives, fantasy magic (see: Grond, the siege battering ram) , and aerial flyers to make up the difference. In addition to the actual damage potential of the Nazgul they also radiated an aura of fear which, in a wargaming context, was probably worth at least a -1 or -2 on any morale check.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[danielxcutter]

Also, like. As Team Evil showed, high-level spells make conventional warfare difficult at best and impossible at worst.

[Jasdoif]

Okay, let's break this down. You've read GDGU, right? So you know that the Azurite military forces aren't concentrated in Azure City but also present in in places like Blue River fort and presumably Robinsegg and other places so that's more troops they could have gathered had they had early warnings. Also had Shojo not die literally the day before the attack, the nobles wouldn't have withdrawn their own forces so that's a lot of soldiers and ninjas that would have been present to the battle. Also, also had Julio not destroyed the City's catapults, they would have had catapults. Ah and there's the death of the only wizard who can cast teleport.

What did Team Evil contribute to the battle? I would be remiss if I didn't mention the vast numbers of undead, especially the three Xykon stand-ins and the undead dragon who were dnagerous enough to present a challenge to the Order and kill a whole lotta soldiers. There's also the fact that had the entire reasons the paladins were stationned in the throne room away from the battle proper was because the good guys knew Xykon was after Soon's Gate. Had this been a simple human-goblin war, they'd have been on the battle lines leading the troops and providing much needed stopping power against the hobgoblins. Xykon and Recloak killed Sangwaan and thr high priest who, as high-level characters would have provided invaluable spells. Redcloak also provided numerous summoned units such as the Chlorine Elemental, the Mammoth mount and The Titanium Elementals who breached the walls.

Yeah, 'coz your claim that the hobgoblins breached the walls on their own is wrong. Redcloak did that.

And the hobgoblins still suffered huge losses.

So what would have happened if the hobgoblin army had attacked without Team Evil? To get inside Azure City they'd have to rely on normal, rocky boulders that would need to be fired in range of Azure City's own catapults. And even if those catapults arzn't precise enough to take out the hobgoblins siege engine? The wizard can just teleport in with a strike team of paladins to take them out. Without a way to break the walls the hobgoblins could then try to scale them and be greeted by more soldiers than there was at the actual battle lead by some more paladins which is a losing battle (hell even the goblin ninjas would have to contend with the Azurite ninjas) or besiege the city. Except they don't have any ships and Azure City is built on a shoreline meaning that the Azurites can still fish and trade for more food (if needed) while sending troops to harass the hobgoblins' supply lines.

So, no I don't think a bigger army of hobgoblins would have compensated for the lack of Team Evil.

Well, at the very least it'd have to be a much bigger army to be comparable to Team's Evil elimination of opposing force multipliers, and the army that was there was already stretching the limits of the hobgoblin population.

[Fyraltari]

They had blasting powder which they used to take the outer walls both in the novels and in the books. This is precisely the same technology used in 1453 to reduce the greatest fortress-city in the near east, Constantinople/Istanbul. The armies of Sauron and Saruman were not using middle ages technology for their city assaults. They were using renaissance-era explosives, fantasy magic (see: Grond, the siege battering ram) , and aerial flyers to make up the difference. In addition to the actual damage potential of the Nazgul they also radiated an aura of fear which, in a wargaming context, was probably worth at least a -1 or -2 on any morale check.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

We're talking about the battle of Azure City, not Helm's Deep or Pelennor Fields.

[Last_Riot]

Okay, let's break this down. You've read GDGU, right? So you know that the Azurite military forces aren't concentrated in Azure City but also present in in places like Blue River fort and presumably Robinsegg and other places so that's more troops they could have gathered had they had early warnings. Also had Shojo not die literally the day before the attack, the nobles wouldn't have withdrawn their own forces so that's a lot of soldiers and ninjas that would have been present to the battle. Also, also had Julio not destroyed the City's catapults, they would have had catapults. Ah and there's the death of the only wizard who can cast teleport.

What did Team Evil contribute to the battle? I would be remiss if I didn't mention the vast numbers of undead, especially the three Xykon stand-ins and the undead dragon who were dnagerous enough to present a challenge to the Order and kill a whole lotta soldiers. There's also the fact that had the entire reasons the paladins were stationned in the throne room away from the battle proper was because the good guys knew Xykon was after Soon's Gate. Had this been a simple human-goblin war, they'd have been on the battle lines leading the troops and providing much needed stopping power against the hobgoblins. Xykon and Recloak killed Sangwaan and thr high priest who, as high-level characters would have provided invaluable spells. Redcloak also provided numerous summoned units such as the Chlorine Elemental, the Mammoth mount and The Titanium Elementals who breached the walls.

Yeah, 'coz your claim that the hobgoblins breached the walls on their own is wrong. Redcloak did that.

And the hobgoblins still suffered huge losses.

So what would have happened if the hobgoblin army had attacked without Team Evil? To get inside Azure City they'd have to rely on normal, rocky boulders that would need to be fired in range of Azure City's own catapults. And even if those catapults arzn't precise enough to take out the hobgoblins siege engine? The wizard can just teleport in with a strike team of paladins to take them out. Without a way to break the walls the hobgoblins could then try to scale them and be greeted by more soldiers than there was at the actual battle lead by some more paladins which is a losing battle (hell even the goblin ninjas would have to contend with the Azurite ninjas) or besiege the city. Except they don't have any ships and Azure City is built on a shoreline meaning that the Azurites can still fish and trade for more food (if needed) while sending troops to harass the hobgoblins' supply lines.

So, no I don't think a bigger army of hobgoblins would have compensated for the lack of Team Evil.

I've read the main comic, Start of Darkness, and Good Deeds Gone Unpunished. I won't claim to have perfect memory of every minute detail, however.

Yes, AC has forces scattered here and there. But their territory seems pretty large. O'Chul doesn't just walk from the city to the hobgoblins in a 15 minute stroll. I cannot claim I know what the exact distance is between their capital and their border posts, nor do I know how many troops they have in said forts.

However, it does depict the hobgoblin settlement, as per their original much smaller size, to be a significant threat.

You are also making a lot of assumptions.

The militia captain had a point, when he burst the PC's bubble. You are putting a ton of faith in relatively few relatively high level characters, as if they would have made a significant difference. At the scale we saw, and even moreso at the greater scale that a furthere delayed conflict would have had, even a very powerful character has a miserable quantity of resources. Spell slots, HP, etc. That wizard didn't seem very good to begin with, how many hobgoblins do you think he could have taken out? Even if he tried to be smart about his targets? Same with the rest of the high level characters. When you've got an army of soldiers willing to march in to their deaths so as to essentially build a bridge with their corpses... and you've got a whole lot more than the enemy, a terrible K:D ratio is meaningless. They still would have prevailed.

You are also missing the fact that the Hobgoblins had no buildup and proper preperation. Team Evil came in, and then they just got rounded up and marched. The Supreme Leader had not aimed for war, and so had no reason to invest into a large arsenal of siege devices. Any replacement is almost sure to have put efforts in this direction before launching the actual invasion.

A lot of hobgoblins died... but that did not even slow them, and they still came out with a ton surviving.

And I see no reason to believe that all of these troops that didn't help 1) would have, had the timing been different (nobles and clans and such), and 2) would have made a difference anyways.

And don't forget Redcloak was just sending the hobgoblins to their death out of spite as an opening strategy. A hobgoblin leader who actually cared more for his people would probably have devised better strategies.

Emphasis mine, to delineate my answers.

I am not arguing that LotR was specifically coding the orcs for human ethnicities. Nor am I saying that normal rational people will go out and Do A Racism because of what they read, like it's some kind of mind control. I am saying that any time we tell a story where an entire group of human-like intelligences are universally unlike the heroes, where they are scary or unknown or vicious and no further thought is put into exploring that distinction, we are reinforcing the concept of The Other.

And every time we reinforce the concept of The Other, we reinforce the idea that an entire group of people can be completely unrelatable to us. And if we see them as completely unrelatable, we don't need to try to relate to them and we don't have to treat them like we'd treat our In-Group. And because humanity only has each other to interact with on that level, every time we reinforce the concept of The Other in our fiction, those concepts are at risk of bleeding through into our own interactions with Out-Groups in the real world. Even if that alone doesn't turn people into racists, it can still affect our subconscious assumptions, and I think humanity is all the poorer for it.

If we gave sentience to a parasitic worm, that would be a fascinating story. I would love to read that story and see what people's thoughts are about it. But that's rarely, if ever, the story that happens in fantasy. Stories with Orcs or similar "universally evil humanoids" almost never explore the race's mentalities, their life experiences, the ethics behind fighting or negotiating with them.

To flip your comparison on its head: if you wrote a story about a parasitic worm being given sentience and then having to decide whether it was moral to continue existing, given its brutal lifecycle, you would have already put more thought into the ethics of an alien intelligence than 100% of the people who simply chuck "default" orcs & goblins & kobolds into their D&D worlds, run them like Always Evil humans, and expect their PCs to just kill and not ask any questions.

The argument that certain topics in fiction make us more prone to certain behaviors in real life sounds like some sort of strawman or slippery slope fallacy to me. We've been warned all of our lives about how video games will turn us all into violent psychopaths. Or how this or that will lead to every boy turning gay. Or how the eviction of the Church in our lives will lead everyone to become evil. Just to name a few examples of how exposure to certain media, or models, or lack of moral oversight, will somehow irredeemably corrupt the average poor impressionable soul. People can and do separate real life from fiction.

And while you might not have, many people have made the claim that orcs are coding for a specific ethnicity.

I'm not sure how well a story about a sentient worm would sell. People tend to crave some level of relatability. It's not to say nothing of the sort has never been tried, I know there's "Empire of the Ants". But the idea kind of passes off as silly. This also reminds me of being forced to read The Character of Rain, where the author passes herself for something she is not, and that was quite a painful read. While presumably not an impossible task, making a story about a parasitic worm would be an awfully hard challenge, trying to find some sort of balance between the alien and the familiar. If it's too familiar, it'll pass as just reskinned humans. If it's too alien, it'll be hard to get hooked to and interested.

Evil humanoids are common not because most authors are closet racists, but because they are a very easy narrative tool. Too easy, one could argue, but there's quite a difference between lazy writing and malicious coding. And that's also the reason why you very rarely see stories from their perspectives. Most stories are about the heroes, the good guys. Evil races are by design antagonists. They are there to oppose the good guys, without the author needing to spend time and/or effort explaining or showing why they are bad. They are also typically depicted in a medieval-esque setting, a time period where the capital punishment was pretty much the default for any transgression, and where whole cities being razed by invading armies was not completely unheard of. People who resisted and then failed against the Golden Horde fared pretty poorly. As for prisoners of war, that's a pretty modern concept. Medieval armies might have kept valuable individuals for ransom, but they certainly did not keep whole armies detained, that was just not financially viable. The productivity to sustain modern levels of incarceration were just out of reach back then. So "capture the enemy combatants instead of killing them" doesn't really fit the era the settings are mostly based on, since there's be nowhere to send them to. Unless, you know... slave labor, which in fantasy only evil societies do. Good(TM) just kills them all (paladin-approved).

That said, it's not true that no stories depict their side, or that "100%" of tolkien rip-offs just have them be "evil humans" with no further thought. Often, authors have ideas about their settings that they just don't include in their works, because it just wouldn't fit without being detrimental to the rest. Sometimes, that lack of details on The Other (TM) is by design, precisely because if you know too much about them, they cease to be The Other (TM).

I also don't think the scenarios where this would matter are actually very common. In LotR, you don't have the Fellowship stumble into a goblin village, and then go "kill all the goblins, because evil goblin mothers give birth to evil goblin babies that will become evil goblin soldiers". It just doesn't happen. And I've seen it argued that Tolkien could have included scenes where the orcs were not overtly hostile combatants, why should he have? The Fellowship is on a quest to go destroy the One Ring and save Middle Earth. They aren't taking a leisure trek through a scenic island nation renown for its sheep and mountains. There isn't really any point in bloating the book with scenes where they start discussing the ethics of baby orcs. That's just not what the story is about. And the same applies for most ripoffs, as with traditional D&D settings. The issue of orc babies rarely comes up. As for orc adults, stories and games rarely have the protagonists just waltz into a town and then start a genocide, for no particular reason. If anything, the common trope is to have the protagonists go to great lengths to display virtue. Often with the very cliché scene where an enemy surrenders, is granted mercy, and then he tries to backstab them and dies (because having an actual prisoner would be too inconvenient, but not giving him a chance to surrender would not do "good guy" enough). In the archetypical D&D quest, an attack on goblins or orcs is not pre-emptive, but a retaliatory solution against attacks done by their raiders. The heroes don't go to an inn to ask "alright, who can we genocide next?" They go in looking for problems that need fixing, and then learn that orcs or such are attacking the countryside, stealing livestock and taking slaves. The resolution is then typically to disperse the camp, and typically that's done by defeating the leader.

Even in the lazy works, it's not about "difference is bad and it's okay to genocide everyone that's different". It's about standing up to Evil.

People don't realize that attacking walls with mundane equipment is very, very difficult. Even catapults would take a while to bring down a good stone wall, taking return fire the whole time as you said. Climbing the walls, or storming a breach, would be suicidal for everyone involved no matter how much they outnumber the defenders. You essentially need high-level dnd shenanigans to make a dramatic assault like this possible. Without that, an army would probably try to starve the defenders out or bribe their way past the defenses, neither of which seems like an option for a hobgoblin army.

IRL, yea, totally agree, "one does not simply walk into Mordor Azur City".

But in OotS, canonically, the hobgoblins did just that.

IRL, catapults do not just break walls. In this comic, they did. One guy argued that this was thanks to Redcloak and his titanium elemental. I don't buy this. The density thing might account for range, but the catapult still has a weight limit, which will be highly influential for its ability to break the walls. Of course, so does density, but if the catapults were able to do this level of damage per shot with the titanium elementals, I'd expect them to be able to do sufficient damage with lower-level ammunition, even if it may take them more time or more shots.

The wall must have been just really poorly built, what can I say. It very clearly didn't respect real world specs, because if denser ammunition what all that was needed to bust walls, then medieval artillery would have simply used denser ammunition... they had access to various materials, after all.

So canonically, AC's walls could be breached by mere catapults. But even with that aside, there are multiple not so high level spells that can be used to undermine walls, and we know the army had several clerics capable of casting not so high level spells, such as by animating the dead. And there's also the mundane techniques of sapping that could have been used. Bonus, AC has an anachronistic sewer system that the sappers could have simply dug to.

[hroþila]

The walls weren't breached because heavy stuff hit them, they were breached because literal monsters punched them so hard that they broke. That was all Redcloak.
A hobgoblin leader that wasn't Redcloak wouldn't have gambled the survival of their tribe on a single battle by mobilizing their whole military might.
Blueriver Fort was taken approximately one week before the attack on Azure City. And don't forget that its garrison would also have got an advance warning if it weren't for Redcloak and Xykon, so the Azurites near the border could have fallen back. There'd have been significant reinforcements in Azure City itself if that's where the Azurites decided to make their stand.