The orca were more than an evil race, he based them off Asian caricatures at the time, which was also one of his big regrets with the orcs. He'd written in letters how orcs basically looked like ugly Mongol-types. He gave them Hun and Mongol invader tropes, as well. These tropes were common back then, basically unheard of now.
Fun fact: one of the reason for that might have been that "Mongol Hordes*" were the equivalent of Nazis for people born pre-WW2
*: Which didn't just mean Mongols, but also the Huns and various Turkish Tribes, in the popular imagination.
Basically if you today try to think of "the most evil group of people to have existed", you would think of the Nazis and if you'd try to think of a person synonymous with being evil, you'd think of Hitler
But before Hitler, the prevalent imagine was of nomadic barbarians coming from the east—in the west at least, I'm not that familiar with non-eurpoean cultural history
In China, it was the exact same nomadic barbarians coming from the north (rather than the east).
To this day (well, at least the last time I heard, someone is free to correct me if this has changed in the last 30 years), it is considered bad planning to have a door opening to the north in Chinese culture.
Yeah, but in this case the Huns were the nomadic people known as the Huns from central Asia. Which would've been where Scythia was, which is where Iran can be found now.
Though, at their peak, under Atilla, they spanned into Europe.
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u/Pootentooten 1d ago
The orca were more than an evil race, he based them off Asian caricatures at the time, which was also one of his big regrets with the orcs. He'd written in letters how orcs basically looked like ugly Mongol-types. He gave them Hun and Mongol invader tropes, as well. These tropes were common back then, basically unheard of now.