Are Orcs That Bad?

[Lalwendë]

I was thinking about the other day about how the Orcs have never really scared me as 'baddies' in any way, shape or form. Yet the Cybermen still have me quaking in my boots because the very thought of humans modifying themselves so that they end up as a race of heartless, homogeneous cybernetic things is just horrible.

So that made me think about how the Orcs are clearly not just 'cannon fodder' either, a mindless, evil mass of enemies who must be put to the sword. Tolkien actually said that they were not beyond redemption, thus they're not such 100% dreadful things that they must be wiped out at all costs. Unlike Daleks (sorry to draw in another Whovian comparison, but hey....).

Then that brought me on to thinking about how Tolkien made it so that Morgoth could not create his own beings, he could only corrupt. That to me opens a whole can of worms because can you say that it's the fault of the Orcs that they behave so badly? Tolkien even muddies things by showing us Orcs chatting happily about retirement!

Tolkien toyed with having them just be mindless beasts, too, but that just doesn't work as a mindless, unintelligent enemy isn't really much of a threat.

Really, the only reason I want Aragorn & Co to hack off Orc heads is that they aren't the good guys, and I want the good guys to live. I don't actually hate the Orcs because there's not a lot of reason to do so. They're ugly, they eat man-flesh, they are cruel. But it's not really their fault, is it? Plus they're not beyond redemption either, so wiping a load of them out is hardly on a scale with Doctor Who sending an army of evil Daleks into the Void, is it?

Are the Orcs not that good at being bad guys, or is it that this notion of them being corrupted muddies the waters too much for them to be seen as really bad.

So. Do Orcs actually work as fictional Bad Guys?