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I think that is the main difference between (the orcs) and the elves who went astray and killed so many, including their kinsfolk. That was clean killing.
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You're absolutely right. And it was still killing, something that was still "bad". Maybe a "lesser sin," but a sin nonetheless, and it speaks to the elves being less than perfectly good. (That's really all I was trying to say.)
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Melkor gave wonderful incentive to the captured elves for them to do his will - i.e. he would stop torturing them.
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Hehehehe. That's enough, isn't it? [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img] Still they had that choice, even though, as Bekah said, as the corruption progressed and the "new" orcs still saw only the ways of Melkor. Perhaps that could be construed as "the sins of the fathers are passed on to the next generations"...? There was still the inital choice. *AND*, in the same way, the Orcs couldn't get out of it on their own, after they had gone so far into darkness--they would have needed an outside force to "redeem" them somehow, and then the Orcs would have had to have made a consious decision to believe in or follow this path to redemption. It wouldn't necessarily make them back into elves/men/whatever right away--it's not like some sort of magic wand. I'm not going so far as to suggest that there could have been a Christ figure for the Orcs--that couldn't have happened, anway, for Tolkien said himself that he would never have put a Jesus-like figure in his stories ("Letters", which discounts the whole 'Gandalf = Jesus" idea as well as the last vain hopes of the allagory-ists). What I'm trying to get across is that redemption for the orcs, along the lines of "bad is a perversion of good" *could* have been possible under certain circumstances. What is corrupted can be un-corrupted.
That's a kooky idea. Redeemed orcs. I think I better check the meds.
-'Vana
PS: I just realized that there were no elvish characters in the discussion plans laid out by Iarwain. I'm sorry! [img]smilies/frown.gif[/img] I guess I got a little carried away.