I like the idea of making Orcs Elf-like. A few different possible ways I can think of to do this (I guess these are mostly “if you’re trying to be canon-compliant probably wouldn’t work but you might take an idea or two from them, and file the serial numbers off and they might be an interesting idea for original fiction”):
Orcs as predatory Elves: Take inspiration from portrayals of Elves like in Charles Stross’s The Nightmare Stacks. Orcs still have something like the beauty and grace of Elves, but it’s wilder, more predatory; more like the beauty of a leopard. Like you said, they’re the kind of Elf that eats babies. Physical features might include very inhuman pointed mobile ears, powerful long almost lupine jaws, sharp teeth, claws. They might also have a lot of subtly threatening mannerisms; even in relatively peaceful interactions they move fast, they’re stealthy, they invade your personal space, they like showing off their teeth and claws and weapons, you can tell by the way they position themselves around the room that they’ve got blocking your exists and maneuvering you into unfavorable positions and hurting you at the back of their minds. They like meat, and they like it raw and bloody, and people are very much on their menu.
Orcs as Nazi Elves: They’re superficially beautiful and noble-looking. You start to notice something wrong when you see them in a group and notice how homogenous they are. They’re like a Nazi’s fantasy of “perfect” tall fit blue-eyed blond “Aryans” with “perfect” features, they almost but not quite look like clones of each other. They embody a single narrow, cramped idea of perfection, and their unnatural homogeneity is a frightening window into the mindset and methods of their masters and what sort of world their masters desire to create.
Orcs as ‘roided up Elves: This is similar to the idea of them scarring easily. It’d make sense if Melkor modified them to increase their combat prowess in ways that didn’t give much consideration to their over-all well-being. So they’re kind of like Elves that have been force-fed a bunch of steroids. They’re more muscular and stronger than regular Elves, but it’s not really good for their health. All those powerful muscle movements wear out their joints and cause them to injure themselves and stuff. Maybe they have a short lifespan. Or maybe they have enhanced healing that compensates for it, but in a way that doesn’t prioritize their well-being. All those broken bones and joint injuries tend to heal wrong, over time they start to look twisted, and by the time an Orc is 40 or something they’re in serious chronic pain, and they’re still functional despite it, they can power through it, but they’re not having a good time (and this contributes to their aggression and quarrelsomeness; older Orcs are hurting and that makes them cranky).
Also, changing them this way might involve messing with their physiology in ways that really mess up their bodies, like it might involve making them produce unnaturally immense amounts of testosterone and stuff, which might make them ugly and aggressive. They might look like grotesquely Chad-ified Elves, with huge jaws and huge chins and huge noses and heavy brows and coarse skin and lots of body hair, maybe even fur if you want to give them a dose of serious inhumanity. And maybe it’s kind of like they’re constantly ‘roid-raging and a lot of the Orc temperament is a result of that.
Orcs as domesticated Elves: Orcs are to Elves as police dogs are to wolves; they’ve been domesticated; changed to be servants of another being. The physical changes associated with domestication may involve neoteny. I think that approach would be great for making it a very viscerally uncomfortable experience to fight Orcs. Orcs look child-like. Adult Orcs have powerful adult bodies, sure, but they have faces like young teenagers (or whatever the Elf equivalent is). Fighting Orcs feels uncomfortably like fighting child soldiers; it feels like fighting precociously big and strong 12-14 year olds.
And this may be more than a matter of appearance. Orcs must have a pretty high mortality rate and Melkor would probably want to minimize the amount of child-care they needed, so I think it would make sense if Melkor gave Orcs accelerated physical development and brain development. Maybe by the time they’re eight or ten years old an Orc is already physically and sexually mature, already physically a powerful mature warrior, ready to march off to join Melkor’s or Sauron’s armies and kill and burn and pillage. And they’re not exactly a child at that point, their brain development is accelerated too, an eight or ten year old Orc has brain development like a human older teenager or twenty-something, but they still have very limited life experience, and if you managed to have a real conversation with one of them that would show. So not only do they look kind of child-like, not only does fighting them feel uncomfortably like fighting child soldiers, but a lot of Orcs actually are something kind of like child soldiers.
I think this approach would be great for showing that Orcs are also Melkor’s and Sauron’s victims. Imagine scenes from like this or this but instead of being ugly scary monsters that make animalistic roars the Orcs basically look like precociously big thirteen year olds and have weirdly child-like voices (I don’t know what a child’s voice but with the force of a big adult pair of lungs behind it would sound like, I guess it might be pretty weird). I think that’d be basically unfilmable cause it’d be so uncomfortable for people to watch that an approach like that would never get approved by a commercial studio, but that’s kind of the point.
And I’m pretty sure this gets into contradicting Tolkien’s portrayal of Orcs, but another layer of tragedy that would be fit really well into this idea is Orcs aren’t naturally bloodthirsty violent creatures, being more domesticated means their natural temperament is actually more social and less aggressive than that of their wild ancestors. If you gave an Orc to human parents as a baby they’d grow up to be a very friendly, extroverted, gentle, basically delightful person with lots of consideration for others; their biggest problem in human society would probably be that they’d be easy to manipulate and take advantage of because they’d be very trusting. In Melkor’s and Sauron’s and Saruman’s Orcs these traits are twisted to make them obedient to their dark masters; Melkor’s and Sauron’s and Saruman’s Orcs believe in their masters as little children believe. Orc soldiers aren’t ferocious dogs of war straining at their leashes, they’re hyper-disciplined totally loyal professionals who follow orders and will always do their best to get the job done, whatever the job is. They’re very brave, but it’s the “will follow orders no matter how much personal danger it puts them in” sort of bravery. They’re not rigid, they’re as smart as you or me (though often with a lot less life experience) and they use that intelligence against their enemies, they’ll improvise, attack on their own initiative where they see an opportunity, etc., but battles are just problems to be solved to them, like building a bridge. Imagery trying to make them look scary would be stuff like this, focusing on the idea of a huge army of disciplined, merciless soldiers who will obey their evil masters without question, but really, I’d prefer to lean into that this interpretation would make it blatantly obvious just looking at them that these are profoundly tragic creatures. Imagine an army marching, and they’re obviously physically powerful creatures, but they have faces like children, and they’re singing together in high voices like the voices of women or very young boys, and what they’re singing is this or something like it (“We take the storm and power / of Mordor through the world! … It’s a good day to kill! / Painted red is earth and sky / Even Manwe will bow down!”).
Which, if you run with that, would suggest a relatively optimistic answer to the “wait, so after Sauron was defeated what happened to the Orcs? Did the ostensible good guys kill them all? Even the baby Orcs?” issue. Like, imagine it’s a few months or years after the One Ring got thrown into Mount Doom, and a bunch of Orcs show up at a human town somewhere, and of course the townspeople expect the worst and are terrified. And the Orc leader says they want a meeting with the local mayor or baron or whatever, and that guy’s like “well, I guess I don’t have much to lose by finding out their demands.” So he goes out to meet the Orc leader, and…
He thinks it’s a female, though it’s kind of hard to tell. She’s big and looks very strong. There’s a disturbing contrast between her painfully young-looking looks like a thirteen year old girl face and all the obvious signs of past violence on it; there’s a huge scar that crosses her mouth and has carved a permanent notch in her upper lip, and at some point the left side of her face seems to have been caved in by a club or a warhammer or something and healed in a distorted caved-in shape and it looks like that wound destroyed her left eye. The other eye looks bloodshot, almost as if she’s been crying.
And she says she and her followers want to surrender.
She says, “Our Precious King Excellent has stopped telling us what to do. He has always told us what to do before, and we do not know what to do without him. We do not know what to do. We are lost. We need someone to tell us what to do. Please tell us what to do.”
(“Precious” and “King Excellent” are two suggestions I’ve seen for a translation of the name Sauron calls himself).
I’m definitely filing this idea away for “if I ever write the sort of fantasy that involves a Dark Lord who commands armies of biologically distinct Soldiers of Darkness, I’m probably going to write said Soldiers of Darkness as like this.”
You could mix these up somewhat. E.g. you could combine the predatory Elves idea and the ‘roided up Elves idea and give them almost a werewolf look.
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