Captain of the Guard

The problem with Mordor lies not in its armies - though the skins they wear are grey or green, not brown or pink, they are people, angry and starving bottled in their barren land, not ravening monsters from some fictive hell, and Sauron, ancient malice that he may be, holds no special place in the world save in the scale of power he holds.  The worlds are full of bullies, so afraid of their own weakness that they feel they must keep others in thrall to fear of them.

The problem with Mordor is its land, a volcanic desert of brittle obsidian sharper than razors, pits of boiling mud and rivers of molten rock, like this, some of them crusted over so that one thinks oneself safe until that crust gives way.  Sometimes the fire is inches deep, sometimes miles.  If it’s inches, you still die, but slowly, from infection, with the skin and flesh burnt off your feet.

The land does not hate.  The land does not care.  It simply is, offering scant food and no comfort, even its rain corrosive and searingly hot.  Its armies rape and pillage, but so do all armies, because war is a great monster made of tens of thousands of little figures not themselves monstrous, but with the capacity to be monsters.  They do these things because they are at war; they are at war because their land starves them, and Sauron gives them no choice but fight or famine.

(Source: chairman-lmao, via consumedbythecity)