Hello everyone, and welcome back to Troop Spotlight! This week, we’re looking at the Ogre. “Ogre” is one of those words that means different things to different people. To some it means a savage, man-eating beast, stereotypically also burly, beastly, and filthy, a blight on the earth; to others it is a misunderstood and (understandably) cranky magical creature that lives on the outskirts, subsisting on what it can.
To me, though, because of these mixed connotations, “Ogre” is a perfect parallel word to a lot of other words. “Nerd.” “Gamer.” “Artist.” We all are, to varying degrees, Ogres in our own right. Magical, misunderstood, and a little cranky, living on the outskirts of society, subsisting on what we can.
All jokes and social commentary aside, however, the definition of Ogre given to me when I was to create this illustration was admittedly unorthodox. I had always imagined Ogres as big, burly monsters who ate children and smashed things with rocks. Savage, unintelligent, and angry. A blight on the earth, and all that.
But the Ogre that OgreWare envisioned was, in some ways, very different. Big and burly, yes. Angry, yes; savage, at times. But also highly intelligent and possessing a small amount of inherent magic. Their description of an Ogre was more like a sort of large, burly wizard, living on the outskirts not due to cranky “git-off-mah-lawn” anger, but rather because the human villagers shunned him.
I began to feel some empathy for this creature. He was just trying to survive, have a decent life, maybe do some magic, and hell, maybe smash some things with rocks, but who am I to judge? (Don’t we all want to smash things with rocks every so often?) And I had to wonder if some of my fellow nerds, artists, and gamers might identify with the Ogre as well.
Regardless, this is the final version of the Ogre that I came up with, colored by OgreWare and presented here in two versions – the “normal” default, and a Negative variant:
I personally have come to love the Ogre as he is – ripped Hulk shorts and all. He’s a bit messy, a bit angry, a bit socially unacceptable. A bit like us, if we are to look at ourselves honestly. And that’s the appeal, I believe, of monsters in general – their most valuable aspect is not that we can see ourselves slaying them, but that we can see our shadow selves in them.
This, if I may be so bold, is the spirit of OgreWare.
You can play as the leader of Troops like the Ogre in Calling All Heroes – click here to play the beta 0.5 version!
And until next time, guys…may the Ogre be with you.
~Admin Julian