Unclear Description: The Morlocks

Morlocks are a powerful and interesting tool in storytelling, for reasons that are obfuscated or not adequately addressed in the description given on this page or the examples that follow from that description. By clarifying the description and correspondingly filtering the examples, we can make this powerful trope much clearer, and therefore more useful, to the reader or writer.

The current page leans very heavily on discussing the trope namer, the morlocks from Well's "The Time Machine". It later switches over to describing morlocks as a new "monster archetype", a human-descended troglodyte, which is quite distinct from Well's example. This switch seems to yield three categories of examples:

— "People who Wells thinks might be morlocks later", A downtrodden group that embodies the economic divisions of unrestrained industrial society (examples from the Cloud Minders, the Big O, Metropolis, 1984).

— Troglodyte-people (examples from X-men, Tolkien's Gollum, the "real life" folder, Blake's Seven and Spock's Brain as inversions).

— Cannibal monsters created or descended from humans (Examples from Lovecraft's Lurking Fear, The Descent, Star Wars Legends, Doctor Who, Tolkien's orcs).

I think the first two categories (misaimed in my opinion) exist because of the page's over-focus on Well's morlocks and their origins as workers driven underground, and on the subterranean nature of the modern morlock. These points give readers material to misinterpret the rest of the page. The third category is mostly consistent with the usage that I think the description is aiming for, but I think even that misses the value of morlocks as a storytelling device, which I shall now proceed to elaborate:

With the rise of industrialization, our stories developed new kinds of monsters that fit our new reality. One of these types is the monsters we build, machines we cannot control: Frankenstein's monster (especially his later incarnations) and his robot counterparts. Another is the morlocks trope, which addresses the monsters we create of ourselves (or certain groups of ourselves) by separating people from nature, treating them like machines, and/or attempting to engineer or control society as we would a machine.

Thus:

It is absolutely universal that morlocks be cannibalistic and descended from humans (or the local equivalent). Morlocks are never aliens or underground lizard people (still basically aliens), nor are they vat-grown or artificial humans (still basically robots / Frankenstein's monster).

Morlocks are typically underground because this serves for separation from nature, but other means of separating from nature also work (deep in the city as in Star Wars Legends; far into technological development as in Doctor Who; humanity altered by technology, as in Tolkien's orcs and even more especially uruk-hai, where of course the setting is fantasy but commentary on industry is still a major driver). A cannibalistic tribe of cave-dwelling savages in darkest Africa, on the other hand, do not qualify as morlocks because they are still part of "nature".

Class divisions are a central part of the figurative dehumanization associated with industry that the morlock trope addresses with literal dehumanization, so morlocks are typically descended from the underappreciated underside of society.

I propose that the trope description be modified by extending discussion of what makes a morlock in terms of storytelling and putting it first, while drastically cutting down discussion of the trope namer, likely to a couple of sentences at most. Since this will both clarify the definition and somewhat modify the existing definition such as it is, we may expect at the same time to have to remove many examples.

Edited by Tomvreomfodj on Oct 16th 2020 at 11:12:09 AM

~Tomvreomfodj: This is potentially a worthy proposal, but it fits into this thread better than into TRS.