I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to “I’m an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race”. And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don’t know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.
Yup, it helps to remember that they’re 1 of today’s lucky 10,000. That said, I do think it’s reasonable to say that certain fantasy races might tend to think in certain ways, or have certain opinions, even if only because that’s what they’re brought up with. It means you can have interesting “ugly duckling” scenarios where one is brought up by a different race and ends up with their outlook instead.
I think “cultural values” are a better mechanism for that. Like america teaches that capitalism and individualism are good values. Anyone raised here gets a lot of that, but it’s not an innate property of being from Ohio