Generally agree. The horny in the later books striked me as absurd enough it mostly just elicited and eyeroll and a chuckle, but I also very rarely like 'on screen' sex/romance in fiction, so I wouldn't be the target audience even if it wasn't weird.

And yeah, fuck Gary Gygax. But, I didn't mean to completely handwave away the orc problem in LOTR, its more that I think that its less of a problem in LOTR than it is in a lot of later fantasy, where orcs are just tribespeople for you to slaughter. Tolkien had some issues, especially the whole "dying mad about vatican 2", but he feel like he was generally less racist and sexist than a lot of his contemporaries. Which, isn't an excuse, since he did still misstep with their depiction, but considering how contradictory and conflicted his different notes are about orcs and the possible origin and makeup, reads to me as someone who knew he wrote himself into a corner, and couldn't really find a good solution to make it right, and chose to just ignore the problem. Which, isn't great, but could be worse I guess.

Speaking of Chud meltdown, like how all the gods were all kind of genderfluid, in that they explicitly wore myriad forms before settling on their favored shapes?