The question is: Are the ways we interact with and view people influenced by the ways we think about our imaginary worlds?
If someone watches SW and/or LOTR and decides to treat someone badly because they see them as orcs or trandoshans, then I’d say the issue is with them and not the fiction. Orcs represent the cruelty inherent within everybody, not some generic “other”, hence why they were once elves, showing that even the most virtuous and civilised people are corruptible. If someone look at orcs and see a real-life group of people then that’s a reflection on them, not Tolkien or Peter Jackson. The same goes for SW.
That’s not to say that fiction hasn’t been used like this before, of course it has, and that’s obviously a bad thing, but that’s hardly what we are talking about here.
If anything I think deconstruction has only made these things worse, since so many people nowadays always look for these types of negative real-life parallels, and more often than not, make them up or project their own biases into fiction when they can’t find any or they miss the point.
Here’s a quote from my Star Wars is Surrealism essay from last year:
PART 4B: EXTERNALISING YOUR INNER SLIMY PIECE OF WORM-RIDDEN FILTH
Now let’s move on to aliens that have more personality, like Jabba the Hutt. Like all beings in the Star Wars universe, if you look up the Hutts on Wookieepedia you’ll get an extensive explanation of their society, their biology, how they reproduce (they’re hermaphroditic by the way), etc. But, if we see Jabba through the lens of abstract film making, what is he really? Well, Lucas wanted a fat and slimy gangster, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather or Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, but of course, in the form of a monster, or rather an “alien” in this case. Monsters have always been representations of real life concepts; like how European dragons have always been representations of greed; hording gold in their caves for no practical purpose other than mythological symbolism. Jabba is no different. He is greed and gluttony brought to life in the form of a big, fat, slimy slug; the abstract made literal. It is a type of storytelling that has made sense to every single child watching the film, but that unfortunately doesn’t always click with us critical-thinking adults.
Jabba’s henchmen are no different. They are meant to be vile criminals working for a mob boss, so their ugliness has been brought to the surface by making them literal monsters; fangs, claws, scales, snouts and all.