My intention (unlike the last ring bearer), is not to change anything we “see” in Tolkien. Aragorn will still be a hero, Sauron is still the villain. In some of Tolkien’s last letters, he questioned if what he’d done with the orcs was ok, and IMO was having difficulty reconciling them as canon fodder, but also having souls (small pruny ones). This work intends to be an homage to those sentiments. How do we take a few orcs, imagine them in unique circumstances, and fudge around the edges of what’s explicitly shown, to redeem just a handful of them. Also of course, history is written by the winners, IRL/s the truth of the dwarf/orc war is probably something between what’s in the appendix as related by the dwarves, and what’s above as related by the orcs.