Orcs are NOT entirely based upon a real life race

Lore Story Forum
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I’d like to make this thread, about a certain writer contracted by Blizzard. Who has been making statements about Horde races being based upon “non-white” cultures, and therefor the Horde are always forced into tribal savagery.

I am making this thread in hopes that it can reach out onto other people, to make it clear that Orcs are not entirely based upon any real life races.

They are however a mix of warrior cultures throughout history. One has to simply look at the Blademaster and see what a blademaster is based upon. However for those that like to see where Orcs are based upon… well.

A lot of people have said they’re based upon Mongols, because the name of the “Horde”. A term used to describe the Mongol’s army. But I don’t think that is entirely true.

If we look at Orcs in general, they are a barbarian race. They love to wield axes, they love to walk around bare chested (the males do lol) in leather or fur lioncloths and their whole ideology is dying on the battlefield.

Orcs love a good fight. Their society isn’t based upon gold or anything else. It’s war. Orcs have been governed for ages by strength. Only the strongest leaders were fit to rule them. Orcs also loved to have fights, brawls, pillages and raids.

Now, here’s a quote from Julius Caesar, the man himself that had to deal with civilising Western Europe when it was nothing more but a bunch of tribal barbarians.

According to Caesar, the Germanic tribes he encountered gave primacy to war, rather than to religion or domestic life. Their religion apparently lacked an organized priesthood and centered upon the veneration of nature, and Caesar suggested that the Germanic tribesmen devoted all of their energies to gaining renown in battle.

Caesar also describes the pastoral economy of the semi-nomadic Germanic tribes that he encountered across the Danubian frontier. Again, he highlighted the Germanic tribes’ single-minded focus on warfare, recording that-unlike the Romans-they eschewed both wealth and luxury, living off conquest and raiding. For Caesar, this warrior ethos made the Germanic tribes into formidable enemies, and he contrasted the military vigor of the Germanic tribes with that of the more civilized Celts.

According to Tacitus, the Germanic tribes chose their war chieftains according to their merit as military leaders and their feats of valor on the battlefield. Furthermore, these chieftains did not exercise arbitrary authority and ruled only so long as they led their people to victory.

For Tacitus, the secret to the Germanic tribes’ formidable military might was the cohesion of tribal society. The Roman author maintained that unlike the imperial legions of Rome, the Germanic war-bands were composed of clans and families, and their warriors fought alongside their own kinsmen, vying for their respect. In this warrior society, individuals sought the esteem of their peers through conspicuous displays of valor, each seeking to outdo the other in feats of bravery.

Now if I didn’t know he was talking about Germanic barbarians, I would’ve guessed the man himself was talking about Orcs. But there’s more.

Thrall himself was raised as a slave and a Gladiator in battle. Guess who loved to see slaves fight as Gladiators inside an arena? That’s right.

Are the pictures clear for you or do I need to draw lines? I see that Metzen had a lot of inspiration from SPARTACUS when he wrote for Warcraft 3, but I can see that he was a fan of Thor aswell.

Please like and share if you liked my rant, and if there’s something you want to discuss, you’re always free to join.

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Blizz orcs always struck me as being closer to ST:TNG Klingons than any specific human culture.

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i like how people always ignore these facts. orcs are absolutely european.

i feel like the problem is the perception these people have of certain people, that makes them see a big brutish “monster” and instantly think one type of person. it’s revealing of their own biases.

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Of course not. Tying any of WoW’s races to a specific ethnic origin is silly.

But it remains worthwhile to understand the fact that the concepts of “primitive peoples,” “savages,” and “barbarians” all have certain cultural flags associated with them. These flags are further magnified when you deliberately make the characters in question look monstrous.

Vikings, and other Germanic tribals (to use the obvious example,) are typically presented in western media as tall and (aside from being a bit too beardy, depending on the interpretation) almost impossibly handsome.

This isn’t new, either - as far back as Rome, they were considered very good-looking, underneath all of the grime.

When primitive people are presented as fanged, hunchbacked and malformed, that’s… not a Viking. That aligns much, MUCH more closely with much more modern Imperialist caricatures of nonwhite people.

Visually, an orc is not what a Roman thought the Germans looked like. It is, on the other hand, EXACTLY what a 16th century British aristocrat thought Africans looked like. That’s where this sort of imagery comes from. That’s the cultural well that Tolkien was drawing his water from, and which we’ve all continued to drink since.

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Even the way Orcs talk, especially the Peons, sound like lowbrow cockney accents.

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Last time I saw someone talk about this it was more than just the name but I’m not knowledgeable enough about them beyond a few surface level details to argue for or against the comparison.

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Orcs are also huge weebs, they fold their katanas 1000 times and so on

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Yeah. One has to keep in mind who made these types of orcs. It was passionate nerds who were fans of that kind of thing. They liked the Orcs and Orks of Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k, they liked the Klingons of Star Trek, etc.

It’s those influences that got injected into Warcraft, not some kind of imagined racial bias.

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I think this word may be key. They’re ‘savage, uncivilized, barely human brutes’, caricatured to the point of actual inhumanness, to the point of monstrousness. They aren’t any one people, but a skewered view of ‘other’ people in general perhaps?

EDIT: that is the origin of orcs in general, I still think that Blizzard orcs in specific don’t code closely enough to any real-world culture.

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Ooof. All I will say is that I never equated Orcs with any real life culture or race until this whole “Orcs are offensive!” trend started. If you see an Orc, and you equate it with a real life culture or race then I think that says more about you and how you see race and culture than it does anything else.

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There’s an indirect problem with the representing any fictional race as Barbarians and then accusing the writers, intentionally or otherwise, fabricating a race based on real world concepts and then dehumanizing them purposefully.

A majority of these supposed concepts are nebulous and hold no water in my opinion. People are inferring things that they wish to see and mantling them as objective fact, then moralizing that if they can infer such then it is obviously the misbegotten intent and thus objectively ‘bad’.

Tolkien is another author that has recently come under fire when naturally his Anglo-Saxon-based chronicles of “Lord of the Rings” had races that were objectively bad and other races such as the Haradrim and Easterlings be primarily composed other than white. Criticism of his hypothetical prejudice, and the transformation of other races into barbarians when there isn’t much actual concrete evidence.

Tolkien later spoke of wanting to introduce more ambivalent concepts to these races to add complexity to them. But they make good antagonists otherwise. It would’ve been interesting anyways.

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IMO, some people lack the imagination to make that sort of connection. Everything must be an analogue of a real world group, and it not being that simply doesn’t fit into how they see fiction.

“So this is Fantasy Japan.”
“Not really. It has a group of noble-born warriors that swear fealty to lords, but that’s really no different from European knights, and their culture revolves around monetary wealth rather than–”
“Yeah yeah, whatever, it’s got bamboo and katanas. It’s Japan. And it’s offensive because [reason].”

IIRC, orks/orcs (Warhammer) came about from the creators of the game, in England, being like “What if we took a caricature of football hooligans and dialed it up to 100? Just make them all about looking for a fight and yelling real loud.”

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Yes that’s what I got from them too, I forgot to add that part

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All the races have multiple blended inspirations. RTS orc armor was definately inspired by central Eurasian steppe people’s attire(so mongols or huns) and Blademasters were basically Samurai, but they also had European influences too.

Saying that Orcs=non-white therefore blizzard=racist is so reductive it’s not even funny. And it’s a problem that DnD and even LotR has been dealing with in recent years as well.

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With dnd and tolkien I can see the arguments much more sharply sense for the most part they are presented as brutish monsters that have no redemption but wow orcs actually have quite a bit changed around (even if int he beginning there’s a bit of that in there).

Modern conceptions of orcs in general have faired much much better IMO, no flat out “They’re just evil for the hecks of it”, now an orc can potentially be a friendly character or someone out living their life without being a beastial person deserving of death just for existing.

Though, I can’t say for what people have been saying about it more specifically.

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I mean, if you want to get worked up about an iffy WoW race the Trolls are right there.

The Orcs though if anything are reminiscent of Pre-Christain Germanic Barbarians with some Viking, Mongol and Samurai flair thrown in.

Hell there’s even a Bloodaxe Clan. And Bloodaxe is literally the surname of a 10th Century Norwegian King. Doubt that was a deliberate refernce but goes to show the similarities.

And personally as someone distantly related to those jibbering primeval krauts I don’t find the comparison hurtful. If Roman accounts of the Battle of Teutoberg forest are to be believed the Orcs if anything toned it down.

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I’d like to know where you draw those sources because I always saw barbarians from Western Europe depicted as fat, hairy and probably stinky.

I mean just look at Asterix and Obelix.

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Look up paintings of vercingetorix

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WoW was the franchise that popularized the “good orc” concept. Saying blizzard is racist for evil orcs gets sillier and sillier the more you think about it.

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The best part about D&D is you can ignore the “official” lore quite easily and play your own game where orcs remain as they were.

Though it is frustrating when things are taken at some skewed face value rather than everything going on. People said D&D orcs were racist but I was like “To WHO? Who could they possibly racist against?” until I made the poor decision of reading through some faux-outrage tweets to figure out what strawman they were propping up.

“Let’s ignore the fact that a literal god (Gruumsh) who was wronged by the others gods and has been consumed by hate and vengeance is the controlling force of the orcs and determines their culture and actions, and cherry-pick bits of information that we can pretend have a relation to real ethnic groups.”

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