The “D&D orcs are just black people” thing from twitter is so funny because it just reveals to me how racist the people making that comparison are. Most of the people complaining don’t even play D&D btw.
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Those who seek to be offended will always find a reason, even if there is none.
The only orcs I can think of that made me go “Hey, those look like… OOOooo, that’s an unfortunate design choice” were the Kara-Kara from the DnD adventure ‘Drums on Fire Mountain’. Google the cover yourself if you wanna see.
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Hmmm.
Yep. I’d say that one is a definite no-no. Though it also came out in 1984 and I’m pretty sure it’s never been revisited.
No WoW race is based on any single thing.
People said Zandalari were Wakanda but the similarities pretty much started and ended at “Zandalar Forever”. Also, Dinotopia was a thing.
“Goblins are just New Jersey Americans”. Goblins didn’t even have New Jersey accents until, what? Cataclysm? In Vanilla they said “yo” but their voices were more zany than anything, and even more so in prior appearances.
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High pitched, squeaking voices. I kind of miss them.
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Honestly this argument is only possible because of how sanded down all the worldbuidling in WoW has become, particularly with the races that have less of a classic fantasy culture like Orcs, Forsaken, Night Elves, Draenei, etc.
Orcs starting from WC3 and probably up until Cata had a much more nuanced culture and their themes were more one of melancholy that this shamanistic and complex society they had was as much a victim of the Legion and the First Horde as the Draenei and Humans were. When fantasy races are made simpler, it’s easier for people to compare them to real life aspects and break them down into those components (even if the comparisons are reductive and dumb, such as in this case).
Moreover, in a fantasy setting, ‘barbarian’ has a different connotation than in the real world, as anyone who has worked with the medium would know. WoW comes from, in large part, D&D, and D&D takes a lot of cues from the old pulp fantasy books such as Conan the Barbarian. In that setting, Conan is generally the hero of the story, and it’s the “civilized” societies that are often shown as being the antagonist. Barbarian in fantasy is an archetype and aesthetic, not a negative label.
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Also considering Conan was actually well educated and cultured compared to the “civilized” societies, it’s actually quite laughable with the way the word is used.
Orcs were brought into literature by Tolkien.
And just like everything else that was evil in Tolkien’s world, i.e. the dark-skinned and swarthy “Easterlings”, they had dark skin, because like most of his peers, Tolkien had a racist view of those who were not WASPs. This was carried over to D&D who then invented another evil dark-skinned elf span… elves. Star Trek did the same thing when they first created Klingons… a race of dark-skinned Space Asians.
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It is literally true because that’s part of where Tolkien got the inspiration, which is the origin of D&D Orcs, which is the origin of WoW Orcs.
Delusional.
No it isn’t? Trolls speak in Jamaican accented English with some Patois throne in, worship and engage with Voodoo, which is a Haitian/US Louisiana African Diasporic Tradition, etc.
Blood Elves have tall magical white spires, greet each other with “SALAM’ashalanore” and have hookahs all over their inns.
Etc.
This is useful and important to analyze, because a good chunk of WoW’s success is tied to how many peoples and how many different peoples see themselves in the lore in various different ways, which for me includes seeing my heritage and culture as the source-material for the WoW races.
Correct.
No but they’re still derivatives of IRL Stereotypes and/or IRL Caricatures of Races + Other Fantasy Material (in turn based on IRL stuff usualy, eg Tolkien) + Other Media References
So Zandalari = West African US Diaspora Accents + Wakanda Memes + Dinosaur Theme + Haitian Voodoo Derivative (alongside all Trolls) + Mayan Architecture (primarily) + Andean Myths (El Dorado) + etc
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Not WASCs*
He was Catholic, and hated Prots 
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The admiring nature of the word ‘barbarian’ as used in the Conan stories isn’t necessarily to their credit, because it was the consequence of Robert E. Howard having some rather esoteric, unusual, and racist beliefs about how human evolution worked. Boiled down, it came roughly to ‘specific races of peoples wax and wane from subhuman monstrous savages that must be exterminated by all true men; to mighty iron-thewed barbarians with eyes of steel and wily senses who really GET how the world works, maaan; to decadent effete perfumed depraved civilized men who know not of the value of being a badass and will inevitably descend once more into ape-people savages.’
As to the portrayal of orcs in fiction…Tolkien, distrustful of the industrial revolution as he was, considered orcs to be something of a reflection on the horrors of mass-industrialized warfare and its ability to reduce people into monstrous cogs in a monstrous machine. However, when it came time to describe what these poor bastards were like he (a) described them as
“…squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types”
and (b) sort of waffled and dodged the question on why he’d portrayed a group of sapient beings as being fundamentally evil, which bugged his religious beliefs a lot - but not enough to stop him cutting a check off it anyways.
Then Tolkien became a prominent ingredient in the bubbling brew of generic fantasy, with every evil overlord, fallen kingdom, and hidden dungeon needing a group of fundamentally-evil critters infesting it for your heroic adventurers to totally justifiably exterminate. A big part of this, obviously, was D&D, which drew as much inspiration from old pulp and sword n sorceries like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Conan as it did Tolkien (it would’ve been more if Gygax had his way - he didn’t really enjoy inserting Tolkien into his stuff, even if it was what the people craved).
Anyways, racist old pulp and sword and sorcery stories and themes, with their savage cannibal tribes and degenerate snake-worshipping monster-people living in jungle ruins, found new expressions in D&D. Now orcs could not only be footsoldiers in an evil army; they could be stupid thuggish tribes infringing on the rightful property of peaceful noble civilized peoples who alas and alack must be exterminated for the safety of all lest their savagery harm the beautiful children and women of the adventuring classes.
So yeah. Orcs started out racist, were adopted into fantasy pop culture along with a bunch of old stories containing further racist seeds, then soaked up all of that like a sponge and are now a happy healthy staple of family-friendly biological determinism in literature and gaming, because while it might be considered grotesque as hell to tell a story about how those horrible backwards primitive subhuman tribal moronic brutes across the river must be exterminated to protect your cherubic families if they’re humans you can take those same stereotypes and slap some tusks on 'em and most people will fight to the death to say there’s nothing wrong with that story whatsoever and furthermore how dare you, sir.
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Warcraft Orcs are Klingons. 100%. Full stop.
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Whatever the intentions of the writers, you don’t need to dig very deep into certain parts of the WoW fandom who very much view Orcs as representations of non-white humans and, accordingly, enjoy certain acts of PvP for reasons that most would not consider wholesome.
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Okay but to your same reasoning the Horde is doing that too with “pink skins” and “Alliance pigs”. Don’t think that everyone is like these ignorant people
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I always felt it was a trope mixed with stereotypes of New Yorkers/ New Jersey w/ a splash of Jewish culture. Also added with greedy capitalist who doesn’t care for ethics or regulations that much. So when it comes to accent and culture the goblins are a mix of Northeastern stereotypes.
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I don’t think this topic is nearly as cut-and-dry as OP is suggesting.
Two points I’d like to make here. My first: some people are making the claim that orcs, or even all fantasy races, are never actually connected to IRL cultures or stereotypes, and it’s stupid to evaluate them as a statement by the author on those IRL cultures or stereotypes. I think that’s a very weak take, for one because nearly all fiction is derived from the world around us. Stories we’ve heard, people we know, problems we face, can all be funneled into a story which, however poorly-written it may be, is trying to say something about those stories, people, or problems.
My second point: is it not insulting to only hear what an author explicitly spells out about their work? To never take the author seriously, read between the lines, and evaluate what you find, whether or not the author purposefully intended to put that subtext there?
In summary: fiction is derived from reality, and can be a statement on that reality. The reality in question is, factually, the author’s reality, because no one is omniscient. Therefore, the logic follows that fiction can be a statement on an author’s view of the world, whether that statement is made knowingly or not.
Let me put this idea to an example.
If an orc is swinging a katana around, then it’s perfectly reasonable to try and divine what the author is trying to convey with that katana. The katana is famously associated with Japan’s samurai. Most American nerds associate the samurai with honorable warriors bound by a code of service to a lord, while the katana represents skill, grace, speed, craftsmanship, whatever. It doesn’t matter how accurate this perception is, only that it influences the way the orc with a katana is perceived. That’s a perception based on design, or visual appearance of a character, creature, or setting.
Did the orc borrow the katana? Steal it? Do orcs craft them en masse? Now we go into perceptions based on story. All three possibilities paint a different picture of the orc as well as the symbolism in the katana itself. This is where design and story come together to create a statement: a collision between the appearance of a culture and their behavior.
Keeping all this in mind, I don’t think it’s at all a ridiculous stretch to question the message Blizzard sends when some races are treated with much more nuance, moral diversity, and sympathy from the story than others. I’m not saying Blizzard or the orcs are automatically racist, but it’s a topic worth having a discussion about rather than being shut down and dismissed out of hand.
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What’s funny is that humans in WoW, the ones that supposed to be “the default race”, the race the fans are supposed to connect to, because all fans are human, thematically are the classic anglo-saxon fantasy white Europeans. And no matter how many Asian customization options Blizzard adds to the game, human kingdoms in WoW remain largely European with big white churches, castles and names like “John” and “Kathrine”.
While non-European cultures are generously mixed into the non-human races like Trolls, Pandas and Tauren.
And sure, it’s a western game made for western audiences, a staple of the fantasy genre, but it’s still… curious to think about.
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I think the phenomenon is called “othering”. Here’s a pull from an article on the topic:
Much later in life, like every other college student in the social sciences, I read Edward Said’s groundbreaking work Orientalism. To condense his multi-layered argument, Said noted that Western art, literature and even academic disciplines were immersed in the colonial act of creating the non-Western world as the exotic “other.” This “other” was often imbued with such descriptors as primitive, static, irrational, superstitious or tyrannical. It was the opposite of the Occidental (European/white) West, defined as modern, progressive, reasoned, scientific and free. These ideas flowed into popular western culture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as European travelers sought to portray and define the Near East–including what is today Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa and lands beyond.
Some of these ideas came from travelogues and the writings of soldiers; others came directly from artists and writers who journeyed to capture their own imagery. Many of these works operated as distinct imperial propaganda, meant to display the enlightened benevolence of Western conquerors in contrast to the despotic, barbaric, lawless, decaying regimes of the lands they now colonized. Others fulfilled romantic notions of an exoticized, often sexualized, non-Western world filled with slave markets, nude harems and noble warrior savages–more indicative of a European gaze than anything approaching reality. As Said noted, Orientalism in the end was a study of the West alone (as it was a creation of the West) and tells us little of the East as it actually existed.
Source: https://mediadiversified.org/2015/04/08/fantasys-othering-fetish-part-1/
Looking at fantasy races through the lens of othering and Orientalism, it is actually interesting to note how European-inspired fantasy races often have a much more grounded cultural backing, easily traced back to German or British history or legend for example, yet many non-European cultural inspirations are superficial and hodge-podge, like the night elves’ loose connection to Korean aesthetics, the blood elves’ to middle eastern, or the orcs’ to Mongolian or Japanese.
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Never would have guessed. I guess it’s the over-saturation of art-nouveau-like architecture.
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