This has been the argument from Millennial D&D players that joined for 5th edition.

The Orcs are supposedly "Black Coded" and this has been a baffling mystery to Gen X players. Orcs have never come across as Black Coded, where the hell are Millennials coming with this accusation?

Well I have the awnser.

It's WoW. World of Warcraft, it's always been Wow.

The Orcs in World of Warcraft have been presented as the oppressed misunderstood minorities against the Alliance, but it goes further than that.

In WoW players could do emotes, flirts, jokes and dances that were programmed in for each race.

Orcs basically got Black Urban American slang and verbiage for a lot of their voice lines.. Like "I feel ya dawg, but I'm not feelin ya" to their Dance being the fucking Electric Slide.

This is all par for the course for Blizzard. The Trolls are blatantly Caribbean and the Tauren are plains Indians. The Dwarves are all Scottish.

Wow was such a phenomenon for Millennials growing up, I truly believe they transposed the Warcraft depiction of Orcs over the D&D depiction and that's how we ended up with "Orcs are black coded."

You're mostly right. As far as I know, Warcraft was the first widely popular franchise to rehab orcs from just savages to noble savages, and WoW gave orcs a certain amount of African flavor (which wasn't so much there in Warcraft 1-3). It's certainly true that WoW is responsible for the current popular conception of most of the classic fantasy races. It's not just the African orcs, it's also the mad scientist gnomes, the big booty goblins, the elves with giant ears, and the general cartoonish, lighthearted and slightly horny tone. WoW didn't invent the "Dwarves are Scottish" trope, but it was a major reinforcer. The Jamaican trolls didn't stick, and neither did the more unique races like the Tauren or Pandaren, but I suspect the Draenei are heavily responsible for the Tiefling boom in the 5th edition era.

Here's the thing, though, and this is coming from a millennial who played WoW shortly after it launched, we thought that shit was HILARIOUS. WoW was extremely silly in the early days (I assume it still is), and it came out in the time where using fantasy races to parody real life ones was still an entirely accepted practice that no one thought twice about. I mean yeah, they made orcs dance like MC Hammer, but they also made Night Elves dance like Michael Jackson and Dwarves like Russian Cossacks. I played Horde and I remember the same people who mained orc characters and would tell you Thrall was their favorite character would also be in voice chat joking about how Orcs should be able to jump farther than other races and get a special ability for running away from city guards.

Because of how radically internet culture changed after the rise of twitter and reddit, people forget that it wasn't that long ago that the internet was the anti-PC wild west. Edgy humor was the "in" thing for millennial teenagers, and WoW reflected that. I suspect that secretly a lot of those now grown-up millennials still think that way behind closed doors, but they've been taught to suppress it by the Boomer/Gen X corporate establishment and the Gen-Z dominated twitter/instagram/tumblr culture.

This is generally the vibe I get. In the 1980's D&D massively shaped the idea of what fantasy was and then WoW was sort of a "round two" of shaping fantasy. I feel like it also locked in a lot of archetypes as well, like shapeshifting druids.

Quote from: Dracones on June 25, 2024, 09:44:18 AMThis is generally the vibe I get. In the 1980's D&D massively shaped the idea of what fantasy was and then WoW was sort of a "round two" of shaping fantasy. I feel like it also locked in a lot of archetypes as well, like shapeshifting druids.

  That would explain why shapeshifting went from more or less a 'ribbon' for AD&D/2E druids to the core of the class's identify during 3E.

I tend to think of Shadowrun where orcs are a mistreated minority.  "Orks are people too" as they say.

The tinker Gnomes came from Dragonlance of course.  World of Warcraft cast its net widely.

I did read an article in Dragon by Gary Gygax, it would have been August or September about a year after D & D 3e came out and WotC was trying to buy goodwill from the fans.  Anhow, in said article he talked about basing the humanoids on the native American tribes around the Chicago area and that they were always intended to be somewhat sympathetic.  As the DM he mostly played the bad guys after all.  But back to our core issue, D & D's orcs were not black people.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on June 25, 2024, 09:51:29 AM

Quote from: Dracones on June 25, 2024, 09:44:18 AMThis is generally the vibe I get. In the 1980's D&D massively shaped the idea of what fantasy was and then WoW was sort of a "round two" of shaping fantasy. I feel like it also locked in a lot of archetypes as well, like shapeshifting druids.

  That would explain why shapeshifting went from more or less a 'ribbon' for AD&D/2E druids to the core of the class's identify during 3E.

3E and the upgunned Wild Shape predates WoW by a few years.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on June 25, 2024, 09:51:29 AM

Quote from: Dracones on June 25, 2024, 09:44:18 AMThis is generally the vibe I get. In the 1980's D&D massively shaped the idea of what fantasy was and then WoW was sort of a "round two" of shaping fantasy. I feel like it also locked in a lot of archetypes as well, like shapeshifting druids.

  That would explain why shapeshifting went from more or less a 'ribbon' for AD&D/2E druids to the core of the class's identify during 3E.

Quote from: David Johansen on June 25, 2024, 10:00:24 AMThe tinker Gnomes came from Dragonlance of course.  World of Warcraft cast its net widely.

Yeah, Blizzard has never been a terribly original company. Their strength used to be in taking existing ideas, remixing them, and then mainstreaming them. But hey, you could say the same of Warhammmer, Star Wars and D&D as well, so whatcha gonna do?

Really a lot of this stuff is relatively obvious if you think about it. Somebody at Blizzard probably liked Dragonlance, but ultimately I'd guess Warcraft gnomes turned out the way they did because they needed a steampunk race to pilot the Alliance aircraft in Warcraft II, and gnomes fit the bill. Same thing with goblins for the Horde. Shapeshifting makes sense as a core feature for Druids, especially if you want to separate them from Clerics. There's precedent in folklore and literature for both ideas, too.

Likewise, the faceturn that Orcs did from evil canon-fodder to fantasy Klingons was probably inevitable. People like orcs, and anything people like is going to get expanded upon over time. There's a limit to how much you can expand on one-dimensional villains, and you can easily get demons or gnolls or whatever to fill that role once you move orcs out of it. WoW has a wholly separate race of pig-men to serve the purpose, which are ironically one of the main enemies in the low-level orc zones.

I sometimes wonder if the shoe is not on the other foot given Tolkien's own theological stances on the matter. In his setting only sentient talking beings come from God, souls are the preview of the divine, which made Orcs a bit of a problem since they are talking and crafting beings with "culture" so to speak. but were created by Morgoth not God.

Via Tolkien's letters and notes it seems this problem bothered him a bit, as the typical notion behind them and what seemingly was implied and ended up in the published works was that Orcs were the products of some horrible eugenics project. later Tolkien would perhaps suggest they were more akin to sophisticated animals or P-zombies, a type of hateful automaton but he was too late to codify that into the lore.

For all the Two-faced evils of Leftism it's undeniable that they still appeal to the same core Western Liberal values we share, and as a result they have touched on this weakness in the writing of Orcs. I think I can speak for any sane or moral person, that if you found out the monsters you were fighting had at one point been human, victims of some horrible forced eugenics process, and were more or less indoctrinated from birth, you might have some complex feelings about simply wiping them out given you could have been one of them but for the grace of God.

Thus much media involving Orcs after Tolkien either leaned into them being soulless monsters and automaton such as 40k, or more or less noble savages, such as Warcraft and later versions of D&D. thus the further Left you go, the more reasonable it seems they become coded as some real racial group due to
ambiguity.

As for other shoes on other foots, Millennials I don't believe are as woke or as stupid as some might claim, given certain trends and the privacy of the ballot box, I think they generally are more based the Gen X. most of the leftists I have the misfortune of being related to and deal with are 35+ it's Gen X, the kind of dumb shits that introduced much of the academic woes we have to deal with now, and still act like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are still in power... yeah Gen X can pound sand.

Just dropped on Twitter: a Vtuber, SquidorabL, talks about the stupidity of _-coded

https://x.com/squidorabl/status/1805606725929586952

You lose me at electric slide...that and all line dancing is the whitest thing on earth.

That's a really good insight.  I was wondering how I missed that then realized I always played Alliance.  It just goes to show the difference a language barrier can make

It's simple.  SJWs are obsessed with race so they make everything about race.  Their entire worldview revolves around race so they see everything through the lens of current year race politics whether that makes any sense or not.  It's the same reason why the sort of feminist who writes for The Mary Sue thinks anything and everything is sexist.

Quote from: yosemitemike on June 25, 2024, 02:40:38 PMIt's simple.  SJWs are obsessed with race so they make everything about race.  Their entire worldview revolves around race so they see everything through the lens of current year race politics whether that makes any sense or not.  It's the same reason why the sort of feminist who writes for The Mary Sue thinks anything and everything is sexist.

This.

Plus, noble savage orks were a thing long before WoW. Earthdawn's orcs were very much 1. A playable race, and 2. had social and racial reasons for their reputation that wasn't "They're the bad guys".

But I will agree that WoW popularized the concept.

Quote from: Orphan81 on June 25, 2024, 08:03:29 AMThe Orcs in World of Warcraft have been presented as the oppressed misunderstood minorities against the Alliance, but it goes further than that.

In WoW players could do emotes, flirts, jokes and dances that were programmed in for each race.

Orcs basically got Black Urban American slang and verbiage for a lot of their voice lines.. Like "I feel ya dawg, but I'm not feelin ya" to their Dance being the fucking Electric Slide.

Quote from: David Johansen on June 25, 2024, 10:00:24 AMI tend to think of Shadowrun where orcs are a mistreated minority.  "Orks are people too" as they say.

The tinker Gnomes came from Dragonlance of course.  World of Warcraft cast its net widely.

I did read an article in Dragon by Gary Gygax, it would have been August or September about a year after D & D 3e came out and WotC was trying to buy goodwill from the fans.  Anhow, in said article he talked about basing the humanoids on the native American tribes around the Chicago area and that they were always intended to be somewhat sympathetic.  As the DM he mostly played the bad guys after all.  But back to our core issue, D & D's orcs were not black people.

There are clearly different takes on orcs that progress in different directions. In Lord of the Rings (1954), orcs are a military-industrial complex sort of evil. They destroy forests to build vile factories; and they have great war machines and even a massive bomb. They speak in cockney accents, like urban factory workers in Tolkien's England.

In early D&D (1970s), orcs are no longer industrial, but instead are shown as primitive tribes squabbling with other humanoids. I haven't seen the article referred to, but it seems to track with the more American and specifically Wild West flavor of D&D. David Johansen, do you have a reference for that article?

In Shadowrun (1989), orcs are explicitly urban lower class - rough and tumble, but not evil. They are contrasted with Native Americans, and I didn't pick up on any specific ethnic overtones, but they're certainly a misunderstood minority. It's similar in Earthdawn (1993) as Ratman_tf notes, with a non-modern setting.

I haven't played World of Warcraft (2004), but what I've heard confirms Orphan81's take.

In any of these, there are variations in how people use them. I don't think orcs being associated with a human group is inherently classist or racist. It depends on how it is used. As I said, I don't know WoW so I wouldn't have any judgement on their usage. There are non-racist stories that have an African-themed monster or a European-themed monster or a Mexican-themed monster.

I always felt that if D&D orcs were coded as anything it was native Americans, not blacks.