Orc City is A Twitter Meme Of Yesteryear

Twitter has been a fucking awful website long before it became an open haven for Neo Nazis. Only one thing has brought me sincere joy in logging on since Elon Musk’s takeover in October 2022: Orc City.

The meme originated with a very simple series of posts. One user, John A. Douglas, a self described “epic fantasy author,” critiqued the writing of Hideo Kojima. 

“Whenever someone glazes Hideo Kojima, remember he once made a boss character that’s a lardass in a bomb disposal suit riding around on rollerblades and sipping wine from a wine glass with a straw,” Douglas wrote. “His name? Fat Man. ‘Genius’”

Film critic and all around good poster Esther Rosenfield responded to this by posting the first two paragraphs of Douglas’ book.

Of course, Douglas’s criticism was already missing the forest for the trees: people like Hideo Kojima for the bizarre levity he injects into even very serious games, and also, Fat Man is very very clearly a reference to the nuclear bomb that America dropped on Nagasaki. Pairing Douglas’s dumb commentary with his even stupider prose was irresistible to the kinds of people who still clown on their friends for minor misspellings in the group chat. I am still trying to understand what Douglas meant by “its ruin was overseen by the architects of its very destruction.” And how much, exactly, is a knuckle’s depth of ash and blood?

To my absolute joy, the idea of an “orc city” has produced some fucking incredible jokes.

Orc City is just good, old fashioned, low stakes bullying. It is not a signifier of larger societal woes; it is not a herald of some kind of culture war. It’s a difference of opinion about video games. Its momentum mimics those of “the dress” or “black people getting powers:” spontaneous moments of a joke catching on and spreading far beyond its original audience. In the old days, these kinds of things would spread until people you didn’t even know were online like that started talking about them in public. They were emblematic of how Twitter’s ability to project a private joke to the entire website used to make it fun. 

These were the ways that the internet made culture before bad actors realized they could co-opt this cycle to hijack local and national elections for right wing freaks and turn Twitter into a place that makes me a witness to rapid onset psychosis almost daily. I am in a stage of my life now where I am trying to wean myself off of using social media—it’s just not good for my mental health to see the frustrations of thousands of people every day. That I have been trying to do this since I turned 30  is probably not a good sign for my success rate. 

I missed things like Orc City. I missed irreverent jokes about the weird and bad things people put on the internet. Orc City shares some DNA with the Doom Bathroom or the Zybourne Clock to me: earnest attempts at creating something that are just, well, bad in a way that’s extremely funny. 

This used to be a more common occurrence on the internet. The internet used to be fun, instead of a portal to the unending horrors of mankind. Seeing Orc City helped me remember that, and also mourn its absence. I’m glad to have Orc City to remind me why I used to spend so much fucking time on Twitter, and hopefully this one last round of jokes can help me finally say goodbye to an incredibly toxic website.