“Once you’ve been to Orc City, you’ll never stop wanting to beat the Elvish King to death with your bare hands.”

After roasting online game legend Hideo Kojima, indie creator John A. Douglas had his personal fantasy writing torn to shreds throughout social media.

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Although it began as a dunk on Metal Gear’s villain names, the Orc City meme rapidly turned a viral joke about overwrought fantasy writing. Folks on X latched onto the dramatic, self-serious tone of Douglas’s ebook, The Black Crown, and turned it into an ironic, remixable meme.

Meme fundamentals

• Meme/pattern creator: @capybaroness on X
• Meme kind: Text meme, response meme, meme edit
• First look: July 3, 2025
• Origin supply: John A. Douglas’s self-published novel The Black Crown 
• Used to convey: Mocking stereotypical tropes and overly severe worldbuilding
• Peak reputation: July 3–6, 2025

What does “Orc City” come from?

In its authentic kind, The Black Crown by John A. Douglas describes a grim fantasy setting. In the opening scene of his self-published novel, the creator wrote, “The Orc city smoldered, burned down in the wake of battle. The ground soaked in a knuckle’s depth of blood and ash. The savage cries of its defenders now silent and still as its ruin was overseen by the architects of its very destruction. The Orc Wars were finally over. ‘There is nothing more reviled than the Orc,’ said the elvish king.”

People started utilizing it to mock the style’s obsession with orcs, elves, and grand destinies. Whether ironic or honest, any publish referencing struggle, destruction, or revenge may very well be spun right into a joke about dwelling in Orc City.

How it began: indie creator John A. Douglas’s misguided Hideo Kojima diss

The origin of this new meme pattern started with John A. Douglas criticizing Hideo Kojima’s supposed “lazy” naming of Metal Gear Solid 2‘s villain, Fat Man. In his July 3, 2025, tweet, Douglas wrote, “Whenever someone glazes Hideo Kojima, remember he once made a boss character that’s a larda** in a bomb disposal suit riding around on rollerblades and sipping wine from a wine glass with a straw.”

People took discover, but it surely wasn’t till @capybaroness quote-retweeted Douglas with a “This you?”-style personal that the meme ball began rolling. They shared a passage from the indie creator’s ebook, The Black Crown, and commented, “this is how this guy’s book starts.”

Douglas’s criticism backfired, and @capybaroness’s publish blew up, with over 15.4 million views and over 6.1K retweets and quote retweets. People began criticizing Douglas’s writing, calling it stereotypical and trite fantasy content material. One particular person discovered the ebook’s glossary, which was full of slurs and racist epithets concerning the varied races within the ebook, resembling Orcpunched and Spear ear.

Popularity/virality

The Orc City meme pattern hit its stride over the Fourth of July weekend. As extra customers chimed in, the jokes grew extra absurd.

By July 4, the meme had splintered into countless parody codecs. @NewEngOfficial posted an Anthony Bourdain meme picture with the textual content overlay, “Once you’ve been to Orc City, you’ll never stop wanting to beat the Elvish King to death with your bare hands.”

On July 5, @hedgebrush posted: “John Elf Kennedy shot in Dal’ath after promising to declassify documents on the Orc Wars” with a photograph of JFK edited to sport elf ears.

Although the meme was lighthearted, it additionally highlighted how fantasy writing can fall into acquainted, drained patterns. Critics used the second to level out what number of fashionable fantasy authors nonetheless depend on Tolkien- and Dungeons & Dragons-inspired tropes like noble elves and violent orcs.

“Why is it always orcs and elves?” one person wrote on X, echoing a sentiment many followers have shared for years. Even informal readers started to query whether or not fantasy nonetheless wanted the identical outdated conflicts dressed up in new phrases.

Some of the most effective Orc City memes:

There isn’t any set meme format for the Orc City meme, which lends itself properly to being reinterpreted as something from a badly photoshopped screencap edit to a dramatically written piece of textual content “from” a ebook about Orc City.

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