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What does Orc City have to do with Metal Gear Solid? [1]
['Grant St. Clair']
Date: 2025-07-09
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.
Those are the opening sentences of self-published fantasy novel The Black Crown by John A. Douglas, and it doesn't get much better from there. You may have seen these plastered all over the Internet if you're any degree of online, as Orc City has, for reasons I can only imagine, become the meme of the summer.
It's not just the bizarrely flat writing, it's the writing Douglas is comparing it to. It started, as most terrible things on the Internet do, with a Tweet. In the wake of Death Stranding 2's critical success, aspiring author Douglas woke up and chose to attack game creator Hideo Kojima for no real reason, ragging on a boss from Metal Gear Solid 2 in particular:
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.
His name? Fat Man.
"Genius" pic.twitter.com/8Qa9EwjVfn — John A. Douglas (@J0hnADouglas) July 3, 2025
Okay, so a couple notes. A: If you want to make fun of Kojima characters, Die-Hardman and Hot Coldman are right there. Come on. B: It makes sense that a guy who named his city "the Orc city" and his war "the Orc Wars" wouldn't understand subtext. I wonder why a Japanese writer would name a decadent, self-obsessed, overwhelming, indiscriminate destructive force who specifically uses bombs Fat Man? Doesn't it just tickle your brain?
Sorry, I don't mean to dunk on John too hard — the larger Internet's done that for me. Everything you put on here is permanent, so naturally his body of work was dug up and compared to Metal Gear Solid, naturally coming away wanting. Orc City has been riffed to hell and back, and you can't go five feet without stumbling over an 'Orc Tuah' or speculation on what the nightlife might look like. (The consensus seems to be 'lots of axe throwing'.)
If anything, the thousands of memes about Orc City should make any aspiring writer feel better about their work. After all, if someone can confidently put something like this out there, the bar to entry might just be lower than you think.
[END]
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