Is it? I dunno, honestly. Obviously it's dehumanizing, but is it actually racist? I don't think this counts as a racial slur, it doesn't have the history, but I also don't know enough orc lore to argue. Seems more like a nerdy version of calling people barbarians...
Either way as a Russian I've waited long enough for us to get our own n-word analogue that only we get to say.
The tweet .
as far as I can tell it started with a tweet from azov nazis calling chechen soldiers "orcs" and talking about shooting them with bullets greased with pig fat
Yeah, from how I understand it the media has pushed calling all Russians orcs to distract from the fact that it was a racial slur used by Azov to describe Muslims.
Someone in the thread claiming it was a thing even before 2014, supposedly it was even in Zelensky tv show. Either way I wouldn't be surprised it's a pre-2022 thing.
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probably, I would still bet on most of the people using it now didnt know about it before they saw azov nazis use it