Heroic there is a loaded term. People take lots of media at face value. Like how the film Starship Troopers is a really terrible parody of fascicm, because the bugs are literally killing machines that don't parley or show any concept of mercy.
So it depends on how you write your story.
Indeed, it can be annoyingly difficult to distinguish satire from propaganda. Which plays right into the difficulty people can have distinguishing fucked up messages in the first place.
Anime like
Terra Formars and
Goblin Slayers are on their face exploitative fantasies of gruesome violence. Their messages are simplistic: you must kill the enemy because the enemy is inherently evil and/or inferior.
These works were not intended to stand up to any kind of analysis. If you try to analyze beyond being brain-dead violent entertainment for sheltered people who have never experienced the horror of real-life violence, then it quickly deteriorates into what you can only reconstruct as either fascist propaganda or failed satire thereof. Along with a possibly fetishistic fixation on imagery of women being raped.
The same holds true for D&D. We shouldn't kid ourselves: it's a children's game with about as much depth as a typical violent video game. It was not designed to stand up to rigorous analysis nor to hold any philosophical value beyond face value.
So if you analyze the typical trope of teh good adventurers killing teh evil orcs with standard academic rigor, then you inevitably end up with comparisons to colonialism and genocide at some point. Not because Gygax was intentionally trying to write a tract promoting genocide, but because he presumably grew up watching Westerns on TV, reading pulp fiction, etc and just imitated that without understanding their original cultural context (i.e. westerns, pulps, etc were really racist/sexist/other -ists).
What I don't understand is why anybody would try to deny this. That's super annoying. Acknowledging that media like D&D reproduce what is essentially colonialist imagery doesn't make D&D bad or you bad for playing it anymore than playing
Hatred makes anyone a bad person.
But what I find the most annoying is a recurring underlying assumption that fiction can't or shouldn't have any deep meanings or messages applicable to reality. It's just supposed to be surface level entertainment... at least until anybody criticizes it. I'm really surprised by how vehemently weaboos can argue that something is simultaneous deep and yet undeserving of analysis/criticism.
Not everybody who consumes media will do so with their brain turned off. If you don't want lots of people of varying political persuasions to independently read messages that you never intended, like sexism or racism or fascism, then you shouldn't setup your work in such a way that lends itself so easily to such interpretations.
So your example is you implicitly using black people as "orcs". YOU are intending that. YOU are being explicit in what only you perceive - which is orcs=black people. WHY would anyone else think that? Jesus, how did you sit through Lord of Rings with this view of reality?
You're completely misunderstanding my point and putting words in my mouth. I'm not saying that orcs are black people. I do not believe or perceive that. At least in the
Lord of the Rings, orcs bear a much closer resemblance to Huns or Mongols in their story role.
What I am saying is that I strongly suspect that if I wrote an explicit racist tract (not authentically, but as trolling) but changed all references to real races with fantasy races, then my audience would be split between people who notice the (here intentional) parallels to racist rhetoric and those who argue that no such parallels exist because you can't be racist against fictional creatures.
Have you ever read
The Iron Dream? It discusses this sort of thing. The premise is that Hitler never becomes Fuhrer, but instead becomes a scifi author. He writes scifi that is thinly-veiled racist propaganda: the non-human villains of his book are Russian caricatures ruled by Jewish caricatures. Within the story itself, critics note a resemblance between his story and real caricature but dismiss it for being unrealistic.
That sort of thing I see time and time again in modern media discourses. In much the same way that the SST movie is indistinguishable as propaganda vs satire, a lot of people argue over whether fiction indistinguishable from -ist tracts is actually -ist. Pointing out similarities between the media we consume and -ist rhetoric sends people into fits of apoplexy.
That really frustrates me.