I’ve been aware of the dance the Floss for a while, but just for the first time heard it called a Fortnite dance. So I looked up “fortnite dances” and found there are several. I’d never heard of Fortnite so I looked it up and found it’s a shooting type game.
So…why does a shooting game have dances associated with it? I’m not grasping the connection.
WAG… Victory dance?
This. The way people use the dances in RL should have been the first clue.
Being 3rd person where you can see your character has made the inclusion of emotes that are more common in MMOs like WoW, which often includes dances, easy to adapt to Fortnite. Other shooter games that are first person don’t include these.
It’s a way of bragging and showing off too, especially if an opponent can still shoot back or just see you dancing as they’re downed.
I think many are cribbed from actual dancing too, and not just made up wholesale.
Aside: In many games with immature player bases, it has become customary to crouch over a defeated opponent (this is often possible even if the game lacks other emotes, because crouching can have tactical value). This is purportedly for the purpose of dangling one’s scrotum over the face of the enemy, a process called “teabagging”.
Well, in reaction to this, one MMO (City of Heroes) introduced an actual teabagging emote. When you use it, your character is depicted steeping a literal teabag in a cup of hot water.
Yup. The Carlton Dance is in there (named after the character Carlton from the TV show “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”).
In fact, Alfonso Ribeiro, the person who played Carlton, sued Fortnite over this but eventually dropped the lawsuit:
Very much taunting too.
I used to play a competitive shooter, and the character I favoured had an invulnerability buffer that also drew turret fire. I had a keyboard macro set that would launch the power and then do a chicken dance, just to annoy other players into trying to hit me rather than attacking other players.
There was something about a character in enormously thick powered armour, painted in “look at me!” shiny silver, dancing about like a chicken that really goaded a lot of folk into expending a disproportionate amount of effort into getting me.
I used to coach youth soccer and one of my teams, randomly assigned orange shirts by the league, chose the name “Orange Justice” as their team name. Being an old fart, I had to look up where they got the name from.
“Orange Justice” is the name of a Fortnite emote (dance). Epic Games held a contest to add a dance to the game, and one of the entries that was not ultimately accepted was a webcam video of a kid, maybe 9 or 10, wearing an orange shirt and dancing his heart out. When he didn’t win the contest, angry fans heckled Epic with a JusticeForOrangeShirtKid hashtag. In the next release, the Orange Justice was added.