To an extent but I’d disagree on a lot of more recent stuff, particularly the ‘Sylvanas was always evil’ things, as well as the ping ponging personalities of the women portrayed in the story. While certainly there are aspects of it present quite far back (mostly at the hands of Knaak, and even in the case of Taretha Foxton, Golden), there was clearly a back and forth that started likely around Cataclysm, but didn’t truly take root until the last several years as those who pushed back on it (I think Metzen is one example) left the company.
Cata onward was when Metzan started to lose his influence bit by bit, mostly due to interpersonal issues such as his marriage, and then his illness as well.
I do think you’re right, in a lot of cases with others it’s not always intent, so much as… people wanting to try and make things in a good way but not knowing how, but also not wanting to give up control to someone with a better handle on it.
It’s why I said there’s a piecemeal aspect to it. Jaina’s writing, for instance, for the first leg of BfA is very well done, but then you have… well, a good portion of the rest of Jaina. Sylvanas and Tyrande are more egregious examples, however.
EDIT: I think it’s also important to draw a distinction between what was considered good and inclusive writing at the time but has since aged out and is less acceptable, versus writing that is just flat out weird about women and is more recent. One is more ‘it was a product of its time’, the other is more inherently strange and feeds into this case.
That would be depressing as she’s written the Horde the best tbh, and McKinney’s reworking of the Earthmother story was beautiful, intriguing, and respectful of the IRL myths she borrowed from (Greek, Amerindigenous, and Polynesian)
Which is painful, because they’re the kind of people we need to stay and rebuild the mess after the rot has been cut out—although I’m not so naive, I’m sure nothing will happen just like with Ubisoft. We need the decent people to take control and put all the pieces back together after this bomb.
It’s not about the story it’s about real people being abused in a company.
Who the hell cares about the stupid story, framing this news in that way is frankly embarrassing and if that was your first reaction you should log off the internet for a while.
That’s one of those things that I don’t think can be assigned to any one developer though. Sylvanas has been written by a bunch of people and her doing bad things has been consistent across it. In fact, this franchise has been going on for long enough that basically every character has had multiple writers pitch in on their development.
It shows that they’re trying to hide this very serious topic.
Better than having the same stupid people whining about the same stupid garbage and now using a horrific real world scenario to justify their stupid complaints.
I just checked General Discussion and I don’t think that this thread is the focus of moderation right now, let’s try and keep it that way by being excellent to one another.
I tie it back to Afrasiabi because he was the one who stated Sylvanas knew about the Wrathgate and had planned it. Her doing bad things only ramped up in Cata when he also came into a greater level of control over the narrative.
Particularly worried about the women of/affiliated to the writing team since Afrasiabi was explicitly named and as we’ve established he was The Lore Exec for a hot minute post-Metzen, so the likes of Golden/Roux would’ve been more proximal to all this.
Whether outright abuse or just lack of adequate compensation.
Sure but these are the story forums. And this is being discussed everywhere, by many people who do not give a toss about the story. And the only person called out in the lawsuit is intimately tied to the story of WoW. And close personal friends with almost every executive at Blizzard.
I’m sorry guys, that’s worth discussing. You’re just going to have to get over it.
I’ll grant you Lorna but Lilian started as a reference and she downright confused a lot of people for the longest time. She only got any sort of traction in BfA and even that was part of the Horde War Campaign which was… uuuh…
In that sphere, they’d have surely all known - people talk. If people from that sphere resign now, it’ll be a bit funny because they’re only deciding to leave to save face.