That certainly makes sense if you don’t know what words mean.
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Right back at you baby.
Well you got your diversity tool. Hope you are happy with it.
It will make the tokenism reach heights we never dreamed of.
Kul Tiras has been brought into the Alliance’s fold and Stromgarde has been reclaimed.
Anduin has stepped down and Turaylon is taking the throne of SW as acting Lord Regent or some such.
We know more about humans than any other race right now, you impossible buffoon.
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we can literally summarize every race in wow like that.
Dwarves formed the council of three hammers.
Moira finally fully brought the dark irons into the fold.
Gnomes discovered their long gone cousins and united as one under Gelbin
Night Elves retreated to hyjal and are not big conversationalist with anyone.
Generalized descriptions we have aplenty.
Name me the noble houses and how many they are.
Where is the defias brotherhood now and what are they doing?
What is the situation in Darkshire?
What is the situation in Westfall?
Has any of this been explored? Or do I need a book to learn anything about the humans in wow?
Jesus Christ. Ya know, I do apologize you’re occasionally just clever enough to appear like you’re actually worth having a conversation with.
Allow me to amend that mistake.
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I am just pointing a finger at this buffoonery. The double speak and blatant contradictions. I don’t think I have seen a fandom and a developer deserve each other more.
As it was clearly show here with the diversity tool discussion.
It is a tool that math’d the f out of tokenism. You complain about it and two minutes later advocate for it by referring to lore inference (not even official btw) to explain why certain races get some minor development to explain their cultural or physical difference but not for others. It is just insane.
But so is Blizzard. So a perfect match I say.
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WoW has three human ethnicities. Normal. British. Or British XL.
This tool wasn’t used in reference to WoW. Because the humans of WoW are fantasy creatures that only bare a superficial resemblance to the humans of Earth.
You see the real humans developed into an upright species millenia upon millenia ago. Became the planet’s apex predators. Spread across the planet. And only got around to creating civilization anything even resembling 10k years ago or so depending on your definition of civilization.
WoW humans are robots. Who are the children of bigger robots. Who all got skin because a tumor with psychic powers willed it so.
There can be no more tokenism with them than there can be with murlocs. They’re not a real species. They represent no one.
Other species however have struck a cord with players because theyre painted with various IRL cultures. The Forsaken are a bunch of goth weirdos who’d much prefer to melt idiots with death fog than speak to them.
So obviously I feel very seen by their inclusion.
The humans are such a blank canvas that you can project whatever you want unto them. Thats why they work in this setting despite having the cultural value of a Playmobil Castle Playset. That is their purpose. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Your accusation that it’s somehow tokenism to not try to retcon this whitebread by design race to have the sort of cultutal diversity as us very much real life humans shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the term tokenism and the setting at large.
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This can be said about literally every work of fiction ever created.
Look, its real simple.
Blizzard adds brown human, brown elves, black elves, asian human, and etc and etc and etc.
Great. Love it.
For over a decade we have seen these elves and humans appear white. Now that more diverse options are being introduced there should be more than just… NOTHING.
They are just… there. No explanation, no development. They just pop into existence and we just have to assume they were there all along but we were just blind to it i guess.
Wow is not alone in this.
There are many movies and shows that due this too. As I named you examples.
That is what tokenism is. Its a low effort, symbolic gesture to check off some boxes to accomplish a marketing goal.
That’s what the Tool was for and that is what you are advocating for now.
The wow humans suffer from the same neglect as the other races and these lazy introductions have done nothing but highlight that fact.
You are grasping at excuses to defend this sort of lazy development when we both know its not just the trolls that “change” with the environment. Elves evolve like a pokemon, Darkirons lived in the darkest lowest part of Ironforge before leaving. Humans dealing with Old Gods or Cult of the Damned change skin color.
Dwarves are based on scottish and the irish i guess? Well they got three distinct looks and each one has a unique identity to go with it. Did the game cease to be? No.
Thats a good implementation but Blizzard decided to do it for the Scottish, Extra Catholic Scottish and Irish. For humans they could have made some new kingdoms (or used existing ones) or name some noble houses like the Kultirans and show them as different Human clans. Both Humans and Dwarves are from titan forged robots and yet somehow the Dwarves organized into 3 distinct different looks and cultures and humans… well they were all white until we decided not really but didn’t put the same effort we did with the dwarves.
Alliance can be interesting. Humans can be interesting. Blizzard just has to put the effort not into just a dozen characters for 20 years but actually bother developing the world and the races they seem to introduce nonstop.
Defending this sort of lazy implementations is the height of bootlicking.
You are actually arguing for the token diversity calculator and you don’t even seem to realize it. Or may be you do and don’t care. Needless to say I disagree with pretty much everything you stated.
Anyway I have had all I can say on this topic tonight.
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I’ve expressed before how I find it annoying when a medieval village has the demographics of modern Chicago sans explanation. Because it’s lazy world building.
I’ve mentioned before how much I adore the human kingdoms of The Elder Scrolls. True 3/4 of them are white but theyre very distinctly Romans, Vikings and Britons. Hell they’re called Imperials, Nords and Bretons. They’re not even trying to try hide it.
The 4th human kingdom are the Redguards. They are predominately what we would interpret as black people though there are more Middle Eastern appearing people therein. They arrived to Tamriel from a continent called Yokuda. Their proper name is Yokudan but the first influx of conquerors called themselves the Ra’Gada. Meaning Warrior Wave in their tongue. That got misheard as Redguard by the other humans who were curious about these darker skinned comrades who turned up and promptly eliminated the local elves.
It’s fine the elves enslaved humans at the time. And seriously I love fantasy that has humans that feel like humans. Which is to say extraordinarily warlike. Seriously WH40k is the only accurate portrayl of humans. Seriously imagine unleashing our species on something else. Look what we’ve done to ourselves and we’re instinctually hardwired to feel empathy for eachother. Heaven help the first lizard or fish people we run into. I’m sure there’s some peaceful race of squids out there who know nothing of war or strife or slaughter, and IN THE EMPEROR’S NAME WE SHALL TEACH THEM OF THIS WITH THE BITE OF OUR BOLTERS!.
Ahem. Ya see though nothing about the WoW humans get me fired up. Because theyre inhuman. They’re robots, quite literally. You can’t try to paint what is by design a blank canvas.
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They nerfed the… assets of a few characters due perceived oversexualization.
Even elves get ‘bri*ish’ed’ sometimes. Look at Shandris, its pathetic.
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That’s where you’re wrong. Most saw it as a “nerf.” But Jaina really needed that soft material between her corset and…can I say nipples, probably not, buds. And since none of you leveled tailoring! Well, this is what we got.
More likely Jaina ate too much mana-biscuits, drank too much wine, and can’t pull off the old look. Gravity is also a harsh mistress.
I’m still waiting for the quest where we go to the beach to measure the length of female swimming suits and have to kick them off the beach for being in violation of dress code.
I get that every armor having boob windows and platekini is dumb, but I hate that every problem gets a false dichotomy treatment and overswing in response. Like, are Preteen Male Fantasy and Puritanism our only options here? Can we at least admit that occasionally seeing a pixel boob isn’t going to bring society crashing down, and that a woman wearing practical armor isn’t going to bring society crashing down?
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What’s weird is a few Lordaeronians randomly have German and Russian accents.
But they’re all Scarlets and Cult of the Damned. So I’m pretty sure they have them because they’re perceived as ‘bad guy’ accents. Because a lot of Americans get their history lessons from action movies.
Though TBF I think Team Fortress 2 was the only game I played that used accents for characterization extremely well. ESO was amusing because the Nord Vactors couldn’t decide if they were doing German or Swedish accents. Then they hired Peter Stromare to voice the Nord King, which is cool. But hearing a genuine Swedish accent next to fake ones is actually pretty funny.
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Um ok… but that still is not addressing what I have said before.
Dwarves were machines. Humans were machines.
Dwarves got a diverse skin colors… and now so the humans.
Dwarves have unique cultures and story to accompany that diversity… humans don’t.
Your lore “reasons” don’t work, your game limitations’ argument don’t work and now you have retreated to “Well I just don’t care about wow humans like I do elder scrolls” to explain your support for tokenism.
There is no justifiable reason to condone what Blizzard did here and it reeks of the same mindset that gave us the Diversity Tool.
You don’t care about this story? Thats fine, doesn’t make what I am saying untrue.
Bruh you’re the one demanding a massive retcon to explain the existence of non white humans in Azeroth.
How tf would Asian humans come from Pandaria. Nobody but the locals have been there in centuries until very recently. And who invented the culture then, Pandas or Asian people?
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Retcon what exactly?
That was a specific example that Baal made to try to discredit the idea of actually giving development is a bad thing. My proposal, for the 100th time so far has been to give these additions have an identity of their own rather than just be a taglong.
Asian humans could be from Alteract and are currently in Stormwind because its literally the only human kingdom left. Couple of voice lines, text lines and a tabard is all thats needed.
It’s just kinda telling to me that Blizz can pull hitherto unmentioned playable dragon people out of their butt with no explanation beyond “magic science” and nobody bats an eye.
But they make existing races have the option for dark skin or Asian facial features and now we apparently need to rewrite Azeroth’s lore to not break immersion.
Absolute clown show.
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Are you kidding? They are making an entire zone for them, they are explaining why they were asleep during this entire time and why and who created them.
That’s the reason no one bats an eye… its because they got exactly what I have been saying should be the norm.
Strawman argument.
The only way your argument would make sense is if they added the drakthyr with zero explanation and refuse to elaborate any further.
“What are they? Idk some dragon i guess? All the other dragon types didn’t have an explanation, why do these need one??? huh?”
That’s your argument.
Bruh there were black and Asian people in Vanilla. Nobody needed an explanation then. Because this is a fantasy setting and if you want you can just say a medieval European kingdom has the demographics of modern day NYC. Because it’s pretend.
I think that’s lazy and less interesting than the alternative. Which is to have a fantasy answer for the other IRL continents in the setting. But Blizz didn’t do that. So the answer is magic cthulu skin cancer.
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