Aesthetics in WOW

Community General Discussion
1

Art = what brings pleasure to our senses.

We got 5 main senses.

  1. seeing
  2. hearing
  3. tasting
  4. smelling
  5. touching
    There are other senses like sense of gravity, the sense of time flow, sense of balance, sense of temperature but I am gonna focus on the first one, the seeing, for our discussion here.

Beautiful paintings and pictures bring pleasure to our eyes. Seeing is our primary main sense which allows us to gather the majority of the outside world information.

But what exactly is beauty? Can we define beauty?
Mathematicians have an answer to this. The golden ratio = 1.61803398875. Any beautiful picture or painting has this ratio everywhere. Plastic surgeons use the number to make their patients look beautiful and perfect, the perfect eye, the perfect nose, the perfect chin…etc…

But what I found to be interesting about WOW characters is that they are not quite following the well known number, the golden ratio. Especially in recent years, I’ve noticed the characters in the alliance got uglier, or should I say not as handsome as before.
Compared to, let’s say MoP, both the elf male and human male got their appearance nerfed. Yes, they litterally look more dull and not as charming as before. Was it intentional horde faction favoritism or a deliberate self sabotage? that I don’t know.

Anyway, I’ve been playing different races and classes in WOW for months now and I started to realize something. It’s all the imperfections in all of wow races. There is always at least one thing not perfect in all of them. Human male looks boring and run silly, Elf male has their lower body out of proportion and their faces no longer handsome as before, same thing with LF and normal Draenei males, always something missing or not quite right.
But I’ve also started to realize it’s their imperfections that make them perfect. If they were too perfect, then I would’ve fallen deep into the character, not looking for other races or other possibilities but I would’ve fallen into the state of stagnancy, playing 1 and only 1 character, not really looking or understanding others.

(Linking a song about perfect imperfections down below.
I am not Chinese, I just like the song)

2 Likes
2

And 'lo the TItans did defeat the Old Gods, but they, in their knowledge of all things, knew the threat was not over.

And so, in their wisdom, they created the Earthen, who were not perfect. And the Titans, knowing that Azeroth would one day require those to defend her, did create perfection.

And Dwarves were born.

1 Like
3

I love my ugly characters even my weird Nightborne. But there are two perfect races: blood elves and void elves :laughing:

1 Like
4

I agree. All races are beautiful. Except the Nightborne. Horrible creatures.

1 Like
5

The OP is saying exactly what i think about male draenei faces, since WOD models were released. I don’t think that they are just ugly, but asymmetrical. In the old models where there it had a lesser image quality, you could get some draenei male faces that look really good. I don’t know why this weird change happend.
EDIT:

Yes it can, you did it with maths. But also can be defined by geometry and philosophy. Anyway, beauty also could be something very subjective, and many times related to emotions and not senses exactly.

1 Like
6

Stop following me around in the forum! you silly dorf!
LOL I like your posting though.

Yeah, I have a nightborne priest level 20 and he really looks and sounds like a mana addict. I am planning on leveling the horde characters once I am settled with my alliance characters, to see the other side of BFA story. It will probably be near the end of BFA expansion though.

Agreed, NightBornes are weird.

I got my own theory on human emotions.

Emotions = compressed reasoning.

But for this I will probably write in more detail later when I get a chance. Thanks for your input.

1 Like