Borrowing from a real-world culture is not called cultural appropriation. It’s appropriation when you don’t treat those cultures with respect.
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Are you saying they have treated them with respect? I’m confused why you are trying to explain something to me that I know and just said.
No, I just clarified because I thought you misunderstood the definition of cultural appropriation, and assumed borrowing from a culture was always appropriation. They can fix racist stereotypes with effort, I think.
I understand quite well what it is, thank you. It is why I said it is a problem more for the Horde side with how they have treated Native American and Jamaican culture.
I’m sorry about that bit, but I think they can improve.
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The most simplistic is just do not make it about race. Anchor your conflicts in a clash between distinct cultures, ideologies, and long built bonds between races. You show the limitations of the races of your world, but also their unique strengths—Don’t make humans always the best at everything, which they are really awful about.
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This book could’ve laid the foundation of treating the lore derived from nonwhite and nonwestern cultures with greater nuance and dignity
Alas
Here we are
They have opportunity. Regularly. Still do in fact.
What they just slaughtered was our patience, hope, and faith in them.
Which they can easily regain if they admit this book was a total multi faceted hot flaming mess, needs to be retracted, and they try again
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Pretty clear to me there were only two sides to this entire thread. There was the this is racist side and the LULZ manufactured side. That is people jumping to conclusions. I saw that neither side was entirely true. I offered that not all people of color are going to find this to be racist. That not all persons of color see things through the same lens. I also offered that I can feel for people that are offended, I didn’t try to diminish them being offended.
I’m not going to comb through 300+ posts again, but I am pretty sure no one used the phrase might not happen. They just assumed it would never happen.
The good thing about critical theory grounded in HISTORICAL and MATERIAL realities is that racism is no longer subject to the whims of individuals
A trope is a trope is a trope
And using a trope without interrogation makes them liable and opens the door for being trash
So best to avoid tropes entirely
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I am fairly sure I said if they had a more diverse team they would not keep setting themselves up for accusations like this. 
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It is fine to use tropes if you know what you are doing with them. You cannot just paste them in without care and use them as they come in the box. You have to flip them inside out, twist them in a way that makes it obvious you know there is a trope and it is a conscious effort to use it as a literary device instead of a mindlessly added bit of implicit bias.
Blizzard has very sadly not shown that sort of deftness in it’s writing.
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There is no might in there. Listen, I agree with you that more diversity is always better. It’s a mantra I have lived by and worked for my entire life. However, I’m just not going to endorse that diversity means that people are never going to get offended. That’s a crutch that I feel people use to try and explain away all problems like it is just going to magically solve everything. People need to understand that when we achieve diversity, it’s not going to just make everything turn into an immediate kumbahyah.
He tried to say that people positioned this qualification of might when I don’t remember seeing people say it might. If someone wants to comb through 300+ messages before I posted to find where they said it might not happen, then I will apologize and stand corrected.
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So this part’s not actually directed at you specifically, and more a commentary on this perspective.
The problem is absolutely the presentation of both sides, namely for Alliance the sheer number of White Male Rulers and the treatment of their non-white, non-male compatriots.
In Vanilla, you have dwarves ruled by a white man, gnomes ruled by a white man, humans ruled… Sorta ruled by a white man. And across the ocean, geographically seperated from the white male rulers, a single purple female ruler. The Alliance largely was depicted as the White Male Alliance, with most prominent NPCs being one of the three afformentioned races who all comingled often, and the occasional purple or blue character.
In BC, we got a second non-white race, also ruled by a man. This race, the draenei, were the least represented of the now five races until WoD.
Cata got us worgen, led by… Yup, you guessed it. A white man. But the dwarves lost their white male ruler, replacing him with two more white men… And an evil, scheming woman (also white) most prominently known for the time she ran off with a dark skinned dwarf, which upset her white father so greatly that he sent adventurers to kill him (yes, I know the Dark Irons were presented as evil. The dark skinned dwarves. Ahem. But we’re talking Moira here). This is also when the night elves began their train wreck narrative of being unable to hold back the Horde from their own lands, which… Is a thing on its own, but we’ll skip that.
So five white men, a blue man, a purple woman, and a scheming white woman. That’s the Alliance at the time.
MoP saw pandaren. They don’t really have a ruler per say, more a representative who is barely represented.
Allied Races tried to change that… But did so poorly. The new shiny draenie? Led by another white man. Void elves? Led by a formerly white, now purple man. Dark Irons? Led by the less-scheming, less-evil woman from earlier. Mechagnomes? Led by the gnome leader, so still white man.
So an overabundance of white men leading. But it’s okay, because at least the white man Alliance isn’t presented as morally superior to a faction made up mostly of races coded as non-white, right?
Except they absolutely are. Every major conflict is started because the Horde got all wildin out. Every major conflict portrays the faction full of races coded as minorities being evil, fighting the goodly white men Alliance. And the conflict ends when the minorities apologize to the white men, who benevolently forgive them.
The depiction problems are definitely present on both sides of the faction conflict. The Horde ones are just more in-your-face, and the Alliance issues are just easier to look past.
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I don’t think anyone has said that. I know 110% I have not. It isn’t foolproof and its the internet: Someone is always going to be offended about something.
I merely say it will make things better, and that is all we can ever work towards. Expecting perfection of any kind is a fool’s game.
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No. There’s a fairly sure. That ain’t the authoratative statement you are making it out to be. He’s also not claiming that his fairly sure hypothesis would fix everything; just that Blizzard would not keep setting themselves up for these massive faux pas.
You know you had to reach to make this one work. Why bother making such an effort at deflection when you could just say a “my bad, should have worded it better”, a “it’s the impression I got”, or any other excuse?
Literally nobody is saying that but you. You are literally creating an argument, just to tear it down.
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Maybe I am wrong, but when reading through 300+ posts, the feeling I got when people turned to the fact all the members of the story team being white was that if they weren’t all white, this would have never happened. 300+ posts are a lot to take in in a morning of reading. Maybe I misread what some were implying, but it definitely didn’t feel so.
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Yeah that’s what I mean
Use a trope and interrogate it
Blizzard is now just invoking tropes for lazy world building, no subversion or interrogation
My position is
- They need to hire at least one historian or cultural expert of some sort per in-game race. The Troll Person should be generally familiar with Haitian, Jamaican, Nahua, Maya, Inca, Yoruba, Ebo, Congo, Xhosa, and African Diasporic histories and myths. Not PhD level, just enough to have the Range to explain it with nuance and care. What are the ingredients to Trolls.
- They need to have an internal DEI type Committee to review the lore. Scrutinize everything the Game Team or Story Team writes. Send it back if needed.
- They need to have at least one in-house linguist, for troll and dwarf and etc dialogue, and to hopefully develop the languages.
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It would help if they would just assemble a team of sensitivity readers to review all literary works to be published as well as story lines, both the major beats, and the quest lines. The sensitivity readers have to have the ability to actually reject things and not just give opinions, though.
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And they CANNOT be writers
They CANNOT contribute to the lore per se in a constructive way
Or you run into too many cooks in the kitchen. One chef and their team can handle multiple orders
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That is possible. I should have replied to this earlier. But, this would make the Horde more evil.