Just an interesting thing I thought of, like a hidden cultural agenda almost. XD
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That’s a very broad and vague question that doesn’t really have a good starting point to even make an attempt to answer, so could you be more specific?
Do you see any sign of them doing this in lore or game, outside of the lessons they keep teaching their monk students?
What kind of beliefs? it’s not like pandaren follow any religion, more like they follow a philosophy and a mindfulness practice.
I just did a quick search to get me up to speed, are you suggesting that Pandaren monk beliefs are a cultural agenda based on Buddhism? Do you think Pandaren monks are pushing a kind of east Asian cultural agenda? because if so. yes, I do believe that is exactly what the Pandaren monks are doing.
There’s some deliberate appropriation of concepts such as “chi” and “zen”
Not with any noticeable effect.
It seems as if the lessons of Mists of Pandaria are largely forgotten, which is a shame. My toons kind of took it to heart, especially stopping to ask, "What are you fighting for?"
So, my RP is less adventure-y, more home front-y and concerns building a space to catch one’s breath, recover from the wars, and think about what makes it worthwhile.
“Slow down! Life is to be savored.”
As far as spiritual perspective, it doesn’t seem like Pandaren philosophy has a proselytizing agenda. A lot of it was directly concerned with not awaking the Sha. That’s no longer a concern. Now it is higher epicureanism - enjoyment, and mitigation of suffering. Those are fairly uncontroversial ideas that don’t need much selling.
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They did a big old retcon in MoP in order to make all Monk abilities and teachings available to the player character come solely from Pandaren. Which was disappointing, to say the least, given that a few races had cool variants of Monks that would have served to give the class legs in lore after MoP was done.
It doesn’t really have a lore reason beyond that, it was just a way to explain why races who already had a form of Monk, like Draenei and Humans, had entirely Pandaren style abilities as opposed to their own.
It wasn’t a retcon because prior to Mists of Pandaria, there were no monk abilities.
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Furthermore, Monks canonically are more or less just Shaman that hyper-specialize in Spirit only. The idea that other races aren’t going to figure out Chi/Spirit (one of the forces of reality, mind you), just isn’t going to fly.
I’m referring to Monks as they were called in the lore, regardless of abilities used, being retconned to all come from Pandaren. Prior to this, the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Crusade had Monks, though they were holy Monks, Light based. In MoP, at least the Scarlet Crusade were retconned to have learned their Monk abilities from a Pandaren, which was not present prior.
The Argent Monks, as well as the Auchenai Monks, were presumably swept under the rug, as they don’t appear outside of their respective instances. But the Monk archetype of “wears leather and fights in close combat with staves and fists” absolutely existed before MoP, right down to the name, but was altered in lore to have stemmed purely from the Pandaren. Hell, they even plunked a Pandaren Monk trainer in Ammen Vale for Draenei in spite of it being timelocked to TBC.
I’m glad you brought this up, Poised, because I was just considering making my own post about this issue.
Monks occupy an odd place in Warcraft. While here they are specifically associated with the Pandaren, in what began as a joke character in WC3, they are also a stock fantasy trope that has been around for decades. WoW could have had playable monks from the beginning, and never had Pandaren. We see generic monks throughout the game, as in the Scarlets and Auchenai. Obviously these were not meant to be the same as the Pandaren-trained monks we can play, but does it not lend some credibility to the idea of other “monkish” disciplines forming outside Pandaren culture, just as priests and paladins represent different things depending on culture? To me that makes as much or more sense as Gilneans and Kul Tirans being able to be druids because of harvest witches and Thornspeakers. It’s complicated by the fact that monks were added to the game as a narrowly defined “hero” class (albeit without special requirements or a unique starting experience), but they never really felt that way because at their heart they’re a stock trope. You could just as easily apply that logic to paladins, druids, and shamans, which rather than remaining strictly racial in their flavor, have been expanded to include many other races, some derivative and others not at all. It’s not like the situation with demon hunters, which are so specific and unique to WoW lore that you can’t really envision them as a generic fantasy class.
I don’t think it would be hard, for example, to imagine a night elf, perhaps a former druid who did not want to sleep his life away in the Emerald Dream, wandering off on his own for a few thousand years, continuing to revere nature, training his mind and body and exposing himself to a variety of spiritual and martial arts. Maybe I’m biased because I roleplay such a character, and it would be nice to have my cake and eat it too.
Monk trainer NPC’s in pre-MoP leveling zones is indeed odd (though technically those trainers are supposed to be travelers from the Wandering Isle like Chen, rather than continental pandaren, so there’s no definitive lore on how many such individuals there were out and about in the world prior to the Mists parting), the thing with Scarlet monks is that technically the change to their abilities in-game and Brother Karloff’s dungeon journal entry took place in tandem with MoP revamping the Scarlet Monastery a second time.
So in their particular case it could outright be a situation where the old Classic-era Scarlet monks were trained more along the lines of those in the Argent Crusade, and Karloff later re-trained them in pandaren combat after observing the techniques of a monk from the Wandering Isle.
Possible. Honestly I’m just salty about Auchenai Monks being swept under the rug because I found the concept really cool…
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Scarlet monks represent Pandaren monks in name only. They’re not the Shaolin “Kung Fu” ripoffs that the present monk class is.
Monks are often trained from childhood to attain true mastery in Pandaria, and most never leave.
Foreigners studying the Monk’s arts aren’t brought up with the same understanding of Pandaren values. They tend to just be who they were pre-training but now with Monk skills, which can be either good or bad depending on the individual.
After all, every Huojin monk I can think of loyally fought for Sylvanas even after the War of Thorns, which is as far from the Pandaren definition of tubular as one can be.
Why not? There aren’t any European versions of Shaolin traditions. There are a lot of European and other martial art traditions but they have nothing to do with monks.
There’s no evidence of Night Elf monks during the Kal’dorei empire for instance.
You misunderstand me, I think. I’m not talking about the cultural themes of Pandaren Monks, I’m talking about the defining characteristic of Monks being the use of Spirit. An honest analogy would be one culture discovering electricity, and no other culture on the planet ever discovering and using it. It’s impossible that only one race will discover “Spirit-only Shamanism.” Spirit is a force of nature. Would you honestly suggest that electromagnetism could remain unknown forever to all but one country?
Spirit is a label one culture will put on a certain thing.
Each form of shamanisim IS sort of unique. Draenei shaman don’t invoke the ancestors the way the Orcs do, and no one looks at the elements the way goblins do.
Three cultures can look at the same thing and it’s possible that none of them get it right.
… I don’t undertand? Have you not seen the Chronicle cosmological chart? Spirit is one of the six Elements on it. Or Blizzard’s comments on the nature of Chi/Spirit? I’m guessing you haven’t read Chronicle. The cosmological forces aren’t subjective. Spirit is the name of the force for us players in the know, Pandaren just call it Chi in their culture.
If you’re a Fregean, Chi and Spirit have the same reference
Chronicle looks to me to be the lastest in a succession of Blizzard produced “lore” that gets ignored or retconned out the season following. None of that stuff is reflected in game. So it’s just snake oil to me.
I assume you’re responding to this part of my post:
That’s why I called them “generic” monks. That’s my whole point. There is the “capital M” Pandaren Monk and the “lowercase M” monk seen throughout the game. But both are derived from the same common fantasy trope (unarmed or staff-wielding spiritual fighter) that dates back at least to the original Dungeons and Dragons. All monks in WoW have more in common with that antecedent than they differ from each other.
Also, FWIW, Brother Korloff in Scarlet Monastery was retconned in the dungeon description to have been trained by Pandaren, further adding to the confusion.
As for the Chronicles, while as a whole they’ve been made non-canon (they’re now “from the Titans’ point of view”), they have followed the logic of the cosmology chart to the letter (the cosmological forces are constantly discussed in interviews) and it appears to be their roadmap for the current and future expansions, to the detriment of the smaller-scale storytelling that Blizzard is (or was) much better at.