I know this is something of an old subject, but I think a lot about how the Vulpera unlock involved the peons in the Horde going on strike because of poor work conditions and bad wages. Some of the peons literally broke their hands working because their tools were entirely broken. They received no recognition, and much of them voiced frustration over the fact that they’d spent their whole lives as peons.
So how is this situation dealt with?
Well, the tools are fixed by the Vulpera - who weren’t formally members of the Horde yet - and the peons are given titles such as “Peon Rank 2,” “Senior Peon,” or “Lead Peon.” The titles are completely arbitrary and only serve to “build some confidence” as Kiro puts it. Wages are brought up, but only to say that the Horde won’t agree to raise them. Then, they are given a single banquet that lasts just one night, and at that banquet, the Horde adventurer beats their strike leader nearly to death so that they won’t revolt again.
So let’s summarize - the peons revolt because of bad work conditions, poor treatment, and (presumably) unlivable wages. This is simply placated with a condescending list of titles and a condescending night of feasting, topped off with a public beating so that the working class remembers their place. All the while, resources are being sent to Suramar to make wine.
This is treated like a job well done, but… c’mon. Is Blizzard gonna ever address how horrific this is?
Its worth keeping in mind that the Peon’s grievances, while doubtless legitimate, are being harnessed and inflamed by an astroturf faux populist who states openly that he’s going to use these people as a stepping stone to become the Warchief. After the position of Warchief has been abolished in favor of a Council system. And at the party you throw for the Peons he states his continued intent to do this, and this is despite most of the actual peons showing appreciation and satisfaction over the small things you do for them.
The story is not meant to be read as the Horde Champion busting a union and keeping their boot on the neck of the working orc, its meant to be read as you stopping an ambitious power-hungry jerk from misleading the working orc for his own selfish gain, while also trying to show (in a comedic way, because Peons are traditionally comedic characters) that you and people like you REALLY care about them because you do things to make them happy, not just rabble rouse for your own benefit.
I’m not saying the quest couldn’t have done more with the whole Working Orcs Fight For Better Conditions concept, on the contrary I would love if they would do more to show that the Horde’s class divide and the relationship between its leaders and its populace are fundamentally different from the Feudal/Mercantile society of the Alliance. Heck, one of my favorite things about Goblins is that they may be turbo-capitalists, but they’re also turbo-unionists. Even their slaves get union benefits if you take the dialogue from those trolls on Kezan literally! Its a fun and different take on the old Ferengi “we want to become the exploiters,” gimmick: Goblins may want to become the bosses and get rich, but they’re more than happy to stick it to the bosses to be richer on their way up. Give us more of that kind of stuff!
I don’t expect them to anything but play it for comedy… at least until it comes time to shame the Horde champion and Horde in general for it.
On the other hand, at least Peons appear to get *paid* now. I'm petty sure they were explicitly/implicitly slaves at some point. And back in the day, one of the first things you did was go around and beat ones that weren't working. There's *some* awareness here that it's not the best look.
Also, not to be that guy, but Peasants, the Alliance equivalent of Peons, don’t get this kind of treatment. Just another example of how lately, Blizzard’s been comfortable writing the Horde as rife with all kinds injustices and abuses, but balks at the idea of including such things in the Alliance experience. Even though Stormwind operates under a literal feudal system.
It’s like how Blizzard portrays having power in the hands of a single ruler is bad when we’re talking about the Warchief, but doesn’t seem to think it’s an issue at all when dealing with the High King. If anything, it’s that’s pesky council of corrupt nobles that are the problem.
Having engaged in organized labor, I can say that this is actually a much rosier picture than how it typically goes. The Horde did actually fix the tools (we still are regularly hindered from doing our jobs with substandard tools) they didn’t raise their wages but they didn’t have rolling layoffs which is what we got the last time we tried to get better wages, and they got a banquet to placate them where we got ‘re-integration training’ to teach us how wrong we were for hating our corporate overlords and the scabs they had brought in to replace and also to remind us how much our families would suffer if we took it out on management by burning the place down.
I think it kinda goes without saying, given past instances of that kind of storyline, that this is either going to never be addressed or somehow end up being addressed worse, like the Defias or everything about goblin work conditions
Vulpera had to commit an atrocity upon helpless people to be welcomed in the Horde but it was too soon to do it to another Alliance race, so they had the Vulpera abuse the Horde itself to join.
Baine is familiar with intra-faction conflict so he openly welcomed them and considering we’re likely never going to see peons get 10 flully fleshed out cinematics about them avenging their grave injustice, I can never be satisfied with this story.
What’s horrific to you is not necessarily so to others. One of the nastier truths of our reality is, some people are made to work to the death, while others are made to feast and party all day long. Or at least, it is so because those in power make it so, until if and when someone with greater power changes the status quo.
Westfall cata questing does the same thing, it takes a humanitarian crisis and treats it at best without tact (and at worst as if the refugees themselves are the problem)
The peasants and peons are one of those things that are cute in a RTS that become extremely screwed up if you have to consider them as part of a living, breathing world.
“Haha, the builder units are silly doofuses”
To
“What do you mean I’ve to beat them? Jesus Christ did you guys enslave the mentally challenged members of your society?!”
Ehh, kinda? The thing is, the destitute masses in Westfall are treated as being rather abused by both sides of the situation. Stormwind indeed seems to be negligent about it all, but at the same time the Defias under Vanessa are cynically taking advantage of their plight rather than seriously invested in fixing their circumstances. Unlike the Stonemasons, the Cata-era Westfall homeless never really seemed to end up joining the Defias cause, as we headed into the Deadmines to eliminate Vanessa and her cronies right after the big speech that was meant to recruit them.
The Defias we crush in Cataclysm still came across like the leftovers of Van Cleef’s professional criminal organization, by whom the dispossessed civilians were being harassed and intimidated as much as anyone, and while it remains uncertain how the refugees’ situation did or didn’t get addressed since then, we nipped the Defias situation in the bud before Vanessa could manage to successfully capitalize on their (far more legitimate) grievances and start getting tons of them killed in her intended war for vengeance against the Crown. We can hope being compelled to address the Defias resurgence may have at least forced Stormwind to scrutinize the overall situation and start doing something to alleviate the plight of the refugees in Westfall, but on the inverse the Defias plans for them were likely to make their situations even worse than they already were by basically turning them into fodder if the intended attack on the capital had gone through and inevitably brought the army of Stormwind (and possibly its allies) down on their collective heads.
Yeah…it’s always a bit weird each time the RTS-style Peons and Peasants get hauled out these days, when in WoW more often than not the Alliance and Horde seem to rely on professional contract labor or military engineering corps and “peasant” in WoW usually comes across as just meaning “ordinary rural civilian” rather than explicitly a subservient feudal labor class.
With the slow-witted speech patterns and broken Common holdovers (never mind the Peasants originally using a unique stooped-over model reminiscent of their original appearance), having those RTS units around starts carrying this ugly implication that humanity and the orcs maintain some sort of burly, less intelligent sub-races to do the most menial tasks that even the regular paid laborers and peasantry won’t touch.
This is why I liked how WoD’s Garrison had a lot of “smarter,” for lack of a better word Peons and Laborers. WoW in generally introduced “smarter,” farmers for both groups going back to Vanilla of course.
Warlords introduced laborers that we actually gave a damn about and went to look for when they ended up disappearing, as though we could acknowledge they were real people and not disposable blue collars.
IRL a lot of people of the upper class work because they choose to, not because they need to. I literally don’t have to work, my family generates income in a variety of ways that any of us becoming professionals is just a lifestyle choice. We’re wealthy, not exorbitantly wealthy, just traditional upper class Old Money local aristocracy types.
There are people of the global elite (the real 1%) who choose not to work at all, who don’t need to, they just exist to consume and then die while having no obligation or need to do any productive activity over their whole lives, contributing nothing to humanity beyond their existence and simply being the “end” of the product-consumption food chain.
As a complete side point, I kinda want to see a recurring Horde B/C tier character that’s just an explicit communist revolutionary a la Da Red Gobbo of W40k.
Just a bit of zany fun to the intra faction stories with a few quests here and there about the ‘eventual’ overthrow of the Horde Elites.
