In all seriousness, I think this is something that needs addressing. There’s a lot of lore buffs on this forum. I think a lot of you would be genuinely challenged to, without checking a wiki, give the name of even one black human character of decent importance to the story, let alone three. The only one that I can recall off the top of my head is the man taking quest turn-ins in N’zoth Invasion Uldum, and I could not tell you his name without a trip to a wiki.
The first thing that will come to most people’s mind is Wrathion who is A) not a human and B) despite being the only dark skinned human “appearance” on the screen, a favorite of being repeatedly abandoned by the writing team, including his complete omission in Shadowlands and not even being mentioned in the novel that immediately follows his greatest triumph. (Yes, I’ve read the whole book. Blame early release bookstores.)
I know I’d like to see the team do better on this. I like a lot of our human leads, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be more diverse.
Even with Kul Tirans and their wide array of skin tones, Blizzard didn’t even add any PoC who were leaders. Heck, they’d rather use skinny humans in Kul Tiras as opposed to their more body inclusive models.
That tells you all you need to know about Blizzard Entertainment.
“However Blizzard is using the new customization options as an opportunity to update the appearance of guards and civilians, correcting an oversight on their part over the years and improving representation”
Blizzard is addressing this, the fact of the matter is that it basically was due to their horrendous lack of customization compared to other MMOs, and nothing really to do with a lack of care. Taelia Fordragon, by her concept art as well as her in game appearance is seemingly meant to be a PoC, if not black per se. They did have much darker skin tones as an option, and on many NPCs, prior to the model revamp, but the change in textures from the updated models had some effect on that. You can go on Classic and look at that, or the League of Arathor emissaries who are all very dark skinned.
But again, this is mostly just an aspect of Blizzard’s own terrible customization, as opposed to a lack of diversity. I’ll remind everyone that it took Blizzard:
Five years to add a barbershop and any new hairstyles.
Seven years to add Transmog.
Ten years to update the player models (not even including the Goblins and Worgen or Pandaren).
Five years after that to update the Worgen and Goblin models.
Six years from new model implementation to fix the issues that the updated models brought, such as one of the female dwarf faces being stuck mid-expression, clean-shaven male nelves having no eyebrows, female gnome eyes have sockets that are too large, hair colours and skin colours being lightened from their original tones, one of the female human faces that was clearly meant to be more Asian being made… not that, etc.
Aaaaand a grand total of fifteen years to make eye colour a separate option from face.
This isn’t a lore oversight, this is a ‘halp i don’t do custom thingy gud’ oversight. They didn’t have prominent PoC characters in lore because then they’d have had to make a bunch of new options, and player choice for customization has been, up until now, their anathema.
Say they agree with you what do you expect them to do, give someone a race lift to be more inclusive? I’d argue that’d be more insulting than a lack of black characters. At least let them release the expansion before you get on your soapbox.
I think part of this comes down to the restrictions of their early engine, and the culture around the time wow began development. Now with the customizations, black characters will be more obvious and likely more prominent in the story.
As for naming black characters myself, I don’t know. The ones I would’ve said have already been given, and I’m not much of a human fan in this game outside of the Forsaken and a few standout characters.
I have to say that I did not see that coming when he mentioned BLM. He the game did have its diversity issues, like removing the darker human skin tones we once had. I have some issues with the Tauren too. I will be optimistic and say that it seems to me that they are trying to move forward in a direction that involves inclusiveness. I’ll accept that while they have had issues with this in the past, that Blizz is trying to do better moving forward.
I do think that they got lucky with the timing though. They announced the new additions last year, before the nation conversation took root.
WoW lore is a train wreck, it has no constants other than to consistently retcon any major timeline event whenever it becomes necessary to tell a cohesive story… Take the Troll wars going from 2,800 years ago to little less than 200 years ago with the first war and the Orcs opening the portal. Good thing nothing really “happened” in those 2,800 years that we know of…
I’m not even a huge fan of Blizzard anymore, and I still hope they don’t try this. Because we all know about how well that would go down. It’s one thing, with the game’s minimal focus on sexuality, to go “BTW, Shaw’s gay”. But it’d be another beast entirely to, say, walk into Stormwind Keep one day, and Anduin is suddenly a POC.
You are correct. But he has a point. Blizzards “history” for their nations, races etc. has a strange habit of ignoring thousands of years between major events with no information at all.
It’s really strange.
And just look at all the events(several even world breaking) that occurred in the last ten to twenty years. So nothing really happened in those thousands of years?
Warcraft is really in need of a hard revision and a foundation overhaul in general, but since it’s a MMO that no one wants to abandon because of their transmogs, it will never happen and we’ll just get some retcons down the about places or people never mentioned before having historical significance.
With the tauren they should get advice from a native american tribe and stick with one aesthetic, not have teepees with totem poles next to then with the leaders wearing headdress. Maybe normal tauren can be the teepee people and high mountain the totem pole people? Baine having totem poles on his back (same with the heritage armor) is a bit weird looking.
As for Trolls, I hope their voice actor is Jamaican, “Dis be da good juju mon, Weetch Doktah Muk’Tal be happy, time for da big voodoo!” being voiced by a white guy seems…weird. And does the accent need to be written that way in-text?
We’ll never have a major lore character be gay because they would have to be removed for China. But a major black character? Humans already have American accents, they aren’t English, there’s even less excuse not to have one with how old the game is now.
I’ve been an advocate for a lot of this, but lets try not to force native cultures/regions into specific races. It kinda misses the point of the tauren, and native culture.
There are differences because of geography, primarily. What peoples had to contend with and had access to on the East Coast is different than the West Coast, from the Great Plains, Southwest Deserts, Floridian Swamps, etc. From those material conditions sprung associated cultures.
Tauren come from many tribes, and as the lore presents to us were very nomadic. This brings up the logic that they’d derive a lot from the Great Plains, following the kodo like the people did the buffalo.
However, what we see in game is that there have been established tauren tribes in Feralas, Desolace, Stonetalon, Barrens, etc. What may be better than just saying that Highmountain are X, Yongol are Y, and Taunka are Z, is to actually create more environmentally and culturally accurate towns/tribes. Those in Stonetalon and Thousand Needles would be more familiar to the Ute or Shashone, those in Feralas the Chinook, the Barrens the Sioux nation, while the Taunka may be closer to the Abenaki or Cree.
This not only retains the Tauren as this amalgamation, for better or worse, but actually gives thought into using these cultures as a basis for your fantasy world in a more respectable way. Surely culture would mix and meld at Thunder Bluff, but you wont be seeing totems in the Barrens and tipis in Feralas, or at least not as many.