it’s exactly like that because your turning a white person into a colored on, someone who has been white for years are now black, how can you not see how that is kind of screwed up?
What i’m more curious about is what are your guys arguments that this is better than just adding new fresh original PoC NPCs? what makes this the superior method of implementation
Someone moved your cheese, and you don’t like it. Get over it.
I highly doubt you memorized every single NPC’s exact appearance prior to this change.
First off blackface would be a TEMPORARY change of a person from white to black using makeup and usually used to make a MOCKERY OF BLACK. This is not it and is a wholesale change of a character from white to black. Nor is there any attempt at disparagement of blacks using said change.
Blizzard can do both. And they are doing both. The reason I am ok with this is because there is only a finite number of NPC that can be in Stormewind and rather than changing the name/effectively killing off NPC they are just changing the skin tone. It also gives the impression that POC were always part of Stormwind.
Blizzard might be able to do this in a few areas, but Stormwind is already so full of NPCs it would just get overly crowded unless they also just started removing the old white NPCs to make room.
Which I sort of suspect that would get complained about too.
it would probably get complained about unless they moved those NPCs to new towns/cities in other zones but at least that’s less creepy than changing white people into colored ones.
Well, just to help you in the future, the term blackface means you are one race and then mocking out another by wearing a costume. This doesn’t apply to the NPCs since they were changed, they aren’t wearing a costume to mock out another race.
The problem with incorrectly using the term is that you may be indicating a severe lack of empathy, or at least … basic understanding.
Everything they’re about to add to the game is in the Shadowlands. There are no new towns/cities in other zones being added.
At this point your options are:
Which frankly, the second one sounds like the premise of a horror story if you want to talk about what’s creepy.
I can partially understand the reasoning behind this. If Blizz came out tomorrow and made Anduin dark skinned people would probably lose their minds because you have a established light skinned character changing their skin color for no reason other than diversity. You probably wouldn’t see many people defending this as “they didnt have the technolgy to make him black before”.
I’m not saying they are right or wrong just that I can see their side of the arguement.
But on that note if you are having this massive ethical dilemma about pixels on a screen you should probably not be playing a game where you are an interdimensional hitman who will kill babies for a handful of gold.
why do they have to have exact same dialog and clothing?
Their skin isn’t changing; it’s a retcon that is meant to right a wrong.
We are to operate under the assumption that they’ve always had this complextion.
I would argue it’s not even really a wrong, there is nothing wrong with having a white human kingdom in fantasy, the real wrong was never having a PoC kingdom as well or at least villages etc. which is why at this point they should have just switched the NPCs around rather than change their skin color.
Because we all know Blizzard would be as lazy as possible about updating several dozen NPCs in major cities.
They meant people like Taelia and Shaw. I highly doubt a generic portal trainer without any dialogue whatsoever counts as “established.”
i would argue the portal trainer is far more stablished than Taelia at least us players especially mages have probably had more run ins with her.
Blizzard can’t stop you from forming a strange emotional connection to a vendor if that’s what you want to do. But it’s very clear to them that a character with literally no lore relevance is not an “established” character.
Do you honestly think it would be less of a retcon if Taelia, after an entire expansion of being white and taking center stage in multiple Alliance questlines, suddenly changed race in Shadowlands? Changing the race of a dialogue-lacking vendor isn’t comparable in the least.
But players do form those connections all the time, just cause blizzard doesn’t care isn’t a good excuse to ruin them.
Careful there. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn’t mean it this way, but you definitely shouldn’t be implying that making an NPC black is “ruining them.”
Regardless, Blizzard doesn’t need an excuse to exercise control over characters in their IP. We’re not talking about POV characters or anyone with narrative significance. Hell, some of the NPCs are non-canon memes like Bario Matali; a guy who is no longer in the game for obvious reasons. These are characters that serve simple utilitarian purposes or are meant to just be jokes. The idea that we need community approval before we start making minor alterations/removals of unimportant NPCs is very bizarre to me. It doesn’t work any way you slice it.
Bario Matali shouldn’t have remained just because players used him to level their cooking in the past, and if we go by the logic that simple appearance alterations are enough to “ruin” a character’s relationship with a simple NPC, then we could extend the argument to absurd lengths like “models and graphics should never be updated in the game at all because I prefer how the classic designs looked.”
You’re being disingenuous by assume anyone would have issue of race alone “ruining” something. You know that’s not what I meant yet you bring it up to try to discredit me as racist. What ruins it is changing someone you’ve made a connection with
People still to this day complain about the cata zone changes for that very reason. You can’t change something someone grew attached to and expect no resistance or in this case they have easy out cause white knights will come in and proclaim any opposition as racist.
Only if you make racist jokes/names of your character for doing that.
Not even player characters are God’s we can be any race gender color etc. We’re noncanon aside from our existence, stupid to compare npcs to player characters