A lot of the Game’s flaws were what we might kindly call “90’s -isms” which was before concepts like diverse representation and actually asking people to chime on how things based on them are depicted.
It was a small handful of white Californian dudes with no idea past what Hollywood told them with most things. Heck the reason that north is Cold and south is Hot comes down to them forgetting if you go south enough on an earth-like planet it is actually quite cold.
Absolutely true. To be clear I don’t think any of this was born from actual overt racism or malice towards real world groups. On the contrary I have no doubt that when things like the Trolls were being thought up they just thought. “Wow yeah these guys are like, so cool.” And it didn’t go much deeper than that.
These people didn’t think Warcraft would be some worldwide phenomenon, let alone be as heavily scrutinized as stuff like the old Warcraft games have now become. These people working in the 90s and early 2000s didn’t think about ANY of this stuff. It’s just that now, over 20 years later, we have new perspective on all this.
It’s not. Just because you think so does not make it true. The fact is Metzen is getting called back in and Golden is being booted out. And this guy pretty much wrote the WoW that became a culture phenomenon so I’m not sure he gets enough credit.
No he gets enough. But Golden has also been doing work for Warcraft since the early 2000’s, you know. Her first book for the setting was published in 2001.
Funny enough I kind of view Golden and Metzen as similar. Voices who have had massive influence on this franchise, who have done both good work and bad work on it and who have at different points been very controversial.
These two people are not a dichotomy, they’ve worked together even. There won’t be this big change you think there will be.
It’s a human interest angle since they happened at the same time.
So now you realize another reason why people like me are asking for faction parity. I didn’t want to bring this up, cause I knew it was cause trouble, but a side effect of favoring Alliance themes is favoring Western themes. Focusing on Tauren mythology could help remedy that.
Metzen was back before Golden even got fired. They likely worked together on some of the Dragonflight stuff.
Golden wrote both Lord of the Clans and Rise of the Horde based on Metzen’s material for the scrapped Warcraft Adventures game. One could argue she basically wrote the entire foundation of the horde. She did Lord of the Clans in SIX WEEKS… which is a whiplash sort of speed in the world of publishing.
so you mean clickbait?
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want more cultural range shown in this franchise, to want more mythologies explored and represented. But it doesn’t need to be from a faction angle.
Mists of Pandaria is, bar none, my favorite expansion of WoW both gameplay and story-wise. I thought it did a very good job of taking this Chinese mythology angle to things, and it produced a lot of very unique lore that I love to this day.
The Pandaren didn’t need to be red team or blue team.
I think this could be done a lot of ways. And hey, you know what? If you want to go on asking for a patch focused on the Tauren? I think that’s cool. I’d also like that. But like… you really take the wrong angle here.
I know, I own most of them. She’s good at writing stories she’s been told to write, judging by how the WoW story progressed since she joined in, I’m thinking she’s good just at doing that.
Anyway, this was a high profile booting. They wouldn’t have done it unless there was something very wrong going on there.
Her firing lines up with the 1,900 people that were laid off at around the same time. It’s just Microsoft cleaning house as they call it.
If that’s what Human interest means to you, than you do you…
I’m pretty sure they didn’t. In fact I would guess she got booted because one of them didn’t want to work with the other.
I am not entirely sure that is true. The beancounters up in Microsoft HQ likely did not particularly care about tenure. They shaved her as part of the 1,900 person layoff. So it reads more as the accountants going “You don’t need that many writers, lets get rid of one.”
Nah, name’s too big to just be tossed away like some text writer.
I feel the same way about Tauren. I would like them if they were not a caricature of native american stereotypes.
The tauren have totem poles are a huge part of their cultural identity. Why? It’s never explained. Tauren are fashioned after plains tribes. Plains natives never made totem poles. That’s a western hollywood caricature. The people who did make totem poles, the Haida and other pacific northwest tribes made totem poles for a reason and tie into creation myths that the animals were created out of cedarwood carved by the creator.
Highmountain are better, but not by much. The narrative still manages to colonize them with Abrahamic religious allegory like Moozy (Moses) down the river.
No matter what Blizzard does it will be whitewashed.
They genuinely can’t, because the rest of the 11.0 patch isn’t completed yet. That’s why the alpha is rolling content in small waves. If the content isn’t done, there isn’t any data to be mined.
The fantasy market has taken a profile nose dive since the days that Drizzt or Belgeriad novels made the NY Times best seller list, and Golden was never that high a profile
She is as far as WoW is concerned.