That seems to me like an overwrought comparison.
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You can equate hobbies and careers together. They tend to intersect.
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I imagine that youâd have to have a traumatically bad experience with a hobbyâs side issues if a community or toxic behavior surrounding the hobby is enough to kill someoneâs interest in it altogether. If you really like playing videogames, but gamers you interact with suck, I doubt youâre just going to stop enjoying games and wanting to share that with others.
If anything, being uncritically accepting is a bad thing because you turn a blind eye to parts that could be improved.
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Just so happens that 90% of them pick pale elves and lay their eggs in the basement of some Titan pillar. Dragon lore in Warcraft hasnât made sense for decades and this doesnât help.
As I already pointed out, of all the 5 original Aspects, all them were mature long before elves were a thing, yet all of them choose elves as their âtrue form.â Except for Deathwing because he wanted do⌠something with humans. It makes this whole ceremony seem pointless because eventually the dragon will just adopt another form.
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Are we really gonna talk about stuff that doesnt exist again? âToxicity is scaring people away from video gamesâ is basically the âVideo games makes our child violentâ of the 21st century.
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You can, sure, but maybe not as effectively as one might desire. It seems a reasonable presumption that for most people careers are livelihoods and hobbies are leisure, and people have much more ability to move between hobbies than their careers.
The intersect is not as strong, and the ability to pick up or drop them is not the same.
This is obviously true. The United States constitution is an example of something observed to be falling short of an ideal, modified over time to arrive closer to the values it espoused. Fighting for change where it needs to be is admirable. One of the last surviving Tuskeegee Airmen, when asked why he was willing to fight for a country that fell short of its ideals in a way that affected him very keenly, answered that the vision of what it could be was not worth abandoning. It needed to be changed, and that was fought for valiantly.
Hobbies are not something that need to be rescued from themselves. Theyâre either a niche interest with a small but very dedicated following or theyâre intellectual properties that live or die by its engagement with its consumers.
I donât find it admirable for anyone to decide itâs up to them to change any aspect of a hobby. Itâs a willful fantasy that echoes the noble pursuits of great men, but itâs just play.
With regards to gaming, there are so many subgroups and subcultures in the broader hobby that a player who is absolutely turned off by a bad social experience can disengage entirely but still enjoy single-player games in various ways. Itâs not up to that player to try to make the parts they donât like better, to find what they like and indulge. Itâs obvious that Blizzard has an interest in making their spaces as inclusive as possible, but the interest is economic, not moral. They are very fortunate that they can pretend its both.
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⌠what? How does this disprove anything? The Aspects were the first dragons to gain proper sentience before much of Azerothâs races organized - by the time they were mature, draconic society and traditions didnât exist. Itâs entirely believable to think that as draconic and mortal races advanced, the idea of a Visage Day would come to be.
And even if they DO adopt another form, doing so is brief and situational if they need to disguise themselves. When itâs time to present as a dragon again, they use their chosen form. When Vaelastrasz was introduced to us in orcish form, he didnât simply tell us he was a dragon - he literally changed his entire form back to his preferred human state, because this is how he had chosen to represent himself. Dragons can adopt other guises, but one is permanent in a social sense.
Youâre grasping really weakly at straws to try and make this seem nonsensical. Youâre acting as if dragons are this big group of people who only use their guise to manipulate and infiltrate mortals, but only a handful of dragons have done this - hell, thereâs a passage in Visage Day where Onyxia says this very thing, and Chromie doesnât agree.
yeah druids are trans.
Making dragons less dragony with a weird coming of age ritual centered around your humanoid form doesnt enrich the world. Also idgaf about representation. Do more pelagos stuff or make actual new interesting characters. Not convuluting dragon lore for brownie points. Tool.
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How does this make dragons less âdragony?â What quantifies as âdragonyâ to you?
Having them not be slowly turned into different flavors of humanoid with colored hair.
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How does this do that? Dragon guises have always been a thing, and it doesnât cancel out that theyâre dragons.
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Dragons have fairly static and carefully considered out preferred forms, so they obviously seems like they matter a lot to the dragons. It is the form they interact with basically anyone but a dragon, after all. It makes sense to me they would have ritualized the process over time.
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Admittedly the âfolkloreâ angle causes me to wonder at its veracity, as making their choice of mortal form some profound decision does kind of contradict the portrayal of Korialstrasz (who in effect, alongside Deathwing were the original examples of WarCraft dragons we first heard about wearing a mortal guises), whose disguise was presented as straight-up utilitarian and adopted for covertly working in the Kirin Tor and Council of Six as he plotted to free Alexstrasza. Which was why he basically had a somewhat âmade-upâ mortal form that looked kinda/sorta human and kinda/sorta like an elf so that it was hard upon really close examination to be sure he was either, but members of both primary races in Dalaran were prone to just assume he was one of them with slightly odd features and be inclined to trust him.
(I.e. he was our first âhalf elfâ (though not really), but only for the purpose of blending in among elves and humans without either asking too many questions.)
It also doesnât seem like something that most of the dragonflights would treat that way. Frankly until only recently the reds and greens were the only dragonflights portrayed as not being generally indifferent, aloof or outright contemptuous of mortals, so suggesting that oneâs choice of which âlesserâ being to wear as a disguise is some profound ritualized decision seems a bit out of character for the other three flights. It was a major plot point surrounding Alexstraszaâs enslavement and the lack of coordinated effort to free her that the dragons had largely retreated from the outside world for 10,000 years and most of them held little affection for the mortal races as a result. So the modern WoW-era paradigm of friendly dragons routinely hobnobbing with mortals is a pretty recent development that only really began with Rhonin, Vereesa and Co. helping Krasus to free Alexstrasza, and even then was slow going until he Nexus War led to the flightsâ more widespread cooperation with Azerothâs champions.
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I might be speaking from a place of ignorance here. Super rambly anyway.
Iâd hope that nobody thinks that Blizzard is suddenly everyoneâs friend just because ultimately theyâre just like any other company that chases the dollar, and being pandered to for the sake of advertising is pretty well-mocked, but I have a few thoughts about that.
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I think thereâs a trap in that wanting only the ârightâ type of representation might result in having none at all. Weâve seen the opposite happen with Pelagos, as well as Thiernax and Qadarin already; people complained that they were being shoehorned in / shoved down peopleâs throats despite the formerâs backstory put behind a dialogue clicky and the latter two bringing it up as nonchalantly as you would when introducing a friend. On the other hand, Chromie is a fan favorite thatâs long had speculation about this sort of thing that Blizzard initially shied away from before deciding to go with it after all. If none of those are good enough, I feel like that closes out the chance to include anything at all, which isnât good.
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I donât know if the straight white male thing is so much of a niche as it has been the default for a long time in computer gaming. Thereâs a reason why the stereotypical nerd is depicted that way, and if youâve already hooked that crowd, then a lot of that content is already passively aimed at them in various ways. But that gaming panderingâs been going on all long; theyâve just had a ~50 year head start in marketing and feeling out what sells.
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People like to see themselves, or aspects of themselves, in the games they play. Thatâs a big reason why the increased customization options were such a big hit, especially for humans and elves; it had the direct effect of letting more people try to model their characters after themselves, or to better function as a totem to show how they want to be seen. And while this doesnât have to do with Chromie directly, I think the concept is the same. These characters function as a representation for LGBT people where before there werenât any. Itâs cool.
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And lastly, even if we accept that Blizzard did it purely for greedy reasons, I still think itâs worth acknowledging that originally they backed away from this idea before returning to it with the fairy tales book. If they truly didnât care about how Chromie would be received, I imagine theyâd probably roll with it just because it would have made some fans happy, so my guess would be that originally they may have been worried about pissing off a relatively larger portion of the playerbase by confirming it the first time around. Whether itâs the playerbase or the company itself, SOMETHING changed for them to reverse course on it. And in the end, Blizzardâs still an entertainment company. If it makes some fans happy, is that really a bad thing?
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My guess is the fact a lot of the transphobes were using the lore-ambiguity of the book is a way to ignore the story entirely.
Which Danuser must have thought the playerbase wouldnât do (naive maybe) but the playerbase did, and the Trans members of the team maybe also put pressure.
I might not have been clear, but I was talking about how Blizzardâs previous stance was âChromieâs female with a male nameâ from years ago, and the book itself is them changing direction. I meant that if they hadnât cared the first time around, they would have said Chromie was transgender before the book.
I kinda suck at being concise. >_>
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You are right. The issue isnât that she is trans. Its that the question was answered years ago and now they are changing it.
The Chromie situation has more in common with the Chronicles debacle.
Chromie isnât trans, now she is. Chronicles is an objective source, now it isnât.
Blizzard changes their story to suit a present direction. That is the real issue.
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Character details and flavor arenât unimportant, as theyâre an important tool for developing verisimilitude and giving a story depth. If we took out every little âunimportantâ detail, the game story would be incredibly boring.
There is nothing in previously established canon that contradicts the possibility of Shaw having a love life. You are free to have your own impression of his character and to view him that way, but itâs not in the game, and the developers are free to interpret his character differently, since thereâs no previous canon restricting them.
I find it especially realistic after everything Shaw went through in Legion. Getting captured and impersonated by a Dreadlord is one of the worst things that could happen to someone in Shawâs position, and it makes sense to me that he might re-evaluate his priorities afterward.
This still isnât the same as meaning that a character was intended to be straight or ace. As you said, romance is not central to a majority of WoW character stories. Unless weâre told otherwise, we canât assume that Blizzard assigns any history or orientation to a given character ahead of such information actually being necessary to the writing. In the case of Mathias Shaw, the subject never came up before, so Blizzard didnât need to plan out his romantic history (unless it turns out that the VanCleef theory is accurate and was intended since Vanilla, but Iâd be very surprised if we learned that*). In the case of Flynn Fairwind, one of his obvious characteristics is his flirtatiousness, and so deciding who he flirts with was necessary in order to show that characteristic.
*Thereâs a fan theory that Shawâs history with Edwin VanCleef was more than just him teaching Edwin how to fight and them having been childhood friends, based on certain pieces of information from Vanilla and with more recent information making that theory seem less unlikely. Itâs still just a fan theory at the moment, though.
Metzen said she was a girl. Trans women are women. Nothing has changed.
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