Cultural Appropriation

European is literally the word for people of europe just like native american is the word for people who come from american, and asians is for people in asian. Are you actually upset that the general word to describe people is too general? Thats what general is. Italians and scottish people are not the same, but they are both european

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My quote isn’t disagreeing with you? American Indian refers to an entire continent of people so - yeah. It is as vague as European. Afro-Caribbean likewise refers to entire islands of people. It’s a super vague designation because that’s what Blizz’s appropriation is.

I said American Indian. My travels take me to Northern UP Michigan near the L’Anse Reservation. The people I’ve met prefer that nomenclature. Is that perhaps true of everyone? Probably not. But I’ll take my ques from them over white people on the internet.

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I mean, when talking about culture, those terms are not exactly helpful. “European” tells us nothing. Norse, Sami, Rus, Slavic, French, Italian, Spanish, British… those are all very distinct from one another.

In addition… I am not sure what you are referring to as being “European”

I know you can’t possibly mean Tauren. Maybe you mean to say that Stormwind is generic European? Which… Yeah, sure. Stormwind is pretty white-bread, undescript, Human Fantasy Kingdom. Which is why I tend to think they are pretty boring.

I see this interpretation a couple times and I do not quite understand it. Well, I do actually… Horned helmets and axes… But the norse never actually had Horned helmets, and orcs have almost nothing else that is similar to that culture.

Norse culture is more represented in Night Elf culture, a bit hidden behind the Taoist, Shinto, and Greco-Roman aesthetics. The Night Elves are really a casserole of a lot of different things.

Orcs kind of come with their own culture, being a staple fantasy race for so long. However, can be originally found in early Anglo-Saxon and Italian folklore. Blizzard flavored them with Japanese and Mongel themes, and perhaps several other things that I am not really educated enough to try and pin point. I do know quite a bit about Norse culture and I do not see it in the orcs.

Just my opinion though I guess.

No, I read you right, the game narrative with most alliance tend to think Darkspear are viewed as the good guys for forsake their customs when actually it’s not the case and it’s mostly the writers not knowing how to write races that aren’t human

He is saying this is how the games narrative presents it to us.

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Game narrative is mostly “go here, raid and pillage what you find” in the questlines related to dungeons. However we often get the short stick of that.

Btw Spuddyc what do you think of the recent changes on said narrative? Aka The Horde races are getting spotlight in a more fair manner.

Depends on what you mean. Since the Zandalari were made playable they couldn’t just turn them into the bad guys and kill them off like with the Amani, yet Blizzard still found a way to turn their capital city into a raid. Blizzard also pretty much made the Horde the bad guys during BfA with Sylvanas… so I wouldn’t say it’s gotten a whole lot better.

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True, it is still a shame Dazar’alor was made into a raid and Blizzard ignored a lot of things to give the alliance a victory and yet the city survived and we saw many tribes crying for Rastakhan which seems to start uniting the other tribes slowly(Farraki and Dark Trolls respectively in the SL customizations).

Meh the alliance has to put the other check and yet again lost another piece of land in-game that will not recover easily so wasn’t a good ride for anyone either.

However Zandalar is just an ally to the horde in equal ground, something no other faction got that treatment

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Ooh boy, yeah, I can see the problem, the very notion that these scumbags existed runs counter to the PC narrative.

The Blademasters are at least aesthetically similar to Japanese Samurai. But really they haven’t been terribly relevant since WC3 and outside the look I’m unsure if they’ve anything else in common.

The Mongols appear to be the Centaur. The Mongols were perhaps most infamous for their bow calvary so taking that and applying it to literal horsemen is kind of clever.

I think the Orcs and Nelves are probably Blizz’s best example of cribbing from world history and culture. Just grab stuff from so many groups that a one for one comparison becomes impossible.

This is my favorite angle when it comes to creating fantasy cultures.

Ultimately, we readers/viewers/players are all human, the only civilization-building species we have experience with is human, and therefore anything we create will be based off some type of human or be interpreted (by humans) as something like an existing human culture.

So, may as well mash a few themes of existing human cultures together to get something closer to ‘new’ as we can get, and it allows writers to add in their own ideas without looking like they’re trying to apply those ideas to the real-world culture that the in-game culture seems based on.

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