Yes I considered how this plays into the Incarnates/Aspects/Proto-dragons thing but I haven’t read much about it. I think it was said that the Incarnates were still infused by something?
I was thinking that having access to Titan technology would jumpstart civilization. Therefore Zandalari, Mogu, and Night Elves were prominent civilizations. With Night Elves discovering the most potent source. That could likely explain why other Troll tribes were ‘less civilized’ in comparison to the Zandalari since they were pushed to areas that Azshara was not interested in.
It’s like those civ games where you luck upon a gold mine and dominate the entire game.
I liked how wowpedia worded it out a lot better:
In time, a tribe of dark trolls[7] came to settle near the translucent waters of the Well. Over time, the Well’s cosmic power affected the tribe, making them wise and immortal. Their skin turned various shades of violet, and they gained a shorter, yet more upright stature. Inspired by titanic words found on titan-forged relics around the Well’s periphery, the tribe adopted the name “kaldorei”, meaning “children of the stars”. They believed that their moon goddess, Elune, slept within the Well’s shimmering depths during the daylight hours.[8][9]
The passage isn’t saying Malfurion has a superior intellect to Rokhan. Individuals being smarter than another individual is all fine and dandy and nobody would be upset if this were about individuals.
But making a statement that an entire subgroup of people is intellectually inferior to an entire race is a very different thing. Let me use some real-world examples to help it come across.
How does this statement sound to you; “aboriginal Australians are intellectually inferior to white people”?
If that sounds like it’s an okay statement, then I guess the passage is just fine, because that would be the real-world equivalent statement. Sure, it isn’t saying all trolls are dumber than night elves. It’s just saying these trolls are dumber than an entire race.
And that real-world example isn’t without merit in the conversation because both trolls and night elves take quite a lot of inspiration from real world races. And statements like that are frequently used by real world racists about the race and cultures trolls take inspiration from.
I find that intelligence is a terrible way to describe how civilizations develop. There’s often a host of other factors that influences these things. E.g. access to resources, innovation by individuals, accessibility to trade and spread ideas, food production, task specialization, and such. Also, the brain is adaptable. A civilization that lives with nature is adapted to things like foraging, hunting, and various other skills. A civilization that is more akin to our modern society is adapted to other forms of specialized tasks like using a computer, programming, art, and such. However we have built a society that generally says that one is more civilized than another.
If you ask me to go out in the wild and hunt for food I’m going to be clueless and probably end up dying because my brain is not equipped and has not adapted to that kind of environment. It’ll take time to adapt and learn.
It’s not implied racism, it’s not an assumption of racism, that is blatant racism. So that statement is 100% unacceptable. As is implied racism for the record. I shouldn’t have to say that last part, but there are definitely some folks who would post on Twitter about it if I didn’t.
But here’s where the hang-up is.
At no point in the books statement does it say that Dark Trolls are a ‘intellectually inferior.’ species. You’ve jumped to the conclusion that “Dark Trolls are intellectually inferior because Night Elves were described as intellectually superior.”
That’s a hasty generalization fallacy. As Kohnila points out, there’s no evidence supporting the idea that Dark Trolls are dumber than any other troll species. And we know the Trolls of that time were extremely intelligent, as they managed to build and maintain massive empires, which you can’t do if you’re duller than a sandstone hammer.
Well, okay, you can try, but the odds of success are very, very low.
The dragons were not memory data, they are actual primal dragons that we herd back into statis. Furthermore a rereading of the quest just mentions that they were imbued with earth, fire, air, and water without mentioning how. So that was left to open interpretation in-game.
Though the War of the Scaleborn novel revealed that the Incarnates and their primal dragons were around while Tyr was alive. Hence these four could have been captured and subsequently studied upon by Tyr.
As far as I know the first were the Yaungol, who eventually lost their knowledge after being enslaved by the Mogu.
I agree that the shift to having unreliable biased narrators for the Exploring series and now this, is doing more harm to lore than good. I don’t expect any human to have an unbiased opinion on trolls but lately Blizzard has been choosing to tell it’s lore through the most negatively biased ingame characters.
It’s like asking Aedelas Blackmoore to write Orc lore.
I added that bit, because you keep trying to defend this passage without really hitting on the issue in your defense.
It is a statement literally marking one race (night elves) the intellectual superiors to another (dark trolls). That. That is the issue. That bit, right there.
“Dark trolls are intellectually inferior to night elves.”
“Aboriginal Australians are intellectually inferior to white people.”
Two races. One smarter than the other. If one of these statements sounds racist, then the other must as well. If one gets a pass and the other doesn’t, that feels not very healthy at all and I don’t see any healthy way to continue this conversation.
I do not know how many different ways I can type it until you can at least address what I’m talking about without turning it into some argument nobody’s making.
Tbh it does a disservice to Khadgar’s character. He promoted working together with the factions, and has worked together with the Horde PC. He should be one of the few Human characters who should be saying the exact opposite.
You really shouldn’t, because that’s where the problem lies.
You’re adding words that are not there, and then you’re creating an argument around the words you added, and wondering why someone is pointing out that the initial words aren’t saying what you claim they’re saying.
We will be at an impasse on this though, because I am not going to base an argument around attached words that aren’t in the text, which when added, drastically change the meaning of the words as they’re written.
I’ve said all I am going to say on this topic. So I’ll be muting it. Take care.
If I say “The towel dried while under the sun.” you can infer that the towel was previously wet.
When they say that Dark Trolls transformed into “lithe and graceful beings of superior intellect”, you can infer that Dark Trolls were not lithe, were not graceful, and had intellects inferior to their new forms.
On top of that, as someone else said further up thread, it doesn’t sound like Khadgar at all. Both in terms of he’s never been shown prejudiced like that before (on the contrary, he’s always been for the Horde and Alliance being allies), and in terms of it just not having any of his voice (the jokes, etc). It’s just Blizzard using him as a mouthpiece without considering his character.
That’s Archmage “I could wipe out this entire village if I chose” Modera to you
That’s often how Blizz writes their characters. They don’t look at the personality and consistency and how that drives the story. They’re more like set pieces to move the plot.
Question, does the book mention Loreth’Aran at all? It was a night elf city on Bloodmyst Isle that rode green dragons as mounts pre-WotA, but that’s always been weird because night elves and dragons weren’t allies before the WotA, so I was wondering if it came up to try and reconcile that.
Ok. Sure. By contrasting their intellectual superiority to their prior state as dark trolls, they are certainly not stating that they are intellectually superior to dark trolls.
It’s just silly to read that.
I’m at a loss to understand the dishonesty going on here. How can you not read that passage talking about night elves becoming intellectually superior and not realize it’s in contrast to their predeccessor race of dark trolls, when it’s all about contrasting their physical differences to their time as dark trolls?
This isn’t me putting words into the context; this is the context.
Your attempts to justify this are very strange. Did you write the book?