People outside the game have strong feelings against “just a robot” because none of the actions of a machine that had all its behavior programmed seem to have ethical meaning. People will describe them as lacking emotion or empathy and not knowing the eventual consequences of their actions. But Earthen are not “just robots”.
Yet also, there are people outside the game who have strong feelings that all biological humans must have free will that must be superior to what anybody else thinks or wants. But they forget or try to downplay how easy it is for empathy and emotions to be used against you…to coerce you into a response that could be ethically harmful to yourself or others. But Earthen are not biological dwarves or even humanoid equivalents.
Instead, Earthen are being written as “magical rune souls” attached to constructed bodies with stereotypically robot jargon and behaviors. This makes things complicated…because the negativity against robots does not apply to Earthen…and the negativity against emotional vulnerabilities in biological free will also does not apply to Earthen. But we could end up stuck with an unfortunate de facto situation…where the Earthen are programmed with emotion and empathy but that programming has bugs and anomalies in it that can be exploited if Void keeps whispering to them or telling them they “deserve” things. The supervision of titan keepers to keep the titan watchers and earthen from causing any harm to others could be very necessary, and rebelling against that or breaking that supervision could be morally bad for all of us mortals besides Earthen. Free will is not automatically and reliably ethical at all.
Lastly, what if the Earthen as they were forged were never intended to be “permanent” on Azeroth? What if they were the plan B, the backup, the temporary bandaid… intended to be discontinued and those “magical rune souls” put into better normal flesh bodies when the original old god threat was over? As such, what if Earthen breaking their forges and declaring that they must make other Earthen use free will…are actually doing something very bad and extremely unethical; not just against us other mortals but against those other Earthen as well?
That’s part of what I’m getting at… in the sense that, what is a “people” in warcraft fiction? We can’t rely upon what people have commented on the tropes out in science fiction with robots and pure biological h.sapiens because the Earthen in Metzen’s fiction have been written in a way that doesn’t fit either one of those tropes exactly. What is a warcraft Dwarf? Is it a magical arcane soul linked to a fleshy body? What is a warcraft Orc? Is it a magical arcane soul linked to a fleshy body? What is a warcraft Draenei? Is it a magical arcane soul linked to a fleshy body? Can’t be a curse of flesh with old gods that gives them any value…because for the Orcs and Draenei there wasn’t any old god presence. And “if” we are willing to give any ethical value to Dwarves and Orcs and Draenei… then I’m having a hard time thinking of any good reason to discriminate or demean the Earthen as written in the WW beta campaign so far. We cannot simply opine “they’re just robots” unless we are willing to admit that Dwarves and Orcs and Draenei are all “just robots” also… and every mortal being we ever want to grant ethical value toward is also “just a robot” in that line of thinking. I wouldn’t be one of those people…but again, I think it is going to be more complicated to have a well reasoned conclusion on how I should view or judge Earthen.
And from that, I am worried that depending on how I view or judge them… I might end up having to view their quest campaign of destroying the forge in Dun Algar that made them and repaired them… as an ethical and moral mistake on their part.
The Earthen of Khaz Algar appear to of been afflicted with a variant strain of the Curse of Flesh. It did not flesh-ify them, but it did make their inbuilt AI (so to speak) begin to go a bit rogue and develop personalities, likes, and so forth as you would expect from a normal person. Earthen elsewhere who did not suffer the same affliction remain shackled to their inbuilt programming that dictates who and what they do and are. It seems the Edict system was put in place as a corrective measure as it reinforces their inbuilt programming to overwhelm their anomalous sapience where the two conflict.
I hope so… but given the track record of things in Dragonflight that they never addressed (no explanation for what a dragon isle ‘turning on’ means…or why, no idea where the primalists came from, no idea where raszageth was before coming out of the door, no quest in the main campaign about shamans, no quest to go ask the elemental lords what was happening on day one of expansion, no quest to go ask the friendly ulduar keepers about dragon aspects or what odyn was like or how to find or help Tyr, etc etc etc) … then it worries me that the Earthen introduction questing in the war within beta never addressed the implications from my first post.
It was addressed here. As I mentioned up above, they succumbed to a variant of the curse of flesh, which has left them stone but made whatever inbuilt programed personalities they have begin to go haywire and evolve beyond the disposable, mass produced tools they were intended to be by the Watchers.
It is a bit like how the Forsaken were disposable cannon fodder shock troops for the scourge before they woke up and began to act beyond their intended roles. Some comparisons could be made of the Drakthyr as well, with Neltharion making them puppets using suspiciously similar Titan tech to the edict system that seems to bind the Khaz Algar earthen to service.
Neither. They are an earthen 3.0 which is not ever made in ulduar by iron nor ever made in uldaman. Their forge and their backstory is shown in war within questing near Dun Algar.
Not addressed at all. You may be confused on what we think needs addressed as I detail in my original comment, and which user Thadeus offers premature claims of future blizzard writing. To restate in other words… I’ve already seen the introduction Earthen questing campaign which people completed on the beta… and they’ve got a magical rune soul bound to a stone body. So neither the “it’s just a robot they don’t matter” stance that some will have nor the “it has absolute free will from biological flesh” stance actually apply to how they are writing these new Earthen. For all we know, their free will may actually come more from that magical rune soul which they are installing in the stone bodies. I’ll have to wait and see if Blizzard writers address it.
I’m not convinced that Neltharion actually did any of that… as the writing for the aberrus patch made me have to remember that the ghost image of neltharion is unreliable narrator. That also means that the earlier in game cinematic with Nozdormu not being able to go back in time but taking a look at Emberthal’s memories ‘could’ just be the ghost image faceless one who was pretending to be Neltharion as the one who used void powers against a storm primal dragon and broke the titan glove device. If Nozdormu wasn’t actually going there in the timeline…then we have no way of verifying if that was actually Neltharion in Emberthal’s memories. But that is beside the point… and not something that should be dwelled on in this Earthen topic.
Dude you literally see Sarky try and bind other Dracthyr, including his own allies to his will when he got his hands on the Oathbinder in the story.
Scalecommander Sarkareth says: Still hiding in Ebyssian’s shadow, I see.
Scalecommander Emberthal says: Sarkareth… our conflict must end. Our people must unite.
Scalecommander Sarkareth says: I agree.
Scalecommander Sarkareth says: Unite as we were meant to.
Scalecommander Sarkareth says: Bound to the hand of our father, Neltharion.
Scalecommander Emberthal says: The Oathbinder? Sarkareth, no!
Scalecommander Sarkareth says: You will all bow to ME!
Sarkareth uses the Oathbinder, stunning the three dracthyr.
Scalecommander Emberthal says: Champion… I can’t… you must stop him…
Can’t wait to see how you will spin this as this is in the game. So you cannot use your “everything that is not in the game is non-canon” excuse.
So ask yourself this, why would Neltharion have a titan artifact called the Oathbinder that can bind individuals to his will? And why did he lock up the Dracthyr when Razzy Dazzy destroyed it?
The earthen do not have a soul, incidentally, runic or otherwise. They are strongly tied to Azeroth, though. Their hm… battery I guess you can call it?.. is charged with power siphoned from the world soul. They have an internal memory matrix which when online stores their experiences into a removable storage crystal; that is more or less their “soul” in the sense it contains everything that makes them, them.
The ones who have been offline in storage for millennia that the PCs come from canonically appear to of been somehow communing with the world soul in the form of dreams, which is registered by titan tech as an “anomalous divergence” in their core memory matrix.
Well, it is never directly expressed, but a big point in early TWW is made that their “soul” as it were is their core memory crystal where all that makes an earthen who they are is stored. They are seen as sacred as a result, and they do not like outsiders handling them. Every Earthen, when they reboot, is basically a blank slate with who they were on the old record. They used to be able to go review the records, but that system broke a long time ago.
