Trolls however do have a written language. It is partly how they went about it. The implication was that the PoC coded troll needs the european white guy to teach him how to read, which is sort of ugly optics.
Blizzard has a bad habit of stepping on rakes they set on the ground themselves.
They didnt? Really?
He is a Blood Elf, not a European white guy.
Sometimes people see things that are not there…
High/Blood elves are based on the general european elven archetype. Trolls are strongly rooted in Afro-Caribbean motifs. Of course people are going to notice that.
That’s what April claimed, I believe. I could be thinking of something else.
In my opinion this was a bomb waiting to go off.
I feel like the racial influence into the Warcraft races was always known about, but everyone just sort of accepted it without realizing how problematic it was. And now years down the road after we’re supposed to be more aware of these things and after everything that has come out this year the fact that there are still so many people (like the ones commenting on the Wowhead twitter) that are acting so surprised and indignant at Blizzard being called out for this stuff…like it’s fascinating watching people realize their blind spots in real time and immediately go into defensive mode.
I look forward to Blizzard’s response here. It’s beyond time for Blizzard to own up to the Horde being BIPOC-coded. Come on Sean, Christie, Steve, Ion. Own up to it.
racism fits in world of warcraft i dunno why people have to compare such topics with real world. this is fiction it is good for every race to be diferent in wow, alliance is so boring i wish that book was the alliance one
I expect ABK’s response to be resounding silence, hoping that the storm will blow over and people will stop paying attention. That is the standard corporate response to this sort of bad press.
Except that only works for few new cycles. They keep stepping on rakes and making people look at them when they are trying to tip toe away.
I don’t see how they do that here. There’s a whole month of bad news awaiting ABK between now and when the book actually releases and dominates the headlines again.
If they are willing to step-up with regards to the bro-culture that they have so far with regards to sexism and inclusiveness, they should be willing to step-up to the toxic left-overs of the bro-culture that is how the Horde is racially coded (in my opinion).
Honestly, I think this only blew up for a congruence of two things.
Poor Mrs. Copeland came to her husband’s defense with all the best excuses. It’s not racist because coded fantasy race. Also, he never saw the final draft. Maybe Secret Santa gave everyone a low key racism gift with the book! Also also, we didn’t even get a copy.
She tried her best, but she couldn’t commit to a single excuse and gave all of them, making the entire defense seem disingenuous. And the excuses, piled atop one another, gave it all a worse look.
Then, thing two. People started talking about the low key racism. Other people didn’t see the low key racism. Some saw it when it was written out. Some didn’t. Then a minority of a minority who didn’t see it decided to explain to those who did that they were, in fact, wrong. That racism can’t exist in a fantasy setting, because… Fantasy setting. That just because a race in a video game makes heavy use of very specific cultures, down to the dialect used, down to the tropes and stereotypes, it cannot be racist because… Fantasy game.
This went over as well as could be expected.
So a really convoluted story of why Sean must be innocent of writing a bad book, combined with racism isn’t a thing because fantasy. If you were to remove one, I don’t think either would have made many waves, and this’d just be another very bad book.
Oh they SHOULD, but if they were they would of quickly done so. To a degree this isn’t up to the writing team, though. It is what the legal department says they can/should do. The present lawsuit is going to make this 100 times more delicate on their end. It is a super ugly optics at the best of times for them to have people accusing them of writing racist books.
I do not know how she could do that and not get him fired. I really don’t.
Oh please.
As if some other massive faux pas from ABK won’t get released between now and then that makes this all tame.
You’ve heard about the breast milk story, right?
That’s my point though. A whole month of new bad news AND Exploring Kalimdor officially releasing at the end of January reopening this wound.
Blizzard has no good option here except to own up to it and try to delay it (if that’s even still possible) or just apologize and learn from this.
I just saw the GD thread about this article, and it’s full of bad takes, and I just can’t handle it.
Well, if any good comes out of this week’s Blizzard controversy, it might compel the writers to re-evaluate the whole “PoC-coded races give in to their base, warmongering nature” plot they subject the Horde to every time a faction war rolls around.
I generally avoid GD, because it is… yeah. It is what it is.
Orcs are PoC coded?
Oh please…sigh
This is fantasy, sometimes races in fantasy are naturally warmongering or warmongering because of cultural reasons, etc.
It’s okay if you don’t see it. But just pointing it out for you; you could just ask people to explain it to you, rather than assume that if you don’t see it, it must not be there.
I could see some parallels drawn between orcs and groups of people seen as “violent barbarians” by others in history. People that came in many skin colors.
Orcs in fiction are like a metaphor for the darkside of mankind amplified, with no restraint. All our bad qualities, with no goodness.
I’ve played this game for a decade and while the story has never been amazing, one thing I will say is that nobody has ever had a problem with the Horde. It’s never been a secret that Blizzard took inspiration from other cultures. But so what? People love the Horde. Most Blizzard devs play Horde. This is only being turned into a problem because it’s 2021 and everyone needs to find an issue with things. There are so many serious problems with WoW right now. But this isn’t one of them.