Is it weird that the Jewish person apparently didn’t find Goblins racist but the diversity council did?
I mean he admits it’s antisemitic downthread, the issue is asking the Token Jew for his approval.
It’s like back in undergrad when I also was part of such bodies for the university, anything involving any Latino themes had to be approved by me awkwardly.
Tokenization makes you the Arbiter they can fall back to later, which is a form of racism.
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Honestly, I think the plight of the Night Elves is far closer to a problem of sexual bias than it is of racial bias. But that being said, lionizing and writing the most European race among the Alliance and demonizing deviations from that - as they did especially with their framing of Tyrande - is pretty telling.
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Not surprised what posters are choosing to carry water as devs and exdevs call out blizzard 
Can’t separate the two, Night Elves are Girl Boss Amazons + East Asian Women + Wiccan Women
Race and Gender (and Sexuality) are all wrapped up with each other, and religion wrapped up with both.
Racism is often a sexual anxiety and homophobia is often a racial anxiety. And religions are often racialized.
It’s why the US had interracial marriage illegal until the 70s and hoteps say the gays are destroying the Black community and gayness is a “white” invention, and Muslims and Jews are treated as some sort of racialized constrict (eg TSA stopping anyone who “looks” Muslim, fascist anxiety about Jewish “blood”).
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Honestly I’m not at all surprised. Not that I went looking for it, but I think one of the first pieces of “fan art” I happened to be exposed to once goblins were announced as playable was an unfortunately popular racist caricature (you probably know which one) recolored green.
I thought you liked Zandalar, though. Obviously the war campaign was junk from start to finish, but I thought you liked the city and NPCs?
Yeah Zandalar was well made aesthetically and what characters we got was good, but the story was lackluster and mishandled.
- Ghuun plot and killing Zul didn’t make sense, especially if they had Shadowlands already in mind
- Battle of DA didn’t get any meaningful resolution
- The two Zanchuli council members that was based on a fictional representation of indigenous Andeans Yazma, from Yzma of Emperor’s new groove, and Volkaal her henchman or Kronk from the same, were villain batted
And the exiles of Voldun were never given a resolution. Blood trolls were just totally killed off.
Compare that to Kul Tiras.
Update
Some former and current devs responded to my ask about people of color on the team
Apparently only one man of color was rehired and one Black intern (of two) was hired on the questing team. Of hundreds of people.
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Why were they so intent on writing Thrall as inept, and then sidelining him for an entire patch and a half?
Edit: Also, Brennadam?
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This is all beginning to paint of picture that my mental worst case scenario was in fact 100% accurate
Just a bunch of guys abusing people IRL, depriving women of wages, refusing to hire people of color, and writing racist caricatures into the canon
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I’m not sure an almost 1:1 retread of MoP counts as development. Either way, it wasn’t really positive at all. Separate complaint, but still.
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wat.
They said in the tweet you could tell when ladies were the majority on the quest team. BFA was definitely the start of it.
So… why did they write Brennadam?
I think it is hard to say the exact motivation for the handling of Night Elves, but given the messy storytelling in general, there is a case for assuming stupidity rather than malice.
Blizzard loves their biennial apocalypses, so overwhelmingly focus tends to mean stuff getting wrecked. They also tend to neglect things about various race’s cultures, like the lack of strong Blood Elf magical representation, Worgen basically being bland good boys, etc. So Night Elves overwhelmingly just being druids trying to protect nature while Tyrande basically just stands around is not unusual.
Night Elves actually having fangs would have been part of a good effort to add greyness and agency to the Alliance so their stories aren’t simply reactive to huge threats against them. Remember when Tyrande killed her own because she insisted on freeing Illidan? Stuff like that is way too grey for current Alliance, especially since Cata ultimately defined the faction conflict as “Horde does bad, Alliance gets mad” with the Garrosh arc.
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My bet?
Two teams, one filled with unsavory characters and one filled with sane people.
They tried to fix Brennadam (remember it was changed form Horde to Quillboar) and then whoever had the final say for launch reverted the change.
Also update: testing dev replied, his team also of hundreds over 7 years only had 3 Black people, no POC otherwise.
No they didn’t. It started as Quillboar and changed because they thought the alliance wouldn’t care.
Hmmm you’re right but it was changed back to Quillboar in one of the last build and stayed as such
The argument is because of racism Horde did not get development.
This is false.
Horde got development and focus. In fact they get it more often than Alliance but the problem is it sucks and detrimental. If you want to argue that Horde development sucks then I agree with you and thats a different topic.
But the Horde does get a lot of focus and development. Its just terrible because people completely out of touch have a hold of it.
People act like Teldrassil is THE issue when it comes to Night Elves. It’s not, they’ve been treated like this since 2010, the treatment is ongoing, it is unresolved, and developers have been called out (at times by other developers) about this treatment.
Regarding Hanlon’s razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
Emphasis mine.
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The first step is to eliminate the voices that are alliance sympathizers. At the top of the list is Baine Foulhoof who is guilty of a number of different crimes against the horde and has directly caused the death of several loyal members.
Second is to stop shrinking in shame when people bring up the felling of that ugly weed. What a monstrous blight on Azeroth’s beautiful land. A complete and total monument to elven vanity and arrogance. Sylvanas did the world a favor by ridding us of the weed.
They were right. Opportunities for the Alliance to fight the Horde in quests were always exceedingly rare and frankly, if Brennadam was yet another “clear out some mob camps filled with pests” questline it would have been junk that nobody remembered except resentfully.
They were trying to avoid the problems that Alliance questing had in Cataclysm, namely the sorts of scenarios where the Horde was on the warpath and winning on multiple fronts and Alliance quests were focused on fighting bears or something.
It is that now.
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I always looked forward to doing Brennadam stuff because I liked fighting the Horde, especially since I’ve been playing for a long time and so I can appreciate it in contrast to Cata/MoP era “yes the Horde is nuking towns and we know that you’re a mighty champion with powers beyond most people’s ken, but what we need you to do is collect boar livers”
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