Lack of Male leaders in WoW

Orcs currently led by a large brick with the words “honor” painted on it; no one has noticed any difference.

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also true for dwarves tbh.

Dwarves need no kings, only shenanigans.

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what are they up to

Its interesting to me that an animated show can get female characters so right like Arcane but projects orders more expensive and more established media like Rings of Power or She-hulk fail so badly.

I can’t be mad at starwars because the internal conflict was so evident and the last movie they just didn’t care. The damage was done and it was cash grab for anyone that wanted a cameo.

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Dwarves need no kings, only BEER

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Can you elaborate on this? I would really like to know why you consider Rings of Power and She-Hulk a fail. I respect your opinion and I have never seen this argument before so I want to know what is it that causes them to fail?

Did you watch all three shows?

I have watched them all, yeah. I thought Arcane and RoP are amazing but I was not a fan of She-Hulk, That’s why I want to know what I missed.

Look, I’ll be honest with you. I sometimes think that Marvel misses the mark on portrayals of female characters and sometimes it’s “girl power” moments, feel like tokenism. Like this scene, if my eyes could roll out of my head.

Now, it’s not like this all across the board, but there is still cringe moments that ‘pander’ and feel too forced. That’s how She-Hulk felt to me, I couldn’t watch it past one episode.

Lets take three characters and only focus on their singular story. Not any other character’s arcs or their impact on these characters.
I am not going to focus on the writing weakness of the main plot in general and just focus on these three.

Vi, Galadriel and Jennifer.

Vi: Sisterhood, family and redemption.
Jennifer: female. lawyer. female lawyer. lawyer that is female. men suck. I am perfect and everyone else is the problem.
Galadriel: I am perfect, I know everything, no one knows nothing but me, I must lead because I am me.

Galadriel is better than Jennifer but neither hold a candle to Vi. All Jennifer can do is put down others to elevate her own self without any growth or self-inspection. The one good episode was the dare devil one where yeah she wasn’t the best lawyer and maybe wasn’t the best hero either and she needed to grow. But they still had to put down matt with a walk of shame.

The whole show seemed to have a chip on its shoulder and it was combative. They tried to use Deadpool style fourth wall breaks to point out their own weakness so we won’t have to. It was just arrogant and narcissistic.

Galadriel was more of the same problem as Sylvanas where she always turns out to be right for no reason because they are the protagonist. They never listen to anyone, exhibit powers and skills they shouldn’t have or haven’t earned yet despite being among peers. It was just amateurish writing, they wanted to make a strong character and thought they had to make a character that is always strong, and right, and perfect and the other characters can’t stop telling us about her.

Vi though? She failed. She was weak. She struggled but she still got up. She didn’t need to put down the patriarchy to be a strong female character.
Maybe a better example would be Caitlyn who was not taken seriously whether it was her gender, her youth or her privileged position but again it was not some cartoonish hatred of women that kept her down but regular old corruption.

I think the perfect moment of a strong female character for me is this moment for Vi.
This is all her, Vander isn’t there. She isn’t the greatest fighter that ever lived. She is fighting against Silco’s minion and she has to pick herself up. And the writers didn’t need convenient writing excuses or cartoonishly evil characters in a cartoon to tell an empowering or compelling story.

I think anyone can empathize with where Vi is, at that moment. Knocked on her butt and about to give up.

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Thanks for answering.

I disagree with your assessment that Galadriel is perfect and the sun shines out of her you know what. She’s an incredibly flawed character. Once you realize that she’s an incredibly flawed character then you really see her for what she is: a complex woman with flaws as well as strengths.

That’s not the reading I got of this character. the very first thing they tell us about Galadriel in her first scene is she lacks self control. “lost your footing again Galadriel?” when she gets mad and almost punches another kid for sinking her boat. The next scenes we see her company mutany because she’s pushing them too hard.
She goes back home to the elves and they treat her like a problem that needs to be solved and their solution is to ship her off to Valinor where she won’t inadvertanly bring doom upon the world.

But she can’t just rest so she decides to follow a sword and meets Sauron in the ocean. She manages to continue to piss off every person she meets and Sauron calls her out on all of it, he continues to call her out on it until the series finale. She just can’t leave anything well enough alone and she ends up being partially responsible for the doom of the world.

Maybe from your PoV she’s this perfect person, but from my PoV she’s fatally flawed and that’s why she’s a good female character. She’s absolutely not perfect. Halbrand compaires her to a “galloping horse’” ie: she’s out of control.

To reduce Galadriel to “she’s perfect and her :poop: don’t stink” is doing just that, it’s reducing her character to a trope or a caricature.

Meanwhile Jennifer is just a vehicle to explain feminism 101, and push this “women are better than men at everything.” stereotype.

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Except the story doesn’t point out those flaws or allows her to fail.

Vi went for Sevika twice.
She got punished the first time because she rushed in.
She got punished again because she didn’t do what the story hinted at, she never guards herself. So in the second fight she fought with what every character jokingly told her. “You guard with your face”.

If Galadriel was like Vi, when she refused to hear advice she should have paid for that consequence. When she fought things alone she should have failed and been forced to work as a team with her fellow elves to beat the ice trolls.

Galadriel has the “I win button” in every scenario and when she takes monumental stupid decisions like jump off a ship in a middle of a sea somehow that works out for her. Its just bad lazy writing.

And the story frames her as the one person that is correct all the time and everyone else are fools.
The story is putting down everyone else and propping her up. Its basically like the Jennifer story but without dumb twitter’s interpretation of feminism and patriarchy. But they are both doing the exact same thing. RoP just does it better but She Hulk sets an incredibly low bar.

It may not look like that but it does. She was wrong about everything and if she had just gone to Valinor she wouldn’t have been the reason Sauron decided to destroy the world.

The problem lies when people want to put her on a pedestal. And that’s exactly what’s happening, If she’s up there she’s a goddess, unattainable, but on the ground she’s human and she’s flawed. I see so many counter arguments like the one Grevius proposed (I am paraphrasing) “She was never a warrior princess. She was always there in battle and managed to do so much while not doing anything but looking pretty and being calm and stoic.” only one of us is saying she’s perfect and has no faults or is not allowed to fail, but it’s not me.

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Thats like saying if Indiana Jones let the relics be then the bad guys would have never been able to momentarily get their hands on them until Jones put a stop to it in the last minute.
Galadriel isn’t responsible for other’s actions and I hardly blame her for it, and the story always treats her as special snowflake for no other reason than she is… Guhlhardiahl they should have just written a story about greek mythology and made her Athena for she is truly the Goddess of Wisdom and War.

Anyway you wanted my take I gave it.

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No, the show specifically implies that if she went to Valinor Sauron would not have become the Dark Lord. He became the Dark Lord because she pushed him to be. Sauron is also a complex character in this show and he’s shown as actually trying to put his past with Morgoth behind him and start fresh.

Have you watched Rings of Power or skimmed it?

I watched it but certain story arcs like the hobbits I just fast forward.
I don’t care about them and they bore me.

And when we finally switch back to the elves I just keep watching Galadriel being a superb girl boss.

The show could stumble and try to paint Galadriel the solver of all problems and if she was there in valinor to solve that problem too then all would have been well is incredibly dumb to me.
Maybe the valar should have cloned Galadriel and put her in the four corners of the world to solve all of the world’s problems. :sweat_smile:

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I so respect your opinion Smallioz, this is not an attempt tp troll, but if you find it boring why not just say so. You don’t have to like everything. One of the things that bugs me about forum spaces is everyone is expected to be an expert on everything. I don’t expect you to know everything, nor do I judge you if you don’t.

I think it kinda did, in ironically the scene that every male tv critic hates. :joy:

Sauron basically tells her that the Elves consider her a problem and they just handwaved her away. She asked for a small contingent of soldiers and they gave her the “honor” of being quietly shipped back to Valinor. It makes all of her accomplishments as the Leader of the Northern Armies, moot.

When they get to Numinor she manages to almost get herself locked up because she starts demading a ship and a ride back to the Elven Kingdoms, while entirely misreading that Numinor doesn’t trust elves since their last king.

She even thinks Oren is Sauron, despite Halbrand literally telling her he took his necklace off a dead man, recounts fighting in Morgoth’s war to her and apologizes for killing her brother and she still doesn’t clue in until him and Celebrimbor discover how to forge Mithril to create rings of power. She’s constantly making stupid mistakes because she’s prideful.

Yep

That’s because the argument I made holds the character to the literature, faithfully, by its creator.

These showrunners completely destroyed the character of Galadriel.

Then theres Sauron. He wanted control. Dominion over all life. He most certainly was never pushed into being evil by Galadriel. That entire plotline was an insult to the lore.

Then there’s Celebrimbor. The greatest smith of all time. Creator of the rings of power. Sauron never told him how to make metals stronger by combining them in an alloy; the elf had milennias worth of smithing expertise.

Then there’s the numenoreans. First men. Absolute towering humans, incredibly strong, built for battle. In real Tolkien lore, Galadriel would never be able to stand toe to toe with 1, let alone 5 Numenorian soldiers

Then there’s the Ice Troll. She would have been killed by it 1 on 1. At the very least, if she were to win, it’d be a tooth and nail battle down to the last breath. And she’d need an entire attack party helping her, it wouldn’t be a quick solo kill.

I could go on and on. There is disgrace after disgrace in that show.

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So you want her to be a delicate flower. Or a damsel in distress. Got it. I think you made your point pretty clear.