‘Loa of Kings’ isn’t an actual Loa, it’s a title bestowed on the Loa the King has a bargain with. Bwonsamdi is now Loa of Kings. Rezan’s power was unspecified, by consuming Rezan’s soul Vol’jin isn’t ‘Loa of Kings’ but he did absorb Rezan’s power, like other mortal trolls who consumed the soul of their Loa, like Shadra who became a half human/half spider. But in the whole quest chain where we find out blood trolls are consuming the flesh of Torga, the belief is if you consume the flesh or soul of your Loa, your soul becomes cursed, but since Rezan chose to give his soul to Vol’jin, maybe it doesn’t apply to him.
There is a plaque, like other plaques for Loa around Zandalar which states the Loa’s power. Rezan’s power is solar, he’s Loa of the Sun. What this may mean for the Darkspear in the future is a shift from worshipping Bwonsamdi (who was previously their patron Loa) to worshipping Vol’jin as Rezan, the Loa of the Sun.
That’s mainly the problem. Most popular standards of masculinity use his Hero Chin dad as a benchmark. The Hero Chin only bites nails and never shows emotion other than the rip roaring rage of revenge or the mocking smirk at an enemy. Anduin is unforgivingly soft. Men are supposed to be hard…nonstop and keep their emotions bottled… unless they’re channelling aggression and rage. The proper male expression of friendship is butting heads and bonecrushing handshakes.
That’s why homophobia is such a thing with men. They fear the compromise of characters like Anduin. Anduin compromises his maleness with his sottness so he can’t be a “real” man.
As far as Anduin being unmanly… He is childish, and that is unmanly, since men are generally adults.
Listening to Anduin is like listening to children - boy or girl. I mean, their naïveté is heart warming but annoyingly simplistic.
And I really do not think the perception of Anduin as unmanly is just the fan base being homophobic… it is an actual part of the narrative. Sylvanas and other characters in the lore call him the boy king. It isn’t just some fan driven conjuration.
To me this remains one of the most harebrained parts of bfa writing and I will forever be mad about it, especially when they were initially planning to kill off Bwonsamdi, too.
Anduin is Golden’s poster child for non-toxic masculinity, which you can like or not but it’s not a problem in and of itself.
The problem is more that in this role, the narrative always bends over backwards to make him right, and other characters just serve as background actors to show just how good and perfect he is.
Which is boring and annoying and nips every attempt at interesting storytelling in the bud whenever he is involved.
Anduin is the Wesley Crusher of Warcraft. He might not smirk when he gives his opinion, but every other character deserves the heavy sigh they breathe after having to interact with him, and the knowledge that reality will bend and twist itself into knots just so that he’s right and they’re wrong.
Imagine a Blizzard Representative came into every Story Forum thread and “declared” the same poster the winner of whatever argument they were in.
How do you think everyone else would behave around that poster?
That’s not the fault of the character though, but the story. As I said, they had a set outcome and then slotted a likely character into the spot. In this case it was Anduin, but he really isn’t much different than he was in MoP at all. The character wasn’t driving the story, the character was being led around by the story. You can look at Saurfang in BfA the same way, his arc was inconsistent and had contradictions in it, but because the story dictated what would happen already, it became less ‘what would this character do’ and ‘what do we need this character to do to get this outcome’.
Anduin in BfA is arguably even more warlike than in MoP, but in MoP the character just had way more to work with.
That’s not either clear nor accurate take at all, and I’m disappointed that’s coming from you.
Females aren’t disposable, most of the ones that were listed were just damsels in distress (the ones that Zerde listed) and the ones you posted were old lore, and well written one, as it made you care about their fates. Both Tiffin and Tartha appeared in book, it’s not like we quested to experience that. So to say that game was skeved to portray their loss is very weak example.
What I said was that game wasn’t going out of its way to show that females are trash and constantly get the short end of the stick, because that’s what I understood as “disposable”. We saw and even orchestrated demise of some, because some of them were villians, some of them were part of tragic stories, etc. But extact same thing happens to male characters. We saw male characters get tortured, killed, villain batted, subjucated, etc.
It’s part of the story, we can argue whether it’s good wrting or not, but to claim that female characters had it worse is completely baseless, especially now.
And in World of Warcraft we should experience all kinds of things happening to both males and females. If nothing bad happens to females then the story would be predictable, uninspired, boring and contrived.
We can sit all day and list each character, and make comparisons but is productive?
Can you really with good consciousness say that men don’t get mistreated aswell? Where Vol’Jinis probably the biggest offender.
Ok, and are you happy with the current state of things? Because while I am happy with more prominence of female characters, i am not happy that males usually have to perish in order to make room for them. As if we couldn’t have both, as you said.
And I really wish we could have both Rastakhan and Talanji. But Rasty had to go, the entire narrative wanted him dead from the get go after barely meeting him.
I dunno the DF duo is also a close competition. I already dislike Naleidea or whatever her name is because she was all “hush hush, we don’t do war here, war is bad and we should embrace each other” . To call it tone deaf is understatement.
That’s a different definition of “disposable” than I would use, but as you say, that discussion may not be productive for the main subject of the thread.
Of course male characters get mistreated sometimes, but that isn’t what this thread is about. It’s about whether there is a lack of male leaders in WoW. (I am definitely salty about what they did to Vol’jin, though.)
I appreciate that they are making an effort to bring more female characters into the game. I would be happier if they were better drawn and/or utilized.
I might dispute “usually.” What other examples are there besides Rastakhan and Talanji? I can’t recall any established male characters who died to bring in Alleria, Thalyssra, Mayla, or Fareeya. And the situation with Geya’rah doesn’t really fit that description either. Emperor Dagran was killed long before anyone ever thought of making Dark Irons playable. Same goes for Daelin and the Kul Tirans.
I do too because he was a great character. But his name is a joke from the 1990s that is considered culturally insensitive nowadays, so I never expected him to stick around.
I wouldn’t say it was insensitive, silly yes, but he turned out to be so endearing and so charismatic, and just overall great, that I no longer care that his name was silly.
Besides, his forces - Rastari, sounds pretty awesome to me.
So was Rastakhan. The old king who was kinda foolish and let his empire rot and took desperate actions to save it only for him to finally pay the price and drag his daughter in the process.
My point is not that. Especially considering Blizzard has spent YEARS changing things so both men and women are more equal in the suffering and needing rescue department.
It is that no one has questioned/or only barely question when female death/suffering are used to further male characters stories but the moment it is used for female characters, you decide to have an issue.
Why is Taretha’s death ok and you question Rastakhan? Hell, we have people like Varian who has a dead wife to further his trauma and Anduin’s story. I don’t see you complaining about that.
No it’s repetitive in case of trolls. It’s the exact same story :
Bad stuff happens to trolls
They rally up
Got beaten
They get desparate
Their leader dies.
Rastakhan was hinted to be a big deal, we finally meet him, and he didn’t last one patch.
It was AWFUL choice. Especially when Each established troll leader dropped like fly.
You’d think that they should’ve learned from Vol’Jin’s death. But no.
Tharetha was a book character. Minor character. Rastakhan was big established Troll character - THE LAST ONE of all big Troll leaders. He was built up to be a thing since Vanilla.
These two examples are uncomparable.
Taretha’s equivalent should be Sylvana’s brother, what was his name -Lirath? I honestly don’t remember.
Edit: Yes, that’s him. He is the male equivalent of Taretha. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Lirath_Windrunner#cite_note-1 So minor character, that has a big ties to Big lore NPC, that had tragic death which influenced other Big characters.
So ofc Rastakhan’s death Stings much more if you take the bigger picture. Zandalar didn’t even have HALF of the stuff they were meant to have.
The scholar troll caste doesn’t do any scholar stuff at all.
Zanza the Restless almost completely gone.
No Tal’Drak
no goldmines
no farmlands…
but you have stuff like Titan facility, blood trolls, sethrak, vulpera… and all other nonsense that wasn’t meant to be there.
And I believe that for him redemption story - would be far more fitting. He wouldn’t last 200 years as a King and get favour of all loas if he was incompetent fool. He was done dirty like entire Zandalar.
And same goes for Talanji, there was a meme where people put her face on body of Yrel. Why? Because someone had to die so she could take the spot. In WoD it was Velen and Maraad, with the difference that it was AU Velen, so the real one was spared, but Maraad is perma gone.
Its exact same story.Brave young woman who shows conviction and passion stands up to the baddies, elder mentor dies, and so she is the leader.
While I’d rather if Talanji remained princess, if she was at age of Jaina, if she was actually wrong about certain stuff. Like she said she admired Darkspears since she was little girl- why not change it? That she looked down on them, but after interacting with them seeing their stories progress she changed her mind and reevaluated her stance?
Wouldn’t it be better to have a funcional family in the Horde? Father and daughter?
Because the trolls never learned, they kept pining for a world that no longer existed and instead of working with the other races, decided to try and rebuilt long lost empires.
He was hinted to literally have no power left in MoP. That it was already Zul, who truly had the power and Rastakhan was a foolish king that did nothing. If anything, back in MoP I expect him to be the penultimal boss to a Zul raid!
He was built up to be an ineffective king that was giving Zul too much power. And suprise, that is exactly what happened.
Nah, I quite enjoyed killing him and as I mentioned expected to kill him back in MoP.
Maybe because there literally were few if any female characters that could rise? In any case, we know of at least one male character that will someday take over for her mother. Dagran will someday be the dwarven king.
You could ask this of alot of characters, why did say Tiffin die and not let her live so we could have a functional family in House Wyrnn? The answer is simply drama sells. Like it or not Rastakhan’s death was a pretty dramatic scene and for the most part, people enjoyed it/acted positively to it.
No it’s the writers who aren’t creative with them and always use them as raid fodder.
No, he was hinted to get rid of Zul so he would avoid civil War.
No he actually did a smart thing, to avoid civil war, he allowed people that wanted to leave- TO LEAVE. And in Zandalar he was still highly regarded.
That’s just you. But not me, not my friends, and I have friends on both Horde and Alliance, and those who main alliance also hated that because they liked Rastakhan too, and would rather kill Sylvans/ Nathanos.
Besides you show absolutely zero compassion to fans of races that got so much screwed over by poor writing.
Repeating same story over and over again isn’t exactly creative. Which brings me back to the female Khans of the DF centaurs. Seeing one, is like seeing them all, they’re undistinguishable, so why bother to have so many of them if one would be enough? Why not to make other centaur clans more conflicted?
The problem is that Horde doesn’t have a prominent character families - minus Thrall, but his kids don’t have any spotliught at all.
Tiffin is a minor BOOK character, she never appeared in the game, unless in some retrospect cutscene.
Meanwhile we had Varian and Anduin for years, until Varian died, and Varian still appeared in front of Anduin in SL and oddly enough with Saurfang, as if Saurfang was super important figure to Anduin for some reason.
We have Bolvar and Taelia
We have Genn and Lorna
We have Windrunner sisters
We have Turalyon, Alleria and that son of theirs…I always forget his name.
We have Katherine and Jaina, and now she recovered even her brother, who miraculously didn’t rott away in the seas for decades.
So Alliance is blessed with lots of prominent families. Horde has only Thrall, and we don’t even interact with his kids becuase they’re too small.
This is why Rastakhan and Talanji being together was far more important. Because we would have proper family dynamic in the Horde. And I’d love to have them both and I’d love to see Talanji roam the world freely with us.
And additionally, with Rastakhan being - let me emphasise again THE LAST established troll leader left, he deserved much better treatment.