Tbh, I didn’t really care about Turalyon until Midnight. I like his voice actor, and I thought it was funny they turned him into a Draenei Weeb. But the character himself, I was like “Meh”
After Midnight? We Stan our boy.
Total Amani Death.
In the Light, we are one.
I think its funny how Turalyon and Gazlowe have the same VA lol! Travis is great.
And this is exactly why I’m pretty sure Blizz’s problem with writing masculine characters is going to persist in perpetuity—any critique worth hearing is going to get drowned out by culture warriors regurgitating their team’s buzzwords. Although, if I’m being even more cynical, I suspect you lot get bigger dopamine returns on having something to screech “girlboss!” “woke!” at than you would a competently written game.
Speaking as someone who has a bias for girlbosses. I RP them, they dominate my writings. I have had people even call me out during D&D sessions that all the cool warrior NPCs are women.
There is no recusing yourself from the culture war. You can sit there and pretend like you are above it, but you’re not. You are a participant in it whether you like it or not. Everything you do in your life, the words you say, the family you raise, the business you build, the things you purchase, is a vote for one side or the other of this conversation. The only real question is whether you do so consciously, with some coherent picture of human flourishing, or let the loudest factions set the defaults for you and your descendants.
You Americans and Canadians are tiring and everyone is sick of you pushing politics/culture wars or making everything be about politics/culture wars.
It’s just the way the world works and how it always has.
This is nonsense that people spew to try to shame people for not drinking their preferred flavor of sewer juice. Any political activity I choose to exercise, and how much of it I choose to exercise, is not going to be dictated by bored people with inflated egos stirring the pot on a game forum.
I am not trying to shame you into anything. I am just saying, even if you took a vow of silence today, your actions themselves are political.
Nah, this is two distinct groups shoving sewer juice down their holes and being offended by people who don’t want to drink sewer juice, as usual. The Story Forums for a game are not where I’m going for politics, and remains political only to the extent the posters here have allowed sucking down sewer juice to subsume their identity.
Apathy, disengagement, whatever you call it, is still a political position.
I understand why it is popular, though.
What is your identity?
Race? Are there not entire political groups that vote as a block in the pursuit of interests for their ethnic group? Are there not entire Political Action committees that lobby politicians representing the interests of a their racial base?
Sexuality? Isn’t there a whole political movement about this? Something that is still heatedly debated? Do people of this movement not also have their own -flags- ?
Religion or other moral commitments? Aren’t there entire political positions that people take on the basis of religion and moral? Hell, aren’t MOST positions taken on some kind of moral basis?
How about your interests? You like fantasy games and stories. Fantasy is inherently political. In fact, it’s inheritably right-wing. It is a nostalgia for a mythic, hierarchical past that was destroyed by the modern liberalism born int he wake of the French Revolution. Chivalry was dismantled by liberalism’s insistence that hierarchy is oppression and honor must yield to rights. Fantasy is the nostalgia for the time where it was expected of the Aristocracy to pursue paths of honor. That is a Right Wing concept.
Do you want to raise a family? Your entire identity as a parent is defined by the kind of future you want for your children. That is a culture concern.
And gaming is art. Art is a mirror that when viewed reveals something about the world, and something about ourselves. How you interpret art tells you something about what your values are. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that it is a popular medium that activists employ to try and hamfist ideology into you.
I am not asking you to pick a side. I am not sitting here saying “Agree with me, take my side, be based”
I am just saying, you cannot escape it. It is a natural law. As concrete as gravity.
The framing isn’t even accurate. Even if we want to drag this down into some dumb “everything is political” drivel (which I’m not going to waste my time on either, mind you) the two specific camps of lunatics I’m obviously highlighting are not the entirety of political thought. And even if they were, this is a Story Forum for Warcraft lol. It is just bored people stirring the pot in a very dumb way in pursuit of that cheap dopamine.
Edit: ^ just look up. They aren’t here because they want to talk about WoW, they’re here because they want to yell at strangers online about politics.
I am interest in talking about WoW. WoW, like most forms of art, is also political.
I don’t typically agree with Akiyass. I just do think most positions have deeper implications than people want to admit. But again, I understand why people don’t want to view it that way. Because that position comes with a claim of being above or apart from it all.
You’ve already acknowledged you don’t want to get into the drivel, though.
Inaccurate framing, still. “Political” reaches far beyond two distinct camps of western partisans. If we were discussing X-men and someone brought up civil rights and racism, I wouldn’t roll my eyes and go “oh God, they’re getting political.” This is more about fatigue with the two aforementioned, distinct camps permeating everything.
Edit: I’ve had and witnessed plenty of discussions pertaining to WoW with people that do not devolve into propagandized buzzword slap fights.
But, I agree. I’m not framing these two groups as the limits of political/politics, though.
And you can feel that way, I just view that sentiment as political.
Okay. Nice non sequitur then, I guess?
So you are engaging in the culture war, you’re just annoyed that most people have an ignorant, clip-based understanding of the topics at hand?
I’m sick of ^ trying to derail everything into their usual slap-fight.
It is sort of relevant though, isn’t it? Especially with the writing surrounding Turalyon.
I understand it being exhausting, but I think we have more to blame Blizzard for. For making something so unsubtle that is leaves very little room for other interpretations. Blizzard themselves are choosing a side. And the distinction between art and propaganda is night and day.