Magni just gets emasculated over and over. I swear half his lines are him talking about how much he failed and what an awful father he was, or how amazing and how much better than him his daughter is.
Baelgrim is pathetic. Sacrifices himself about a minute in to take out minor and forgettable nerubians. And the people who knew him the longest are quickly drawn into a story where they get to exclaim about how Lufsela has immediately improved things in a way Baelgrim never could.
The manner in which they demean these characters is not subtle.
You must be playing a different game, because I sat through a lot of "stay a while and listen"s where he talks about other stuff, like hyping up Dagran. The way stories go, you see, is that a character has a setback, and then they overcome that setback. If there’s never a setback, then there’s nothing for them to overcome, and the story stays flat and uninteresting.
I didn’t realize that having doubts was fundamentally un-masculine, though. Learn something new every day, I guess!
I’m sorry if your dad never hugged you and told you this, but it’s not demeaning for a man to not win at every aspect of his life all the time, to have emotions other than “grr” and “raaargh”, and to show them.
ah the good old Ard response that doesn’t really have anything to do with what is being talked about. What happens in the future doesn’t change how a scene was presented by the game.
Exactly, you’re very quickly told how Lefsela is basically inconceivably better than Baelgrim, no one for thousands of years had even thought to be nice to the animals or treat them with compassion (lol).
Honestly seems very hamfisted when you have Olbarig right there who is much better suited for that role, and better written for that role.
Even further, the contrast between Baelgrims demise and Aggartha’s for example - the screen is lit up with praise at Aggarthas heroism, how brilliant she was, etc, Baelgrim on the other hand is pretty easily forgotten lol.
This messaging is not subtle, and not limited to Isle of Dorn - it pops up everywhere throughout the expac, but its like the same 5 people who keep insisting all this stuff is conjecture because of how they view the world.
This doesn’t really bother me that much- on account of most of us who play WoW probably roll female characters anyways. Like yea, its woke AF, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s still some cool male characters like Turalyon, and Thrall. They’re just taking a backseat for now so that female characters get their time to shine.
They’re trying to beat the sexism allegations and look generally progressive by overly promoting strong women in leadership roles in their game. Warcraft has always had great female characters, but there’s been clear shift with them taking much more of the spotlight and them male characters looking weak, broken or just straight up dying.
This isn’t a secret either. They have a DEI page on their website which says-
“It is critically important Blizzard represents the millions of players that make up our communities worldwide–in our games, in our stories, in our characters, and in our global offices. We know diversity leads to growth and innovation, while being inclusive allows players to feel at home in our worlds, and our employees to feel at home at Blizzard. Representation matters, a diverse employee population matters, inclusion matters.”
So yeah, this is intentional and ideological. You can feel how you’d like about it, but it is a departure from the way the IP was originally written.
OMG! You’ve cracked it wide open! A company that wants to sell its game to a wide range of people is gasp marketing their game to a wide range of people. Not just a small minority of ideological wangrods who demand that they and only they be catered to.