That’s right. It’s central to the goblin fantasy. Quite frankly, I’m amazed we haven’t gotten it yet already, considering how goblins are the coolest race in the game by a country mile and we all know about 95% of all players play a goblin as their main.
Just like how we should get (but probably won’t because small indie company)…
Straight backed Undead, Trolls and Worgen
Goldshire Inn RP in the LFG tool
Mantid as neutral race
Sethrak as allied race
Murlocs
… We should also get the option of picking an obese goblin body type.
This is a fantasy game, and my fantasy is for my ele shaman, who’s already a straight up g, to look like his glorious patron saint Gallywix.
Let’s see it. Let’s get it. Sign the petition. Change dot org. Share it with all your friends. Let’s get at least 1 billion signatures by tomorrow morning so we can show it to the execs.
A few years ago there was a series of videos about “What if animals were round?” and it showed all kinds of wildlife only they were all very round and bounced around.
It could be like that. Have a round option for all races.
That way we can all just bounce off of each other.
As cool as the mantid are, it just absolutely wouldn’t make any sense.
At the end of story in Dread Wastes in MoP, you walk with Kil’ruk the Wind-Reaver. He imparts this knowledge/message to you:
Wakener, your deeds have earned you the trust of the Klaxxi.
You are to be rewarded. Walk with me.
We mantid are an elder race. The pandaren you associate with - they are but children. They have their role to play.
Each cycle, our young swarm their walls. The pandaren slay the weak. The strong return.
With each generation, we grow ever stronger.
Before your history began, our empire was vast. We shared this world with our sister kingdoms, Ahn’Qiraj and Azjol-Nerub.
Our Gods were many, and powerful. We mantid worshipped the seven heads of Y’shaarj.
Great was the Old One, and terrible was His wrath. He consumed hope and begat despair; He inhaled courage and breathed fear. When the usurpers came - the ones you call “Titans” - Y’shaarj was destroyed.
His last terrible breath has haunted this land ever since, but the shadows he left behind are mere whispers of his former glory. I tell you now, because you have earned this warning. Your gods are not our gods, outsider. If the Old Ones ever return, we mantid will once again stand by their side.
The wisest among you will do the same.
They plainly tell us they will be our enemy when/if the old gods return. They held true to that as in the Siege of Orgimmar we faced the Paragons of the Klaxxi
Blizzard plainly just put all that in there as a reason to ensure they wouldn’t have to make them playable one day. Just as how they wrote that, they could also write a lore reason for them to be willing to join horde/alliance. It’s all just fiction anyway. So… I don’t care about the contrived lore. I wanna play as bug.
Mantid are worshippers of the Old Gods that literally betrayed us. We killed their queen and their council. They’re probably extinct. How do you figure them as playable?
We should replace them with Grummels. What’s your luckydoo?
One of them starts reading the banned books and other materials that will educate him on the perspective on outside cultures, gets curious, wants to adventure, eventually joins horde/alliance. You play as either that one, or one of his acolytes/followers. They’re a breakaway group that are heritics to the other mantid but are our allies.
One of them has a birth defect and is abandoned shortly after being born. His mother found a way to hide him away so that he wouldn’t be killed immediately. Anduin finds him, and places him in a Pandaren home in valley of 4 winds, a couple who couldn’t conceive. They raise him. Stormwind priests later mend his injury. The player plays as him or her.
Except that recent lore (as of TWW) continues to paint The Mantid as hard-line zelots of the Old Gods.
Their barbaric cycle of throwing their youngest and weakest into battle so that only the strong return is notable, even amongst another desendant race of the Aquir like the Nerubians. Who consider them mad. They liken Ansurek’s warlike behavior to that of the mantid.
They’re also biologically incapable of forming sub-culture of potentially friendly mantid.
The Mantid are the most eusocial all the Aquir races, and like bees, wasps and termites, all seem to be the sterile offspring of one reproductive empress.
Open-minded drones couldnt buzz off and form their own society, they’d die off in a generation. An empress would have have to arise that is somehow more willing to cooperate with outsiders. This would be really strange for such a dogmatic society. But she would then have to contend with the Klaxxi council, who act as the sole check to balance the otherwise absolute rule of the empress.
When someone takes an animal and starts putting human emotions onto it, it is called anthropomorphization of the animal. If your son has a pet turtle and he says “My turtle gets sad because I didn’t pet him today” that is an example of this.
You are doing something similar. You’re taking real life animals (in this case, eusocial creatures like bees) and extrapolating all of their real life characteristics onto their in-game representations. Just because the Mantid are modeled off of eusocial creatures from real life, doesn’t mean that they have to share all of their characteristics. They are fiction, they can be whatever we want them to be.
Not to mention that the mantids’ intelligence goes beyond the kind of intelligence we see in eusocial and hive-mind type creatures. A mantid is individually intelligent and aware of its own self outside of the group. It is not just a simple drone. Therefore, the possibility exists for the kind of scenario I laid out earlier
Kultirans are in the uncanny valley and have very few face options (edit, in my opinion. they’re alright. im more likely to play a female KT than a male one)