log off World of Warcraft player Scabber “i don’t want dark skinned representation in my video games unless it’s how i approve of it and if anyone calls me out on it i will go to Instagram to harass anyone potentially associated with them” from Emerald Dream
It’s a bit late for the blood elf skin tone argument now, they’re already implemented! Missed the ol feedback window.
On a more positive note, scrolling through this thread this morning made me forget for 5 minutes how much I absolutely despise Blizzard right now.
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It’s weirdly cathartic to have a good ol drama thread again, feels like it’s been a while
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Nope, there’s always room for nuance. I always had a very nuanced take about this, which is why this guy resorts to copying and pasting ad hominem to paint me as a villain.
Imo every race with the skintone of irl humans should be able to be the skintone of any group of irl humans but apparently theres some lore I’m not aware of regarding elves and their melanin?
I mean, yeah, there actually kind of is.
The curse of flesh is responsible for the races that have normal human melanin behavior.
Elves exhibit the opposite of melanation. They began as dark trolls, who we can see in Zandalar and also reflected in the new model updates, and were mutated into night elves by the magic of the well. Night elves are lighter than dark trolls, and the Highborne who practiced magic that the other Kaldorei refused to became lighter skinned through more exposure to magick. The blood elves went further into that more-magic-equals-more-pale logic, and then we see demon hunters in BC representing darker fel-magick tainted skins, which are predominantly red and purple.
In other words, a nocturnal (night-living) species of night elves evolved to be diurnal (day-living) blood elves, who are paler than night elves. Considerably so.
Melanin isn’t responsible for the coloration of elves. Never was. Magic is.
I’m not OPPOSED to the skin tones that were added, however, and I pointed that out in that original thread many moons ago. It makes sense in context with the shorter ear option, because half-elves are very well known to be a thing, and a half-elf can have human melanation without cause for lore contradiction.
Nuance is what good lore is actually made of. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water in a bid to genericize the entirety of “high fantasy” as one thing. Ask questions instead of lobbing accusations.
log off World of Warcraft player Scabber “i don’t want dark skinned representation in my video games unless it’s how i approve of it and if anyone calls me out on it i will go to Instagram to harass anyone potentially associated with them” from Emerald Dream
Now you’re the one digging a hole for yourself.
I agree in principle, but I’m both intrigued and horrified by the notion of “white” Mag’har orcs. Those big creamy boys.
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log off World of Warcraft player Scabber “i don’t want dark skinned representation in my video games unless it’s how i approve of it and if anyone calls me out on it i will go to Instagram to harass anyone potentially associated with them” from Emerald Dream
https://imgur.com/a/366eLnz
and…this was why my original line in the sand was caucasian goblins.
I will not tolerate a version of my character with peachy pink skin. That’s the final straw.
Nightmare fuel man.
But that’s just a theory.
A Game Theory.
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looks at thread length since last night
I’m not reading all that.
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that’s called a life hack
Hmm… You make some good points here. It would seem to make sense that the titanforged/curse of flesh races all work the same way as far as skin tone is concerned, while the native trolls and elves all have their rainbow spectrum of blue, purple, green etc.
The Sunwell’s power gave the formerly purple highborne elves their peachy, Caucasian-ish skin. However, on a meta level the high elves were already peachy even before the purple elves were introduced in the lore, and this “Sunwell did it” explanation was merely a justification of that.
Compared to that, if we say that the Sunwell changed the highborne into a wider range of different skin tones, including darker (but still distinct from night elven completions) it is a much smaller addition to the lore. The actual color the Sunwell changed them to was always arbitrary, as “peachy skin” has no correlation with “arcane font of energy”.
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That’s the real oddity of it. It’s definitely not melanin if walking in the sunlight made 'em look all pale-pink. They’ve also always exhibited some tanner tones, and really the old pre-WoD model leaned more into the pale-pink than the explicitly-the-same-skin-as-the-humans color. The issue is simply that the color that they were given feels like a copy-paste of human skin variables logic, rather than an expansion of the existing races colors.
I was never saying darker elves shouldn’t exist. I was critiquing the application of lore to inform the colors used. Dark skinned blood elves probably should have been given two options; a dark reddish brown, not dissimilar to my own fathers skin (thanks for the accusations of racism, guys) , or a purplish brown, to further relate them back to their night elf and troll roots, just the way they gave trolls the dark blue and purple skins to give room for dark troll characterization, and just as the night elves got a darker blurple to relate them back to their dark troll ancestors. Even we goblins got two new skintones that make sense for us (a sunbleached yellow-green, and my own teal-blue gilgoblin-adjacent tone)
Azeroth has a lot of bad lore. The evolutionary history of its various species isn’t one of the bad spots though. It’s not fun when people misrepresent your sincere interest in this universe, specifically as a phobia, informed purely by their own disinterest in the specifics.
A lot of the customization options opened up are amazing, and I’ve made literally dozens of toons using them. Blood elves in particular got a different treatment than the other races, though, they were treated as the Horde proxy to humans. While this was always their true function in-game, to give people who wanted to “look human-ish but not undead because they’re ugly”, a race on the Horde, this was never the canonical reality of who they were.
The “issue” was largely solved by the introduction of the short ear option, since the short ears historically signified half-elves. Most half-elves are specifically half-human, so, that opens everything up cleanly on its own; even if you just so happen to be a half-elf with ears as long as your full-elf kin. Recessive and dominant genes be like that.
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Hm, I agree that the “reddish brown” and “purplish brown” skin tones would have been good options that expand on the Burning Crusade customizations and indeed the lore.
I guess the heart of the issue is that I dont understand why we would want to limit them to just those, seeing as the Sunwell could have magically turned them any number of colors. It isnt like the dark iron dwarves where their physical change was aesthetically linked to the source of the change. High elves arent glowing the color of the sunwell, which if I remember correctly was a golden sun color?
Anyway for the record it does seem to me that your stance isnt based in racism as was implied hundreds of posts ago. I cant go back and read the entire argument thats been going on since then so I dont want to take a side and appear to endorse what you or Liotuse have said or done since then, but I feel I should apologize for believing the initial contextless caricature of your opinion.
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Well, I wouldn’t really call it a limit. The end result skin is almost there on the dark reddish brown, just drop the blue levels 3-4 ticks. But yeah, I was never advocating against options. I wanted them to get one more instead of settle for the middle approximate. They’re the only member of the troll to elf evolutionary pipeline that didn’t get that beautiful dark blurple.
I just want options that imply logical relationships between customization choices and the world we’ve been (trying) to immerse ourselves in for a decade+.
My mock line in the sand is and always has been us non-human(ish) races. I would be viscerally uncomfortable to see goblins with human skin tones running around Orgrimmar.
Viscerally.
Not looking forward to the neon green tauren either, unless it’s those paint bombs from Mechagon.
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Do I have to read all this? Wyrmrest Accord must have be the best server ever.
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Imagine hating choice so much there’s an argument against Dark skinned elves.
If I was still playing, I’d totally change Oleandis’ skin tone just to annoy.
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Imagine demonstrating you literally didn’t read a word shared between Nyumbani and I.
Bad faith begets low trust and low information conversations that boil over to nothing but emotion.
That’s how the thread blew up y’all, bored people more interested in the drama than the truth. It’s sad how many times I’ve had to reiterate those words lately.
The snake eats it’s tail. Oribos City knows the vibe.