A lot of the reasons for people harboring negative emotions in MoP are valid. Feeling anger and a desire for vengeance after the destruction of Theramore for example, from the perspective of the sky admiral, is understandable. You can get that. It doesn’t excuse gunning down surrendering soldiers. It doesn’t excuse waging a proxy war that unearthed an ancient evil.
You can understand why Taran Zhu felt so much hatred for these outsider who brought a war to his lands and have caused so much destruction. You can get it. But it doesn’t excuse him becoming blinded by hatred.
Feeling these negative emotions is one thing, but if you manage them and temper them it’s okay. Becoming obsessed with them, enshrouded in them, that’s when problems start.
Even after SoO in War Crimes, for example, we see Baine go through a similar dilemma. He has to defend the man who killed his father. He doesn’t want to, he feels that he doesn’t deserve a defense. But the resolution is that he decides to do it anyways.
The Alliance and Horde combined unleashed the Sha. This is literally true and the text of the event. Either go play the content being discussed or stop being dishonest.
The difference being, the Horde went there for senseless conquest/colonization, the Alliance went there to rescue Prince Anduin.
One is not like the other. Your attempt to place the Horde and Alliance on the same level is laughable to say the least, as the Alliance quite clearly has the moral high-ground.
If you are going to exaggerate about me and say I’m “supporting capitalism” because I used the word “free enterprise.” My goodness you need to learn more about liberalism and capitalism.
How many educated people have to tell you you’re wrong before you just stop talking about topics you are not mentally equipped to handle?
Anyone presenting a political opinion of any kind on this forum expecting to be taken seriously is delusional.
Anyway on the topic of this forum I think the actual problem people are having, that I’ll try and engage with, is that there is a fundamental gap between what we may morally expect the writers to do and what they have actually done.
In theory we may expect that a people who have had their ancestral homelands taken and occupied, who were then defeated in battle, to perhaps be sympathetic. As media continues to adapt to the ever changing public perception of colonizer and colonized peoples our expectations change. When you see a character coded as a historically oppressed group you expect them to be portrayed sympathetically, I’d say this is a fairly normal expectation. However, in Warcraft we don’t quite get that.
Warcraft is in many ways stuck in the past, it has to be due to the fact that well over a decade of old content is still crammed into the game. You can still go and see what they were writing in 2004 right now if you wanted to. The depiction of tribal or clan-based societies is one of those things that was always distasteful in the Warcraft universe and hasn’t really gotten much better over time.
In the vein of this the Amani Trolls, and many other troll tribes, are genuinely portrayed as savages. They eat people, they commit mass acts of human sacrifice, they are more often than not blatantly evil in their actions. This is made even worse when you consider that islander savage stereotype that the Trolls are blatantly based on. Unfortunately the Darkspear were one of the only Troll tribes that were not given this treatment, after all they were the ones who were “civilized” due to the events of WC3.
Long story short the Amani should be sympathetic. At least a little bit. You would expect that their plight may be taken seriously and that there would be some effort to humanize it, to make them more than brutal savages who lurk in the woods and eat people. But these efforts haven’t really happened. So no, text as written the Amani are not the good guys. They’re blatantly written as the bad guys, actually. Which you could say is emblematic of many problems in the Warcraft setting.
It is somewhat a fundamental issue with the longevity of the setting as a single coherent thing, yeah.
Their solution so far has been to basically pick a place on the map and make a new version not coded so badly. Prime example off the top of my head be the Maruuk Centaur, who totally do away with the savage mongol invader tropes of the Kalimdor Centaur. In some ways the BFA era Zandalari also serve as a foil to the notion of the voodoo cannibal troll tropes, though that is at the expense of them being a blatant homage to wakanda.
It is hard to get away with that sort of rewrite when you go visit an old place with decades old established lore.
There is no reading between the lines, though. There is no subtle implication that the Amani are actually very sympathetic and that maybe they aren’t all that bad or whatever. Like, this is just a failing of the game and an example of how indigenous coded characters have been poorly written for centuries now.
Like Idk man not specifically the Amani but when you have things like a quest where a Troll asks you to go out and scalp people in the game you just have to acknowledge and understand that you’re dealing with an insensitive piece of media.
I did the Blood in The Snow Scenario for the first time yesterday. In that scenario, you have to save three dwarves from being cooked alive, and Moira talks about the trolls “breed” like they’re animals. These are the Frostmane. Not sure if the Amani were known for cooking and eating elves.
Now, even indigenous tribes who did practice cannibalism didn’t deserve to have their lands stolen
It really isn’t about being impressive or standing up for people. Blizzard has relied heavily on sometimes harmful stereotypes and tropes since the beginning. I think stating that as fact isn’t exactly some big virtue signal.
It’s really just a problem of people having inconsistent morals because they view things based on race and see 1 race as always wrong no matter what they do and 1 race as always right no matter what they do.
It’s why the same people here arguing that the trolls were right to try to wipe out the elves will turn around and argue else where that the humans were unredeemable evil to put orcs in internment camps. Instead of seeing that both events were bad.
They don’t view the actual events that happen, they just see race and make a judgement solely on that.
That one always sort of baffles me. The internment camps were the best option out of a lot of even worse ones. What else DO you do with hostile aliens from another world with no way home?
