Comparison with night elves would be inappropriate, right?
And even Thrall is useless compared to Golden’s pet characters, who get to show off great feats of strength during the initial escape.
Seriously, I want the “boo hoo, Blizzard favors the Horde so much in lore” people to explain that. Also why the “favored” race goes through racial leaders like coffee filters.
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Honestly I’m starting to think that it’s less about Blizzard favoring one faction over the other and more that some people play a faction that happens to clash with their own personal beliefs and desires, a sentiment common for people in both factions.
This probably wouldn’t be a problem if the faction divide wasn’t ironclad and didn’t segregate players but it does. I’ve seen Horde posters who would clearly be happier doing Alliance stuff and Alliance posters who would clearly be happier doing Horde stuff.
Ever noticed how it’s very rare for anyone to actually give an affirmative reason for why they like their faction on these forums despite obviously being married to it? It’s always about why they don’t like their faction and think the other side has it better.
I mean, from what I get Thrall does get a nice little questline with Draka in 9.1. And he seems to be getting his mojo back, a fancy new axe (as he’s respecced into Enhancement), and plays Jaina’s counter as a game mechanic for the Sylvie fight. Its not a lot of content, but at least he’s getting something … and Draka is being well handled. Not coddling him by the looks of things. The real issue is … this is a Death expansion. Where the Horde has almost no relevance beyond Thrall. No spirit worship, limited Loa/Bown/Jin (and who knows if we’ll see a resolution for that), and no Forsaken (despite Maldraxxus/Primus/Jailor being their literal true creators).
Just … why?
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Same reason Sylvanas got to have zero relevance to ICC outside of her dubiously canon appearance in Halls of reflection.
The devs write about the characters they think would be good for the story they want to tell in the moment, rather than work out what would make sense organically. Hence why Jaina and Anduin are so horrifically overexposed.
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Because they are not peace treaties where such things are finally clarified. We should actually stop calling it that, it’s not a peace treaty, it’s a armistice
You know, I can now see the humour in the fact that Jaina and Thrall are only there because Blizzard is too small to make bridges out of Starlight, and are recycling Legion stuff instead, because that’s why Jaina and Thrall are in this raid.
Of course it’s a shame for Blizz, but hey, at least it’s entertaining when you look at it from the side.
Oh god am I disappointed in the core of this company.
It’s sadly consistent with the seeming perpetual need to hearken back to WC1 & 2, a paradigm in which a Baine-type character has to be ineffective to exist at all. Ever since WotLK it’s become increasingly evident that as long as faction war remains an option, they no longer know what to do with the Horde if it isn’t fighting the Alliance.
Northrend was the last time we got to truly see the Horde being heroic “their way” (while Saurfang’s little vignette with Garrosh in Borean Tundra drove home why the “old way” wasn’t good) and even that started veering off-course partway with the Broken Front, a standard-setting response to the last overtly heroic Horde moment being ruined by Putress’s betrayal and the subsequent Battle for the Undercity.
It’s like with that one betrayal, Varimathras’ grand scheme was really to create eternal war between the factions by reaching outside of the game and breaking the writers’ ability to write the Horde as more than the Anti-Alliance.
And depressingly the waste of Vol’jin’s tenure as Warchief spoke volumes. As soon as they got back to a Warchief who wasn’t out for Alliance blood, the faction was left to rot on the vine for the duration of WoD, an expansion built upon a premise that should have been absolutely top-full of opportunities for the Horde (and especially the orcs) to heroically display in full view against the Iron Horde that it doesn’t represent who or what they are any more.
But nope. The Horde was just kind of “around,” with just one orc NPC in Tanaan during the final patch acknowledging that lost story potential with a few lines about being surprised to see just how savage his people used to be.
Then unsurprisingly, they only brought the Horde out of that torpor for a split second - long enough to off Vol’jin - before replacing him with a new Banshee Warchief geared up to instigate all sorts of faction conflict again.
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That is a silly argument considering there are several light bridges(like the one in Halls of Valor). My guess on why Jaina and Thrall are in the raid is because both of them will actually have to deal with Garrosh’s spirit. Don’t forget he is part of the raid.
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To be fair, they don’t really know what to do with the Alliance either aside from kind of hang out waiting for the next expansion threat to heroically battle
At least with BfA and Shadowlands we get a sense that the Alliance is actively consolidating territory and dealing with the political aftermath of the Fourth War. That’s far more than they usually get.
I was going to come back to this but got busy the other day and see the thread continued, but I’m glad to see the discussion continued somewhat.
But yeah, I cannot agree that the way most fantasy/scifi handles humans is indeed representative of IRL humans.
Because both in Star Trek and WoW, “Human” is pretty much synonymous with majority white people whose culture can best be described as some kind of idealized version of US, UK, and/or NATO that also happens to have some characters that are women/non-white/non-NATO . They get treated as the default and middle of the road and neutral option, that also happens to be the most morally upstanding. And everything is told from their point of view.
All the other aspects of the human experience gets pawned off to other species/races. With varying degrees of stereotyping/dehumanization/tokenism.
But Chinese and other East Asian history/cultures, Afro-Carribean cultures, Mesoamerican history/cultures, etc are just as much a part of the human experience as Western European hstory/culture. Hyper-capitalist oligarchies, tribal confederations of hunter gatherers, caste based theocracies are all just as much a part of the IRL human experience as feudalism and hereditary monarchies.
Being capable of committing terrible warcrimes is just as much of the IRL human experience as striving to do the right thing and fighting for freedom.
But in WoW, only some of these things are considered characteristics of Humans (the in game race).
The appeal of the pre-Cata Horde-at least for me- is that it does indeed separate the concept of what counts as the default from your usual Tolkien-inspired idealized Hollywood version of the British Isles with some US sensibilities bolted on. It takes inspirations you don’t usually ever get to see in genre fiction outside of antagonists/sidekicks, and makes them front and center. And the it’s not about how a “normal person” comes to learn about this world. They’re treated as the main characters in their own narrative.
Trying to think of a good example of averting this and the best example I could think of would be Nickelodeon’s Avatar series. It doesn’t have a character from the rough equivalent of the US/Europe (past, present, future, fantasy or otherwise) to be our PoV character and define everything else. It let the world building and characters stand more on their own merits.
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I think you are misinterpreting what I said. My point was that we, as human beings, can’t actually create characters that are properly alien because no matter who we are or where we’re from, there is a commonality of experience on the basis of the fact that we are all human beings.
I agree that humanity’s fictional portrayal should incorporate more non-Western cultures into itself instead of pawning them onto non-humans but that wasn’t what I was talking about.
I understand what you’re saying.
However, it’s built upon the assumption that the humans in Star Trek/WoW are indeed more representative of humanity than say a Klingon or an Orc. They are not.
Outside of generally cosmetic stuff like tusks, forehead ridges, pointy ears, green skin, height, or hulking frames (Which WoW humans also have) the aliens in Star Trek and monsters in WoW have the exact same intelligence, range of emotions, and general values as humans have displayed IRL. Most of them take a lot of obvious influence from real life human cultures. They aren’t actually aliens. They too are reflections of a particular portrayal of humanity as much as the Federaton/Alliance are.
But they don’t get treated that way the Federation/Alliance does in the narrative. Because what’s treated as default has less to do with reality and more to do with what particular tropes have sunk in and become more/less familiar over the decades and what the people writing want to express as what.
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Yes. Correct. We agree.
Is this inherently a problem? All narratives, no matter the genre, time, place, or setting are going to have some element of humanity in an antagonistic role due to the inherent structure of most narratives, barring some of the more radical avant-garde stuff. Mind you that antagonistic doesn’t mean villainous.
So they could indeed do a theoretical switcheroo with these groups (and in the case of Star Trek, did in the case of the mirror universe. In fact, this is also pretty common with comic books) but ultimately it’s the same scenario with the pieces swapped.
If your objection is to the fact that the portrayal of humans in popular culture often trends towards being informed by the experiences and beliefs of those who craft the works in popular culture, and that as a result works produced in the West often take on an aesthetic informed by Western identity, then it seems like complaining that the sky is blue or that water is wet.
You aren’t the first to make these observations and how it’s a cultural consequence of globalization in particular, but I don’t really see how its a productive line of discussion in the context of WoW lore. Do you want Blizzard to try and write stories about peoples and cultures that they don’t understand because they haven’t lived through it? Do you want them to hire more non-Americans to write for them despite the immense practical obstacles in the way of doing so and the fact that many people’s cultural experiences in the 21st century are informed by western popular culture no matter where they live?
Because absent more constructive arguments in that regard, it honestly comes off to me as attempting to use the sociopolitical environment of our time as a rhetorical cudgel to win forum arguments about your favored faction in an aging MMO rather than something that can be meaningfully translated and applied in a practical way to the game’s narrative. Particularly if we’re also taking into account the sorts of things that the audience is expecting and desires, which is going to be radically different depending on who you ask.
The Alliance/Stormwind isn’t “the social political environment of our time” if you’re referring to the US and Western Europe. Not unless you think we live in a non-democratic hereditary monarchy leading a fuedal system in which most people live in cottages or castles and ride horses. It’s as foreign to our everyday lived experience as that of WoW Dwarves.
If I we’re really going to really point at what in WoW race really best represents “the social political environment of our time”, and is informed by the experiences and beliefs of those who craft the game: it’d be Goblins. Goblins have cities of glass and steel, with highways and roads and resorts and golf courses. Their society is run mostly by the wealthiest people at the head of a highly industrial/information/trade based economy that produces stuff like canned soda, disposable food containers, and magazines. They have actual paper money and radios with pop music, and have a huge sports culture around footballbomb.
Yes. I want Blizzard to do this. This is exactly what I want Blizzard to do. And not just Blizzard. I want more media companies to do this. Because the alternative is just more of the same stuff. And that only reinforces itself or false ideas of what reality is. Because apparently some people think that the society they live in is more like Stormwind than it is like Undermine.
And honestly, if you’re looking for the same thing you’ve seen a hundred times before, why are you looking to the FANTASY genre of all things? The genre that, by definition, is about imagination and creating scenarios that specifically do not exist in reality.
No, I’m never going to stop asking for people who create fantasy to display more imagination. This thread is about how the Horde can be a different kind of hero. That, by definition is going to require imagination and a reexamination of what how we define hero beyond traditional genre tropes.
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No, I’m referring to the current political environment in those places where the role of race in society and culture is an extremely hot subject.
To be more specific, the portrayal of humanity in WoW is heavily based on the genre of chivalric romance. Romance is by definition an escapist genre, with the intent of hearkening back to a simpler, often mythological time that will always have a certain appeal to people.
Romance obviously isn’t an inherently Western genre, although the Medieval romance aesthetic that has its roots based heavily in the Rennaissance probably is.
You’re correct, it isn’t a real reflection of reality, but that’s because it isn’t supposed to be.
Obviously, you aren’t a fan of chivalric romance and that’s fine. People can have different tastes. But it’s very much what Warcraft humans always have been by intent.
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I can’t think of any time when anything other than the status quo wasn’t a “hot topic”. It doesn’t stop Blizzard from mining such “hot topic” people and cultures for use as influence for it’s antagonists, monsters, and other things. It shouldn’t stop them from humanizing them and letting them have their own story.
I have no problem with Western style romance and chivalry and the like. I just don’t think that the way humans generally get portrayed in fantasy as he default is something that should just be taken for granted and overused to the point where we dismiss or don’t bother putting effort into anything different.
The human experience is very diverse. Nothing wrong with exploring that diversity.
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Agreed. But do we really want human diversity to be explored by way of using literal aliens or non-human monster races as the standins for non-Western cultures? It seems to me that what you’re advocating should come in the form of more diversity among humans in Warcraft in order to properly represent humanity’s diversity as well as its commonality (and to their credit, Blizzard has made baby steps in that direction with Shadowlands new human customization options)
The idea of non-Western heritages being explored by way of characters that are explicitly completely different species seems like it would be pretty problematic on its own, and in the case of Star Trek we see that the way that they attempt to resolve this is with the Federation’s open-door policy, where anyone can become a Starfleet officer be they human, vulcan, android, klingon, or ferengi. In doing so they display both their differences and their similarities.
But this of course also means that the Horde is put on the backburner. Probably because if you are going to view every group in the game as a condensed form of a real world human culture, the Horde is problematic right down to its very concept regardless of its conduct, because no matter how it conducts itself, one could easily interpret the Horde as an implicit statement of “these particular human cultures are so different that they might as well not be humans” which is, of course, extremely yikes.
This strikes at the very core of speculative fiction such as fantasy or science fiction where sapient non-humans are involved. Sapient non-humans are always going to be de facto humans and so the choice becomes whether to include them at all, or to make every story exclusively about humans and all of the diversity that implies.
? What
Black, Indigenous, etc people exist in the US, not to mention THOUSANDS of diasporic communities.
The fairy tale book already brought in multiple writers. Many of whom from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds who visibly used that heritage in what they wrote.
I’d like for the next WoW Lore Panel at Blizzcon to not be 8 white people discussing what the legacy of slavery means. Like lmao
This is literally the case globally. No where on earth is a racial utopia.
It’s already the case lmao
That’s the entire point of it
How did you not realize this
All the monster races are based on cultures that exist in periphery to Whiteness or Westerness or etc. This is an intentional explicit design element of WoW. It ALWAYS has been dude.
Even with the new customizations, they’ve made no effort to create a new Black or Asian or Otherwise character to add to the Human Leadership Roster. The only Lore Relevant Human that is Black is Natalie Seline who they changed in Shadowlands, under the table, secretly. Even though BFA was the perfect opportunity to introduce new Black or Asian etc characters
The entire game is a metaphor for US-based racialization within a war context. It always has been. How did this not click in 20 years?
It’s even a general fantasy trope, NonWhite = nonHuman, and has been for the entire past century.
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Cool. You must be happy about that right? Blizzard is already taking steps to address your complaints.
I know that it’s already the case. It’s why I brought it up, because challenging that concept is going to raise the question of whether or not the Horde should actively exist as a faction given that it’s conceptually problematic.
I mean, the whole concept of different human cultures being explicitly non-human in their fantasy portrayals is problematic itself but uhhhhh I think that the boat may have sailed on that one for WoW.