From what I understand, the comparison isn’t about if the “savage’s” culture in question is actually primitive on some kind of objective level (and I wouldn’t have the foggiest how to judge such a thing); it’s if the main character / point-of-view of the story is viewing and judging the other’s culture in that light. So that character can go “oh, you’re actually wise beyond your technological level, how quaint,” in a patronizing way.
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Ok Patronizing is a completely different situation.
Than Primitive Aesthetic + Vitrue = Racist that Baal describes.
I don’t recall this happening in wow or warhammer for Orcs or Night Elves.
At least in how I experienced the game, no event jumps to mind right now.
Whenever I saw something like say… Trolls doing voodoo human sacrifices in Hinterlands I just rolled with it as something that Trolls just do.
Or is the viewer supposed to be the one doing the patronizing?
I mean, frankly, I think that Facebook and Twitter are just natural extensions of the way we can be in public debate.
When two people are just talking, each has an incentive to convince the other - and as a result you can have some wonderful conversations with someone face to face, even if you really disagree with them.
In a public forum, however, you aren’t out to convince them, you’re out to convince the audience - hence it becomes advantageous to be toxic and to deploy intentional fallacies in order to make your opponent look like an idiot or to distract from the issue. It’s less about being right and more about protecting your image while damaging those of others.
I try not to do this myself. I don’t like feeding this problem, but it does explain the toxic nature of social media.
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You can’t really apply it to Warhammer, because everything in that universe is soo over the top ridiculous.
*Gasp *
So in my family, for a few generations now when curry powder first got to Colombia, we just lazily slap some curry powder on chicken with a splash of soy sauce, rub it in, and grill
My favorite way to make chicken cuz it reminds me of my childhood
However I also am super into cooking so my favorite absolutely favorite chicken preparation is chicken roganjosh
But the standard entry level curry chicken is tikka masala
(Yes and also hint, no culture is primitive, you are correct it cannot be judged)
Yup
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Idk Baal seems to be calling it racist.
I have no problems with Warhammer, I love it all.
Except end times.
Admittedly I was speedreading to try to catch up to the thread but I thought Baal was saying that the orcs weren’t noble savages, only Thrall up to a certain point before he got disconnected from Jaina for a while. It’s specifically Baine that’s embodying this because he’s been used for a similar role twice, by showing his goodness via working with the alliance.
My personal opinion is that since historical / magical fantasy leans so heavily on medieval European tropes (as Ainhin will point out), in lieu of an actual main character, the setting uses WoW humans as the default to which every other race is compared. It’s why I think non-human alliance posters often complain about how human-centric the stories get. It’s because they’re the side show. The horde kinda dodges this when the alliance isn’t involved in their own faction stories.
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That’s awesome. I love lot of Italian food for the same reason. It brings back fond memories of big family dinners during the holidays and such 
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Yup
Correct
And elves, to a slightly lesser extent
Or the enemy races, whether Naga or Murloc
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It´s spicy AND glorious. But then again, as a lucky inhabitant from a country geographically located near the Equator, I have year long access to a great variety of vegetables, fruits AND meat; so I´m not picky. I actually just bann one type of local tuber AND some VERY specific organs (liver and brains) from my diet, the rest is fair game for me (I do like pâté though, which is ironic cause it is usually made out of liver).
I never use Facebook nor Twitter (I associate the first to my college girl friends obssesively following their exes to badmouth, criticize and act miserable afterwards, so this would explain why I developed a disregard for it).
I´m guilty of sometimes reading tumblr blogs -another cesspool-, so take it as you will.
You 100% right on this assesment about the differences between face to face discussions AND using the advantage of anonimity to have discussions.
Yup, ergo we feeling relieved when the objective menace that IS the Alliance for our own narrative development is absent. Cause the actual Alliance narrative is NOT about the races that supposedly compose it, is about “Human Potential & minions”. 
Common Elf tropes basically embody idealized medieval European tropes.
Why do you think i only could develop a bond with the Belves? Cause they are the “case in study” about those “Perfect elves” getting exposed as not perfect AT ALL thanks to their traditional trope allies (a.k.a. the Humans screwed them up and showed all of us the actual fraud that were the elves before their fall).
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First off in this entire discussion about Orcs being noble savages according to Blizzard not once did Baal correct me by saying that is not what he is saying. He just followed it up with his next argument. So… 
As for Baine’s virtue being “Works with Alliance” is not strictly true since he just does good things… Or are good things only attributable to Humans in the Alliance which has the euro centric view?
I never interpreted that way.
Its actually that in my view Blizzard writes everyone with modern day human western morals and views. Nothing deviates far from it, sometimes it becomes hard to distinguish characters of vastly different racial and cultural backgrounds if you removed their funny accents and cultural references like “By the Ancestors/Light”
If Baal is right then we just can’t have aesthetically primitive people like nomads or tribesmen having virtues because the eurocentric protagonist admires them and their virtuous ways.
So… are the Aiel racist? I struggle to say yes.
Actually I did
No he only does good things for the Alliance lol
That’s his trope
Baine is
- The damsel in distress
- The Horde leader who always sides with the Alliance
He’s been this way his whole story
The problem of the Noble Savage is not that it is a Nonwestern Based People that is Good
But rather the only time we see the Noble Savage do any good is when working with the Other who seems him a savage (Baine).
Baine always sacrifices himself for the sake of the Alliance, never in any action that is strictly internal to the Horde.
For example, if we had ever been given a questline in MoP where Baine raids Orgrimmar to save the Goblins and Orcs in cages and escapes.
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Baine was at the Battle of Lordaeron commanding Horde forces. Even killed a bunch of footmen
Oups I guess you did. I didn’t understand it then.
What about all his other quests where he does things for the Horde or has you do those things for him? They don’t count? Surely the only time Baine does something its not just to help the Alliance.
I guess Derek doesn’t count even though he is currently Forsaken he is still related to Jaina.
And him grumbling all the time about it (no wait, grumbling only because he was more worried about Sadfang´s status than the actual political ramifications of the Siege of Lordaeron thanks to the WoT; which implies he didn´t give a f over the actions taken by the Horde in Kalimdor) while we all KNEW the Horde were the evil cartoonish minions of an evil cartoonish villain is an example of Baine NOT following the “Noble Savage” trope to a T how exactly?
Dude, the whole “Derek Proudmoore” can of worms is an ode AND a love letter to the Noble Savage trope. Which is, the only “positive” behaviour undertaken by Baine in the BfA expac and assumed as such by the narrative.
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Anyway, I think that we can finally close this thread now that the OP’s question has been answered.
The answer is that they have Bloodlust instead of Heroism
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In isolation, I don’t think Baine doing good things would be enough to label him with the Noble Savage trope; that’s just him being good. Which is normally in-character for him.
The problem comes about when most of what Baine is known for is going to the alliance to do so. Off the top of my head, what I remember about him is…
- Going to Jaina instead of the rest of the horde for help in taking back Thunder Bluff.
- Citing Taurajo as a legitimate military target to deescalate conflict with the alliance.
- Feeling so guilty about having to fight against Theramore that he warns Jaina about it. Garrosh weaponizes this guilt against him.
- Telling Vol’jin during the rebellion that he’s going to need assistance from the alliance if he wants to take Orgrimmar.
- Driven to another breaking point over Derek Proudmoore, putting his own safety (and later implied the safety of his own people) at risk for the two.
- Apparently he does something in the Highmountain recruit questline but I don’t remember because I was too focused on being able to fight alongside a black dragon I dunno.
Of course, the unifying theme of almost all of that is “horde bad” and I’d point to that as the real issue, but it still has an effect on the character’s portrayal. Being friendly with the alliance isn’t by itself a bad thing, if it was just one part of his character. But it seems like that’s all he’s known for. So now you’ve got a horde racial leader who’s more or less defined by his interactions with the alliance and that’s why he’s accused of being a Noble Savage trope. Or maybe, as Baal once put it in some other thread, “Noble Among Savages” because he seems to be the only enlightened monster in the faction.
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Incidentally, given the reaction to that relatively less known bit of Tauren lore about the Centaur where we learned that they have periods of bigotry in their history of their own, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind folks that this is part of the deal when a race gets “more lore.” We learn all about them, including the not great things they did.
Which is fine? Who cares?
Only the Alliance playerebase seems obsessed with keeping their races inhumanly pristine? The capacity for racism or bigotry isn’t a turnoff. The philosophy that Blizz seems to operate off since Cata where “the capacity for flaws = Evil inherently” … is however. Which is why the Alliance is oversaturated in virtues, with few avenues towards tangible flaws anymore. And the Horde is drowning in flaws, with few windows towards virtue. Nuanced writing is hard, GoodRace/EvilRace tropes are easy. No matter how problematic it is to reassert them after you’ve subverted them between WC3-WotLK … due to the method you chose to subvert them in the first place.
It becomes even more problematic with Blizz continuing to pretty heavily rely on that philosophy they used to Humanize the Horde races WHILE also continuing to reassert those Evil Race/Good Race tropes.
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They gotta be morally perfect. But they also need to be proactive and commit horrible war crimes on civillian populations.
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