The "Sad Tauren" trope and its effects

Lore Story Forum
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Hi!

Second thread i ever make here in the US forums, but wanted to share my thoughts on something.

I’ll start by being completely honest before getting to my point: I dislike what Baine’s character turned to be, and what its portrayal is doing to the entire race that he is supposed to represent. Tauren as a whole should be much more than that.
I hate to have his main theme be always about being the thoughtful, the tender one, the mindful, the sad puppy, the “Heart of the Horde”,etc.
Most of the major events involving him, seem to use him as the tear-jerking resource to either demonise a particular collective (often his OWN faction), or appeal to the audience by trying to make him seem like a tender teddy that needs to be protected or saved.

And my first question is…why? Why does it have to be that way?

I must admit, that i was never much interested in Tauren lore, although i loved Cairne in WC3.
But the sort of focus Baine has in the story, is making me quickly grow weary of every tauren influence the plot may get.
Because at this point, my subconscious automatically equates said plot with yet another “Baine approach” where the protagonist or main theme will unequivocally turn into the same things that happen any time Baine is brought up.

An example of this being, this cinematic:

I dislike the fact that the underlying mindset that compels writers have tauren be the “honourable” (Baine’s character definition for the word), seems to now be leaking into other characters simply because they take on a tauren appearance.

Is this as some weird “Baine effect” or do writers really think that tauren are supposed to be this way?
This wasn’t the image i had of Cairne.

Like, damn, i LOVED Ebonhorn in Legion.
So, why is it that some Black Dragon has to be yet another “Baine”, by being the soft-spoken, remorseful, gentle giant?

I get the message here about needing Black Dragons to reflect on their legacy and all, but i think that there are other ways to do so without feeling as yet another Baine-induced guilt trip that tries to make the audience jump into the screen and hug the tauren that’s speaking.
I shouldn’t feel as if Baine was the one giving the speech here.
I would NEVER mistake Sabellians nor Wrathions demeanour as those of a human. So why does it feel like that way for Ebyssian?

You are a dragon. Be a Dragon. Act like one.
Not saying that these concerns in the cinematic aren’t valid, but the story should be framing all this differently.

It may seem as if i’m equating two different angles here and mixing up the Tauren situation with the Black Dragon one, but the thing is, and i’m sure i’m not the only one feeling it: this cinematic resonates A LOT with all those times they had Baine give the sentimental lecture.
It happened in the novels, it happened in cinematics (Jaina meeting Derek), and it happened again at several points of the ingame story (specially when Anduin is around or involved).

Am i wrong here? Is this the approach Tauren should have?

Am i being overly dramatic regarding Ebonhorns speech in the cinematic?
I’ll admit that regarding the whole Black Dragonflight Aspect thing, i’m quite biased in Sabellians favour, but i don’t think that i’m so off the mark with the parallels we have regarding the cinematic and the treatment Baine/Tauren often get.

To put it bluntly, i expect regal dignity and drive whenever a dragon is concerned. Something that signals the fact that we are speaking of a demigod-like being far above mortal views.
And even if i understand the drive to write characters to feel more humane…do we really have to start by “humanising” the dragon that looks like a Tauren? Again?

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I get where you are coming from, and I do not totally disagree… but Blizzard has made movements to show discord among the Tauren. The Grimtotem are a bit on the nose… but even still, I do hold some appreciation for Blizzard holding a fig leaf to Tauren fans :

Atikka Moonchaser

A Tauren who contramanded Baine - who is also not of the Grimtotem. Call me easy to please, but I am glad that Blizzard showcased a Tauren who was not enthused with just being OK with Taurajo.

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His role in the black flight to be a reasonable voice compared to shady old school Sebellion and brash upstart Wrathion. He spent his entire life with the Tauren as an advisor to their leaders, and in that cinematic we got to see why they kept him around for thousands of years in how he helped talk Emberthal down.

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Wholeheartedly agree with the entirety of your post. The Tauren as a race suffer greatly from having been defined as the “moral backbone” of the Horde and it seems the writers just can’t possibly get them out of that role. Having any race represent “the best the Horde has to offer” was, in itself, a terrible, terrible idea ; combine that with the fact that Baine as a character is a complete failure, and you got yourself a convincing explanation as to why the Tauren are in such a narrative dead end.

As a result, just like you mentioned, I found myself weary or at the very least not exactly enthusiastic about the story whenever the Tauren start to get involved in any significant way. Sad.

Also, there’s absolutely nothing interesting about Ebonhorn since he’s basically flawless and infinitely less polarizing than Wrathion and Sabellian, which is why I was always convinced that he would end up becoming the Aspect of the Black Dragonflight. Suffice to say, I’m not particularly thrilled.

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Well now I know why that cinematic just got me very annoyed for no discernible reason.

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I think there are a few reasons why tauren writing leans toward the kicked puppy angle. Like night elves, they’re the faction’s designated “nature race” and destroying nature is a very fast way to communicate to a viewer that someone in your story is a bad person. This, coupled with the “crying indian” trope, combine to make them the prime target you want to use for sympathy.

Unfortunately, that’s most well-known through horde-on-horde attacks. :confused: While I personally don’t mind the “gentle giant” gimmick as a baseline, provided it’s not in response to anything done to them (I feel it’s part of the trope inversion of using minotaurs as a race), it’s definitely overdone to the point where they’re effectively passive doormats because Blizzard’s also seemingly coded passivity as noble and proactiveness as bad.

As for Ebonhorn specifically, I think his character is in an awkward spot as far as dragons go because he’s effectively not a dragon at all. He’s been raised as a tauren from birth. So him acting like one is entirely what I’d expect him to be. If anything, I’m surprised he even wants to identify as a black dragon, given he’d have had 10k years of conditioning to think that his entire flight are evil.

As for how dragons are supposed to act, I dunno if WoW’s have ever been depicted with alien personalities or perspectives? The game’s humanizing shorthand has always been to make different races act like varying human personality types to begin with, and I don’t think there’s anything special about the way Wrathion, Sabellian, or really any dragon behave that couldn’t be applied to almost any other race in the game.

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I’ll respond by being completely honest. When I think of taurens, I think of Oxhorn and Staghorn. They were ingrained on me when I started back in Wrath and nothing Baine or any other tauren can do will change that.

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I was also happy when i read his dialogue in Zuldazar.

But that was before i got the full scope of Blizzards writing for BfA, and realised they weren’t really acknowledging the point of view of certain people, and simply were throwing them as part of the “unreasonable” bunch that were fooled by Sylvanas to continue the war.

Another example being, Magister Hathorel and the heaps of truth he hurled at Jaina regarding Dalaran, before getting killed by her while we helped her save Baine.

You can accomplish that without sounding as yet another Baine copycat with a mirrored mopey speech.

You can appear wise and reasonable, without it leaning again on the usual trope that Baine (and by extent, the tauren) usually get about flashing puppy eyes towards the camera.

Want to know how? Look at how they managed Nozdormu and his struggle against the Infinite Dragonflight and his future self.
Again, another example of wise and reasonable contemplation, that manages to uphold such without cheaply pulling emotional strings with sad cow eyes. Again, a character that i would never mistake for anything other than a dragon, regardless of what visage he uses.

Also, and even if i think that dragons need to have some personality to them, his character should be first and foremost, a dragon. Not a Tauren.

And if they wanted him to act a Tauren, at least he should behave as other HIghmountain Tauren like Huln, Lasan or Mayla.
Because even if the latter ended up being portrayed as some Baine accesory (much to my profound dislike), mimicking them wouldn’t make me feel as if we were having some Baine 2.0 moment there.

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I don’t get mopey from him? he was simply quiet and reflective. I think you may to a degree be reading in your own general distastes of how tauren have been treated into this. If he said the same things as a dragon, I don’t think this forum thread would exist.

Also, the thing here is what is a dragon? Azerothian dragons are not alien like they might be in other settings, any more than the 10,000 year old elves are despite having lived longer than every human civilization put together. They do have a history of being aloof, and that aloofness got them in trouble just like it did the Titan Keepers who pawned their jobs off on the Aspects to begin with. They seek to avoid that mistake again.

The Dragons of Azeroth these days wish to be fairly approachable; that is the point of a visage to begin with.

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He suffers from being passive, plot wise. He is always reacting to things. What the need is to be more proactive. To be doing something to shape events. But that would require having the Horde involved in the non-faction plots.

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If the Horde happens to have a modicum of representation beyond a lost muffin… someone around while the Alliance saves the cosmos with the help of Player Champions… we can count on Baine sitting at the knees of the Alliance at the new player hub.

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One thing that I’ve always said the game could use is a player hub that was designed by the Horde in some fashion or another. Orc town, tauren village, blood elf sanctum, whatever. There have been enough cross-faction hubs provided by the Alliance or by neutral factions yet I don’t recall ever seeing one provided by the Horde.

As for the Tauren… Yeah. We really, really need to get past this “Tauren represent what’s left of the Horde’s shattered honor and they’re all sad because it’s shattered” crud and move the F on. While I did enjoy watching Baine leave bloody mess piles where Nokhud were once standing, it would be nice if he were at the forefront of current content next time and not just beating on a faction of dudes we defeated already and are just hanging on by their fingernails.

Next patch he is forming a new band with Rhexar, Rokhan, and Chen. No Alliance NPCs involved that I know of.

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He is also a major character in the Fryakk assaults in the plains. Its pretty fun seeing him do his signature stomp thing and kicking around proto-dragons.

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Writing around the Tauren definitely lean a lot on the honorable savage trope, pretty much the same issues we see in representation of the indigenous americans of the real world earth. It might not even be that much of a stretch to say that’s actually a big part of Tauren characterization since WC3, at least from my perspective.

As a whole I don’t really see an issue with how Ebonhorn is presented, while somewhat contributing to the issue, it’s more of a case of circumstance and what kind of character they’ve made with him already. As for Baine and other Tauren, they should be given more complexity, and perhaps that’s the direction they’re trying to lean towards with the initial aggression towards Centaur.

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I get what your saying about Tauren.

My main objection in that video however was Emberthal. The animosity she displayed towards Ebonhorne seemed kind of misplaced, excessive and overdone.

Another thing to remember about Ebonhorne is that he is a lore character like Velen, Kadgar, Malfurion (before bfa), Lore walker cho. These characters tend to be more philosophical than their factional counterparts.

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I don’t know if it’s my bias, or just the trend of these type of characters in fiction in general but I tend to find these characters a lot more enjoyable then the more serious and dramatic types.

I think while it feels harsh initially, it’s actually pretty understandable from her perspective. Note that she points to her comrades in arms as family, and that the Dracthyr essentially are new to the world around them. What little they did know included basically only other Dracthyr and Neltharion.

The emotion itself is not from nowhere, and why it’s directed at Ebyssian makes sense, even with knowing where he’s been all this time. She simply didn’t understand that while he was alone as a Dragon, he was still surrounded by family, one that’s not made up of Dragons or dragonkin, she thought he was hiding away for self preservation (not entirely wrong, but still).

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Yeah, I get a bit of an idea of where she’s coming from and all, but the level of hostility she presents is several notches above where it aught to have been even considering that the Drakthir are the only dragons/dragonkin written as drakonic.

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Just Noble Savage garbage.

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Blizzard’s idea of “the best of the Horde” is to be the Alliance. That’s why whether it’s War or Peace, the faction stories they write suck horribly since Golden started writing contemporaneous lore.

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For “Noble Savage” to really work you have to have a group of civilized A-Holes antagonizing them so that the readers/gamers can identify and connect with the protagonists. At least IMO anyway.

Blizzard was off to a good start with this in Vanilla. They had dwarves digging for stuff in Mulgore where they weren’t wanted, setting up a fortress in Southern Barrens, and appropriate quests involved to deal with them. They went pretty good in Cata as well with the whole Taurajo thing EXCEPT for trying to make Hawthorne a sympathetic honor person in the eyes of the Alliance.

Then…a crap writer named Christie Golden wrote a crap novel where she had Baine losing his cowpies over tauren retaliation. “No no don’t do that, they were trying to spare civilians! Guys, you’re going to make Anduin mad at me! Don’t make me banish you!” :confounded: :face_vomiting: :rage:

Since then the “noble savage” angle has just been kind of a big joke through and through.

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