Wanting to be hated

Lore Story Forum
363

This is one of the creepier tendencies, I feel. There is one thing in portraying racism as a realistic phenomenon and its characteristics in the human psyche.

I just frankly don’t feel like they’re doing anything on this level, or creating it as a realistic plot device for a character struggle, or exploring it as a social concept.

Instead, they seem to be using it as a deus ex machina to facilitate faction conflict which is exactly what the playerbase is suggesting they do. Injecting racist hysteria into your characters.

It’s a little unsettling, if I stop my totally detached sensation from the plotline of this game. I’ve become so desensitized to the comic book violence and languishing stupidity of the lore characterizations that sometimes I forget just how brazen all this is.

Just imagine, suggesting in a cavalier way that the characters should be racist, shouldn’t they, darling, how will the paper soldiers fight each other if they are not?

Who exactly, should be “racist?” Should Anduin all of a sudden start throwing slurs and enforce mandatory armband wearing in Stormwind?

364

Is forcibly incarcerating people long after they have ceased to be a threat to you a crime?

365

Tell that to old men and woman, dying in prison for things 30-40-50 years ago.

Crimes are Crimes, threat or not, they have done this Crimes.

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I would suggest that your main issue here is in focusing solely on what you rightly refer to as “comic book violence and languishing stupidity of the lore characterizations.”

Because if you really go back and compare the content of Warcraft III and even the Vanilla - Wrath of the Lich King eras to, say, Mists - Shadowlands, you’ll see that the lore of the Warcraft series used to be a lot darker, and far more serious.

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367

/sarcasm Well, this is clearly not a heartless and draconian take on justice systems…

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368

Warcraft III was primarily about demons. Comic book demons, at that, to provide something to kill.

It was a cartoon, dear.

There was nothing in vanilla-Wrath.

The worst atrocity in Warcraft III prior to Arthas turning was him killing people who had been afflicted with a plague to turn them into mindless murdering undead zombies.

I’ve actually studied history, this is PG.

This is a game in which the lore designer positively shuddered that some poor innocent child might, heavens me, read the b -word out loud.

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369

Ok, so please do not refer to me as “dear,” or I’m not even going to waste my time on you.

If you honestly believe that Warcraft III was “primarily about demons,” then you really slept your way through the first three campaigns, in which the Legion barely appears at all. If anything, it would be more accurate to say the game was “primarily about undead.”

Even that, however, would be ignoring the fact that the moral of the story was all about humanity learning to forgive and fight alongside the orcs to protect their world from the demons, which is about as profound a lesson as you could ask for.

I can’t tell if you’re being deliberately facetious here or not, but this is a pretty ignorant statement to make.

Sure, but it’s also one of the most morally-complicated events in Warcraft, as well.

370

Oh, no, please, anything but that.

I can’t imagine I would be facetious towards you, with such serious commentary. Do educate me, though. I only played through War 3 probably 3 times all the way through, and obtained the Loremaster achieve. What do I know, though. I suppose I got Loremaster during Cata, so maybe that soured the pot. Perhaps I’m missing some deep, introspective commentary on humanity from vanilla like the goblins needing more leopard hides to run their oil pits or whatever tripe passed for lore back then.

This game has always been borderline brainless cartoon drivel, I hate to tell you. I slogged through it all to satisfy my inner child.

Dear.

371

There were no achievements in Warcraft III…?

Ok, so you got an achievement for completing a bunch of quests in World of Warcraft.

Good for you, I guess?

372

Again, I don’t think the authors support concentration camps. No, I don’t think they approve of racism. I don’t think they approve of genocide.

I think that in this instance, they didn’t think through how to properly portray the actual racism of the Alliance and it instead their actions came about as being less villainous and more justified because they were framed as a choice any reasonable/moral person would make.

This goes back to what I was saying dozens of posts before about how sometimes the game presents us with with instances where the racist views of the Alliance are not framed as being immoral from a meta perspective. Rather, they’re conflated as being similar to what just about any other reasonable person would conclude in such a situation.

But racism isn’t logical. Sure, people come up with all kinds of justifications for it, but you’ll never “logic” them out of it.

So whenever the issue of the camps comes up, the response tends to be, “Well what else was the Alliance supposed to do?” as if to explain away their “racism” as not being a flaw, but just a rational response to an incredibly difficult moral dilemma. Not just from the point of view of the Alliance, but from the point of view of the audience.

The writing team is indeed different than it was in the RTS, but that doesn’t mean they can’t make the same mistakes. None of us here are part of the writing team either, but we can fall into the same lines of thinking as the writers sometimes.

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373

Oh…okay. Sure. Must be a really deep game, then.

I can’t imagine any book of fiction that has ever scraped the outer edge of such a complicated moral conundrum. I’m sure the Culling of Stratholme will be debated by literary scholars and philosophers for generations.

Now you’ve got me dead to rights.

The lies are exposed, now!

Yes, you have found me out, I never got the Loremaster achievement during Warcraft III.

374

Ok, now we’re getting somewhere.

On this, I like to think at worst, we could agree to disagree. And at the very least, I think we are encouraged to believe that the leaders of the Alliance did genuinely consider their own actions to be moral—from their own perspective. The orcs were abominations, they had to protect humanity, locking them up or even executing them was the right thing to do, given the Second War.

From an objectively-moral viewpoint, this is of course abominable given what we know of orcs now. Given the limited knowledge of humanity at the time, it was at least understandable.

Now which game are you talking about, though? And define “meta perspective,” please.

Because it does need to be stated and understood that the original Alliance of Lordaeron =/= the current Alliance, and therefore, the original Alliance’s racism =/= any racist acts done by the current Alliance.

Of course not; all racism, heck all prejudice, is based on ignorance.

Which is, of course, the primary motivator in why the Alliance of Lordaeron viewed the orcs of the Horde with such loathing—they had limited knowledge on where the orcs came from to begin with, or why they wrought such carnage and sought such bloodshed.

It’s also why we have the stark contrast between how Jaina views the orcs vs. how Daelin views them during the events of “Old Hatreds.”

That’s stretching it a bit; I do think we the audience are encouraged to judge the original Alliance as morally-corrupt.

Because objectively-speaking, they were; see again novels like Of Blood and Honor and Lord of the Clans for more on this.

I’m not sure what mistakes you’re referring to, but I do think the writing team behind the RTS games told a much more compelling narrative than anything we’ve seen since post-Cataclysm.

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Where are you getting this? It really wasn’t.

If you go back and read some of the novels, you’ll find it’s the humans who are portrayed as senselessly cruel to their prisoners, purposefully singling out younger ones because they’re easier to abuse.

And it’s not like the orcs at that point were uncontrollable beasts, the novels make it clear they could literally step over the fencing of the camps, but wouldn’t, because they all collectively had fel-withdrawal depression.

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And honestly, I do think this was the actual reason for the early novels like Of Blood and Honor and Lord of the Clans. There’s only so much of this kind of thing that you can show in-game, where combat takes up most of the player’s time.

Without examples like Tirion saving Eitrigg and Taretha loving Thrall like a brother, I think there would have been an argument for, “the writers/narrative are supporting human racists,” but the events of the novels calling out the Alliance on its cruelty was pretty much the counter-balance to this.

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Racist isn’t a “Flaw” to build a narrative around. Its a symptom of a sickness that is just not prevalent in Alliance Culture as of now.

And it can’t become a prevalent characteristic for the Alliance, not without also Villain Batting the Horde (Again) for narrative purposes.

You know not what you’re asking for.

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378

It is true that the current Alliance isn’t even remotely as racist as the original Alliance of Lordaeron was, but considering that we (the playerbase) are literally still talking about Teldrassil and the Fourth War, they don’t necessarily need to villain-bat the Horde again.

Because we’re still dealing with the aftermath of the last time they villain-batted the Horde, which is definitely something that could be exploited as “old wounds.”

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Honestly Tolkien’s Orcs feel more like demons or boogeymen than any of the other Orcs I’ve encountered in any other fantasy. And I say that as someone who is meh about LOTR precisely because I played Warcraft and the Elder Scrolls before I was familiar with their progenitor.

Taken as their own thing Warcrafts Orcs, when they’re not blatant rip offs of Warhammer’s Orcs, remind me more of pagan European ‘barbarian’ tribes than any other IRL cultures I’ve ever read about. There are of course some Eastern elements mixed in there, most notably from the Golden Horde and Feudal Japan, but between the veneration of wolves, storms and names like Bloodaxe or Blacktooth I’m much more reminded of Germanic and Nordic tribes.

On the note of the Mongols while I think their presentation is more than a little yikes these days, I actually think having Centaurs crib their style is pretty clever. They were the largest land empire ever created largely because of their mastery of horseback archery.

I don’t know if that’s offensive to modern day Mongolians. But I also don’t know how bad I’m supposed to feel for Genghis Khan and his army being made to look like bad guys. But speaking for my own ethnicity’s pricks if in 815 years there’s monsters in a game dressed like n@zis it’ll still be extremely okay to do.

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380

Waaaaaagggghhht?

Da orks is not like no bleedin’ Warcraft gits, you steamin’ grot! You wa’nt know an ork wut bop ya upside da 'ead!

Ugh. Less of this.

Please, less of this kind of cringe.

381

Someone has to be ignorant of European culture/history to make this sort of statement

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382

Imagine thinking all of Warcraft’s races and peoples came out of a black hole, rather than being directly influenced by RL cultures.