??? There’s a literal Haitian/Louisiana Voodoo Guede/Ghede Lwa represented in-game for the Afro-Caribbean + South Amerindigenous + West African metaphor race with all of their architecture being based off of Incan imperial, Aztec/Nahua imperial, and Mayan imperial styles whose two major playable umbrellas speak in Jamaican Patois or West African Accented English, literally mention voodoo as a concept in-game, various internal narratives to “El Dorado”, and whose object motifs within the city includes staple foods e.g. little tacos with lime wedges.
The Zandalari and “Other” Trolls are very aggressively and clearly meant to be the specific combination of South Amerindigenous (read: Latin American and Caribbean Natives) + West African + Afro-Caribbean.
Same as how Tauren (both Mulgore and Highmountain) are meant to clearly and unquestionably be North Amerindigenous (and specifically Dine, and the various tribes of the Pacific Northwest which are the originators of Totem poles, and a few others)
Orientalist Lens of Subaltern Peoples for all Horde Races, Revisionist Power Fantasy Idealism of the West for Alliance Races.
Nah this is the only game where I have African Diasporic folklore and Andean Indigenous myths represented via playable races.
The representation is actually Good, save for Narrative Racism (the constant killing of Trolls every expansion, the rendering each part of Troll culture to be instances).
Well I happen to be Austro-Italian so you can understand how it’s a sore subject. Lost several distant ancestors on both sides. It was 2,009 years ago but still feels like yesterday all the same.
Obviously not my culture but I feel like the Troll dungeons wouldn’t feel as iffy if the Alliance races also had more subgroups who were also unrepentant disagreeable pricks. Because you really just had the Scarlets and it turned out a devil made them do it.
The bad dwarves where manipulated by Ragnaros. The bad Gnomes just have several tumors pressing on their frontal lobes. The bad snake nelves were corrupted by the Nightmare. The bad Draenei are literally demons. The bad worgen are literally feral.
Come to think of it, I think the Ashvane Company are the only Alliance adjacent baddies who are bad just because their worldview is “F you got mine” and not because dark magic made them a victim of circumstance.
Sure and yet here we are in real life with social structures of supremacy/hierarchies established via neocolonial/imperial relations between states and capitalist exportation from core to periphery of media
Them and Syndicate. Ashvane turned evil because greed, Syndicate turned evil because Stormwind bourgeois and aristocrats are capitalist anti-union labor abusers who rob the people of wages.
I don’t think it’s racism in the type of “Human superiority! Stormwind! Hoo-rah!”, but rather the original Alliance descriptor is “A deep loathing for all things demonic”, which is an extremely wide net, that can include the Orcs and the Forsaken in that net, and by extension the Trolls and Tauren, who take their side. Just an innate inability to understand, or a lack of capacity to really socialize with the people that they’ve been at odds with.
An unfortunate part as to why we haven’t destroyed a lot of hateful ideologies at its foundation is because it speaks to the lizard part of the brain, where humans instinctively fear what they do not know. They’re all fundamentally flawed and can be destroyed by education and interaction, but, every now and then you’ll have someone who falsely links a problematic person, group or community as one big picture and comes to form a flawed bias. People like Daelin, or Garithos. But they’re both dead and the only person who seemed to be exhibiting flaws was Genn, who just mellowed out, and Danath, who just recently returned to the story after his hiatus in Outland.
I don’t think anyone’s asking for Anduin to suddenly become a bigot or anything of the sort, but, the Alliance has long been lacking characters that exhume the shortcomings that started all of this to begin with and perpetuated the conflict after the 3rd war, and I think they’re necessary to exist in the Alliance, if they’re going to keep pushing this faction conflict story and not just finally put it to bed.
This is a very good point to make; the early (read: pre-Cataclysm) days were filled with great examples like Varian and Magni, who could come off as completely racist and sexist, respectively, one moment, but then remind us of what great leaders they could be the next.
A common misconception is that someone who’s racially-prejudiced behaves that way all the time. When in fact they act far more like Daelin Proudmoore than Garithos; they’re less one-dimensional and merely exhibit that “one side” of themselves on occasion.
That kind of moral complexity is what made both sides so interesting back in the day; neither side was wholly good necessarily, but they certainly weren’t wholly evil, either.
If anything, they’ve only started becoming cartoonish caricatures recently with Mists of Pandaria onward.
The in-game metaphor races are meta representations of real world peoples and how blizzard writes the story should take into account the real-world historical complexity of the situations. i.e. killing the Caribbean/Native Americans/Africans every expansion is bad
Think you mean the Defias. Syndicate are Alteraci nobles who just started robbing people when their kingdom got overthrown for aiding the Horde in the Second War.
And here’s the thing; its fantasy. I’m okay with some groups just being evil because screw it we needed some enemy variety today so you’re all terrorists now workers angry at aristocrats stealing you’re labor. It’s an MMO. Not everything can be New Vegas where even the blatant villains have a coherent ideology. Broad strokes painting and sometimes bad dudes are bad dudes - don’t think about it too hard.
But yeah it is a little weird when Troll tribes and Orc Clans and the leader of the Forsaken and Sin’Dorei can just be pure evil. But the Alliance always get an out.
Putress gets to be an undead supremacist bio-terrorist because look at him, but Sally Whitemane can’t be a frothing at the mouth human supremacist zealot without it being devil manipulation. Oh and also she gets a redemption arc as a Death Knight. To be fair, Putress has had a lot less sexy cosplay made of him, so there’s that.
and my argument taking into account the material reality that each race is a meta-representation combining 2-4 real world cultures/regions is that the writers see themselves too deeply in the Alliance and thus are unwilling to write them as bad without some “evil spooky magic manipulation”
