It actually doesn’t, but ok—the artist has a “responsibility” to tell a story that’s going to be meaningful to their audience, sure, but they don’t owe their audience anything, which is what it sounds like you’re dangerously close to implying.
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The only “cringe” and “yikes” here is you.
And frankly, your own internalized racism.
The Alliance deserves to be racists because they kinda look racist.
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I mean there’s a reason and video game origin as to why all the Fascist “protesters” wannabe insurrectionists started using face masks that hang around their necks with a skull design, and it isn’t my little pony
or why 4chan/reddit says kek
etc
Owe the audience, no, owe society? yes
Nope you’re just lazy and trash lol
I await another villain bat for you to suggest other than racism then? Anytime now?
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I’m admittedly talking way out of my rear here, but I feel that if the intent for tauren was only to draw a bit of inspiration, then that would have needed to be spread out and diluted among a lot of other artistic designs instead of focusing on a single stereotype, because drawing too much from one source of inspiration just reinforces a single theme.
But not only did Blizzard not do that, they actually doubled down with the Highmountain Tauren by taking the minotaur visual and slightly adapting it using a New World animal’s horns. I can’t fathom how that wasn’t intentional on the designers’ part.
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I use “kek” in in-game chat all the time. It literally means “lol” in Orcish.
You’re acting like video games setting a trend is somehow a bad thing.
Nope, you’re not bringing socialist ideology in here, please and thank you.
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I don’t mind the Alliance being prejudiced but the type of systematic racism you want them to have makes no sense in the established setting.
You basically want them to be bigots because the culture they’re predominantly based off of was colonial.
You are literally saying screw lore they look like racists so they should be.
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It’s also a little more complicated than that, because there was legitimately a time in established lore when the Alliance was overtly racist.
But much like how the Horde post-Thrall is no longer corrupted by the Burning Legion, neither is the Alliance post-Fall of Lordaeron a cadre of power-hungry human supremacist bureaucrats.
So yes, to make them racist now, when they’ve added both draenei and worgen to their ranks along with void elves and dark iron dwarves, would be problematic for several reasons.
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Which is fine! My Objiwe and Lakota and Dine friends I show the Highmountain Tauren to and explain their myths think its amazing! Especially the Ohn’ahra vs IRL Thunderbird bits.
Now if only Blizzard actually put the same narrative effort as the aesthetic/background effort.
The lore has multiple instances of racist alliance leadership in the not too distant past. lmao
“Hey that’s weird, all these guys being arrested by the FBI were wearing exactly the same face masks this specific video game franchise well known for having right-wing playerbase popularized, wonder if we, the game developers, should maybe do something about our video game so that it doesn’t appeal to these people so much”
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Adds a little in-faction tension! Doesn’t have to be Garithos level racism.
Gotta watch more zombie movies m8. I think they were a good method for subversive cultural commentary post Romero, they cycled into a sort of rural doomsday prepper / nihilist phase with Snyder’s Dawn and the Walking Dead, but more recent films like Blood Quantum make me hope we’re cycling back to social commentary.
That’s about a Canadian film made and starring mostly Indigenous Canadians about a tribe with a strange immunity to the zombie virus. I really enjoyed it because while it has some things to say it never pauses to beat you over the head with it. Because it’s busy driving chainsaws into zombie skulls.
That’s not to say I don’t think the genre can be slower and more thoughtful. 15’s Maggie which also proves Schwarzenegger can do dramatic acting is a paper thin allegory about watching your child die of a terminal illness and I liked that. But I prefer it when it’s a little more cathartic.
Anywho back on topic I do agree with the Victorian horror vibes but honestly they seem like such a hodgepodge of drastically different things they feel, appropriately, like a Frankenstein’s monster of horror tropes than any one specific thing.
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I was actually referring to
No creator or company “owes” society anything. They’ll make well-written and thoughtful stories and narratives because that’s how they make money, but at the end of the day, if you hated the Burning of Teldrassil—and I know I did—you can either live with it or stop playing.
In this case, unsubscribing.
That is your right as the player/customer. You certainly have the right to complain about the game’s content, being a paying customer, but it is beyond naive to assume that Blizzard Entertainment or any other game developer inherently “owes” us anything.
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Try making with a worthwhile argument before calling others trash.
Don’t try blaming THAT on Socialism. Socialism has nothing to do with that kind of internalized hatred and anger.
Trying picking up any literature at all about cultural theory and the implication of video game representations, at all, in general.
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Please see above: I was referring to his claim that artists “owe” society something.
Which yes, is a pretty Socialist claim.
“Socialism is when I’m expected to care about the social impact of my actions and creations”
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That’s actually neat to hear. I’m basically as white as Wonderbread so I don’t really have any frame of reference of what someone’s perspective would be regarding people taking inspiration from lesser-represented cultures in something like WoW. I know hypothetically I probably would have erred on the side of caution and probably not do it at all, out of fear of being insensitive about it.
I’m probably just weird though because I remember being disappointed when I first got into WoW and saw that the tauren didn’t have any Greek themes to them, as on-the-nose as it would have been. But I guess I also felt a little ashamed to care at all, given that I never really took much of an interest in that stuff outside of a general nerdity fantasy interest as a kid, so I felt like I couldn’t really “own” that interest.
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Nope, you don’t get to walk back your original claim.
You didn’t say that artists should care about the social impact of their actions and creations.
You said they owed society in regard to their actions and creations.
That is a fundamentally immoral argument to make.
Don’t need to. I’ve met my quota on BS already.
So, Socialist is about PERSONAL responsibly to society as much as Societies responsibility to each other.
It’s nothing about “Owing” anything to anyone. That’s some kind of new wave Capital-Social hybrid where everyone things they’re owed something.