Even though I’m a white person, I’ve always felt a connection with the Orcs. I always and still do, love their shamanism religion, love of family, respecting their elders, living with the land instead of abusing it, like we tend to irl.
Is that weird or am I just being paranoid? It’s a bit off topic I know, I just felt compelled to throw that out there.
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they randomly decided to have old man Greymane and the worgen fight to reclaim Gilneas from an army of blighted potato mutants.
Blizzard truly seems that tone-deaf.
So we established that just taking a fantasy race and sprinkling some RL culture upon it is not in of itself racist.
But don’t you think this creates and unfair responsibility on the creator to not use the story development they want because they can vaguely be linked to historical events?
So in BFA Blizzard could not have had the Alliance attack Zandalar because it could be linked to the Conquistadors. We can’t have Alliance attacking Taurajo because it would like the American Cavalry raiding Native villages, we can’t have the Orc internment Camps because of well take your pick there are a few comparisons we can use here.
So using these I can’t say that Blizzard’s story is inherently racist even thought I doubt they originally intended it that way.
Its like if I make a D&D campaign and it happens in some Mayan ruins with some ethnic inspired monsters but we can’t raid the treasury because of RL history.
You see? Suddenly we are banning entire situations here that can be fun events.
Right so if there was Teldrassil Burning on Trolls its racist because… history… but NEs which are loosely based on Celtic culture is not because there is no historical precedent?
Well I don’t agree with it but I guess I did ask for a test to determine what is racist and this works as well as any other.
I don’t agree with it but I understand it. Thanks for sharing.
Not weird at all if you’re finding positive aspects in Horde races, especially when Blizzard keeps telling you not to.
I always found the horde in general to be more well thought out lore wise, with their rich histories and such. It seems the old blizzard team actually cared about what they were doing.
Wish I could say the same about the current group of people running the clown show now.
It literally would’ve been so easy
Nah you’re good? Why would that be weird?
No, it doesn’t.
That was literally the intent of the whole interaction. Not only colonialism (there are multiple Heart of Darkness references in the Alliance Nazmir War Campaign questline), but also modern imperialism (SI:7 planting bombs all over Dazar’alor, looting the palace, and killing the king, as I’ve mentioned).
They set it up knowingly.
Camp Taurajo is literally a reference to the Battle at Wounded Knee lmao
Again, they knew what they were doing with putting Orcs as slaves in camps.
I remind you what one of the Warcraft 2 ads looked like:
https://i.imgur.com/Z1qYbJx.jpg
Actually given Night Elves are partially based on the Japanese (not just Celts, and even then it’s hardly genuine Celtic culture but a NeoWiccan variation), Sylvanas burning Teldrassil is arguably comparable to what the US did to Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
Sometimes I’m paranoid like that. It’s a bad habit really. And I’m annoyed they used a new age religion to depict the Night elves. Like, you have thousands of years of beautiful Celtic/Pagan history to draw from…and you use a religion that’s 34 yrs old. Like crap on my culture a little more why don’t you blizz.
I will say that the reason I thought the original Warcraft games were done well was because we did have that turning point in Lord of the Clans and at the beginning of Reign of Chaos.
Suddenly, “Oh, maybe humanity isn’t as virtuous as we originally thought. Oh, look! The orcs have redeemed themselves! Now they’re good guys saving the world! Oh, this human Admiral is living in the past and is racist.”
etc. etc.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:
That’s what’s truly jarring about Battle for Azeroth. Whereas Chris Metzen wonderfully set up the notion of human supremacy ala Lordaeron’s Camelot for the purpose of refuting/tearing it down.
The current writing team seems to genuinely believe it at face value.
Which is a truly terrifying notion, because it threatens a return to the old days of Lordaeron with none of the narrative nuance or irony.
Jeez I didn’t think of that. Seems kind of burdensom that you can’t really enjoy anything because of your knowledge you can link almost anything to some historical event and interpret it as racist.
Maybe because of my own ignorance I just view it as something fun rather than project anything RL related upon works of fantasy like this. Also aren’t Orcs the Japanese reference here? They talk about honor, duels and they got samurais… so yea.
I didn’t even know what this was until I googled it. Like I said right over my head.
Which is why I’ve repeatedly pointed out the Blizzard writing team as of right now either lacks self awareness and/or has lost all its writers from other (nonwestern, nonwhite) backgrounds. Afrasiabi, to my knowledge, was the only visible Blizzard executive from the Global South (Iran).
Nah I enjoy it more. My knowledge of Abrahamic canon and apocrypha and folklore let me accurately predict every Supernatural season by the midpoint of the previous season. It’s an artform.
Figuring out what the writers are trying to replicate, and speculating as to their motivations or justifications, is fun.
Correct, blademasters are also derived from “samurai” motifs. Multiple in-game races share a basis.
Blame your education, and/or lack of Native American friends?
The issue of narrative racism is, again but slightly rephrased, the Blizzard writers are causing the in-game races based on subaltern peoples (read: POC, BAME, etc, whatever) to suffer parallels of IRL racism replicated in-game (e.g. The Japanese Night Elf nuking of Teldrassil, the Native American Tauren being slaughtered at the battle of Camp Taurajo), and also in some instances become caricatures of racist tropes (e.g. Baine the Noble Savage) and also making them do the worst war crimes (e.g. the MENA/Muslim-coding Blood Elves bombing the tower of Theramore, or Garrosh being Orc Fascist, etc).
So in your estimation should we let Blizzard and really other companies like Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast continue doing what they have because they seemed to have been able create some really cool stories and settings that people have identified with or should they go back and revise everything one by one?
I am kind of the opinion of leaving it alone and just try to make a good story. Blizzard especially seems to have a hard time as it is without the burdens of sensitivity.
Because when I see a story of Orcs slaughtering Night Elves because… idk Garrosh? I don’t see the Japanse slaughtering the Chinese in the massacre of Nanjing.
Thats too dark.
I kind of like leaving it as just Orc on Elf violence.
We as individuals resonate with different races for different reasons. Some might do it mostly because a race reflects their real life culture or ancestry and they feel pride in that. Others might do it because they feel a connection with the race for another reason.
Personally? I strongly sympathize with the trolls because I was the outcast for most of my formative years and now I just immediately latch onto monster races by proxy. Particularly the ones that have close ties to the outdoors and a close relationship with animals, which is something I can relate to pretty strongly.
Plus dinosaurs are just cool and I absolutely love Mesoamerican style pyramids.
Exactly. Merely basing trolls off real life peoples isn’t what is racist. Making them the perpetual losers of the universe who every other race is morally justified in exterminating and stealing their lands IS.
Shoot, it wouldn’t even be so bad if Blizzard at least gave the destroyed troll empires real pathos in the story. But they don’t. They paint the trolls as deserving their genocide that is reflective of real world historical events.
It literally is not hard to make the story good and also not absurdly replicating IRL history.
Like I’ve said since this thread started, making some members of the Alliance extremely racist (e.g. Tyrande looking down on all other elves, much like the Japanese Imperialist period did, e.g. Genn Greymane and Turalyon and Alleria being aggressively Anti-Troll and Anti-Undead, etc) would give the Horde more moral footing, would give the Alliance internal conflict, and would let the game tell stories of the Horde being heroic against the Alliance and also provide moral validation for the Horde races.
If you’re going to make Horde races (and some Alliance races) endure in-game parallels of what their real-world inspirations have endured (again, Japanese Night Elves having their tree nuked), then the writers must be willing to write into the game instances of those same races doing real-world parallels of moments of heroism or justice.
Instead, the only in-game races allowed to be heroic for the past few expansions post-Cataclysm appear to be the European-centered races and their lore-relevant characters.
And the rest of us get:
It’s genuinely vile.
Considering how often we now hear about companies in virtually every other industry—and even then, plenty of other major companies within the gaming industry—employing minorities within executive positions, this is truly terrifying to think about.
“Hey, Mr. Hazzikostas! Care to comment on how many non-white people Blizzard Entertainment currently employs?”
Imo at this point Alliance is pretty justified to be ‘racist’ against the Horde any normal people would be with Horde past actions. But definitely from the Horde side it would definitely make the Alliance threat actually credible.
This whole group kumbaya singing therapy session after each AvH war is getting really old and stale.
I mean, you might find racist reprisals understandable, but that does not make them justified. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t put such content in the game - for various reasons in fact I think we should, but I also disagree with this idea that you are granted a license to kill people on the basis that they look a certain way because of a past injustice rendered by people who also looked that way.
Which is exactly why Daelin Proudmoore was the bad guy.
Nothing justified the Orcs slaughtering Draenei or the inhabitants of stormwind.
But I understand the logic that some people in the Draenei or Stormwind populations who would view the orcs as nothing more than ruthless savage killers.
I also don’t really like the word justified.
Justified to whom? Maybe something justified to me is not justified to you.
PS. I am talking about this on a personal level rather than universal.
Sure, but that was the whole point of Reign of Chaos: that these weren’t the same orcs that destroyed Stormwind, that they could fight for a noble cause alongside humanity against the demons that had previously enslaved them.
All of that went out the window when Blizzard decided to villain-bat the Horde via their Warchief not once, but twice.
This is the core of what continually trips me up whenever someone proposes trying to repair the horde narrative or whatever. To me, it feels like the game has done such a good job of showing why the alliance is justified to hate against the horde that I feel convinced…as a horde player. And with the story as it played out in BFA, the horde player character is canonically part of the problem.
Like, Saurfang was an interesting character concept (before BFA). But I didn’t want to PLAY as him. And if Blizzard tries to walk it back now? Well good luck, but the faction currently has a permanent invisible title of “Genocider” floating over its head. And with the way race is perma-tied to faction, there’s no way to divorce your character from it.