The problem is that without such citations, people will simply take the assertions that I make and dismiss them on the basis that they don’t mesh with the objectives that they themselves want to advocate for, and attempting to dispute those objectives run into the wall of competing racial and factional interests.
I cite research because I want to transcend such barriers. I want to come at things from an informed perspective, and to get at the core reasons for why people feel the way they do about story developments in a video game, past the noise of factionalism, and the drive to dismiss people on the basis that they like things that other people don’t like.
Bwonsamdi and Flynn are both popular because they’re fun characters that everyone can resonate with while also being an iconic character from African Diasporic Traditions and folklore (Baron Samedi) and a fun bisexual man, respectively.
I think Blizzard underestimates the importance of FUN characters that are also representations.
I mean compare Pelagos vs Flynn, both new LGBT characters (trans man in the former, bisexual man in the latter), and how the community responded to both.
Both are positive largely (except for some weirdos who tried to edit their wikis with homophobic/transphobic stuff), but there was a lot more enjoyment with Flynn over Pelagos.
That doesn’t jive with your OP. On the one hand, you say we should discuss the lore devoid of one set of feelings you don’t think count. And on the other hand, you pretend you have some science to back your claims about how we should discuss the story based on feelings, and that feelings matter most:
So you state we should focus our discussion on feelings based on some theory you state must be applied, and it shouldn’t be treated as a public policy debate where facts matter most. But then you don’t want feelings to get in the way of the discussion, and you have the urge to cite research in an attempt to remove feelings you don’t appreciate from the discussion.
That’s basically more of your: “Only my PoV matters. We must include what I consider facts and we must exclude things I dislike in this discussion.”
Discussing the canon as Blizzard lays it out is far more neutral than trying to perform some highwire act between feelings Kyalin approves of.
I also think that up until these type of characters, the representation of cultural ethnicities in WoW was heavily focused on the negative, on the oppression rather than the positives of cultural expression.
One of the things i particularly liked about Flynn and Pelagos was they diverged from normal LGBTQ+ stories where trauma and exclusion is a focal point. I also think that has a lot to do with their likeability. They are not serving as a teachable moment on inclusion, they just exist unquestionably.
There are also some characters who are disliked because they are perceived to represent something negative about society. I’m only bringing this up because it’s relevant right now, but I’ve seen that the major complaint and backlash against, Sylvanas, for example, can be largely summed up to her being perceived as a “feminist” character. Bias against social justice can negatively impact how people view this character. There are other reasons too, based on cultural mythology and fear of the rebellious woman, a woman who doesn’t fit conventional societal norms. When that’s highlighted against someone like, Tyrande, for example, who is maternal, upholds societal norms of women and family. Intentionally or not they are asking the audience to pick a side based on social prejudice, and Tyrande wins that fight.
If Bwonsamdi were a villain instead of a fun trickster, they could tap into fear of the other to demonize African Diasporic Traditions, like Western media usually does. It’s great that they didn’t do it to this one character, but that doesn’t discredit the fact that they do it to other characters and it’s largely why the fandom is polarized.
Trolls (African, Caribbean, Southern Amerindigenous) are villain batted and Tauren (North Amerindigenous) are useless, Night Elves (New Agers, East Asian mostly Japanese, lightly Antiquity Mediterranean) and Dwarves (Scottish + Tolkien’s Jewish Metaphor Prototype) are also regularly useless and play second fiddle to Stormwind Humans (US/UK).
But SW Humans have Human Potential™ which is just an in-game affirmation of Manifest Destiny/US Exceptionalism type logic.
Who gets assigned Cultural Stereotypes/Tropes as good or bad is a hot mess.
I’d argue Pelagos has been less well received than Flynn precisely because his character is centered on that he wasn’t able to transition until Death.
It’s the “Kill Your Gays” Trope but taken one step further, he was already dead when he transitioned lol
Oh yeah 100%.
I mean again, the wowpedia pages received weird homophobic edits last year that we immediately undid but the fact someone went out of their way to do it is insane.
And just look how some of the playerbase responded to the inclusion of IRL Black, Asian, and Amerindigenous phenotypes into the game, where they used Lore to justify super imposing their own racism onto the game.
But also it’s one of the things that evidently went over peoples heads from the onset. Daelin and Garithos were 100% meant to demonstrate racism and racism as a response to tragedy, and how that is bad.
But now we have some players insisting neither was racist and that it is valid.
I was darkly curious and went looking, but I personally didn’t see anything in the Pelagos page’s history. Were they purged altogether or something?
The skin color stuff had some amusingly yikes takes from what little I remember. I remember one line in particular where someone self-censored an F bomb but not the Gamer Word in the same sentence because they were that angry about blood elf skin colors. And a screenshot from some guy’s game where one of his guild officers “politely” whispered him if he could change his blood elf’s skin color because it was bothering other people in the guild.
The reason why it’s loaded is because of people justifying racist RP. There is an entire subsection of Blood Elf RP’ers who choose to believe that High Elves were breeding out darker skin and eyes, to create a “pure” white haired, blue eyed race (yup, not unlike the modern white nationalist “Ayrian race”) people believed that it wasn’t racist to explore this through RP in a fantasy setting. It’s cringe, it’s possibly the biggest cringe of the WoW RP community.
The clapback about the new customizations was largely from this small but loud part of the WoW RP community who felt that the inclusion of darker skinned blood elves broke their purity based immersion or Blood Elf culture.
It’s the darker side of the WoW RP community. They were usually propped up by people of the “Alliance should have High Elves” crowd because the majority of those race fantasy RP’ers also wanted these “pure” light High Elves to be Alliance, again relating back to the coding of the Horde being too ethnically diverse.
I would argue it’s not just a WoW problem but a fantasy genre problem in general where being white is considered magical, elf-like or divine. There’s also this problem with “night elf supremacy” RP’s too [look for yourself at the thread a couple threads down where people are still disputing if Night Elves originated from trolls to see that people still believe in Night Elf divinity as an actual origin story. It’s wild.]
Oh nah there were also obvious fascists trying to superimpose IRL Race Science onto WoW. “Where did Black humans come from? Stranglethorn Vale jungles?” was a common take.
Never mind the origin of humanity in-game are Robots Made From Different Metal And Rock Cursed By A Lovecraftian Tentacle Monster.
My favorite is when they come up with a whole backwards theory like “White humans were the first humans because Vrykul are all white but Black and Asian humans came about due to regional isolation”
Which Human Kingdom, pray tell, was the Black and Asian Kingdom?
Sir you are a tentacle cursed robot please calm down
It comes to mind that I’ve never seen a single thread demanding a lore explanation for the equally sudden appearance of navy blue skinned elves or purple eyed forsaken or whatever.
How exactly do you make points like this with a straight face? How do you turn “strict canon isn’t necessarily what we should be focusing on when we evaluate stories” into some idea that what is factual and citable doesn’t matter?
Ah wait, actually - I think I know what it is:
Which is hence why you exclude anything that might interfere with your own positioning, to the extent apparently that you will miss the point of the OP entirely and throw out a research paper because you found the word “theory” in the URL.
I think you’re presenting a problem that doesn’t exist. Nobody is stopping anyone from talking about their feelings on the Story Forum. If you want to control how people respond to your feelings on the forum (or anywhere else for that matter)… well, that’s not going to happen.
I think for narrative work to be good, it has to appeal to both your emotions and your intellect; which WOW does… just not all the time, and not all at once.
If a story focuses too much on trying to make feelings to the point of being wildly inconsistent, or other pitfalls, the story runs a the risk of being “stupid”, regardless of how intense the initial reactions are to it.
If a story focuses too much on facts and logic… it runs the risk of being “boring”. regardless of how interesting the list of factoids presented are.
While feelings don’t always care about what is factual… they often do. Of course the “presentation of facts” is important, but to say that it’s more important than the facts themselves is, I think, delusional.
Communication of a story is dependent on both the writers and the audience. I wouldn’t automatically find fault with the writers if parts of the audience “don’t get it”. That’s going to be the case, no matter how the story is written.
I’ve not made a thread about it, but it did not go unnoticed. In wow, “glowing” eye color typically has something to do with the character’s energy, so it’s not too difficult to make a sufficient headcanon that isn’t incompatible with canon. It also doesn’t have the problem of being interpreted as a sudden change to the game universe for the sake of real-world issues.
