servitor - a person who serves or attends on a social superior.
am i meant to expect that the kyrian stewards and draconids are 100% happy and content with their lot in life? they’re basically created to serve a “better” (the kyrians/dragons). while there’s not, as far as i can tell, any oppression or what would essentially be like racism or making them feel like theyre inferior or “untermensch”.
i find it odd that they just accept that this is the way things are. we do see the mawsworn kyrians and they have their own stewards but it’s unclear if they’re doing so of their free will or theyre just kinda doing it because that’s what they were created to do. we also see draconids among the primalists who likewise don’t have any characterization that would point towards wanting to not be servants to the dragons beyond “reee titan bad elemental good”.
In Dragonflight there was a story about how the Drakonids were chafing under the return of the Dragons and the Aspects. It was resolved diplomatically.
As for the Stewards, they’re treated rather well, overall. Kyrians make it a point to protect and defend them, to give them gifts, and to always value their efforts towards Bastion.
A better argument could be made for the Dredgers in Revendreth.
About the Stewards serving the Mawsworn, either they defected because - like the Kyrians - some stopped trusting Bastion’s system, they served specific Kyrians so when those Kyrians became Mawsworn the stewards chose to serve them still or those Stewards were forced to serve the Mawsworn.
While that issue needs to be addressed, I think OP was taking about slave/servant races. Not selecting only one race to be slaves, but the idea of an entire race/species that are made to be someone else’s slaves.
Stewards are engineered to be servants, they are born from Bastion itself as part of its overall ‘program’ to help the Kyrian complete their Progenitor-assigned task as the Psychopomps of the multiverse.
The Drakinod and Dragonspawn historically have borderline revered the dragons as Gods. Which makes sense, given the Aspects made them. The ones in the Dragon Isles had a lot of time and distance to come to see them differently.
Pictured: Two earthen soaking in a hot-tub. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1170101966295285760/1231337284431773807/GLoJwS8bcAAbTWO.jpg
Not quite slaves, I’d think.
It helps Blizzard populate areas with people who are just there to do PC services without having to worry about who they are. Ironically, sort of like in the IRL sitatuation.
If by solved diplomatically you mean we killed a bunch of them, smashed their magic quills (printing presses) and dragged their leader before Alexstraza in a headlock.
It was a military victory with relatively generous terms. We stopped shy of executing her.
As for Bastion, the Stewards do have their own area where they can knock off as desired, but they actually do seem to be creatures inclined to be helpful… kind of like skittermanders of Starfinder.
It depends on if they were made with free will or not.
If they were, then it’s immoral because to enslave them would be to deny them their free will.
If they weren’t, then it doesn’t matter because they haven’t a will of their own.
It’s basically like comparing an automaton with a positronic brain a la I, Robot to a toaster oven. One is essentially a thinking creature with a will of its own, albeit restrained by the Three Laws of Robotics, while the other just toasts things according to external inputs.
There’s a gray area where you create a race that has a will of its own but endow it also with essentially a genetic desire to act as a servant, but then that only matters if they’re able to reproduce with genetic variation that you aren’t also controlling and can eventually lose that trait, at which point it only becomes immoral when they no longer wish to serve.
And all this isn’t even getting into the idea of creatures that weren’t manufactured, that have a free will, and just happen to be down with existing in subservience.
But I ultimately see no problem with there being slave races in the lore. It’s not real life, I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea to police fiction like that, and I don’t think it’s an example of intrinsically bad writing compared to, say, what Thad mentioned about heinous villains constantly being forgiven and the idea that to seek justice is wrong. But that’s a separate conversation entirely.
Falls under the same umbrella.
Unless you’re counting slave races that were created to be slaves, in which case I don’t count that as enslaving a race because it’s one that didn’t exist until it was made by its master.
If I had to put my own two cents in, it would probably be connected to Blizzard’s overall handling of different societies in the game not correlating with our own society and failing to make a statement on these types of issues.
Like, I highly doubt Blizzard endorses cannibalism, killing of innocents, or outright ethnic cleansing, yet in some cases they haven’t been able to make a clear comment on some of these things sometimes, for whatever reason.
Yet at the end of the day, it is a failing on their part, no matter how much leeway or charitability we give them in the long run.
If you serve because of your race or class, and you have no choice, that’s not good. If your race was literally created as servants, that’s a little more grey, but still pretty bad.
If you, as an individual, was created as a servant, that is pretty grey. But the involuntary aspect is still iffy.
Blizzard seems to want to have their cake and eat it too. I think Blizzard does feel that Azeroth is, as Ion said, “morally grey”. But then they use modern standards of morality all the time.