What's the deal with wow and slave/servitor races?

What’s “too modern” for a millieu that has steampunk or better tech and crossplanar travel?

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It’s not necessarily “wrong” . It’s inconsistent. They have the PCs do things, the have the main characters do things, they have “survivor races”, that all conflict with modern morality and then they trumpet it.

No, they were talking about Goblin slavery.

That’s messed up.

there’s a whole questline about this in Dragonflight, no, no the Draconid are not just content to serve. There’s a whole rebellion about it until the issue is resolved diplomatically

How? the Stewards are happy, they have distinct personalities and they’re pretty much like skittermanders. (google them)

They’re only happy because they don’t know any better because that’s what they’re programmed to think.

Time to begin the United Steward Socialist Revolution!

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I get the message “This content is no longer available.”

This.

Stewards are a species native to Bastion. They are not robots, they cannot be ‘programmed’, nor are they forced either mentally or physically to do what the Kyrian want. They are more than capable of rising to higher positions, as shown by Mikanikos, who is the Forgelite Prime.

That’s a far cry from what we see from other forms of servitude in WoW. Goblins use physical beatings to force their slaves to work for them. Orcs force the weak-minded to serve as Peons, denying them good pay and working conditions in the process.

I wouldn’t call the Stewards slaves at all.

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Pretty sure some of the origions for races were made to be slaves. Id have to look that up though.

Funny, if were going down the realism hole, id like to point out that we murder people in this game. Like a lot of people and were the heroes for it.

So whats the point of this thread really…

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Why is this necessary? These things are obviously evil, they shouldn’t need to say “btw this is bad just fyi incase u didn’t know”.

Outside of the whole slave race thing which is a interesting point I don’t think Blizz has glorified the other stuff.

A few things…

-Is slavery OK if, at least as far as you know, the slaves are treated well?
-It isn’t uncommon, in systems of slavery, for some slaves to accumulate influence. The Forgelite Prime fits into that.
-There are “caste” systems that are not the same. But, these are not seen as a good thing either. “Slavery” on a group, rather than indivicual, basis.

The key to all this is lack of choice. It doesn’t matter how nice you make it, if people can’t choose you have taken away something that is seen a fundamental right.

The purge of Dalaran was a classic example of ethnic cleansing.
" Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area". Yet Blizzard felt it made a good fist pump moment for the Alliance. And, as the Clocklock pointed out we murder people in this game. How often is group “X” a problem or inconvenience and so the quest give has you go out and kill some numbers of individuals who happen to be of that race?

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And many understand that a lot of other quests or aspects of the story are also problematic, so this isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Lol.

That being said even “murdering people” isn’t necessarily a problematic thing to feature in a video game story. It all depends on context.

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It is not chattel slavery atleast not American style.

Everyone in Bastion is a servant of some kind of other. It is literally the plane of Service the beings native to it are inclined to service just as beings from the Elemental Plane of Fire are inclined to burn things. It is their essential nature.

Choice, or free will, for most people is an illusion. For most people choices are pretty much preordained by a combination of genetics, circumstance, and influence. Much of our choices are heavily influenced by factors we are not conscious of. The Stewards at least ARE. They know that they are created to serve and they are OK with it.

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No, its not problematic, its just a video game. This is the problem, people throwing fits over nothing. Its a VIDEO GAME! People sit there and dictate what’s right and wrong with with writing making the company waste more time on redoing dumb crap thats been in the game forever. pathetic real pathetic

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You’re entitled to that opinion (unfortunately), but you’re just wrong, and Blizzard is listening, based on how they wrote the Centaur in DF for example.

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this, you are a amazing person.

Does it have to be to be a problem?

Things get murkier when you get into races “created to be slaves”. (Though, to the OPs point, this is not necessarily true of “servitors” outside of the Shadowlands.)

If they are a race that was created to be slaves, that gets uncomfortably close to the historic view of some peoples as “slave races”.

It gets pretty grey when you decide that every individual was created “to serve”. You get a rebellious robot stories exploring this. There are issues one could explore here. Though, to the OPs point, Blizzard seems to have skipped by them.

I have to say, I don’t agree with this at all. Tendencies don’t determine an individual. Nor do I think it makes it right to deny them their due.

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The truth is, Blizzard has never cared or given any thought to these kinds of implications.

Anything beyond a hand-wave answer when people ask about it.

This is largely due to this kind of thing just being a standard fantasy trope, and convenient excuses to give certain factions/races/villains easy ‘henchmen’ without thinking too much about it.

Orcs played the same role within LoTR, and there was never really expanded upon as anything more than easy-make stooges for the important characters to boss around.

If you take any hard look at WoW or Warcraft in general you can find a numerous amount of outdated, bad, racist, or otherwise uncomfortable fantasy tropes that they continue to use.

Which, to be fair, might be for the best. I wouldn’t exactly trust Blizzard to write about this in any tasteful way, especially when, in the case of the draconids, it might make their ‘good’ characters seem bad or flawed.

If Blizz were to ever decide on making the current Dragonaspects ‘evil,’ they’d expand on this. Until then, they’re left in their ‘theyre fine with it dont think about it’ bubble.

Oh, also, for the people in this thread trying to turn this into a weird ‘culture war’ issue… It quite legitimately isn’t that deep, I doubt Blizz even knows what they’re doing. You can say these kinds of things are problematic, sure, but Blizz trying to actively write this stuff narratively would likely come out as even more problematic, in all honesty.
Though it would be interesting to delve into these kinds of things, unfortunately it’s better to just accept these things at face-value or try to convince Blizzard to think better about how they justify their ‘henchmen’ for their villains in the future.

This depends on your perception and what you believe about the fundamentals of reality.

Though, in the context of slavery saying something like this is stupid.

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