You’re still not getting it, and I think these last sentences are the key: Azeroth is not real, and neither is its history. It is fiction. Artificial. Every single sentence of it is put together by human hands for a purpose, by authors, and people are objecting to the story this fiction tells, which your three examples above are perfect case studies of. People feel that stories like those, of ‘sanitized’ colonialism, are overtly shaped by gross historic biases - which is not a shocking accusation, since the mishmash genre the game itself is a mishmash of has housed racism comfortably for as long as it has existed*.
- As for genocide, again, that seems loaded in the sense the most if any genocide done was truly a last resort deal as oppose to Sylvanas attempt at using genocide as a first solution. That you had no choice but to fight them to the death because they were never going to surrender/leave you alone.
Your defense of the game’s story still seems to ignore this, since it keeps coming back again and again and again and AGAIN to explaining how ‘the game has shown it so this genocide really wasn’t even genocide, was the only way forwards, and was therefore okay, and that genocide was bad, so how can we equivocate between the two?’
Zerde, those portrayals are precisely why people are fed up with the story. There are centuries of media for us to look at for stories about how ‘alas and alack, the noble and relatable daring explorers ventured into the fruitful new lands, were unfairly attacked by savages without provocation, and had no choice but to defend themselves because they were so evil and wicked that they would not stop unless killed, what senseless violence, oh well, to the victor go the lands, which the savages weren’t even REALLY using all of.’ When we see a new one people can recognize it and be disgusted for what it is, no matter how thoroughly the game tells us that this time the savages were like, SUPER evil and wicked, and DEFINITELY weren’t using all that land.
- Tamanii has just been applying this to humans/elves when in fact EVERY RACE in Warcraft has benefit from a degree of colonialism. Singling out the humans/elves as somehow being the only one to benefit from the lack of empathy we have to most of the villains races is insanely blind.
It’s not just about who gets no empathy, it’s about who gets empathy at all. Societies that the reader are intended to empathize with get written as heroic underdogs or unjustly-persecuted peaceful types, while their enemies are written as bloodthirsty monsters whose murderous and unprovoked attacks forced their victims to defend themselves.
And those societies the reader is intended to empathize with are those that appeal most closely to the sensibilities of an American audience.
And those societies the reader is NOT intended to empathize with are those that are written as ‘uncivilized,’ ‘barbaric,’ and ‘savage.’
And this is, again, why people are angry with how the game is written. Because they know about the ugly side of history, and seeing the fiction of this game putting a bloody-handed old chestnut of a story in a pretty new dress pisses them off.
*Like kindly ol’ professor Tolkien and his orcs, which resembled ‘the less lovely mongol-types,’ and their wicked allies from exotic Far Harad, ‘black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues;’ or Robert E. Howard and his views on evil depraved savages, soft effete civilized men, and manly iron-thewed barbarians; or HP Lovecraft whose guiding terror was ‘what if white people are NOT the center of the universe?’ writ large, with squamousness.