Why don't Tauren join the Alliance?

Lore Story Forum
928

I am denying your claim… That is a valid position to take on a debate stage…

Such as?

Do you think the Vrykul are racist tropes against Nordic people?

Do you think Night Elf culture and ideology being slowly deconstructed, either violently or socially/diplomatically, is a racist trope that is problematically similar to the Christianization of European Pagans or the Westernization of Japan?

Do you think Drunkard Dwarves with thick Scottish accents perpetuates a harmful, racist trope?

Do you think Stormwind being only shallowly and aesthetically inspired from post-Christian Europe, but failing to be a true, authentic representation of Post-Christianized European culture makes it a racist caricature?

Or do you only see such things when it comes to fantasy races that draw inspiration from peoples with a little bit more melanin in their skin?

The reason to drive them off is they are assaulting sacred shrines…

The Wormwing specifically allied themselves with the Black Dragonflight, and were actively trying to prevent Avaiana’s resurrection. It’s not that I fail to recognized instances of racism, I just reject your blatant distortions of the truth.

I mean, sure, If you want to ignore the examples that YOU literally brought up from another thread lol.

It’s not that I fail to acknowledge instances of racism… I just also acknowledge that racism has been something every race has experienced.

YOU seem to think that it is something that only applies to people of color. Which, not going to lie, is kind of racist.

I acknowledge that Stormwind is Imperialist. I don’t think that is Blizzard making justifications for Imperialism. It’s just World Building to me. I would rather Blizzard acknowledge that Stormwind is Imperialist. However, since Vanilla WoW, Blizzard has always avoided making such declarative statements about their lore. Mostly for the sake of convenience. They want the main characters and institutions of their world to be mailable so they can be what they need them to be when trying to tell a story.

I don’t like that, but that’s what it is, and it’s a far cry from justifying imperialism.

It’s not Blizzard giving human an excuse to slaughter these races lol. It’s just the world of Azeroth, which is completely separate from Earth’s history. You are looking at this through lens, rather than from an objective perspective.

Humans were privative when first contacted by the High Elves, and they were specifically contacted and taught magic so they can seize Quel’thalas from the Amani. That is pretty cut and dry and how they story is told. There is no moral justifications made there.

The High Elves are not depicted in any good light. They were banished from Night Elf society because they were so high on their noble horses, they thought that can continue being the ruling caste AFTER INVITING THE LEGION TO AZEROTH.

This is why I hate when people say Highborne lore is Night Elf representation. No, they are everything Night Elf culture stands AGAINST!

It’s not swept under the rug, it is only that we live in a world where the Imperialism of the High Elves and Humans have been mostly successful. Creating a world where successful imperialists exist is not justifying imperialism… In fact, it sets the stage for a very nuanced world.

The Dwarves and Frostmane are a perfect example. We don’t know what the first contact was like, but what we do know is the populations of both factions have been born and raised there for hundreds of years.

So, there is no good or bad side in that conflict anymore. We don’t even know if there was a good or bad side to begin with. We don’t know how long they lived in the area, unaware of each other’s presence. We don’t know if the Dwarves came as conquerors or as tradesmen or anything like that.

All we know is they both live there and they are both hostile. That is it. And that is kind of interesting, and it makes sense if we are trying to create a world where conflict is the main premise.

Again, that is why I outright reject your characterization of the Kaldorei Empire and their relationship with the Trolls. We have no idea what first contact was like. Which makes claims like “Genocide and displacement” completely baseless.

What we DO know, is humans have surrounded themselves with buffer vassal states like the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, and let their culture be the driving force of Alliance identity and morality. So yeah, I think Humans are imperialist, but it has for more to do with their treatment of Alliance races, rather than their treatment of Horde races.

The Horde, for the record, is not much different when it comes to Orc culture being the driving force behind Horde identity and morality.

When an entire playable race is the victim of the most significant genocide since the Scourging of Lordaeron, they deserve some feel good moments. None of that actually proves you right in the slightest.

It actually has been that until recently.

No we can’t.

Well, you can, but it’s not an objective truth and very much subject to interpretation.

Again, not in the RP communities.

RP might be down for everyone, but Nelf RP is currently nonexistent.

I am not turning around, I was making that point specifically to show you how absurd the claim is. It is actually hilarious that you don’t think so.

It’s called a knee-jerk emotional response to watching HIS GOD GET BLOWN UP BY DEMONIC LAZER BEAMS!

He didn’t just “Get over it”

He just had bigger things to worry about.

Good lord, that double negative…

Yeah, you keep showing me these. Ignoring that these illustrations are representing each empire at the height of their power, and several hundred, maybe even thousands of years apart.

Nothing in Chronicle says there was “Genocide and displacement” of Trolls at the hands of the Kaldorei. I even makes a point to say Azshara was not interested in conquest.

It doesn’t matter how much you blatantly misrepresent the lore, your headcanon will never be the truth.

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929

They are what Kal’dorei stand against. The Kal’dorei are just one branch of the race that spawned modern Night Elves. The Highborne of Eldre’ Thelas are another, as are the Quel’dorei, the Sin’Dorei, and the Nightborne, and those weird spider elves in the Broken Isles. All of these have their own culture and values as well.

Quel’dorei was a term even back in the pre-Sundering period. Highborne is a derivation of it.

930

Kaldorei*

Not sure why you are telling a bunch of lore I already know though. Are you just going to ignore this very embarrassing thing you did?

931

The only one who should be embarrassed is you. You’ve been strutting about as the gatekeeper of Night Elf lore while ignoring the more subtle aspects of it.

Tyrande and Malfurion’s bunch aren’t the only Night Elf survivors post Azshara. Farondis ghost tribe sort of counts, and so did the survivors of Eldre’ Thelas who do not share the same cultural mindset as Tyrande’s Night Elves do. Those who became the Quel’dorei and Sin’dorei are yet another group. as well as the scattered Night Elves who live in the Broken Isles and those who settled in the East Kingdoms.

The point is that the survivors headed by Malfurion, Tyrande, and Fandral do not encompass the whole definition of the Night Elf race or culture.

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932

If Turalyon and that bunch were actually worshipping that overgrown self-righteous chandelier version of Dark Kosh, Illidan did them a favor.

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933

Yeah, and that is High Elves, Blood Elves and Nightborne.

As I mentioned before, if we want to categorize all elf lore as Kaldorei lore, then we can categorize as all Elf lore as Troll lore too.

No argument there.

934

His mental capacity entirely seems equivalent to an adult dragon.

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935

As a person of Aztec and Mayan descent, I find your dual obsession with the Frostmane Whelps and the ways Trolls are presented to be extremely jarring. Your general insistence on these matters frankly comes off as wanting indigenous cultures to be presented in a Disney Pocahontas esque rendition as unrepresentative of native cultures as the happy-go-lucky presentation of Thanksgiving given to children.

I’d link the NPR articles, but they are rather graphic in their skeletal photography, but look up articles titled “Aztec ‘Tower Of Skulls’ Reveals Women, Children Were Sacrificed.” Or related to the the Inca, who also had those stone pyramids, “Remains Of More Than 140 Children Who Were Sacrificed Found In Peru.”

Many of the cultures that were established before Spain’s conquest of crimes were doing exactly the same to their neighbors as what Spain did to them. To make calls for a cultural representation that ignores this is to call for ignoring and burying history.

The Zandalari are not living on modern day Mexico City. Though they are on a mountain and not a lake, for the sake of my metaphor, they are living on Tenochtitlan, from where the Aztecs launched campaigns of expansionism, forced religious conversion, and, yes, sacrifices of their neighbors.

Did the Aztecs and other cultures deserve what Spain did to them? The question itself is meaningless, as it has never been a question of deserving. It is simply a matter that they lost. As their neighbors lost to the Aztecs and Inca before that.

Including, yes, the killing of children you find so distasteful now.

The Zandalari, Amani, and Gurubashi and all other Troll tribes went to war with each other because they were expansionist and disregarded the lives of their neighbors. That the same happened to them is not astonishing, nor is it a historical misrepresentation of at least some of the cultures that inspired them.

You have fair grounds to complain about how the Amani were treated in Burning Crusade. And more so I suppose we should be thankful the Blood Elves don’t have a holiday where they tell their children stories about the Elves and Trolls holding hands and cultivating the land together. But your harping on history that isn’t even covered by Chronicle between the Troll Empire and the Night Elf Empire undermines your position. For as much as you like to say that you believe you are influencing lurkers and people who might be reading your endless back and forths with people into seeing things your way and wanting to bring calls for different cultural representation of indigenous people, it is also possible you are driving more people away from agreeing with you.

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936

The Disney Pocahontas-esque rendition of native cultures as happy-go-lucky presentation of Thanksgiving to children was not a product with significant input from native peoples and doesn’t exist to treat them as people either. It exists so that Americans don’t have to confront the more complicated and less pleasant realities of America’s colonization and have a more palatable alternative narrative.

And even if you’re against the Disney representation, it doesn’t mean your only alternative is to jump to the one depicting the warrior tribeman attacking the innocent explorer/colonist- who just has no choice but to kill large numbers of these backwards savages.

There’s a lot of room for depictions that aren’t either of those.

The question is not meaningless. Peoples’ lives have meaning. The answer is no. The women and children -or even the adult men- did not deserve to be sacrificed. Neither did the Precolumbian peoples who were subjected to genocide/displacement/colonization deserve it.

While you’re seemingly averse to treating the sad reality of people killing people as if it’s anything more than just some inconvenience that nobody should never feel one way or the other about- WoW certainly isn’t. It just uses the power of fiction to twist this sad reality into more simplistic narratives and morality plays that are more palatable to its broader audience.

Also, I wasn’t aware that my distaste for child killing was unique. Did we all decide we’re cool with it all of a sudden?

The “historical misrepresentation” comes in when you retell the tale of the Conquistadors’ conquest of Mesoamerica and call attention to the savage, dark, and warlike natives are and don’t equally call attention to the even greater cruelty and and brutality of the colonizers- even going so far as to rewrite the tale so they came to Mesoamerica with no ill intent, weren’t themselves racist and disregarding of the natives, and act like everything was fine until they were attacked. That’s not accurate historical representation and it’s definitely not free of moral/political/racial framing.

Also, you say that the question “who deserves it” is irrelevant, but then specifically bring up how the Aztec/Zandalari were expansionist and had no regard for the lives of their neighbors, as if that was a factor that resulted in what happened. Would not being expansionist and having regard for their neighbors’ lives have saved either from their ultimate fate?

The history of conflict between the Zandalari and Night Elves is discussed in Chronicle. Pages 95 and 96 specifically.

But yeah, I’m familiar with how touchy people get when it’s pointed out their escapist entertainment contains more politics than they might have initially thought. This is especially true at the intersection between gene fiction and videogames.

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937

A proper debate also includes citing sources, which you don’t do. Don’t act like you’re engaging in a legitimate debate. You’re not.

You didn’t have any figures or references to back anything up in those threads either.

But I’m not dismissive and definitely don’t try to argue against the existence of other examples of racist caricature in Blizzard materia either. I just recognize that the history of the US racism regarding people of pre-Columbian, West African, and Pacific Islander descent is deep/long running. That it continues to manifest itself in subtle and less subtle ways in various aspects of life, including popular media.

And you like to reply to me specifically in order to deny this on principle.

You ask me for examples and then you beat me to the punch by giving me several. So yeah, you apparently can also see Blizzard using lazy racist stereotypes.

Vrykul are already pretty thin Viking stereotypes. Should Blizzard repeatedly put out a patch every other expansion that features mead drinking, horned helmet wearing, axe wielding berserking Vrykul raiding parties spouting faux-Norrwegien curses? Then have several storylines about how players travel to their lands and convert them to the Light?

And WoW’s focus on Dwarves as drunks is totally playing on Scottish stereotypes. RTS Dwarves weren’t walking drinking jokes. Should Blizzard double down on that aspect and have Dwarven drunkenness and belligerence be used as a reason to have them constantly fighting everyone and when we talk to Magni, have the text point out how he reeks of alcohol? Should they add a fixation with buggering sheep and being notoriously cheap?.

You mention yourself that you dislike the Imperialist aspects of the Stormwind Human/Night Elf Dynamic. and portray Night Elves as passive/sneaky while giving them exaggerated Asian accents as well? How about they throw in some human sacrifices, make Cenarius a member of the Burning Legion because Horned God=Satan?

Because that’s generally what Blizzard’s been doing with trolls in WoW, with BfA Zandalar being the biggest -and a very very welcome- move back in the other direction.

Is your argument supposed to be that because Blizzard already lazily uses a variety of stereotypes based in ethnic/racist caricatures for other races that they aren’t aren’t doing the same for trolls?

How about we acknowledge these stereotypes for what they are, not try to act like they aren’t these elements aren’t what they are and invite Blizzard to put more effort into it when drawing off real world influences and not just rely lazy stereotypes. I mean, I’d understand more if there was some kind of satirical bent going on here, but it’s not even that.

None of which is any reason for Shiralee to bring up how she thinks they’re an inferior race she’s disliked even before they allied with the Black Dragonflight, and how she welcomes this turn of events as an excuse to finally be able to drive them off.
 This kind of talk could have easily come out of Garithos.

And the reason why Blizzard doesn’t want to call out Stormwind as being imperialist is because Blizzard wants to avoid framing Stormwind by associating them with it. It’s part of Blizzard selectively white washing and okaying Imperialism/genocide/displacement by not calling it out for what it is… unless the people whose image they aren’t as concerned about do it.

There are Highborne living among the modern Kalimdor Night Elves- although they are a minority. Not all the Highborne of the Kaldorei Empire sided with Azshara, and an even greater number of lowborn supported her and lived in the Kaldorei Empire before she did- like Tyrande and Malfurion and Illidan. Not all Highborne left afterwards to become High Elves, either.

Night Elves and their history include a lot more than just the Priests of Elune and the Druids of Cenarius. The Kaldorei Empire is an integral part of the Night Elves’ history. Especially considering the fact that so many Night Elves were until recently ageless major and are still living former-citizens of the former Kaldorei Empire, with many of their stories repeatedly going back to or reference those very days.

Genocide and displacement aren’t defined by the nature of first contact. Genocide’s the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation; and displacement as it relates to people is the enforced departure of people from their homes, typically because of war, persecution, or natural disaster, respectively.

And we do know that the Kaldorei Empire engaged in the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially trolls; and the enforced departure of trolls from their homes because of war.

And we do know that the Dwarves engaged in the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially trolls; and the enforced departure of trolls from their homes because of war.

And we do know that the High Elves engaged in the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially trolls; and the enforced departure of trolls from their homes because of war. Pages 120 and 121 of Chronicles vol 1. Same with humans, pages 126 and 127 of Chronicles. Those buffer states were created with land taken from conquests of Troll lands.

WoW does indeed make it obvious that this is a big thing in the history of Orc culture, and also points it out as a bad thing when carried out against Humans and Elves, which is why Garrosh and Sylvanas moving the Horde back in that direction is called out as being terrible in a way it’s not when they do that kind of stuff to say, Quillboar or Trolls in Stranglethorn.

Blizzard did used to be more thoughtful about this stuff. Indeed, the Warcraft RTS games, they were better at calling out the Alliance as being having racists and imperfect leaders. They were better about not mainly using trolls unsympathetically. It originally didn’t have Elves being from Kalimdor and taking over Troll lands. It was just an ages old conflict, with both seemingly fighting for survival. They also weren’t afraid to have Night Elves initiate hostilities in Warcraft III.

But WoW’s narrative has been steadily moving away from that; with more moralizing (inconsistently), more reliance on tropes (including racist ones) , and more consistently framing groups as just being generally more good/bad/justified in their conquests than others.

The playable race that’s the victim of the most significant genocide since the Scourging of Lordaeron would be the Gnomes. Or the High/Blood Elves. Or the Tauren and Darkspear Trolls, both of whom were at the brink of extinction when Thrall encountered them. Or Mag’har Orcs (via their scenario).

Unless by “most significant”, you mean the one on which Blizzard’s been placing the most narrative focus and emotional/moral weight on -in which case yes- that would indeed be the Night Elves.

I can. Blizzard does too. Blizzard uses the term whelp in combination with undersized sized models exclusively to refer to children to refer to children. It never refers to whelps using undersized models as adults. That is an objective truth. It is not subject to interpretation.

Night Elf RP is existent, as Night Elves remain a popular race. It’s just very common for RP’ers, upon noticing a decline in their RP situation, to declare RP as a whole is dead/nonexistent.

Blood/High/Void Elves have shared history and lore and then turn around and claim the idea is absurd? Lor’themar, Liadrin, Alleria, Umbric Vareesa, and Auric were literally citizens and key members of the Kingdom of Quel’thas, under the leadership of Kael’thas until only 25 or so years ago. And Alleria Umbric were members of the High Elves and Blood Elves respectively until the last expansion.

It’s not hilarious that they have shared history and lore, especially since all of them were well into adulthood before the Thalassian elves started fracturing and their people regularly live for hundreds of years. It’s absurd to try and claim they don’t have share history and lore.

An initial reaction followed by never ever bringing it up again, within the context of the story is exactly how you characterize someone as getting over something in a story.

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938

Again, this is basically the “But they act/talk so maturely for their age!” defense when it comes to treating a juvenile as an adult. It doesn’t actually make the juvenile into an adult.

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939

And how are you any different? Speaking on behalf of Mesoamerican people without them having asked you to or even have any need of you to speak for them. And more, asking of a more palatable alternative narrative so you don’t have to confront the unpleasant and complicated realities the Trolls are based off of.

Nor is this either. Night Elves were the warrior tribe attacking innocent explorers and colonists in Warcraft III. The time between the Troll Empire and the Night Elf Empire or even the Amani attack on the Arathi were cases of expansionist neighbors, neither innocent, neither seeing expansionism as wrong, and happy to subject their neighbors to it.

This is also not true. Even the completely horrid presentation of the Amani raid because Budd Nedreck maybe would have paid players was accompanied with the trailer that laid out that Zul’jin had all the appropriate grievances in the world.

The ruling Mesoamerican people were cool with it. As you point out, the Trolls are in part based on them, sitting high on their style of pyramids. We do have at least one case of a Troll seemingly preparing children to be eaten. I more question your adherence for these cultures when you’re so against the killing of children.

And this is just as loaded, calling what the Spanish did as even greater in cruelty and brutality, as if the Mesoamericans were less cruel or brutal in their own acts of colonization against other Mesoamericans. What is jarring is how you are asking for the same historical misrepresentation for your own moral and/or political framing.

In asking this you show exactly why it is irrelevant. That it happened to them does not have any factor into that they also did it before. Had Spainish not arrived the Mesoamericans neighbors that the Aztecs and others conquered would have been subjected to what they had been all the same.

Yes, pages you have pointed out many times that do not actually cover what caused the Trolls to lose their lands, only a jump to conclusion that the Night Elves committed genocide against the Trolls.

More than a jump to conclusions. You are for all practical purposes requesting your headcanon be the official story to fit your agenda of making the Trolls seem as victims as if that has any relevance to the Troll’s own wrongdoings.

Exactly as I am pointing out here to you, as it feels like nothing more than your requesting an escapist entertainment rewrite of the Trolls in a way that ignores the parts of Mesoamerican history in which they were cruel themselves.

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940

This is, as ever, not true, as per Chronicle: Volume I, Page 95 - as you pointed out even - actually did separate the Highborne and Cenarius’ followers, such as Malfurion and Tyrande, as far as conquest and expansion went:

    There was, however, one location Azshara and her forces avoided: Mount Hyjal. The spirits and demigods who roamed the sylvan forests unsettled the queen. She knew in her bones that Hyjal was somehow beyond even her influence. It was a place steeped in ancient magic, a wild, untamable, and unchangeable land that stood in stark contrast to her vision of a new Kalimdor. Publically, Azshara prohibited expansion into Hyjal out of respect of the night elves’ ancient kinship with the forests. In truth, she despised the mountain and the harmony it represented.

    Azshara’s views on Hyjal were well known to Cenarius. With growing unease, he had watched the night elf empire expand. Year by year, he became increasingly frustrated with the hubris and thoughtless actions of the sorcerous Highborne. The majority of night elf society continued honoring the old ways of revering the wilds. The fact that these folk still lived in harmony with the land warmed Cenarius’s heart, but he knew that they had no influence over Azshara and her arrogant followers.

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941

We in fact do not know the Kaldorei Empire engaged in the deliberate killing of a large group of people. In fact, nothing in your image citation states as such. What’s more, we know that the Vrykul and Humans lived on what was land colored as part of the Night Elf Empire, as a very example of people neither killed nor had their homes taken from them by the Night Elves despite the Night Elves claiming where they lived as part of their empire.

If anything, this issue you have with the Night Elf Empire comes from the retcon of having placed the Trolls and their empire exist before the Night Elves, where back in Warcraft III the Night Elves were the first race to awaken on Azeroth.

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942

that was just some BS lore blizz threw out so they can add a race in Eastern Kingdom to the horde. Blizz should had simply add the Blood Elves to the Horde in Vanilla; that the Blood Elves reach out to the horde for help to reclaim their lands because the Alliance would not in vanilla & being the horde faction on the eastern kingdom. The very story they did in TBC for blood elves.

943

The difference is in real life we know certain aspects of human development and growth. We know a brain is still going through certain processes. And that because of this and their capacity, we’ve set a somewhat arbitrary limitations on when they are an adult.

None (most) of this is true about dragons. They are magical creatures and develop differently than humans. It is apples to oranges to compare rather acceptable understood aspects of humans to a creature that could talk and run a complex organization within months of being born.

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944

I havn’t made claims… I have just denied yours. And your own citations disprove your own claims because you misrepresent them.

Racist caricatures that don’t exist.

No, they haven’t. You have yet to prove that they have. You just see certain inspirations taken, and make the assumption that it -has- to be racist. Because God forbid, ANY of those inspirations might reflect negatively by today’s moral standards.

Human sacrifices were things that happened in nearly all cultures, for one reason or another. Sometimes they were volunteers, sometimes they were slaves, sometimes they were based upon looks, appearances, gender, whatever. Some cultures had greedy, petty gods that from an outside perspective, could be classified as evil. I don’t think I need to explain why Zues is a problematic God. Odin is certainly not terribly nice by Abrahamic standards. Even the Christian God is kind of an a-hole.

So in a world where Gods exist, can it be only a racist trope that there are a number of Trolls who worship a not-so-kind God, and commit various atrocities in his name? Including human sacrifice?

No. You are just hyper sensitive because you are looking at these warty, tusked, hunched over monsters, and code them as “Black people” Which is much more of a problem than anything Blizzard is doing.

It’s not before. They were already assaulting sacred shrines and actively trying to stop Aviana’s resurrection. You can keep repeating yourself… again, and again, and again. It doesn’t make your blatant lies true.

You can’t just attribute motive. This is the problem with you. You speak as if these things are objective, when you have no way of actually knowing that. You blatantly distort the lore to fit your headcanon, and you make assumptions about character AND IRL people’s motivations, to, again, support your headcannon.

Blizzard doesn’t put that much thought into it. They keep EVERYTHING vague, so the story and it’s players are mailable. We see that clear as day with the 180 heel turns Blizzard will do with a character or even an entire race, to suit the narrative.

Yet that has been the defining aspects of their culture for the last 10,000 years, and we never actually see anything about it. If it’s not Cenarian Circle stuff, it’s highborn stuff, and thats more elf stuff than Night Elf stuff at this point, because as I mentioned, THE HIGHBORNE AND THE ILLIDARI IS EVERYTHING MODERN KALDOREI STAND AGAINST!

The presence of characters doesn’t matter nearly as much as culture. Unless you want to admit that Broxigar makes the War of the Ancients Orc lore. Which you wont do, because then you have to admit that the orcs stole Kaldorei lore and history, and, admit that the Kaldorei never actually have any lore or story of their own.

It doesn’t matter. We don’t know what the first contact was… So you can’t say the Kaldorei empire invaded Troll territory, and geocided and displaced it’s populations. Because nowhere does it say that, and it even says QUEEN AZSHARA HAD NO INTEREST IN CONQUEST. and the images you show from Chronicle SHOW THE EMPIRES AT THE HEIGHT OF THEIR INFLUENCE! NOT AS THEY APPEAR AT FIRST CONTACT!

Your claim that the Kaldorei Empire displaced and genocided the Trolls is COMPLETELY BASELESS AND UNSUPPORTED BY ANY OF THE SOURCES YOUR ARE CITING! THE SOURCES YOUR ARE CITING IS ACTUALLY DISPROVING YOUR CLAIM!

No we don’t. We know there are battles. There is no mention of genocide, or displacement anywhere. We know there were battles, from OPENLY HOSTILE TROLLS. Not, an invasion from the Kaldorei.

Again, we know there was a war, again, from openly hostile, war-like trolls. We know nothing about first contact, we know nothing of how many generations of dwarves lived their prior to the conflicts. We don’t know what steps were taken to drive our the Trolls, or if the Trolls just retreated on their own.

And I talked about the Trolls Wars and how there were no justifications made for that.

But now you are acting like Troll displacement always has a moral excuse, and in the same breath want to act like every instance of Troll conflict was unjustly committed against troll kind.

Pick a lane.

Not until BFA

Before that, and even now still, everyone seems to just write off when the Horde or Orcs in general, act like big a-holes. Like the End of WoD, when everyone just silently forgives Grom for trying to exterminate the Dreanei and invading Azeroth.

The Night Elves, you mean.

Who were already severely weakened after the battle of Mount Hyjal. Losing the Dragons blessing, dealing with infertility and a susceptibility to disease, as well as advanced aging. SOLVING that problem, then being brought to the brink of extinction by at least some of the races you just listed.

The War of Thorns is th emost significant genocide since the Scourging of Lordaeron. Period.

No its not.

No its not.

Yes it is.

No its not.

945

Actually, I’m a member of a discord server which includes many people of indigenous Mesoamerican descent living outside the US. Many of them have made these exact same observations/criticisms, which have informed my own views on the topic. Not only am I making some of the same points they themselves have made, they also post here on the boards making them too and have expressed support for me speaking out on them.

Also, I myself am a black man of Haitian heritage and a practitioner (uninitiated) of Haitian Vodou. There are several other posters on these forums, some of them also of West Africa, Pre Columbian Mesoamerica, and Pacific Islander descent, including those living outside the US. One of whom is an actual initiate of Vodou: Baalsamel. They too have made similar observations/criticisms about the racist elements of WoW and fantasy in general.

So you’re wrong if you think we’re just a bunch of woke white people being offended on behalf of someone else who can’t speak for themselves. And generally don’t hop into other threads telling people how X,Y, Z actually isn’t racist and that they need to stop talking so much about the use of racist tropes in WoW or fantasy.

I don’t think that us calling Blizzard out on it’s use of racist tropes and asking them to avoid the Noble Savage or Evil Savage archetype and heroic/villainous framing is going to result in the sanitation of real world cultures.

First off, it’s worth considering Aztec human sacrifice was religious in nature.

But it’s Haitian Vodou, not Aztec religion, from which WoW’s voodoo draws sooo heavily from. And it does not have evil gods, let alone any that bid people commit atrocities or perform human sacrifice. Hakkar is the only Aztec themed loa, being clearly based on Quetzalcoatl. Incidentally, Quetzalcoatl was an Azterc deity that specifically forbade human sacrifice in his name.

The kinds of divinities more likely to take human sacrifices that WoW draws on would actually be the Shinto and Pagan inspired deities of the Night Elves. Both traditions engaged in human sacrifice. Or the Titan Watchers the Dwarves revere, they’re obviously based off the Norse deities to whom people were sometimes sacrificed. Or the Church of the Light, which is clearly based on Abrahamic religions. So named because it was founded when Abraham- who was about to sacrifice his own son- made a pact with God who asked him to sacrifice his own son. And then later, when Jesus was offered himself up as a martyr. And the role of self-sacrifice in Islamic traditions is a whole discussion in itself.

So if Blizzard is so okay with including human sacrifice as being true to the portrayal of historical cruelties, why did it omit all references to it when drawing influence from so many cultures/religions that actually engaged in it? And if Blizzard is going to make the deliberate choice to include human sacrifice as a means of remaining true to the history, why would it base it on a religion generally and a god specifically that historically diid not engage in it?

Because the decision it’s not based on any kind of desire to be truthful to history or an explanation of the potential for people to be cruel to one another. It was just using the old Hollywood Native trope as a template, wherein it’s just a given that they engage in human sacrifice, cannibalism, and the like.

You and I acknowledge he has appropriate grievances, but WoW doesn’t actually portray it as sympathetically in the game. It has the Amani continue being basically the same racist stereotypes of the savage native and sending us to kill him without a second thought. In fact, Zul’jin’s grievances in the trailer are the only time Zul’jin gets to speak in the story before we’re killing him. Then they did it again with Zul. Blizzard frames the complaint about Trolls being killed/displaced and wanting their land back, not as a morally gray conundrum to be pondered by anyone. The answer is clear. The Trolls must not succeed. And we have to kill them to stop them.

If what the Aztecs as a whole can be fairly be portrayed as altogether savage, dark, and warlike for their death toll from human sacrifice, why not the Spaniards, with an even bigger kill count resulting from genocide/displacement/colonization? And if there is indeed no moral judgement to be made, why describe any practices as dark, savage, and warlike and not just- you know, people being people no more/less capable of violence than the Spanish?

If the Spaniards had not arrived, the peoples of Mesoamerica would have indeed simply continued to live under the rule of the Aztecs, with wars and sacrifice. They would not have been summarily genocided/displaced in as massive numbers as they were under the Spanish.

And the Spanish also tortured and made war on fellow Europeans/Spaniards in their own lands, while also risking death in month long voyages to new worlds in order to engage in the genocide/enslavement/displacement/colonization in Mesoamerica.

No story that tries to call out the Aztecs/Aztec analogues as being exceptionally violent while not also bringing equal attention to the Spanish/Spanish analogues as having engaged in even more violence is being an honest impartial reflection of history.

I don’t JUST say genocide. I also mention both displacement. The killing of trolls and the threatened continued killing was what Azhara used to eventually get the Zandalari to the negotiating table, where she could displace their populations.

Night Elves, even the ones that revered nature, did not actually dwell on Mount Hyjal or apart from the rest of Kaldorei Empire society. Malfurion, for instance, was born with his twin brother Illidan in Val’sharah.. He lived outside Suramar and when he started studying the ways of nature under Cenarius, he did so right next door in Val’sharah. He, Tyrande, and Illidan were all citizens of the Kaldorei Empire.

Retcons in and of themselves are not my concern. Blizzard does retcons all the time. The introduction of Night Elves in WCIII is a massive retcon with more consequences than anything they’ve done since in WoW. I don’t dislike Night Elves.

What, I find more worth addressing is the decision in WoW’s writing to intentionally create a situation wherein they set up one race as being dark and backwards, introduce another race as expanding into their territory, having natives attack them, and then ending the whole story with them and killing/expelling the natives, and giving us periodic quests/dungeons where we go in and continue the job- and such actions are not a big deal worth moral framing… Until they also decide that performing such actions against another race is.

And yes, the bulk of my complaints about the writing are leveraged at WoW (which is why I say WoW and not Warcraft as a whole franchise), as it’s the game we’ve been playing for over a decade and a half, the game where most of these racist tropes pop up, and the game where future changes in writing can be implemented to address the issue.

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[/quote]

Classic Ayikass. Drakyn pointed out how you’d start doing this before this exchange even began…

This is what you’re doing now.

If you didn’t see the potential racism in those examples, how could you have picked them out?

Haitian Vodou, from which WoW’s voodoo draws sooo heavily to the point of barely bothering to change the names of different Lwa, nevertheless does not have evil gods, let alone any that bid people commit atrocities or perform human sacrifice. Hakkar is the only Aztec themed loa, being clearly based on Quetzalcoatl. Incidentally, Quetzalcoatl was an Azterc deity that specifically forbade human sacrifice in his name.

The kinds of divinities more likely to take human sacrifices that WoW draws on would actually be the Shinto and Pagan inspired deities of the Night Elves. Both traditions engaged in human sacrifice. Or the Titan Watchers the Dwarves revere, they’re obviously based off the Norse deities to whom people were sometimes sacrificed. Or the Church of the Light, which is clearly based on Abrahamic religions. So named because it was founded when Abraham- who was about to sacrifice his own son- made a pact with God who asked him to sacrifice his own son. And then later, when Jesus was offered himself up as a martyr. And the role of self-sacrifice in Islamic traditions is a whole discussion in itself.

This is what I mean when I say Trolls don’t just take obvious influence from the cultures of West Africa, Pecolumbian Mesoamerica, and the Pacific Islands, but rather also has them fiill the same narrative role in WoW that indigenous natives fill in turn of the century adventure stories. I.E. that of primitive war-like savages living in ruin-filled jungles, where hunt and potentially eat/sacrifice brave explorers and treasure hunters- when they aren’t being driven back.

Skylord Omnuron has been too gentle with the Wormwing harpies. He allows them to share a perch on this mountain just because they’re creatures of the air**. Well , not all creatures of the air are created equal.When the attacks on Hyjal began, the Wormwing went into a frenzy. They’re up there right now, assaulting a sacred shrine they once claimed to revere. I’m not troubled. **Now we have a reason to drive them from Hyjal, don’t we?”

Thiralee didn’t like sharing the perch on the mountain with them to begin with, and NOW she has a reason to drive them from Hyjal.

I have to repeat myself because you keep editing so much of the content from peoples’ posts that nobody can tell what you’re even refuting, especially because you yourself bother to offer any kind of references or sources. You don’t even agree with half the points you make yourself.

You can absolutely attribute motive to creative works. I mean, you try to claim Blizzard is not trying to be offensive, which is also attributing motive.

WoW is a fictional world created by human beings. WoW isn’t just Blizzard randomly banging away at a keyboard and producing a game. There are flesh and blood people that make decisions about what does/doesn’t get made, what does/doesn’t make it into the game, and what kind of experience they want to craft. And then the audience consumes, interprets, and critiques it - not as if Azeroth were a real place existing outside our minds- but as a creative work.

You can’t have fiction without context/meaning/intent because fiction is not real life. It is an intentional human fabrication.

Blizzard shows us plenty of stuff having to do with Night Elves that aren’t about the Elune’s Priests/Cenarius’ Druids. The Kaldorei Empire and Much of the War of the Ancients- of which a good chunk of Night Elves are living members/veterans- involved non-priests and non-druids.
As can be seen in this quest, which incidentally, stars Illidan, a long with so much of the Night Elf content in Legion.

But they did. If Queen Azshara has no interest in conquest, but also says her “Expeditionary forces set out to explore the world, and also spread its borders” and “ “Azshara expanded her dominion.” Also, the map went from…

To this.


The Night Elves killed/displaced the Trolls from their former boundaries.

You yourself admitted that Blizzard is not above having a race engage in imperialism and conquest, while refusing to call it out by name. You can recognize it when Humans do it to Night Elves, but apparently are blind when it happens to other races.

If I were a more disingenuous person, I’d accuse you of “being too sensitive” and claim that what the humans are doing isn’t actually imperialism because “Blizzard doesn’t call it that.” But I actually agree with you.

The Troll wars were just a continuation of the already justified genocide/displacement of the Trolls by Humans/Elves. They’ve already established Trolls as basically Hollywood savages, so slaughtering them and taking even more land when they dare to attack is just a given.

That’s how the map went from this…

To this…

Even before BfA. They used it to start slandering Garrosh in Cataclysm. They also had the bulk of Night Elf violence of WCIII be perpetrated by people either jacked up on demon juice or outright demons themselves.

Yeah it was messed up how quickly everyone got over Grommash. And yes, I’m acknowledging they got over it, just like Turalyon got over Illidan killing Xe’ra. Because if I were disingenuous person, I’d argue that they didn’t actually get over it, but they just had bigger concerns than dealing with the affairs of an alternate reality.

But while Grommash and the Iron Horde were being a jerks, the narrative acknowledged acknowledged it as being in the wrong and not justified in exterminating the Draenei or Azeroth. They kind of made a big chunk of the expansion fighting against them. Like they didn’t even bother trying to invent some, “Well you see the Draenei/Azeroth were just unreasonably violent from the start, so Grommash just did the thing all societies do,” argument.

No, Gnomes definitely. 80% of their population died in days, and among the survivors, many became Leper Gnomes. High Elves lost 90% in the attack on Qul’thalas before additional fighting and Garithos killed even more. Mulgore Tauren and Darkspear were literally described as being on the brink of extinction. They all lost more of their population than the Night Elves.

They were more significant genocides than the Burning of Teldrassil.

Also, Night Elves don’t have any issues with infertility or susceptibility to disease or advance aging.

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We also know in WoW that whelps aren’t adult dragons. Blizzard uses the terms it uses exclusively to refer to children and juveniles of any species to refer to Wrathion. Even within the logic of the universe, Wrathion is not an adult Dragon.

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