And? That doesn’t change that PoC players who want to play elves might not want that elf to have to be vanilla.
I don’t know. I’m not a PoC, so I could be totally off-base.
Sounds like a retcon to me. A modifying retcon, but a retcon nonetheless.
Not really. Literally nowhere does it say all the Vrykul are pale, or white lmao
I am an Afro Indigenous Colombian IRL :^)
The Sunwell is now light based and arcane based. Different elves have different eye colors though they’re all exposed to the same magic, so different skin colors also apply independent of any RP lore necessitating x o y.
On the topic of race and historical cultural influences. I am curious at what point does such a thing become problematic in fantasy. I am somewhat of the opinion that there should be no lines drawn for cultural influence, however, I can understand the perspective of people who see things differently.
I have seen people complain about black characters having certain hair colors or eye colors, under the pretense that it was “White washing” or “Adhering to European concepts of beauty”.
Likewise, if that is problematic, isn’t it also problematic that Vrykul could have dark skin? Even though they are merely caricatures of Norse people, it is in the same line of thinking.
We can be less hypothetical here, in that Blizzard has received quite a bit of backlash for their Pygmy race, yet no one seems to complain about the similar caricature of Norse people evident in the Vrykul.
It really shows the hypocrisy evident in those who play the pseudo-moralistic game of identity politics, and to me, it’s kind of silly to really care about race and culture so shallowly.
A lot of discussion regarding race, gender, and sexuality in gaming often comes off, to me, as boarding with faked, unearned virtue, tokenism and blatent racism.
And it really comes down to players unable to let go of the reins regarding a franchise they never had any control over, or any right to control in the first place. You want black humans in Azeroth? I agree that would be cool. Black elves? Sure, I don’t see why not. You see Blizzard’s Pygmy race as a problematic caricature? Why weren’t you concerned with any other racial caricature evident in the lore?
Virtue signaling is hella toxic, and people just need to get over the fact that the creative direction of WoW is not up to them, nor are they entitled to be represented in that specific medium, marginalized group or otherwise. Just because that is an inconvenient truth doesn’t mean I am against representation, I’m not.
There is no fine line. That’s why things tend to get examined on a case by case basis and discussions are so important. But a good rule of thumb is to look at the relationship between the subjects.
But a good rule of thumb is that when subject A has a long standing history of institutionalized marginalization of subject B, it’s usually more problematic than vice versa. The former is usually a perpetuation of that marginalization in a way the makes equivocating them very difficult.
Also, who says people weren’t concerned with any other racial caricature (among other things) in the lore? People have been calling out, to one degree or another, the often offensive coding and connotations of ‘races’ in fantasy since the days of Burroughs, Howard, and Tolkien.
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I don’t think this is so much true, because historically, you’ll be hard pressed to find any group, be it ethnic, national, religious or otherwise, that wasn’t marginalized at some point, in some way, in their history.
I am more targeting the individual who is drawing a line between races as to say it’s fine for some and not fine for others. Which typically begins and ends with the amount of melanin in the skin.
If this doesn’t apply to you, then it wasn’t directed at you.
For me, it only becomes a problem if the peoples that are intended to “represent” my people IRL regularly get the villain bat.
So for example: Trolls. The one race in the game based on Latin American Indigenous people + AfroCaribbean/Afrolatino people + West African people (of which I am the first two categories), and Trolls regularly get the Villain Bat.
Meanwhile, before Battle for Azeroth (Waycrest Manor, etc), when’s the last time we had a 100% We Are Killing Humans dungeon? Even when it’s Human-lore-centric dungeon (Catacalysm’s Deadmines) there’s Horde races everywhere. Or Scholomance, which again, Horde races everywhere.
Off the top of my head, the only time we went into a instance that was purely Killing Humans and only Humans were the various Scarlet Crusade dungeons in Mists of Pandaria. When’s the last time we went into a dungeon to kill dwarves?
Meanwhile compare to the plethora of Undead, Orc, and Troll dungeons, or dungeons whose lore is rooted in Orcs and Trolls.
Yup.
Sure but say, the last time Anglo-Saxons were oppressed on ethno-pseudoracial lines was… what, the Norman conquest? Reducing contemporary history based on prior history ad absurdo is nonsensical and useless.
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But isn’t that the same baseline? I agree it is nonsensical and useless, and I apply that to every group. It is nonsensical and useless to say, at all, "My ancestors were oppressed, and therefore I am the arbiter of their justice, and I get to dictate what is and isn’t acceptable use of my culture, skin color, and other racial traits in works of fiction.
Especially when so often ethnic groups are socially consolidated into “White” or “Black” or “POC”
The 20th century was full of white people being marginalized, oppressed, and slaughtered by other ethnic groups of white people. So do they have the same say in what is or isn’t the proper way their culture can be represented in fiction? Or is that just a silly notion altogether? Which is my point.
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But Nordic people and their descendents were never largely systemically marginalized by people from the west coast of Africa, which is the situation we found ourselves in courtesy of the United States, where Blizzard is based.
Now if Blizzard existed back in the year 60 BC, after the Roman conquests in Germania and depicted an ideal Roman society as one in which there were virtually no Germanic peoples and in fact posited a creation of humanity seemingly intended to exclude Germanic peoples -while at the same time claiming they love Germanic people and view them as equals- I’d call that pretty problematic. I wouldn’t be surprised if Germanic peoples went, “Hey, that’s messed up!” and made a stink about it.
And I’m saying that one person who noticed one thing and didn’t notice another, doesn’t exist in some kind of vacuum. Just because they didn’t recognize the troublesome implications of something while arguing another doesn’t mean that nobody else recognized it. Some people just don’t realize/acknowledge such things until later.
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Well, this is awkward…
Nordic people were systematically marginalized by people from west Africa. Northwestern specifically. There are accounts of Nordic slaves in the Moorish and Islamic slave trade as late as the late 1700s, and people living in bondage in North Africa is still pretty common today.
And mean, it’s pretty frequent. You can write it off as an outlier if you want, but I would argue that you are the outlier in this case.
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Errr no. So right now, as I speak, there’s a humanitarian crisis in my home country of Colombia where Black and Indigenous leadership (community/tribal leaders, elected officials like mayors, and otherwise) are being assassinated basically every day for the past two years such that the UN has declared it a crisis.
Everytime Colombia has a civil war, righwing and leftwing groups both decide to seize Black and Indigenous territory to establish a base, for example.
And before then the colonial period, Black people were enslaved, and Indigenous people were subjugated in other ways (and regularly killed en masse to seize land).
So the oppression that exists today is a product of a continuity of violence for now five centuries. Emphasis on CONTINUITY.
Meanwhile Anglo Saxons… err well… the French oppressed them for two centuries… and then the British Empire had a continuous growth and expansion, oppressing, killing, and enslaving people the world over for the following 600 years.
POC is a US/US sphere of influence term. In the UK/UK sphere of influence its BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic). So in Colombia we use “personas de color”.
You mean the Irish? In the US they bought into Whiteness via historical processes but in the UK the Irish are still oppressed even though they’re “White”. If you mean Eastern Europeans, yes, Rus Supremacy is a thing in Eastern Europe, same as Germano Supremacy in Northern Europe, or etc in other parts of Europe. In fact, North Italians often consider South Italians Black, and the North French consider Southern French “dark”. And the North Spanish often consider the Southern Spanish suspiciously too “Moorish”. Etc.
These are all real histories.
However WoW is aggressively US-centric, where other macroregional histories are only barely touched on when an expansion is based on “Another Land”, e.g. Mists of Pandaria.
The Highmountain questline, where you reunify the various tribes and include a new people who are “dark”, can be read as a real life comparison to the Late Colonial Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes Natives unifying with local Black freed peoples.
This is ahistorical and false lol
No it isn’t, there’s a humanitarian crisis in Libya.
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They do get a say. Blizzard is mostly staffed by people whose ancestors are from the Isles, Northern/Central/Southern Europe. They do get to decide how they want to portray themselves, and others.
That’s also why people talk so much about increased diversity in the company. When you have a more even distribution of women, LGBT people, and non-white people in the story writing process, they have greater say in how they’re represented in the final product.
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Not all white people are Anglo-Saxons though. Furthermore on that, the issues plaguing your home is not at the Hands of Anglo-Saxon people either. This pretty much ties into my next point about how people are socially consolidated into generalized terms.
Irish, Slavs, Poles, Sami, Germanic jews, and even Germans, where Forced labor was an aspect of their reparations in the wake of WW2.
You seem to understand this, so again, why is it okay to say “This is problematic for my culture” but not okay for marginalized European ethnic groups?
No it’s not, research it.
Yes it is, I have been to several North African countries and seen it first hand.
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I have! Have a degree in such matters in fact.
Sure bud.
Didn’t say they aren’t? If a Romani from Eastern Europe gets mad about Vulpera or Draenei, then they’re more than entitled to get mad about it lmao
And also a better story!
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Maybe take a second look, because you are wrong in this instance.
Well, then you actually agree with me. Yet, it was you were having an issue with my original point. That it is pretty useless to dictate what is and isn’t an acceptable line when it comes to cultural or racial inspiration in fictional works.
It is indeed awkward.
The Barbary Coast pirates and the slave trade was carried out largely by North Africans. Not the West African populations from which the Atlantic slave trade got it’s chattel slaves. You’d have to cross the Sahara and the Sahel to get to West Africa and then continue on to the coast. Further away from the ports of Algiers or Rabat than Paris was.
The people of West Africa, such as the Yoruba, Ashanti, and Igbo, weren’t raiding the UK, Norway, and France.
But still, I agree with you that the way those Moors treated their European slaves was terrible. I’d agree that Europeans had a pretty legitimate gripe as to how they were portrayed in Algerian popular media.
Also, the victims of the Barbary coast pirates weren’t sold into a inheritable system of chattel slavery. A good chunk, if not most, were actually ransomed back to their countries of origin.
Yeah, it’s pretty frequent. It’s like some people are okay with stuff like women getting more representation, but draw the line at non-white people, and some people are okay with that but draw then draw the line at LGBT people.
It’s like every time we want to increase representation in media to reflect a work, there’s always someone coming out of the woodwork acting like we haven’t had this discussion a hundred times before.
Complaining about pandering and tokenism, and asking why people are only making a big deal now, and how come they haven’t heard of all this oppression before, and how it’s all part of a political agenda, and how it’s politically correct culture run amok, and how it’s really the non-women/non-LGBT/white people who are actually oppressed.
And constantly switching goal posts, searching desperately for even the smallest justification as to why this representation for an underrepresented marginalized is bad.
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So you can see the issue with homogenizing ethnic groups based on skin color and even regional proximity. Which is kind of the problem here. In the US, basically if one person is white, they are not allowed to speak on racial issues… Even though Europe has diverse ethnic groups, man of them marginalized in one way or another.
So again, drawing the line at anything is a bit pointless to me. Representation is fine, imo. I get people don’t always see things that way, and I address them as much as anyone else here. Ultimately, no one is entitled to representation in fiction. It is not their intellectual property to dictate it so… And it is silly to dictate it at all, and say “This representation is okay, and this representation is not okay”
I am against drawing lines of any kind, and I think being mad about representation or lack their off is silly and useless in all respects.
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The “White” population of the US is derived, in large part, from the same populations that engaged in the Atlantic slave trade: the people of the British, Dutch, Spanish, French, German empires, as well as the United States, Hispanola, and several American countries… to name a few. And that’s just the couple centuries of slavery part. There’s also all the stuff each successive generation kept doing afterwards in the US and abroad.
So no, it’s not the same as equating the unrelated groups of the West African southern coast whose descendents now live in the Americas to the politically/culturally distinct North Africans of the Barbary coast centuries ago.
And while you say representation is fine, you then call into question the legitimacy of the idea that people historically starved for representation in media might welcome or daresay ask for more it in properties they otherwise enjoy. You cast it as some kind of unreasonable demand born of privileges or special treatment, when the truth is that people just want to enjoy the same kind of treatment that straight/‘white’/male audiences in the US have enjoyed for centuries- and only shared with others bit by begrudging bit.
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The Highborne transition to High Elves was as a result of being cut off from Nordrrassil. They had however had used the name Quel’dorei, which means Children of the High since the days before the Sundering. Quel’dorei is simply another word for Highborne. That’s why the title of the relevant in game book used to be “Exile of the Quel’dorei”.
I am aware thank you, ergo my mention of the retcon.
Apparently it means children of noble birth.
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