and? none of this explains to me why you think i should have sympathy for koltira cause he was a dirty traitor , what should i like calia too just cause she had fwiends on the other side
She is a far bigger betrayer than Koltira, but you donât believe she should be punished.
But youâre okay with (and fully approve of) torturing a person into being a slave if they betray one battle.
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well not into being a slave, but the torture i could care less about. again i like the forsaken we got under sylvanas, nothings going to change that
Tell me something I donât know.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
I ainât reading that, but tell you what you keep humping saurfangs leg, and iâll keep enjoying my favourite race in the game
I told you to tell me something I didnât know.
i think thatâs a false dichotomy. itâs static vs dynamic, not just different flavors of static. at least, thatâs assuming the writers are competent, and if theyâre not, then the tension doesnât matter because it wonât amount to anything. rejection can change into other things.
It is a binary for The Forsaken. The world rejects them or accepts them. If the latter is true, their central tension/identity is gone. To this day, the description for The Forsaken as a playable race insists the world despises their existence.
Individuals changing perspective is one thingâThrall and Jaina forged a path contrary to the societies they came from. Both characters were often at odds with said societies, however, which was a tension that produced worthwhile stories. An entire world arbitrarily about-facing on that attitude (undead = evil) isnât meaningful development at all. It is a lazy contrivance to avoid telling stories around that tension, for whatever reason. I donât care what kind of meta morality Anduin carries with him, it is silly that a Faction at war with the Horde would look at those zombies that enjoy dining on corpses and think, âGolly gee, theyâre just people!â
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I donât think this is the case.
I think we can have a world where most people fear and revile the Forsaken - until you get to know them.
Sort of like Turalyon expresses the typical attitude when he meets Faol - but then feels the Light within him, and knows he is good.
For example- if things remain peaceful, I could see some event, like Naga raiding a Human coastal town, and maybe nearby Forsaken ships sail down the coast to fight off the Naga -
the Humans might see the Forsaken ships and the marching ghouls and fear the end has come - but then they beat back the Naga, clear the beach, and march off.
Before actually experiencing the âgoodâ that the Forsaken can perform, in person, most living people probably would be unaccepting.
I donât see it as one to the exception of the other- I think they can be reviled by the ignorant while finding acceptance by those who understand them.
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In the last two years Iâve come to believe (and Iâm probably way behind the literary scholarship here) that the most meaningful character development is found in a characterâs hypocrisy. Like Doc Holiday saying âIt would appear my hypocrisy knows no bounds.â
When a character does what they say, itâs just setting the stage for development. Itâs a baseline for a future hypocrisy. The circumstances behind that hypocrisy tell us so much more about the character. That was what used to be so fun about Sylvanas. She was such a hypocrite. Unfortunately, the circumstances of her hypocrisy became more and more nonsensical, until finally they tacked on a Nathanos shaped motivation that contradicted previous circumstances like that found in Edge of Night.
I speculate that the entirety of the Sylvanas book was trying to create a weak motivation that didnât sound too much like a justification, so people wouldnât feel like Blizzard was excusing genocide solely because the original motivation seemed too much like the latter. But thatâs just speculation.
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Iâll refer again to actual humanity, with all the bigotry and self defeating grudges that entails, and wonder at fictional creatures (some of different species) who have spent most of their existence warring with one another suddenly behaving rationally and with patienceâŚ
⌠towards zombies that stitch together monstrosities, feast on the flesh of the dead, and tinker with exciting new ways to make flesh slough off. And only recently supported someone who tried to genocide the world to feed souls to the Super Devil in Great Value Hell so he could grind them out of existence to turn the entire multiverse into his meatpuppet fanclub.
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yeah i mean i just donât know whether youâre grasping my point, and i donât really think this argument addresses what iâm saying. engaging with the tension looks like amelioration, among other things. i think youâre operating under the strange delusion that societal perspective isnât plastic, which clearly just is a false notion. no one is proposing an âarbitrary about-face,â and if you think someone is, i think youâve lost the thread.
Iâm describing what isâAnduin and Genn, namely.
You initially asked how can we sustain a revulsion to Warlocks and Undead and have it make sense. My answer is: by having them behave no better than actual people do, who are not even faced with the same existential crises or immediate blood drenched history that these fictional characters are.
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yeah i mean i really think thatâs fairly mild salsa. the entire druid class exists because of a massive cultural shift in the face of an existential crisis and bloody history. and if you really wanna get into how âactual peopleâ would react to something like deathwing, nâzoth, pandaria, ulduar, legion, etc. all happening in two decadesâ of time, we could try, but i think we both know thatâs a silly task.
Cultural shifts arenât the same as Us vs. Them mentality. At no point have I suggested everything remain stagnant. Iâm just saying itâs lame to ruin a factionâs identity in the pursuit of ârealism,â especially when that ârealismâ doesnât even track with behavior in reality.
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i donât think change constitutes ruination by virtue of itself, and iâve never said the forsaken need to be redone for the sake of ârealism.â
You said it didnât make sense for The Forsaken to remain reviled, which is the cornerstone of their fantasy.
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i guess weâre just gonna have to agree to disagree on this one. it seems to me that your version of the forsaken sort of leaves them bereft of any sort of tension at all. they dislike the world and the world dislikes them, and thereâs really nothing more to discuss on that score. excellent. lovely. quality worldbuilding.
The only part of the rejection trope thatâs narratively unsustainable in the long run is the idea that the Forsaken are all but Scourge minions still ; by now virtually everyone on Azeroth should be aware that the Forsaken are sentient, free-willed undead â so, people. But rejection in itself remains sustainable. There are many different reasons why you would still revile them, depending of who you are and which culture youâre from : because theyâre still rotting corpses, because they were shunned by the Light and largely canât (or rather, arenât supposed to) wield it anymore, because necromancy in general is considered to be an abomination and an intolerable infringement to the druidic vision of the cycle of life and deathâŚ
Same goes for Warlocks. Rationality and instances of individual heroism typically arenât enough to put an end to a situation of systemic discrimination that has its roots in cultural and societal factors.
So yes rejection is sustainable, you can keep it and still have it make sense. The subject is rather : should you keep it ? I think yes, because Iâm of the opinion that while the setting can and should be dynamic, it is the writersâ job and responsability not to stray from the racial fantasy and themes they initially presented as the defining characteristics of the race. When you introduce the players to a new race, you introduce them to a set of defining narrative features, and you tell them : âthis is what this race is aboutâ. Itâs a contract between the writers and the players. From that point on your job is to upheld and developt that fantasy, not to contradict it. If you contradict it youâre breaking the contract.
And being rejected by their living kin, in turn forcing them to reinvent themselves, strike new alliances and build themselves a new social circle, is a defining narrative characteristic of the Forsaken, so they should stick to it one way or another.
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Basically this. I think this is just a fundamental disagreement over what it means for the setting to be âdynamicâ.