This reminds me of the time I had to find the answer to an esoteric question about social security benefits taxation back when I was in public accounting.
Call the IRS - “courtesy” hangup after an hour.
Call the IRS again - Another hour later: “Oh, you need to call another line”
Call other line - Another hour later “actually, you need to contact the SSA.” -click-
Call the SSA - “You need to call the IRS on that.” -click-
Call the IRS once more - “You need to call the SSA” “But I just did!” “It’s not in our department!” -click-
Either way, our justice is in another castle it seems… and another and another and another.
It was not about the discussion that the TE started, but that you are accusing this company again of latent racism, and I think that …goes them just too far.
Maybe they shouldn’t invoke themes of race into the game if they don’t want such scrutiny? Racism was a big factor in the story of arguably the most important character of the franchise; Thrall was literally an innocent child suffering the countless abuses of slavery simply because he shared the race with the army of demon pawns. Furthermore, the guy who shattered Frostmourne, vital to the victory against the most iconic villain of the franchise, is introduced to you in vanilla talking about how race does not determine honor.
Pointing out their awkward handling of factions that are directly analogous to IRL cultures is pretty fair.
It’s seriously funny to me when WoW gets hit as some woke franchise because they made playable black people and added in a Canon gay couple (only in multimedia though that you can just conveniently not advertise or release in say Russia).
When like, they did a story where colonial European dudes rampage through a Meoamerican styled city. And the ones with the English accents are the good guys.
Now if you interpret that as malicious or deliberate that’s another discussion. Personally seeing how they handle literally everything else I would be feeling charitable enough to just call them oblivious, but that whole business with CoD being blatant lying propaganda has me giving the whole company some Banner Bae tier side eye right now.
But no matter how you spin it that’s a weird story to tell. And I don’t think anyone (here at least) is accusing Golden or whomever of secretly being Mrs.Hitler. Just that it really feels like they’re not doing due diligence when playing with themes and concepts that’ll definitely rub reasonable people the wrong way if fumbled.
Which, we know they aren’t doing due dilligence. We know Golden/Danuser are tragically ignorant of Black history in the Western hemisphere given their various Juneteenth/related tweets (no other dev made tweets I saw, personally).
They’re doing the google searches to invoke the architectural/aesthetic motifs, but not the google searches about histories that they’re intentionally or accidentally invoking.
Golden basing War Crimes after the Nuremberg Trial is sort of the ur example for me.
If I was tasked with that, my immediate thought would be to find a book on Medieval Chinese law and order. There’s gotta be something on court proceedings back then, and if I’m very lucky maybe they tried a Mongol Warlord because that sounds like a great place to start.
I’m not an expert in Medieval Chinese Court proceedings, nor any court proceedings come to think of it, but that’s where I’d think to start. Because you really have to have a pretty rudimentary understanding of history if the concept of war crimes and trials begins and ends with N@ZIs.
You wouldn’t even have to read a book. If you’re writing something for a multimedia franchise of this size I figure you could probably score an interview with experts who’ve not just read but written books on the subject.
And the fun part is this is fantasy. So accuracy isn’t even sort of a concern. Dates and names aren’t really relevant. You’d just want to get a sense for how to provide a modicum of authenticity.
Like do you know how much fun I’d be having wandering around with a corporate credit card, bribing historians to talk with me at length about niche and obscure subjects?
Like hey again I don’t know the deadlines here. Maybe the writers get like a month and some Wikipedia skimming is all you’ve time to do. And you’re mostly just skimming WoWpedia articles to remember how to spell half of this, because fantasy names are frequently a ten car pile up of vowels.
But if that’s the case it’s a management issue. And as you’ve said they nail the authenticity of the visual themeing pretty well. So the art team at least seems to have time to research things.
Obviously this is just random hearsay on my part and I can’t back this up, but I once read that the quest writers in general are overworked and if they need to reference something for upcoming content, they’re just going to quickly doublecheck the quest database already in front of them or MAYBE skim Wowpedia, but they won’t do some deep-dive of the novels unless they’re informed about it because they need to move onto the next dozen quests about collecting pinecones afterward.
This goes back too. Golden’s imagining of how Thrall felt as a slave I first thought was her over indulging in incoherent fantasy, now given her Juneteenth/Tulsa/etc related tweets it’s evident she simply had no familiarity with historical slavery and what slaves felt and simply had an optimistic view on the whole thing
Edit oh btw last night Golden was praising herself for writing a brave story that tackled serious issues
It’s just- like survivors of slavery were around when we invented the ability to record sound. You can literally go hear them talk about it. They don’t mention any silver lining.
