|
sirtommygunn posted:Arthas has to lose any semblance of free will or personality right away because otherwise he wouldn't listen to Tichondrius in mission 1, so for the rest of the campaign he's just a guy who follows orders. His friendship with Kel'Thuzad is the only interesting development in his character but KT has to drop a ton of exposition so we don't even get to see that really. I was wondering if they could improve the story by compressing it so that Archimonde shows up halfway and the second half is about Arthas reacting to being sidelined, but the lack of free will undercuts that and it would end up depending on tedious details about how the mind control/soul loss or whatever works exactly so that he ends up okay murdering all the humans but not okay with being less important than he thought.
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 16:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 21:43 |
|
|
Cradok posted:I wonder... swap the Undead and Orc campaigns, and then set half the Undead on Kalimdor against the Orcs and the Night Elves. Start with Quel'thalas, pare it down to two missions and merge it with Uther, then off to Kalimdor for four missions, then finish off with Dalaran. It gives you a break from Arthas to go and see how Thrall is doing. Play out Orc as normal mostly, but weave in a reason for the Scourge to need something on Kalimdor. (Do you ever face the Scourge in the Orc campaign? Maybe put in a Orcs vs. Scourge forward staging force or something if not, to give you that match-up). I'd agree the Undead and Orc campaigns need to be swapped, though I think Kalimdor itself is a huge part of the problem. Like, yes, we need some idea of where a whole new faction comes from without just saying they were in hiding on the main continent all along, but forcing a huge chunk of the story to shift to another continent also sequesters things too much between the two main halves of the game. I think you need a really radical change to things to make it hang together better. Like "give up on the Night Elves" radical, or maybe at least their backstory. Make them a product of the breaking of the Sunwell and Quel'thalas, either a breakaway faction of the elves who went even more primitivist over the centuries or a group chasing a new source of power. (Yes, I know this massively steps on a later subfaction. Even so.) Or work with the Nagas as the fourth faction, taking their opportunistic shot. Meanwhile the orcs could have run away into the ruins of southern Stormwind, down near the Black Morass, or into the far north of Lordaeron where they are beset by the invading Scourge as well as the Alliance. Somewhere out of the way to start with but not completely detached from the first half of the game.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 20:39
|
|
|
Been i while since I watch the original but was Archimonde model always that small? Dude look like at most a head taller then the dreadlord right next to him compared to the giant from my childhood?
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 20:43
|
|
|
Chainrider37 posted:Been i while since I watch the original but was Archimonde model always that small? Dude look like at most a head taller then the dreadlord right next to him compared to the giant from my childhood?
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 20:51
|
|
|
Chainrider37 posted:Been i while since I watch the original but was Archimonde model always that small? Dude look like at most a head taller then the dreadlord right next to him compared to the giant from my childhood? Archimonde is basically however tall he feels like being at any given moment. Helping matters is that he probably shrank himself down somewhat to make the summoning process easier.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 20:52
|
|
|
BlazetheInferno posted:Archimonde is basically however tall he feels like being at any given moment. Helping matters is that he probably shrank himself down somewhat to make the summoning process easier. "Look, we've got a deadline for this one, so you're getting Archimini." "Don't you mean Archimonde?" "No, portal energy requirements don't scale linearly, we can have him here in five minutes if he's the size of a mouse."
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 20:53
|
|
|
Bigger Archimonde Hypothesis.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 20:54
|
|
|
disposablewords posted:I think you need a really radical change to things to make it hang together better. Like "give up on the Night Elves" radical, or maybe at least their backstory. Make them a product of the breaking of the Sunwell and Quel'thalas, either a breakaway faction of the elves who went even more primitivist over the centuries or a group chasing a new source of power. (Yes, I know this massively steps on a later subfaction. Even so.) Or work with the Nagas as the fourth faction, taking their opportunistic shot. Meanwhile the orcs could have run away into the ruins of southern Stormwind, down near the Black Morass, or into the far north of Lordaeron where they are beset by the invading Scourge as well as the Alliance. Somewhere out of the way to start with but not completely detached from the first half of the game. Personally, I'm tired of writing fix fics, tempting though it is to try to write 'how to make all of this better.' Blizzard doesn't give a drat and their willingness to change things depends on what enters the minds of the executives as they do lines of coke off a sobbing intern. But I'm increasingly of the view, as I play through Reforged in this LP, that WC3 maybe should either have been about the Scourge and Arthas' story, or about Kalimdor and Thrall and the night elves. Either keep playing with the sand castles set up in previous games, or move to new ones like how WC2 left Stormwind and the Dark Portal behind until the expansion. If there was an alternate mega-campaign just about Jaina's story through the game, I'd probably play it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 21:03
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:If there was an alternate mega-campaign just about Jaina's story through the game, I'd probably play it. That's a pretty neat idea actually, yeah. If you fudge the timeline a little for this campaign then she's present for all four.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 21:10
|
|
|
disposablewords posted:I'd agree the Undead and Orc campaigns need to be swapped, though I think Kalimdor itself is a huge part of the problem. Like, yes, we need some idea of where a whole new faction comes from without just saying they were in hiding on the main continent all along, but forcing a huge chunk of the story to shift to another continent also sequesters things too much between the two main halves of the game. Eeh, I think that's going too far into just rewriting the game. I'm just looking into making what's there work better.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 21:11
|
|
|
Tenebrais posted:That's a pretty neat idea actually, yeah. If you fudge the timeline a little for this campaign then she's present for all four. For this campaign she's around doing stuff for most of it and then the end could be her version of thralls Island adventures.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 21:24
|
|
|
I really liked the undead campaign. You come off a super defensive human army fending off waves of attacks in multiple missions and suddenly you're just this unstoppable undead juggernaut that tears through everyone it sees for like 6 missions straight. Like you roll into Quel'thalas and lol these loving elves think they can.. ouch.. hey ouch.. stop that... I'm trying to...loving Sylvanas! It's a great feeling because you get necromancers at that point and every one of the elf dead gets put into a meat wagon and carted around for skeletons to show up later and eviscerate more elves. And then you get to raise Sylvanas into a banshee for daring to cross you. And then there's Dalaran where Archimonde just tears those foofy mages down and it's all so good. Like I enjoyed the human campaign but the undead campaign is where young me fell in love with the game because of just how well the Scourge play as an offensive army. The truly disgusting things you can do just with necrowagon makes it incredibly fun.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 21:42
|
|
|
Oh yeah the Undead campaign is very fun to play just because Undead is an awesome faction.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 21:46
|
|
|
BlazetheInferno posted:Archimonde is basically however tall he feels like being at any given moment. Helping matters is that he probably shrank himself down somewhat to make the summoning process easier. If you have sufficient magical power, size is a relative matter.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 22:31
|
|
|
RevolverDivider posted:Oh yeah the Undead campaign is very fun to play just because Undead is an awesome faction. And some of the mission gimmicks are pretty fun. It just is a mess story wise.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 22:46
|
|
|
The narrative in the undead campaign feels a bit dull because the Scourge is on the offensive for 7/8 missions and the one time they're not it's by their own choice. Every single mission is a variation on "the dreadlords have an errand for you": Arthas, go find the cultists Arthas, go collect the dead necromancer Arthas, go resurrect the necromancer(x3) Arthas, go talk to your boss' boss Arthas, go find the manual to summon your boss' boss Arthas, go summon your boss' boss It would've been nice if there was SOMETHING with higher stakes than Tichondrius whining that you're too slow(which he does anyway). Personally, I'd do a little more with the rift between the Legion and the Lich King, have a mission or two where the Scourge works towards their own goals when the dreadlords aren't looking, possibly subbing it in for one of the elf missions and have there be some kind of credible threat against the Scourge like reworking the Ashbringer timeline a bit into Mograine showing up to avenge Uther with his sword that can actually permanently kill the undead leadership.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 22:58
|
|
|
Asehujiko posted:Personally, I'd do a little more with the rift between the Legion and the Lich King, have a mission or two where the Scourge works towards their own goals when the dreadlords aren't looking, possibly subbing it in for one of the elf missions and have there be some kind of credible threat against the Scourge like reworking the Ashbringer timeline a bit into Mograine showing up to avenge Uther with his sword that can actually permanently kill the undead leadership. Maybe a mission where you need to complete a certain objective, while a group of Dreadlords and THEIR minions are working towards another objective. You need to complete a certain amount of THEIR objective(to prove you're allied, helping out, not just stalling.) while also completing YOUR objective first. If you ignore their objective they might complete "too much" of it for you to get your part in, if you help them too much, they might complete it before you complete yours.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 23:05
|
|
|
Asehujiko posted:The narrative in the undead campaign feels a bit dull because the Scourge is on the offensive for 7/8 missions and the one time they're not it's by their own choice. Adding to this, the only times Arthas has what I refer to as an adventure segment, it's playing Metal Gear until you have a big enough squad and the preamble to getting Kelly into a wagon to do the base building. The adventure segments where you're primarily focused on a dungeon crawl between base missions are what make WC3 exciting for me, or changing the flow beyond "Kill base, do thing and do it again" gameplay.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 23:07
|
|
|
How about the campaign starts with Arthas just killed the king and fighting you way out?
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2023 23:13
|
|
|
ChaosDragon posted:How about the campaign starts with Arthas just killed the king and fighting you way out? That would be neat and at least a little more time with those named captains.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2023 00:25
|
|
|
I'm going off decades-old childhood memory here, but I recall the Warcraft 2 manual does talk about the Guardian of Tirisfal, and I think it does mention that they do get mega-boosted by the mages and it's more than a title.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2023 09:56
|
|
|
Yeah, the WC2 manual is on the Internet Archive and even there Aegwynn outright states that the Order of Tirisfal were granted immense power and longevity to perform their duties protecting the world from the Twisting Nether, though by what exactly she doesn't say. So there was some source of some kind of boost, explicitly one that let her live over a thousand years. And then she passed down her powers to her son, which is also something found even in the WC1 manual, then blah blah blah power corrupts etc.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2023 16:35
|
|
|
If there are any goons reading this thread who identify as Native American or have Native American heritage, I preemptively offer my deepest condolences for what's coming up in the next campaign now that I'm done recording the first mission.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2023 16:42
|
|
|
The tauren's lovely cowboy movie pastiche of "noble savages" is pretty bad, but I'm really mystified by how Blizzard insists on having a Jamaican/West African stereotype in every single game. … it's racist voodoo movie tropes, to go with their racist cowboy movie tropes, isn't it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2023 20:39
|
|
|
Those stereotypical characters do all tend to talk about or display Hollywood understandings of voodoo, including Tosh wearing voodoo dolls on his person in Starcraft 2. So... yes.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2023 22:53
|
|
|
disposablewords posted:Yeah, the WC2 manual is on the Internet Archive and even there Aegwynn outright states that the Order of Tirisfal were granted immense power and longevity to perform their duties protecting the world from the Twisting Nether, though by what exactly she doesn't say. So there was some source of some kind of boost, explicitly one that let her live over a thousand years. And then she passed down her powers to her son, which is also something found even in the WC1 manual, then blah blah blah power corrupts etc. There is enough titan stuff lying around to grant someone all that power and more.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2023 23:08
|
|
|
WC3 made me laugh a lot, at it and not with it, as a lovely thirteen years old, from the other end of the world, who knew just about nothing, with its noble savage stuff, and it wasn't even in a lovely teen way, I actually understood that it was bad and offensive and that's not something lovely teen me was any good at, I haven't actually played that campaign in about two decades and I'm so ready to learn that it was actually infinitely worse.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2023 23:37
|
|
|
Sounds like there's going to be a theater director who's suddenly getting a very long talking-to in the near future...
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2023 00:42
|
|
|
For whom it concerns, the 'lore' post going up tomorrow is going to be part American history lesson, part lore essay. This mission made me very uncomfortable in ways that I suspect Blizzard did not intend, and I think my non-American readers will need some context and explanation as to why. Discussing the Problems I Have with this mission eats up enough of the update as it is. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 01:54
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:For whom it concerns, the 'lore' post going up tomorrow is going to be part American history lesson, part lore essay. It's ok. We put up with the discomfort of having Americans around most of the time, we can manage.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 04:28
|
|
|
SirPhoebos posted:I never heard of tefilin being called a 'phylactary'. Old, but a clue to this effect was in this year’s Jeopardy Tournament of Champions episode that just re-aired today, which is why I thought of it (and why I had heard of the actual usage of phylactary in the first place). It was a triple stumper.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 05:43
|
|
|
Gridlocked posted:It's ok. We put up with the discomfort of having Americans around most of the time, we can manage.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 09:23
|
|
|
Horde 1: Manifest Destiny Put thoughts of Arthas and the Scourge and Archimonde aside for now. It's time to resume Thrall's story.   I knew it. Can we confirm our location? Is this Kalimdor? We traveled due west, as you instructed. This should be it. You really think Medivh would have given the Horde a map, considering how important this was. My son is a high-stakes gambler. Whether a situation needs to be a high-stakes gamble or not. No, Warchief. Not since we got separated. Hmmm. Prepare to move out. If our comrades did make it here, we should be able to find them along the coast.It strikes me how similar this is to the new prologue missions in Reforged. Thrall and some troops wash ashore on an unknown coast after their ships were damaged and Thrall is looking for Grom. And, spoiler alert, some natives will be hostile to Thrall and some will help him and join the Horde.  The Horde campaign of course assumes that you did not play the prologue. Thrall is back to square one and the Horde as a faction is re-tutorialized.  So, remember in the minor race compendium lore posts I made how there's a bunch of animalistic minor races characterized as barbaric, xenophobic, and extremely hostile to everyone? Welcome to the campaign that's the source of most of them. A new continent means a lot of new creeps, which means new races that you're meant to slaughter guilt free. The Horde's colonization and ethnic cleansing of Kalimdor begins with an old favorite, murlocs. Note the big skeleton to the north. Hostile Primitive Barbarian Native Race Counter: 1  So in your timeline, Stormwind colonized Kalimdor? A little. Port Llane declared independence during the Third War in my timeline and proclaimed itself a free city beholden to no one. I'm told that the Kalimdor part of the Third War in my timeline went considerably worse for Azeroth than in yours, but by then I was an invalid who couldn't recognize my own wife. Not that I ever did know who she really was, I suppose. I made sure you were well taken care of, Isidora. You had earned that much. Thrall, did you really think Medivh launched you and the Horde at Kalimdor because he wanted the Horde to be at peace?  Centaurs, if you'll recall, are Warcraft's primary overt homage to the Mongols. And are intrinsically twisted and evil because the man and woman who fell and love and created the centaurs and their offspring were from wildly different cosmic forces and their coupling was an abomination against nature. Can't even blame Danuser for that one, Maraudon was in vanilla WoW. Hostile Primitive Barbarian Native Race Counter: 2  The game does not expect you to actually save the tauren, so if you do they just stand around and can't be interacted with.  Here's a new batch of creeps, the quilboar! A mindlessly hostile and xenophobic race of pig-people. Hostile Primitive Barbarian Native Race Counter: 3  And you really had nothing to do with my condition? You think dragon-kind even knew that some humans can develop a degenerative brain disorder that degrades your mental capacity and memories? You, and humans at large, place entirely too much store in your self-proclaimed role as the starring actors in Azeroth's story. Well, Arthas kind of is the main character- Get on with the scene. Now. For those unaware, I am an American. I am also white. I am a citizen of a nation built on the oppression, exploitation, and extermination of native peoples, and I am very fortunate to have been born into the privileged racial majority of the US.  A very common historical justification in the US for this behavior was proclaiming native peoples to be inherently primitive, barbaric, and violent. Fundamentally lesser than white people as immutable biological fact.  Warcraft's portrayal of race, proclaiming that a given race is always like X and Y as an inherent and universal (minus the occasional special exception) fact, has always rubbed me the wrong way. Especially when this race essentialism is often used to justify guilt-free slaughter of clearly sentient people.  While I like creeps as a mechanical idea, Warcraft 3's use of sentient races to be mindlessly butchered feels very wrong to me.  I do sincerely credit Chris Metzen for taking a significant step forward in Warcraft 3 with the orcs and the Darkspear trolls. I also sincerely blame Chris Metzen for repeating the same racist, backwards tropes with the other minor races of Warcraft 3, in the same game where he succeeds in refashioning the orcs themselves.  Ah yes, harpies. An entire species suffering from a universal genetic blood curse driving them all murderously insane through no fault of their own. Hostile Primitive Barbarian Native Race Counter: 4  This entire mission felt uncomfortable for me. On paper it's a simple and heroic enough story.  Neither the Horde nor these new races even try to talk to each other in this mission. We know they can communicate, per the previous rescuee who said the quilboars had been talking about other survivors. They just don't.  Until now, just in case you didn't pick up the hints that of the native races of Kalimdor, the tauren are the Good Ones.   Seeking destiny? Hmmm. It will find you in time, young one. However, there is an Oracle far to the north which might be able to- North? But there's an army of those horse men marching north. What?! No! My village is in danger!Thrall's use of the word 'destiny' here set off further alarm bells in my head, but for now, Cairne's a pretty cool old dude and I like him.   I never did meet Cairne. I'm told he was a great man. He was at the very least a good man, and oftentimes that is enough.  Er, Thrall immediately ignored Cairne and plowed into an army of murlocs?  THAT'S MY BOY! At least on Story, Cairne is not actually in any danger until you catch up with him. The reward for all this slaughter is an item that increases Thrall's HP by 150.  Once you reach Cairne, it's just fending off a few waves of centaurs.  Interesting detail here, the centaur champion is a woman! Yes, there are women centaur models with humanoid-appropriate boobs.   And you fear the marauders will overtake you. Yes. The devils' speed cannot be matched on the plains. Kalimdor's geography is interesting. In theory, there's a vaguely African vibe to much of it. In practice, though, especially in Warcraft 3 I think things make more sense if you think of Kalimdor as North America, particularly California and the rest of the Pacific Coast where Blizzard is headquartered.   I do like Thrall and Cairne meeting, for the record. While I'm extremely disgruntled with a lot else about this mission, and the tauren as a blatant pastiche of Native American tribes of the Great Plains is, uh, a discussion I'll have another time, I do like Cairne himself as a character and what this meeting tells you about Thrall as a person.  I hope you like noble savages, because the floodgates have opened.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 14:08
|
|
|
Blood Trail So, I think that it's time for a history lesson. I have Feelings about the depiction of the Horde in Kalimdor, Warcraft's 'minor races' in general, and Blizzard's views on these things at large. I believe that Blizzard's writing is heavily informed by a particular period of American history that has an enduring and heavily sanitized popularity in American pop culture, so I'm going to deal with the history first before explaining how I feel that history impacts Blizzard's writing.  The painting 'American Progress' by John Gast, 1872. Everything you need to know about how white Americans saw the 19th century in one image. Outside the initial colonization of North America and the American Revolution, I believe that by far the most romanticized period in US history is the expansion of the American West during the 19th century following the Louisiana Purchase. If you've ever played an Oregon Trail game or seen anything dealing with the Wild West, this is the time period I'm talking about. This was a time of rapid expansion of the United States' borders, immense economic prosperity, imperial wars of conquest, genocide against non-whites, and the bloodiest war in US history in terms of American lives lost. The title for the gameplay update, 'Manifest Destiny,' was a term coined in 1845 by a newspaper columnist advocating for the annexation of the then-independent Republic of Texas, writing "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." He used the phrase again, in a much more influential column, arguing in favor of the minor international crisis with Britain known as the Oregon Question where he proclaimed that the United States had a special, God-given destiny, writing "And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us." This man argued that the British Empire was inherently incapable of spreading democracy and 'proper Western virtues' and that the time had passed to a new and rightful inheritor of North America. If any of my foreign readers are feeling a deep sense of instinctive terror at this point, you should be. 'Manifest Destiny' became synonymous with this period of colonial conquest in the United States, much as Britain's corresponding wars were famously characterized as being driven by 'God, Gold, and Glory.' The popular idea in the United States was that the country had been charged with a special, divine destiny by God to rule over all territory, no matter who might stand in the way. White peoples could be negotiated with. Others could not.  The painting 'Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way' by Emanuel Leutze, 1861 This was also a period of extreme violence and near-endless wars of conquest against those deemed lesser. In 1846, the Mexican-American War began when the United States annexed Texas, which Mexico considered to still be rightfully Mexican territory - Texas had moved to secede and join the United States because the United States condoned slavery. From 1861 to 1865, the American Civil War raged over whether slavery should be allowed. At the tail end of the century, the Spanish-American War erupted in 1898 and ended in the US seizing many of Spain's colonial possessions. And throughout it all, the Native American peoples of North America were butchered. I am not Native American, and I must acknowledge that my knowledge of Native American history and culture is extremely limited. Yet, I feel that I don't need to be Native American to feel a deep and visceral disgust over the United States' treatment of Native Americans, during this time period or ever. Being from the American Deep South, the specific manifestation I am most familiar with is the Trail of Tears, the ethnic cleansing of the southeastern United States of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations and forced relocation to 'Indian Territory.' My non-American readers might not be aware of the Native American 'reservations' in the United States. As the United States seized land belonging to North America's native peoples, those residents who weren't simply killed were typically forcibly relocated to marginal lands deemed non-valuable to white settlers migrating West. And when the United States discovered that there was something valuable on a reservation (most often gold), they ignored the treaties and took it. Other Native American peoples (especially children) were abducted from their homes and placed in special schooling districts that tried to 'school the Indian out of them.' This is, flatly, cultural genocide, and it was standard practice throughout American and European cultural domains. Games like Oregon Trail, and most depictions of the Wild West, would have you believe that the United States west of the Mississippi was largely uninhabited, a virgin land ripe for brave settlers. This is not true. The western expansion of the United States was paved with the bones of indigenous peoples and mortared with the blood of those who tried to defend their homes. Which brings us to Kalimdor. Blizzard's depiction of Kalimdor bears a lot of striking similarities to romanticized notions of the American West during the 19th century, I feel. Wide open plains, distant mountains, a very warm color palette in gold and orange and brown, to contrast the cooler colors of green and blue back east (and Kalimdor is literally the far west of the established setting). There's no visible established empires here, just tribes of primitive barbarians. There is no question of the morality in slaughtering the centaurs, quilboars, murlocs, and harpies. While clearly capable of communicating with the orcs, both sides attack on sight. Instead, the only peaceful interactions come with the one native group where both sides suddenly decide to talk. Our viewpoint I do feel that this comparison has limits, the night elves we have coming up certainly could be interpreted as fitting into this particular metaphor, but they're so strongly a collection of very specific Western fantasy ideas that I'm going to discount them from this particular discussion, at least in this post. Blizzard is, after all, based in California on the US Western coast. I am not from this region and have only visited it briefly, but I find it very believable that a lot of Blizzard's leadership would have grown up on a diet of this romanticized view of American expansion in the West. Certainly we know that Chris Metzen is a big Western fan, something that comes across very blatantly in the Starcraft franchise. If you're not familiar with US history, you might be a little confused by me linking the 'minor races' of Warcraft and Blizzard writing them as intrinsically hostile and evil to American cultural depictions of Native Americans. Throughout about the last century or so of American history, the preference in pop culture for depicting Native American peoples in the US had been benevolently but patronizingly racist (see Disney's Pocahontas, the Oregon Trail games, the tauren in Warcraft, goddamn Humba-Wumba if anyone in this thread is also watching Chaos Argate's Banjo-Tooie Let's Play). But there's a long, ugly history of depicting Native Americans in US pop culture in considerably less, uh, 'flattering' ways. Nor is that purely history. We need look no further than 2017 for the Game of Thrones directors explicitly evoking old film stereotypes of Native Americans to depict an attack on 'civilized' white people by savage barbarian hordes. This is a staple of older Westerns in particular, 'taming the savage frontier' and full of menace for the righteous and heroic white colonists, especially full of sexual menace towards the pure and virginal white women. Now, I can absolutely believe that all of this was unintentional on Blizzard's part. I don't doubt for a second that there's a serious problem with deeply ingrained racism at Blizzard, but I'm willing to be ambivalent about whether Blizzard was consciously evoking the aesthetics and ideas of the American conquest of the 19th century or whether Metzen and company were just big fans of media depicting this time period and never thought critically about it. But any time an American writer sits down and portrays a people from across the sea (or across the stars, in sci-fi works) settling a new frontier of bounty and encountering hostile natives, my eyebrows begin a rapid migration towards the ceiling.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 14:09
|
|
|
I was born and raised in California, and our history/education with respect to Native Americans is a bit different. It's worth noting that California was controlled by the Spanish, and the Spanish established missions up and down California to "educate" and convert the natives. So a lot of the genocide had already happened before the US took over the territory (the missions were established around 70ish years prior to the US annexing California). And when the territory was annexed, a lot of the history was about mining for gold (especially in northern California, which is where I was educated at the time), and local native tribes were really only talked about in context of the missions and in context of Spain (we did, of course, learn about the Trail of Tears and other things that occurred in other parts of the country). For all the horrifying history they signify, I would recommend visiting at least one mission if you're ever out in California again. Hell, the reason that a lot of our cities are named after saints is because that's the closest mission to the city. Tons of roads and cities are named in spanish, and you pretty much can't exist in the state without getting at least a cursory understanding of the spanish words for road, ocean, saint, and the like. So a lot of our local history is much less about the natives and much more about the Spanish, for what that's worth.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 15:30
|
|
|
I was gonna talk about how lazy fantasy writing is the root of Blizzard’s portrayal of culture, but then I realized something as I was pondering the history of “noble savage” portrayals in lazy fantasy. Why are both the Tauren and the Orcs noble but savage people grouped into tribes, led by spiritual warriors connected to nature, and bearing elements of nomadic lifestyle tropes in their culture? Because they’re both “rehabilitated” depictions of Native Americans that took different routes to get there. The Tauren are explicitly Native Americans, and thus inherit the “noble savage” depiction. Pocohontas or the Last Mohican, sad and noble survivors who represent a deeper connection to nature that is lost to the industrialized West. Well meaning but problematic in their own way, which I’m sure will be expanded upon by Cythereal. OG orcs though? While Tolkien’s orcs are industrial monsters (brutal metal armor and weapons, home defined by fire and smoke), the real source of the pop Orc depiction is Gygax and D&D. And Gygax was a racist motherfucker who loved Cowboy and Indian shows. So when he made his bad guys, he made them Native Americans. Like, nearly explicitly. That’s where all the loincloths, totems, raiding, and elements of nomadic culture come from with the Pop Orc. And Blizzard just took that aesthetic for Orcs vs. Humans. Plus Sam Didier’s metal head and pop fantasy preferences, of course. So when WC3 rolls along and Metzen gets it in his head to rehabilitate the Orc depiction, he runs along the first well worn track that comes to mind. The same way white authors rehabilitated depictions of Native Americans for 50 years prior. He makes them “noble savages”. I don’t think anyone at Blizzard even noticed either. Orcs by then we’re their own thing, stubbornly clinging to age old tropes, but with enough distance that people forgot that “savage uncultured horde” used to mean “Indian” to American audiences. I wonder if the writing team ever sat down with the orcs and Tauren and wondered how they ended with two “noble savage” tropes. If someone did, they probably didn’t have a lot of pull anyway.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 15:47
|
|
|
I said before that the Orc campaign was my favorite one but it’s not for any of the reasons you went over and I’m not gonna defend any of the depictions Blizzard did here. As far as gameplay, this is a pretty bog standard adventure map which I mentioned before is a welcome change of pace from the unending base building stuff of the Undead campaign, and where I think the campaign shines is mixing up the scenarios Thrall and co. find themselves in way more than Arthas, Errand Boy.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 15:55
|
|
|
Dirk the Average posted:I was born and raised in California, and our history/education with respect to Native Americans is a bit different. It's worth noting that California was controlled by the Spanish, and the Spanish established missions up and down California to "educate" and convert the natives. So a lot of the genocide had already happened before the US took over the territory (the missions were established around 70ish years prior to the US annexing California). And when the territory was annexed, a lot of the history was about mining for gold (especially in northern California, which is where I was educated at the time), and local native tribes were really only talked about in context of the missions and in context of Spain (we did, of course, learn about the Trail of Tears and other things that occurred in other parts of the country). The missions didn't cover the whole state and there was still a lot of genocide done by settlers after the Spanish, especially in far northern California. There were multiple protracted campaigns of genocide done by settler militias funded by the state and feds. Many of the rancherias started as concentration camps set up for the survivors of mostly wiped out tribes. California also used to have a system of slavery set up for natives where they enacted laws targeting them so they could be arrested, and then allow white men to "buy their debt to society" and keep them as slaves. The state of California was built on genocide and theres a lot of brutal stuff that is swept under the rug . Where I am theres an island in the bay where a local tribe would gather for ceremonies. At some point the men would usually leave on a food run. A local militia from the town nearby waited for this and massacred hundreds of women and children left behind, and then up until the 1970s people would go graverobbing on the island digging up the bones of those massacred.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 16:10
|
|
|
I'm going to offer an alternate take here. In the Ramayana (An ancient Hindu epic), Lord Ram meets the Vanaras, a group of Forest dwelling ape people. Here he befriends Hanuman, the great hero of the apes and Hanuman's friend the exiled ape king Sugriva. Ram helps Hanuman and Sugriva by killing Sugriva's brother, Vali. Here we see Lord Ram meeting an unfamiliar tribe of beast people who are different from him in culture, befriending one set and fighting against another. (Notably, Vali isn't actually evil per the text, but Ram had picked a side by that point) So is the Ramayana racist? I mean probably, but I'm going to be incredibly presumptuous here and say that it's not framed in the racism of American colonialism. The themes we're seeing here are near universal in almost any story about exploration. Meeting new, unfamiliar people with ways different from your own, then resolving conflict between groups deemed to be good and bad by their actions is just part and parcel of stories about exploration.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 16:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 21:43 |
|
|
Since Game of Thrones was mentioned, and it is related, the Dothraki nomads are made up nonsense with no connection to anything in history other than racist tropes. If you wish to read a long, pedant but very interesting blog about it: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/ Just a bit of the conclusion at the end, since quoting all four parts would just be silly: quote:That makes it a good time, here at the end, to take stock. As I’ve noted in each of these posts, the fundamental claim we are evaluating here is this one, made baldly by George R.R. Martin:
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2023 16:13
|
|