In my mind, I’ve been sitting on a chair in the corner of a dark room, slowly puffing on a smoke pipe, like Gandalf trying to figure out the secrets of Middle-Earth. I whisper to myself softly, pondering the reasons and thought process as to why Blizzard would create a story and narrative around the inter-fighting’s of women, with a all female cast, to a mostly mature, male audience.
It strikes as a high-school teenage drama, where a group of girls once close friends fight over a boy that one of the friends liked, but the other started dated behind her back. Now, she’s been shunned by the friend group and they’re “enemies”, but not in the really like “I hate you” way, but more so hurt with each other, and so, this is their story.
Even the men, Anduin, Magni are simply conduits as supporting actors to present the female characters in a stronger light, as less emotional, and more decisive, as without the women, they’d have given up already.
There’s no attempt to give you a greater sense of what Anduin is agonizing over, like cutting to a scene where Anduin towers above a helpless mother with her two children, bracing for impact as Anduin brings down his sword across them, cutting to a dark screen at the final moment. A doll falls slowly to the ground from the child’s arms with ominous music playing, drenched in blood. At some point the camera zooms into the dolls face, revealing a smile that is not of it’s own, but of Xal’atah’s face silhouetted upon it.
Magni, is literally a conduit for the voice of Azeroth, he himself is a hopeless man. He only moves on at the behest of others, he has no motivation of his own, despite being surrounded by his literal children (at least one is I think). Children tend to be a signification motivation for most men, many would give up without them, yet, the man can hardly move the feet he has underneath them to save people without the voice beckoning/forcing him onward.
Like, who is this story trying to connect with? where are the strong men? I’m not even someone who is deeply vested in stories, I’m more of a writer than a reader myself. The intentions behind the “casting” is so obvious. Every meaningful, relevant, purposeful, talented, strong character is a woman. You can’t even find men among the insectoids hardly, everything is just female. It doesn’t take much of an IQ or strong pattern recognition to detect any of this, it’s literally smothered into your face at every turn.
I don’t have a problem with female characters, especially strong female characters, or necessarily weak and vulnerable men. I don’t think it’s in men’s nature to feel empathy for vulnerable men, that’s just not who we are or how we’re wired by nature, I believe, it’s not conducive to survival. Men “Well, looks like we have no food here…guess we’ll all just die together then”. That’s why I think you’re not going to have the greater majority of men feeling a great deal of empathy and connection with Anduin as a character, the way he is being portrayed as he is. Magni at least has some soul left in him, at least as a father and not always having been weak.
If i had a product and I was trying to make a game/story that went over well with it’s audience, like let’s say women, I wouldn’t put an all male cast. I wouldn’t make all the women in it crazy, emotional and/or weak.
With that being said, I found the Earthen story great, unfortunately, it fell off quite a bit after that. I stopped paying attention, it just didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I felt like I was visiting someone’s house and the people starting fighting there about personal problems and I just sort of walked outside or into another room, to avoid being part of it.
So, was this the idea to draw in a larger audience into the game? did anyone feel moved/inspired by the characters in TWW or that convinced you to play TWW?
