We know Mellinora is talking 
Mellinora knows heâs talking
Not much more to be said
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Itâs a shame that the whole Uldum wastewander concept has been poisoned by faux-arabic characters overtly fetishizing aspects of IRL middle eastern culture. Iâve said it before, possibly on these forums, but Iâll say it again - wastewanders could make for great roleplaying characters. A history of piracy before landing in the deserts, where that previous life of crime morphs more into the actions of a bandit or brigand, only to then get redemption and possibly re-join the Alliance and renounce your past criminal ways in order to fight against future big bad world ending threats, given Nâzothâs invasion of the zone.
But instead, if you make a character with ties to that zone youâre gonna have people talking in Simlish at you and expecting you to follow along with it entirely, or get lumped in with the blatantly fetishized stranglethorn characters who use descriptions like âmochaâ or âexoticâ. 
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Arenât the humans in Stranglethorn just Stormwind humans who were isolated by Onyxiaâs schemes?
Yeah â Kurzenâs lot were an expedition into the jungle. I think he got mind-controlled by an ogre mage?
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Iâll admit Iâm not super caught up on the lore there. That sounds like it might be right.
But in terms of how RPers often play them, it doesnât feel like they play it out that way. Too many of the Stranglethorn toons Iâve seen have basically been sexy female tarzan.
As I said previously, people casusing crap because of your belfâs skin colour are not worth RPing with.
Also, my new elf hunter looks amazing with a darker skin tone (hence why iâm posting on her and not Cro for this comment)
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Dark skinned elves are cool and pretty. People who complain are wrong and lame.
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Not necessarily. They could be Booty Bay fellows too. https://wow.gamepedia.com/Makasa_Flintwill has Stranglethorn (and Stromic) blood. Sheâs 17 during MoP, which would have her born around Year 13, a good while before the Onyxiaâs schemes hit full swing.
dislike based on race -> I shake my head.
Dislike against another species, orc v humans -> big brain nod.
know the difference.
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Just wanted to say hi on one of my new-skintone elves. If people give you grief for it, the ignore list is there for you. They deserve neither your Time nor your attention.
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Honestly mate, just let them pander. I played this game since 2011 and the only character models that looked anything like people I grew up around were humans with a tan; I got this almost self-loathing idea into my head that people like me didnât belong in fantasy unless there was some mysterious desert-people race, and even if the fantasy allowed for Black people it was limited solely to humans. Elves just werenât âfor usâ.
Itâs because of people like you that I spent eight years role playing as pandaren (sorry I do love my Mogi) just because playing as the sort of elf or human Id enjoy playing felt wrong in the setting. The first thing I saw in a large AD discord when Black elves were data mined was âCrip Elvesâ; âWe Wuz Blud Elfsâ.
People will say that representation doesnât matter because theyâve spent their whole lives surrounded by media filled with people that look just like them and never had to feel strangely locked out from a certain race; if pandering is what it took to convince me to stop discouraging myself from playing what I want to play then let them pander. Itâs Blizzard, of course itâs just for profit, but for the first time in years Iâm playing characters that I feel comfortable in, and itâs comforting to see so many people in this thread unwilling to put up with your crap.
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I am glad they added the option that you in particular like, and I am not arguing that they should remove it now that they added it, but pandering is still pretty meh on many counts. One of these counts is just directly representation - you say that you care about it, but will you actually get it with pandering? No. You wonât get it. You arenât getting it now and you wonât get it in the future. Because options that are not politically expedient wonât be added, they are crowded out by options that are politically expedient. Now, I personally do NOT care about representation in video games, so thatâs fine by me, but you claim that you do, and because itâs just pandering, you wonât get it.
In general, it might be that you donât really care about representation in general. You just care about your representation. But if I am wrong about it, you should be against pandering, not for it.
On to the quote - it is false. Here is a simple proof. I played Asian RPGs and there all faces were Asian. I am not Asian myself yet I was surrounded every day by characters who look Asian. And I was fine with it and continue to be fine. So, no, people say that representation doesnât matter not because they are surrounded by characters that look like themselves all the time. Some people, eg, myself, have other reasons.
Canât believe weâre sending this thread into a âwhite guy talks about why representation doesnât matter, actually, because [anecdote]â episode
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Then stop talking about it. Let people be happy. I donât know what sort of sick thrill you get out of invalidating people, but leave us out of it.
âYou are wrong because I didnât feel uncomfortable playing an Asian game as a white man, and my experience is universalâ. I know youâre getting a rep nowadays as a baiter but this is just ridiculous in so many ways.
Recent example: Larian Studios took the analytics of all their Baldurâs Gate 3 character creation, and the most commonly made character was a blue-eyed, brown-hair white man (the default option for a human character is a black woman). As youâd expect, the most common demographic in the game was white men, and so naturally the character creation reflected that; because whether consciously or not, gamers will make characters that they feel comfortable playing and they feel represent them (inb4 the orc posters). It doesnât take more than a passing glance to see that this European server has a vast majority of white human characters - and this isnât a bad thing, itâs what the players feel comfortable playing. What Iâm saying is that PoC deserve that option too.
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I would have liked to have seen the situation handled a bit more clearly, perhaps with a throw away line in a patch note like:
âAs Azeroth becomes more varied and travel between regions more common, the variety of Azerothâs inhabitantâs creeds, races and appearances has increased. Thankfully the citizens of Azeroth are a welcoming sort and embrace diversity within their factions readily.â
Just as a little explanation as opposed to âIt has in fact always been this way and if you donât like it thatâs bad.â
Personally, Iâm glad to see more character customization of any kind.
Yes, exactly.
Your argument was that people who donât care about representation donât care about it because they are represented, my example contradicted that. What you said was false.
Welcome to logic.
I note that you didnât answer my point that if you indeed care about representation, you should be against pandering, not for it. This is also telling.
I find you complaining about pandering and arguing representation is pandering because âIâm a white guy and didnât mind seeing white guys in this one video game I playedâ quite telling, myself, tbh.
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I just illustrated that my reasons for not liking pandering are different from me being represented already. Maybe read the posts.
The distinction between a standard white European player and a person like Dunasen is that the former doesnât need to worry about not being represented in one game â because thereâs hundreds of other, mainstream AAA games that do represent them.
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Asian MMOs are not, unfortunately, the primary form of media in the western world. Your news station is not an Asian MMO; your government is not an Asian MMO; your public broadcasting is not an Asian MMO. Asian MMOâs are their own thing; itâs a single slice of media that you yourself consume a lot of, but it is not a universal experience nor would it in any way contradict a single thing anyoneâs said against them.
You donât live as the only white man alive in Korea just because youâve played a few Korean MMOâs.
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