more than a few…
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That’s just it tho, they’re not political rivals because his position has no legitimate legal power. So anyone could have just risen up if they wanted, he had no political mechanisms nor backing to prevent such. But no one did, because he’s just a totally great guy.
Can’t have an abuse of democratic process if you don’t have a formal political structure in place. Big brain Gnomes.
Agreed, apologies for going off-topic! Let’s keep the gnome talk to other threads now 
I haven’t read all 300+ posts, but I try to reply to the topic in general.
As a gay roleplayer myself, I haven’t ever experieced issues IC at all. There was just -one- guild (traditional orc clan) back during Legion, that had same sex romances not permitted. They justified it with the usual idiot logic: “Because a) in the lore is like this, that means b) fictional applies and that means c) NO GAYS ALLOWED!!11” Not going into detail, because I do not namecall.
There is absolutly no homophobia mentioned in Orc lore, not even once, people just portray their assumptions onto a game to justify a way to play out their bubble.
On alliance side though, I had no issues so far. Mostly positive reactions, when it got mentioned in some form.
OOC though there were -TONS- of them.
As in real life and also in roleplay, if you or your character is queer and potentionally into someone else, the only way to find out if it could work is to come out to the person and talk about it. This often leads to very negative experiences for both people, because the other person sees it as “OMG he’s rubbing it in my face that he’s gay and needs attention” and the gay person is super disappointed because a normal question was seen as attention grabbing.
But there is no other option to find out about someone’s sexuality other than to talk about it. So what do you do? You’re screwed.
In Campaign Discords if people especially the younger generation finds out about your sexuality (and don’t worry they will spread the word for you which is absolutly a no-no normally), you will get bullied, made fun of in an unappropriate way, or have your RP trash talked by those people. For a queer person, it is absolutly stressful being part of such a comunity. For many of those people it seems to be impossible to judge and treat your roleplay equally to everyone else’s. And that’s really all that queer roleplayers want.
Second, it is not very pleasant to be reminded of your everyday struggles when you play a video game. There is a reason “safe space guilds” ooc and very open minded RP guilds exist. The public can be scary as hell, considering the issues I’ve mentioned above. The fear of being judged for what you are is always there. Videogames for many people are a way to escape from real life. But how can you do that when you log in and boom, homophobia everywhere, both IC and OOC? Most queer roleplays I know tend to stay in their small group of friends/guild and just stay away from anything public. And if they play in public they are trying to hide anything that “somehow” signals their sexuality. It’s very sad.
But thankfully there are still many open minded and friendly groups of roleplayers and raiding guilds that accept you for who you are, let you roleplay how you want and treat you just like everyone else. Big shoutout to YOU! YOU ARE AWESOME!
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I think homophobia is just an unappealing route to take in WoW. As Perroy said, it’s really hard to build any tasteful narrative for your character with that. And as someone else said, it’s very likely to hurt the person behind the screen. If role-playing is a cooperative effort, homophobia is a good way to create an uncooperative form of conflict.
Tbh I believe lore offers some form of sexist/conservative examples, which you could stretch further as anti-LGBTQ attitudes, but in the end the question remains: should it be done? I think it’s one of these things you don’t want to bring to a videogame like Warcraft.
It’s like bringing up a very uncomfortable topic when no one asked for it (wait a second, is that what I do on the forums?): it’s just unlikely to be well-received on the other side. Like when you ask your second-grade uncle at Christmas: “so where did you find this new girl of yours, that happens to be thirty years younger than you are?” and after a few days police arrives at your home and tells you she’s a prostitute who also has a relationship with a drug dealer. As much uncomfortable, and less fun.
As a side note: I’m getting a bit annoyed by the strong conservative outtake of some characters, not per se, but because often it is uncalled for.
I remember being insulted on my DK because he wasn’t wearing a chest plate. It is actually funny when you get comments like “half-knight”, but confusing when people go “it’s disgusting”. You have an entire history of men not wearing a chestplate in Warcraft, what is the big deal? And I could understand if it came from traditionally conservative classes, like priests and paladins, but when it comes from necromancers that raise the dead from the ground - they should be the last among all classes to even care about disgust or dress codes? It just looks so out of character that you kind of wonder: “where does this come from?”
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Last time I went outside, I don’t recall anyone announcing their sexuality as they walked past me in the street, so why do some roleplayers feel the need to make sure others know their toon’s sexuality before a word of RP conversation has been typed?
I’m afraid I’m still very pessimistic about that, experience of such roleplayers has usually ended with booting them out of the guild for either public ERP or loads of bubble RP with their “partner”.
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Totally agree with all of your points, thanks for your input.
Btw: I’m wary of acting as if people have “values” they always uphold because it repulses me as some kind of backwards (x-tian) thinking, just as moralising over someone’s sex life. I think all of these issues are best solved by simply putting people who’s RP one finds repulsive on ignore. Problem solved.
You are in an ERP guild. Female members of the Master’s staff announce their sexuality via guild tag.
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Doesn’t your guild annonce sexuality thru ur guild page.
something along the lines of “every women under his employment sleeps with the lord” if my re-collection is right
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last time I went outside I couldn’t know their name or backstory by hovering over them with my eyes either but whoops turns out RPers do that all the time
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wait
is seeing this not normal?
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Sadly not. More’s the pity because I’m terrible with names.
Though it did lead me down a mental tangent of a TRP feature where names are unknown until they’re introduced directly which would be both immersive and probably exceedingly tedious.
Share with the class
That was it, that was the full tangent. A feature where, when toggled, it’d set everyone else’s name (and guild) to [Unknown] until their name comes up in conversation, at which point the addon saves it for future encounters through logins.
Bonus difficulty would be that sometimes it’ll just randomly erase a known name to show that your character forgets it if you don’t interact with them for a bit. Like I do. Because I’m bad at names.
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You mean it doesn’t exist yet? You have ruined my day and possibly my entire week.
I think it would be better if you could set the [unknown] name to a basic descriptor. Your character in a nutshell. “A Headhunter” or “A Sorceress” or “A Hooded Figure” – Imagine the kind of stock NPC names we see out in the world.
Though it requires people to abide by it properly and you and I both know that can be a tall order sometimes.
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what do you think a mental tangent is god damn do I look like Mr TRP to you
Also no homophobia in wow, thanks. See now it’s still on topic.
yes
Homophobia is bad, simple as.
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Look, it is simple. If your character is a Homophobe, then you are not playing a character in that setting.
So you are bad at roleplaying in that setting.
So you are bad at… (Could be badminton, could be chess, more likely to be -Roleplaying-)
There’s no need for anyone to bring their weird OOC foibles into the game setting, WoW has its own universe for you to draw inspiration from, you don’t need to take it from American History X or whatever.
Also IDK why you would want to ‘play devils advocate’ when what you’re advocating is widely panned in modern society and serves no real purpose in the game.
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In my time of roleplaying, there have been times where I’ve either heard IC or received whispers off of people using the whole “it’s just the way my character is.” “It’s not me, it’s the character.” “its my characters opinion” mindset when it comes to this topic. The way I see it, we all put a bit of ourselves into our characters and if you go out of your way to put homosexual, bisexual, asexual characters down, as well as other members of the LGBT community, then you’re displaying a quality of your personality that’s quite ugly. There are people, as others have said already, who are members of that community and roleplay on WoW gives them the platform to feel comfortable in themselves. So hearing that people still have this mindset of “it’s just IC, it’s just my character” when it comes to this topic is disappointing.
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