i’m southern/eastern european.
you guys don’t know what ur talking about period
nobody asked for ur milktoast enlightened centrism
1 Like
Though I am inclined to agree with the spirit of Adrasial’s statements, maybe we should NOT continue the same derailing through pointless discussion that will ONLY be two sides sniping at each other?
Can we stick to thread topic? Plx?
i’m not a centrist 
but you’re proving my point so it’s cool
I guess this sort of sums up the whole point of this thread. Logging onto WoW as a piece of lib-left anarchist scum I come to expect that the majority of people I interact with are going to be slightly more on the alt-right side of the spectrum when it comes to OOC. I guess the crux of this thread is that it’s irritating when people’s thinly veiled homophobia / racism / whatever come out in their roleplay, especially when you can’t find any real lore basis for it.
Consider the thread re-railed.
1 Like
I feel like there’s nothing more to add to the thread topic anyway, and feeding it bumps like these help keep it on top of the thread lists so people can see the actual thread.
Nope, now its time for Red featherwind.
Yes, but it will also qualify the thread as lockbait because derailment. Which is what I’d like to avoid.
2 Likes
It’d be locked anyway without activity for a month.
I wonder if moderators actually read these threads completely through anyway, I wouldn’t be completely surprised if we get another troll spouting the same stuff again because who even bothers to go through nearly 4k posts before responding?
i’m quite the left leaning bull myself
(oh no boush is typing)
2 Likes
I apologise if this has already been discussed but there is a LOT of replies here and I don’t have the brain power to read through all of them, lol.
I’m a queer person. Before Blizzard brought it up I just presumed that these issues were treated the same in WoW as they were in real life, because there were no real queer characters until recently. And the few that did exist, like the mention of lesbian pandaren in that one novel you can find, or the orc in the flying motorbike quest with the blood elf dude, were treated as jokes. It felt like a natural assumption.
Because that’s what I thought, a few of my characters definitely have homophobia in their backstories. One of them was disowned by their family, another is very much in the closet. I feel like these things are okay to explore in RP, especially as an actual queer person who has to deal with this stuff, and might not have ways of exploring it IRL.
Do I think it should be okay to hurl slurs at people in casual city RP? Absolutely not. But I also don’t think its okay for Blizzard to just say these things don’t exist, without there being no actual in game proof of it, feels like when JK Rowling said Dumbledore was gay kinda.
TL:DR: I’m queer and I’ve used some of my negative experiences in RP and now I’m worried that its not valid any more.
2 Likes
I think this problem is the same for many other characters with different issues, as lore develops, changes and is retconned. I think the best thing you can do is adapt to the lore as best you can.
One of my characters had a homophobic mother, which I retconned into simply being a narcissistic c-word. So on and so forth.
I’m not sure if I can agree with this completely.
Yes, you should adapt to changing lore if you can. But that usually amounts to something pretty fantasical in this game, something annoying but not necessarily something that affects you in real life.
But like, this stuff does. And I think someone’s sexuality or gender identity is quite often a big thing they take into consideration when making their RP characters. And that can often mean homophobia or transphobia comes up, because that’s just how our lives are, its how we can relate to our characters, and I don’t know if Blizzard has earnt erasing that by just saying ‘lol nope homophobia isn’t canon’ when they’ve not really done much to address it. Why is there basically no queer characters if homophobia and transphobia wasn’t a thing?
That being said, I don’t really want to give people who are IRL homophobes and excuse to be like that IC either. I guess where I stand is that homophobia has no place in casual RP with people you don’t know, but I think to erase actual queer peoples’ stories just because Blizzard made the barest minimum to look good isn’t really right either.
1 Like
This is something that exists in all aspects of RP.
Someone RPed a Drakkari aaaaaand nope, they are apparently all gone because of one BfA NPC, entire character concept becomes lorebreaking.
Someone RPs destruction of Zandalar in Cataclysm as important thing for their character aaaaaaand nope, retcon, Zandalar is fine.
People back in MoP RPed utter destruction of Scarlet Crusade aaaaaand nope, they were alive in Legion (although to be fair, people have been arguing that SC has been gone probably since Cata and somehow fail to realize that even if lore outright states they are destroyed, Blizzard will bring them back).
Blizzard often retcons things or updates lore that has not been touched on for years. I doubt anyone likes it, but that´s how it is.
Because putting LGBT people into media wasn´t really popular even few years ago and still isn´t in many places in the world to the point where it might cause loss of profits.
Also, this public opinion change has undoubtedly influenced Blizzard itself too. Maybe people who are now putting LGBT characters to the game would be opposed to doing so 10 years ago.
And lastly, WoW is not getting renewed in its entirety every year, it´s a game that started in 2004 and progressed since then. That quest you did yesterday was put into the game in year 2008 and that book you read is from 2007. I don´t think we should blame Blizzard of 2020 for not calling the quest “Mankrik´s Husband”.
Well if they want us to believe they’re serious about homophobia not existing in WoW then maybe they should go to that effort.
That is a fine assumption - I also had a similar assumption of the universe before, just because it’s how it goes in most universes. And I was pleasantly surprised to more recently learn that it is not so.
In this thread and previous, we’ve also sort of dissected the reasons why people might be homophobic in RP/lore, and the only sort of ‘agreeable’ ways are when it’s about nobility and such. I don’t know your characters, but perhaps that can be a reason why one was disowned and other is in the closet, instead of actual homophobia? (And even then, being gay doesn’t mean you’re infertile, but maybe the parents are dumb - they’d have to be dumb to hate on gays anyway so idk)
Absolutely. I also think that sexuality itself can be a Big Thing, even if many say that they don’t care about a character’s sexuality, it can still give motivations and plot points, however obscure or direct.
And in the WoW universe, we can explore a life without homophobia or transphobia. It’s a life we can’t have in real life, and I also don’t want to be reminded of problems and challenges I’d see in my daily life also in my RP. That’s how our lives are realistically, so why not explore an utopia?
Thankfully, we’re seeing quite a bit of diversity come Shadowlands, and I would expect to continue seeing more in future content patches or expansions.
Yet also, to quote you - that’s just how our lives are. Blizzard can create an universe that is accepting and so on, but they themselves live in a rather unaccepting world. The few LGBTQ+ characters that have come with Shadowlands or more recent books (Fairshaw) have been met with very heavy backlash from the players. I would love to see a more solid representation from newer characters and it would send a message, whereas retconning/changing already existing characters might not get the message across all that well or receive even stronger backlash for the retcons.
(And to other people it might seem as very lazy writing to just say ‘oh btw this character is gay too haha’ without any development or reasoning).
Nobody is erasing the players’ stories, but the characters exist in a different universe. They can be queer without being hated for it.
1 Like
I personally think Blizzard will (if they will at all) introduce gay or trans major characters very slowly or make them intentionally vague.
There are still many countries that do not condone such people or representation and to make them vague about it on purpose so they won’t be forced to remove it in countries like China.
This is exactly what I think. Maybe I’m just a cynic though.
I completely disagree with the notion that author of the story has to support his statements about the world with extensive evidence within the story.
Sure, people should never sink to the levels of J.K. Rowling, but demanding that one´s vision for the world he creates is not valid unless he focuses his effort on portraying all the nuances connected to this decision is just wrong.
Sometimes you want to create world with two moons without thinking about how gravity of two massive stellar bodies in its close proximity influences your world.
This is absolutely valid and I don’t disagree. But I also think it can be cool playing a character that has suffered from those things and has succeeded. I absolutely do not want to shut this down at all, I just think there is room for some nuance- For the sake of queer people, mind you, not for homophobes/transphobes to take advantage of. Which is where the challenge comes I guess!
As much as my ideas might be nice I guess just a blanket take of ‘no homophobia’ is probably better overall simply because people will almost definitely take advantage otherwise.