Where Are the Strong Male Figures in the Latest Expansion?

Community General Discussion
758

So far, we have Khadgar, Baelgrim, Merrix… they all took a stand, sacrificed themselves for others or what they believe in, so I don’t really see a problem with that. This was still only the first chapter of the story.
As much as I get it that people are annoyed by the “strong female character” cliché that basically copies the concept of the flawless “90’s male action hero” and seems to be shoehorned in every second franchise in the last years, I find it kind of annoying that now, as soon as there are non-white female protagonists, somebody instantly yells “THE MESSAGE!!!” Just because Critical Drinker is right many times with it, people don’t have to be drunk and yell it whenever something doesn’t fit the expectations and the cliché of the “strong male character”.

I don’t really care about both, as long as they tell a good story and don’t overdo it. Regarding “strong male characters”, I find that Anduin fits the part quite well. Sure, he’s not a one-dimensional demigod power fantasy like Varian, but he literally went through hell and came back - if that’s not strength, then I don’t know what is. The point of a “strong character” is not to be flawless all the time, it’s to overcome obstacles to stay strong.

With Faerin, it says a lot when people reduce her to her disability and the color of her skin. Ironically, it says more about those people than about the character and her role in the story. Not to mention that she is just one of the important characters, but had no problem to wait outside during Alleria’s and Anduin’s confrontation with Xal’atath.

Even though I’m absolutely for a more mature, darker WoW - after all, WAR is in the game’s name - there’s no need to make it about gender, sex or ethnicity when it doesn’t really matter for the story.

That said, even our “headliner” NPCs for this expansion (Thrall, Anduin and Alleria) are two men and one woman. So… what’s the problem?

Of course, there are more male characters dying, when overall, there are more male characters among the important NPCs. That said, two expansions ago, a very powerful and iconic female character stepped aside and had to “give up her power” - that doesn’t count, I guess?
Anduin was edited by moderator and literally went through hell and came back. If that doesn’t justify PTSD or the need of emotional support, nothing does.

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759

I think most kids want a strong male character to be 10 feet tall, bigger than arnold schwarzenegger, a big scruffy beard who just grabs his edited by moderator constantly for no reason and looks at people and grunts.

I saw some guy when I was away at the far back of a bus once, who when I first eyed thought he looks like a edited by moderator, few stops later a pregnant woman gets on the bus and has to stand, not one other person was going to give her a seat, but he did.

He was a strong man to me.

760

Nah.

There’s always been plenty of women in the story, in prominent roles at that - they’re just rarely actually held accountable for even the most reprehensible of actions. Just look at how differently the likes of Sylvanas is treated compared to Arthas and Garrosh. Then there’s characters such as Vereesa, Vanessa and Jaina who have the blood of innocents staining their hands - including that of civilians - but mysteriously despite war crimes being an established concept in the setting the women are always painted as the victim.

This has been a problem long before DEI/ESG/BRIDGE entered the equation and is perhaps one of my biggest frustrations with the setting as a whole.

761

Moira is a perfect example of this, it’s why I made that other post about her specifically. Lore wise she’s a colossal POS. But she make Magni out to be the bad guy when he did nothing wrong. He gets side lined for no reason and it’s constantly all about her.

Khadgar was taken out straight away for no great reason other than we don’t want to have a white straight male in charge, yeet.

Baelgrim, owner of the dumbest death award, just so they can fill his council seat and leader of the storm riders seat with two different female dwarfs

Merrix is pretty interesting I’ll give you that.

There’s not an issue with female leads in stories, but when you notice a repeated theme of male characters being cast into the sidelines for no logical reason, killed off in stupid ways but having their exact role immediately filled with a female replacement you get the makings of forced diversity and it’s never good for a product.

For those that say, why would it matter if it’s all women. I put to you, if it didn’t matter why was there a need to replace almost every male character with a female one, if it didn’t matter?

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762

:woman_facepalming:
I miss these updates from blizz, where do you get yours from?

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763

The only functioning reason you can give for taking out Khadgar like that, is, he would be the defacto leader of the expedition, and blizz very very clearly have an agenda this expac. there’s 3 male Main characters in game right now you deal with, they are almost never not with a girl boss who tells them what to do.

764

I disagree with this, because Moira is one of the best characters in the story.

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765

Agreed. I don’t dislike her so much as I lament her lack of potential. She’s very similar to Cersei Lannister, a character I thoroughly enjoy. Yet it becomes tiresome when Moira is so heavily sanitised and rather than the story acknowledging her more dubious actions, it is instead not so subtly implied that Magni is to blame.

Even if you make the concession that he could have handled things better, which is the benefit of hindsight, she still did some pretty shady stuff afterwards.

It’s tiresome seeing male characters criticised so frequently when the women are treated with kid’s gloves. That isn’t equality.

766

I didn’t say that they were no women in the story, I wrote “more male characters”. Especially if you compare the faction leaders since vanilla, there are way more men among them.

Then you also have to compare their fates. Arthas became the Lich King because he was arrogant, without remorse and too full of himself. Garrosh chose his fate every single time - even his final death in hell. Sylvanas’s soul was torn apart in WC3 - against her will. She basically lived in her personal hell since then, with a part of her still trapped in real hell. Now, after becoming whole again, she’s seeking redemption by walking through hell and freeing souls.

The only one who got a chance for redempion was the only one who started as a victim. Seems fair to me.

Elisande wasn’t a victim, neither was Azshara.
When Anduin is painted as one, people cry about “weak male characters”. Can you see the pattern?

Khadgar? You mean the archmage of Dalaran? The person who is closest to be the Guardian of Tirisfal right now? The powerful mage that lead us through Warlords of Draenor and also during the Legion’s invasion? Who has already proven his power, so that we could see that anyone who’s able to beat him would be a really terrifying villain?

Yeah, I’m sure they only did that for DEI reasons. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Okay, so we don’t want female leaders, but immortal male badasses that never show weakness? These stories will be SO exciting!

And others being brought back. Like Thrall and Anduin (But we don’t talk about them, because they have emotions and struggle). :man_shrugging:

And who said that?

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767

Yeah you’ve pinned down exactly my issue with her. I’d be happy for her to take more of a lead, if they would ever acknowledge her faults. Instead it’s Magni’s a bad dad, I’m so great. The story puts her on a moral pedestal and literally she’s an ###hole. She had a good dad, that loved her and trained her to be a fighter and leader, she was kidnapped so her dad tried to save her. Still ends up being her Dad’s fault :man_shrugging:.

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768

Hey man, whatever floats your boat.

Sure, mostly. So why is it so bad to have a bit of break from that norm for a little while?
Balance in all things.

Well, you’re going to have to accept it, because the devs do.

Now, I agree that pushing female characters at the expense of male ones, should only be done if very necessary for the story. A character, male or female, should be able to rise to great heights without diminishing anyone else.

The way WoW has done the above in TWW is not egregious imo. Of course you can have a different opinion on that, but that’s my take and that view’s probably not going to change for either side because we experience the story in our own ways.

I just have an issue with people who’s experience is completely biased; they basically knew beforehand what kind of stuff they were going to hate and they went looking for it. That’s doing yourself a disservice, honestly, because it just ruins your experience downright.

I don’t agree that they feel like that.

Because, as stated above “WARcraft(emphasis on war) was about rugged men waging war for decades.” So when you have a surplus of male characters and you want to introduce new ones; there’s going to have to be some cutting or we’re left with too many characters and that would be at the expense of everyone.

Anduin has always been presented as not warlike. Not a warrior, but a diplomat. Honestly, for me he’s always been a bit of fresh air. You can only do so many ‘rawr me tough’ characters before they start to get very stale.

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769

And why not ?

This is a phrase I see over and over and over again but no one can actually say what “Organically” includes.

But you still did not answer my question.

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770

You’re aware Arthas’s soul was also torn apart by frostmourne. And Sylvannas’s arc proves the point, they can’t be having a female character actually be bad, no it wasn’t her fault, same as it wasn’t the fault of all those soldiers under her command that committed war crimes, we’ll just forget about all that.

You could have had him beat by Xal’ atah. you could have had the staff broken and him defated the city in ruins. It gives the same hopelessness to the audience, the only reason to kill him off is because he is who he is, he would become the leader of the remaining people. Blizz don’t want that they want Moira and Alleria.

No people don’t like it because Anduin’s been turned back into a snivelling baby that has to be hand held by the two “strong women characters” bolted to him like a handler.

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771

He died briefly but got ressurected by Anduin… So what was that about killing off characters now again ?

772

Arthas was arrogant and driven by ego way before he received Frostmourne.

Azshara, Elisande, Ashvane, Xal’atath, Whitemane… want me to go on?

You should… play the campaign, I guess. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Which only means they don’t care about the story. That’s like saying “I want this character who just lost one leg to RUN A MARATHON RIGHT NOW! Otherwise, that’s unmanly!”
Not to mention that Alleria (the other “strong female character”) achieved her latest character development only because he reminded her of something.

773

I answered this much much earlier in the thread.

The example I gave was on race not gender but it functions the same.

Black panther: Great movie incredibly well recieved. 99% of the cast black, film set in an african country that never integrated with the rest of the world so completely makes sense would be really odd if a bunch of gingers were walking around. The story was the classic heroes journey told from a fantasy version of cultures that we have never really seen in superhero movies.

Little Mermaid: They told the same white european story, but put a black girl in it. It’s the writing equivalent of black face. If you wanted to tell a mermaid story and wanted a black actress to be the mermaid, why not maybe tell one of the many many African fairy tales, instead of telling a european story with black actors.

Same thing applies to female characters, if you wanted to add a female character to say, the fellowship in lord of the rings.

You could add Éowyn, she’s a good fighter, she knows horses which although the others know how to ride, they’re not a skilled as her, this is a unique skillset to her, making her bring something new to the table. Her development is different to the other characters development so it doesn’t replicate or replace anyone elses journey.

What you don’t do is what bliz do, with characters. Which is kill of Aragon and replace him with Arajen, she’s Aragon but way better because they inject a bunch of stuff into the plot about how Aragon actually was stupid and made tons of mistakes.

774

I think that an underlying issue that might not be obvious until you think about it is that, beyond Blizzard’s political agenda and fairly poor writing, there are virtually no differences between men and women in media nowadays. It has been normalized to see men and women do the same things and share the same traits, and you can ultimately replace one with the other and it would make no difference.

The only thing I could think of are pregnancy and sexual relationships, and these are hardly exploitable for good writing.

775

Alleria seems to have been written for a female teenage audience, while Turalyon is mr. Barbie. Then you have semi-mature (Warcraft has not been this mature) writing on the other hand with Anduin. I don’t think warcraft has ever been either this chaotic in terms of writing. I think the story doesn’t have much of the old-style writing left. I wonder, if they have an actual big enough target audience for this, or if employees just all write their part of the story for themselves rather than for us, and that’s why you have this extreme mix of different vibe-shifts.

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776

Not entierly true, it mostly started because he did an oopsie daisie with his horse.

Oh and then being emotionally manipulated by Mal’ganis until he took up Frostmourne and his soul got slurped up like a good bowl of noodles. :yum:

777

Just like Arthas ‘wasn’t really bad’. But in that case it was okay, because…?

Also I don’t think the NPCs in game have forgotten about anything.
If Sylvanas returns at some point; I want to see her be treated as an outcast. I don’t want everyone to accept her back with open arms. I would have an issue with that.

Ehm… :thinking:
Have you actually played the campaign?

Stop being so incredibly hyperbolic.
That’s NOT what’s happening at all.