When I was doing the campaign in Zul Aman today, I noticed that Akil zon and Jan alai speak like women?
But in the raid, they were male.
Has feminism struck Zul Aman too, or have I missed something in the lore?
Greetings
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Afaik we fought an avatar of Akil’zon in TBC who had the essence of the loa fused with the Amani shaman Man’ye, Malacrass’s Zul’jin’s son. The same goes for Jan’alai who’s essence was fused with some (unnamed?) Amani rouge.
Malacrass basically stole the power of their gods to create these avatars in a heretical fashion.
The avatars gender/sex seems to be independent of the loa.
Same sort of story happens in Zul’drak up in Northrend. We manage to save a few there before that happens though, then kill more avatars in Gundrak.
Seems to be a thing with trolls and their loa. Happens again in BFA if memory serves with Shadra and sort of with Hir’eek and Rezan.
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what the belf said, what we fought in tbc were mortals infused with loa’s magic/essence, not the loa themselves.
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Op is completely right
Akilzon has always been male both he and his avatar.
Doing some digging i found old lore nerds talking about the Loa spirits and Akilzon has always been a “he” when refered.
Official wowwiki when discribing the spirit binded to the Cataclysm version of zul amans last boss also discribes Akilzon as a “he”.
Google Amani Eagle Spirit Wiki.
Im very certain that WayBackMachine can reveal more.
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Same goes with the Amani Dragonhawk Spirit.
Then it’s likely the case of Blizz retconing for some gender equality reason. 2 male, 2 female loa.
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do the 90% of the “male npcs” with female voices count into the equality.
Because they keep feminizing men while also retconning male to female and make female characters exceptionally strong regardless of the plotholes.
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Didn’t the part about Jan’alai describe that they are the loa of Death, Life and Rebirth for the Amani? And the crazy Loa Speaker of Jan’alai specifically pointed out surprise that his loa was female this time around?
And yeah, we did not fight the Loa themselves in the ZA raid. The entire storyline describes Zul’jin, grandfather of Zul’jarra and Zul’jan worked with Hexlord Malacrass to steal the Forest Loa’s powers to infuse into his chosen champions, and thus become their avatar.
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When you talk to Jan’alai’s Speaker he says it’s a good omen that Jan’alai returned as female instead of male this time. They can switch genders when they’re reborn.
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Yeah this. He SPECIFICALLY remarks on this. Even the lore nerds don’t read lol
Yeah this. He SPECIFICALLY remarks on this. Even the lore nerds don’t read lol
Oh no women in a game. How will we survive this horror!/s
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The creators of Lego were struggling to expand outside of their target audience and attract the attention of women, so they did a study to find out why.
Their researchers concluded that whilst exceptions certainly exist, most men seek to immerse themselves in a character when engaging with an established setting. They’ll look at, say, Batman, Leon Kennedy or Cloud Strife and seek not to self insert as them but to think and act as they do in canon.
On the other hand, most women tend to hijack existing characters to either self insert as - complete with retconning them to be the opposite gender - or just forcing the character to be little more than a doll that exists as their fictional boyfriend, revolves exclusively around themselves and no matter how dark or edgy tends to be changed to mimic the personal values of the woman in question.
That, combined with companies being paid to embrace ESG/DEI/Bridge - something both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard proudly admit to in investor reports and on their own official websites - is largely why this sort of thing keeps happening.
Do not simply take my word for it, though. I encourage everyone reading this to do their own research - if not for the silly trust level system, I would do it myself but simply putting ‘Microsoft’s/Activision Blizzard’s commitment to DEI/ESG’ into your search engine of choice should bring up the relevant articles. Read through it and whether you think it is good or bad it should help with pattern recognition when it comes to certain decisions.
Of course, alternatively you can also look at the controversial statements that deranged individuals such as Madeline Roux have made, who have contributed to the writing. She’s well known for making bigoted statements towards men, white people and gay men who dare to commit the ‘crime’ of having ‘genital preferences’.
Quite frankly, a lot of writers hired by the company are not only lacking in talent and the concept of immersion and respect for what came before, but are little more than activists pushing agendas and talking down to actual minorities who speak up and tell them to stop being weird and trying to sanitise absolutely everything in cool fictional settings.
On the other hand, whilst this sort of thing certainly gets push-back it is often only grifters who seek to profit off of the situation by ‘countering’ with increasingly deranged purity spirals of their own.
It’s going to take a while for this nonsense, on either side, to drain out of the industry.
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Of all the worldbuilding and continuity problems, the gender of some vaguely benevolent non-characters like Loa seems especially irrelevant to me. Is it an indicator that the devs are still playing with the 2020 rulebook that has been proven to be useless? Sure. But do we really need to look at Loa to see that, when we have two young women doing their “chosen of the gods” questlines as the main attraction, while the one male lead is going on a journey to deal with his feelings? I don’t think so.
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This would only work if this speaker said that in previous expasnions in previous rebirths.
As for the being a man being a bad omen really fits with exactly whats wrong with current narrative and its exactly why people have a problem with.
I personally prefer female characters but not to the expense of male characters,
the demand of equal threatment is onesided.
They can keep retconning, just not it being for the sake of propaganda.
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Normally I’d prefer not to even engage with posts like these but in case anyone was curious about this in good faith…
Afaik, the bosses we fought were merely avatars of the Loa. You took a male champion who took Akil’zon’s powers, staying male. Same thing for Jan’alai, really.
Another thing with Jan’alai though; they are a Loa of Flame and like a phoenix their life cycle is of deaths and rebirths. Sometimes they are reborn as a male, sometimes as a female. Now, in Midnight, the latest rebirth simply turned out to be a female. In a more modern understanding, one could think of them as genderfluid. Albeit I believe you can find similar gender-changing gods in mythology as well, northern or eastern.
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Honestly, normally I’m adverse to the idea of retcons/gender swapping existing characters for what are likely modern social political reasons. But, in the case of Jan’alai it kind of fits the idea and theme of a phoenix like god of death and rebirth who already died in the lore.
There are other games that have done trans/hermaphroditic divine representations well like Elden Ring, and I view this along a similar vein. Not to mention the existence of irl mythological representations you brought up too.
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i dunno lol
especially as a gay guy, i’m pretty tired of the snide little digs at men
they’re probably not a big deal to some and certainly not in isolation but just look at how differently garrosh is treated to sylvanas - both of them should have been killed off, but the writers go to great lengths to excuse the latter and try to push her as the ‘real victim’ at the expense of the countless individuals and nations she’s defiled
Can’t disagree with that. They definitely use cotton wool mittens when dealing with Sylvanas’ past actions compared to how they handled someone like Garrosh.
It’s also not gone beyond my notice, and likely that of others, that modern Blizzard have definitely been pushing for female representation a lot sometimes at the expense of male characters in the story.
Whenever we’ve been introduced to a new group, faction or race since probably around Dragonflight maybe even Shadowlands, there’s always been a tendency to introduce more female leads or relatively important ‘good’ npcs compared to male. But, if there are males occupying those positions already, then they usually get killed off, turn out to be evil and get dispatched or put in their place by some up and coming girl boss.
Now I’m not saying it’s true in every instance but, it’s beginning to get a bit repetitive at this point, if not somewhat obvious there’s some messaging being injected into the story and/or some metric being met.
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*Zul’jin’s son.
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Just because it is a good omen that she is reborn female, it doesn’t mean that being male is a bad omen.
Reading comprehension where?