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Stereotyping the Horde
Terra Nova is having a discussion today entitled Cultural Borrowing in WoW, looking at the cultural references made in relation to the Horde (Jamaicans for the Trolls, Native Americans for the Tauren) and what that means given the Horde's reputation as Evil. From the article: "I want to talk about how science fiction and fantasy often engage in this type of borrowing -- most 'new' things are just old things recoded. For instance, the Wikipedia entry on Klingons points to the Soviets, Mongolians, and Japanese Samurai. In most cases, I think this whole process of cultural encryption, mash-up, and recoding is fun -- perhaps what good art is all about. Looking particularly at WoW, though, I have to wonder sometimes..."
Terra Nova has absolutely no clue what the word "lore" means. The entire premise of both the links in the story are patently incorrect. The Horde is not inherently evil, nor is the Alliance inherently good; yes, there are definitely cultural stereotypes behind many of the races, but attempting to dredge up bullshit by making this link is insane.
The only inherently, directly "evil" race in all of WoW is the Forsaken (undead). As an Alliance player, I don't know the Troll leader, but I can vouch for both Thrall (the Orcs) and Cairne Bloodhoof (the Tauren) as wise, intelligent, brave leaders. Both kick ass, and neither are severely vulnerable to hubris. The same goes for King Magni Bronzebeard (the Dwarves). However, the leader of the Cenarion Circle (Stormrage), linked to the Night Elves, is arrogant, self-righteous, and condescending. The leader of the Undead is cunning and greedy.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that this story starts out by implying Blizzard is racist by saying Native Americans and Jamaicans are evil, yet if anything Terra Nova has the entire thing backwards.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
The horde isn't evil, they're just alien. That's part of the entire point of the game! The horde is a player race, and if you're a member of the horde then you're the "good guys" and the Alliance is the "bad guys". Of course the horde has all of these strange, "other" cultural identifiers tagged to it-- that's why the Alliance hates them. If you see these cultural identifiers as negative, that just means you share the Alliance's prejudices.
I imagine the author of this article stumbling through the woods, complaining loudly that he can't get a good view of the forest because all of these trees are in the way.
[My son] was afraid of the Undercity. And that's just from the imagery ... as his father, my only defense in this frightening choice would have to be that I am just trying out evil, just getting to know it, just using evil instrumentally for some greater purpose. He abviously can't grasp that now, but even if he could, these are the only possible justifications for me to inhabit such a wicked being.
The author is confusing ugly with evil. Perhaps he should be teaching his son not to judge people on appearances?
Not that undead isn't somewhat evil, but a 3-year olds fear at unfamiliar faces is not a spectacular judge of this. And, I certainly don't know anything evil about trolls! They are downtrodden, and ugly, for the most part, but not evil. The author seems to be reading his own preconceptions into this a lot more than Blizzard is.
To anyone that gives a few minutes of thought to the story of WarCraft, it's clear that the Horde isn't evil.
I think WarCraft, if anything, is posing a criticism against the entire Western mindset from the Medieval period up through Modernity. The Orcs have ceased being manipulated by demons and have returned to more peaceful, shamanistic roots. The Tauren are in a similarly peaceful mindset. The article also notes that some aspects of the Alliance represent technology and capitalism, but a lot of the technology depicted in the game is faulty or untrustworthy. Note, for example, the harmful effects of many of the failed experiments of Gnomeregan.
The articles in question cite appearance and old mythology a lot; I think Blizzard is attempting to turn the stereotypes of Orcs, Trolls, and Undead as evil on its head. My experience in the game is that they have successfully taken fantasy races long considered to be evil and made them noble.
That's the argument given at Terra Nova, that the Horde is evil because it's made up of races that are generally thought of as evil. It's a crap argument in the case of WoW, though, since it requires you to ignore all of the backstory that Blizzard has set up in order to agree with it. Blizzard isn't just saying that orcs aren't evil and expecting you to agree; it actually shows that the orcs are no more evil than any other Warcraft race through the story.
Remember: WoW is not set in Middle Earth.
Rob
I think it's a part of human nature to think of 'those guys over there' as bloodthirsty, uncivilized animals. My bachelor's is in anthropology, and in my reading, time and time again, all over the world, any ethnic group, society, or culture refers to itself as 'the people' -- that's literally what names like 'Navajo', 'Hopi', etc. mean. The implication is that anyone who is not in your group is not exactly human. It doesn't matter whether you are a large kingdom or a small group of hunter gatherers. Those guys over there are bloodthirsty savages with long penises, one step up from animals, who are just salivating to come over here, kill us, and rape our women.
This kind of racism is by no means limited to white Europeans conquering other groups. When the first White Australian prospectors encountered native New Guineas, the New Guineans thought that these whites were going to rape and seduce their women with penises so long they had to wrap them around their waists! What a reversal of stereotypes -- blacks afraid of over-sexualized white guys with long penises.
It should come as no surprise that these motifs are repeated in fantasy and science fiction. I'll admit that I'm not widely read, but you rarely find some truly creative and outlandish descriptions of extra-terrestrials. Mostly they are some kind of 'Noble Savage' humanoid with bumps on their head, or a mask, etc. Non-intelligent life forms are some re-capitulation of Earthly life forms, be it plants, insects, reptiles, etc.
For instance, in Star Wars, you have Chewbacca, who is some kind of Bigfoot Woodsman who growls to communicate, wears no cloths, and has a crossbow for God's sake. A crossbow. Same deal with Ewoks -- cute pygmies, naked, furry, with wooden spears and magic.
Same deal with warcraft. The Humans are all white guys, with medieval clothing, architecture, and religion. They build churches and practice alchemy and magic. They speak with various British Isles accents. The 'Others' set up tents like Mongolian raiders, have shamans, which is the name for a non-European witch, live in tribes, have cheifs, etc. Orcs are basically Big Scary Black Men in green skin -- muscular, wide notrils, thick lips. Taurens have Totems like North Pacific Native Americans. The Orc Hero Blademaster is obviously a samurai -- people might doubt that orcs are stereotyped blacks, but no one can seriously argue that the Blademaster is not a Japanese guy in green skin. He even has a Japanese accent! "I Hear-O and Obey!" Trolls are voo-doo practicing Jamacans, etc.
This is the basic fantasy paradigm that we inherited from JRR Tolkein and the racist perspective of the world he lived in. It's called the White Man's Burden -- it was Europe's job to bring civilization and culture to those poor, dark-skinned people inhabiting the rest of the world. This was the justification for the resource explotation of Asia, Africa, and the Americas that fueled the wars and industrialization of Europe, finally culminating in WWI and WWII. The Hobbits were the British, "A nation of shopkeepers" as Churchill put it. The warring factions of humans, elves, and dwarves were the various European nations that couldn't stop their infighting to face a common threat. The Orc armies that Saruman raised represent the vast resources marshalled from the colonies to finance the new European war machines.
Your honorary anthropology degree in a nutshell. For more detail, check out _Guns, Germs, and Steel_.
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-- Pablo Picasso
Star Trek was also the first and is still one of the only television shows to feature non-whites as ranking officers and important cast members, and to make them beautiful and intelligent to boot...
It was too me very refreshing. The entire "series" had this element of turning stereo types upside down. One of the games allowed you to forge an allience between a village and some gnolls. You could have easily slayed them to complete the quest but making an allience made for a far better game in my opinion.
Nonetheless stereo types are the norm. It is not that suprising really. I have talked to other Torment players who never "discovered" the undead village because they immidialty went into slaughter mode upon spotting the skeleton guards.
It is easier to be able to spot the goodies from the baddies in an instant so you know who too hit with a big sword and who to heal in the confusion of battle. It is kinda the reason why soldiers were uniforms, in some ways zombie is just a uniform that identifies the NPC as an enemy.
But why use real world races in a fantasy setting? Well two reasons, first the Star Trek reason. It allows you to discuss real world politics without immidiatly having all the real world baggage. The klingons were like the soviets but were not the soviets. Be symphatethic with a klingon is okay (Kirk does it several times) be symphatitic with a communist is not.
Sci-Fi often uses this tool the most classic being the case of the two alien races fighting each other tille exstinction. One black and white, the other white and black. Obviously a reference to our black vs white struggles BUT without at any point having to deal with wich of the characters is the white person and who the black.
The second reason wich I think WoW took is because it safes time, copy and paste a culture is easier then making up your own, plus it increases immersion. People will be adding their own knowledge to your game making it seem deeper then it really is.
I don't really think there is that much meaning behind it except perhaps the general kinda low level racism that is so common among all of us it is just part of live.
Could you really picture a jamaican like culture in control of advance tech? Be honest. For that matter could you imagine a troll with the bearing of a british gentleman?
The predator had dreadlocks. Could you imagine him with a Beatles haircut instead?
Like it or not but we are all prejudiced. We can overcome it but at a basic level we expect certain behaviours from people with certain looks. It is as simple as that fat people have good humor and thin people have none.
You can read to much into things.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Are we thinking about the same elves here? In Tolkien, sure. The Eldar were really good to the human tribes who first came to Beleriand in the First Age, taught them everything they could, gave them lands, the works.
But in Celtic mythology? I wouldn't go within ten miles of a real old-school Celtic elf even if I was wearing cold iron chainmail and carrying a rowan-wood quarterstaff. No bloody way.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
To anyone that thinks the creators of WoW are racist: YOU come up with even TWO cultures for use in a fantasy game, then tell me that you didn't draw anything real-world cultures, and that you aren't a racist hypocrite.
Actually, Tolkien did it consciously, since he was creating a mythology for England, hence, it's eurocentric and superficially racist. There are plenty of subtle and not-so-subtle hints, like when Sam wonders if the southern man he sees dead is evil or just came to the war out of need, etc.
I guess Tolkien didn't give a shit about being politically correct.
If you follow from Westfall all the way up to Onyxia, it becomes apparent that the Alliance is thoroughly corrupt. TFA has it backwards.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
I think you're misunderstanding. There aren't "evil elf elements" -- all elves (in Celtic legend) are portrayed as amoral. There aren't some "good" ones that can be trusted to help out humans and other "bad" ones -- they're all capricious and spiteful the majority of the time. One half of the original elf stories tells you how to avoid elves, and the other half tells you what happens to you if you fail to avoid them.
But for whatever reason, people like the idea of a beautiful, stately, powerful, good race, and fused that with the admittedly beautiful, stately, and powerful (although decidedly not good) elves of legend, resulting in the saintly (sanitized) elves in LOTR etc. Warcraft certainly draws inspiration from LOTR -- no one's arguing that -- but concluding that because they both feature an alliance of humans and elves that they both view humans and elves (and orcs) identically is poor logic. Even if Warcraft I was a literal recreation of the LOTR world, which it wasn't, there would be no compulsion for WoW to perpetuate this one view on humans/elves/orcs, especially given the Warcraft III storyline. Warcraft has evolved into a version of elves and orcs somewhat closer to the original Celtic legends, and is arguably more interesting for it, at least for those of us who find perfect goodness and perfect evilness irritatingly boring. It's not that the elves are good and the orcs are evil, or the orcs good and the elves evil -- they're both more nuanced. Kind of like real life.
unfortunatly the author and the author he quotes have no clue of the game. The one thing that sticks out in WoW is that you basically get to kill every "race" in the game. As alliance you kill human members of "evil" rogue syndicates (defias), you kill evil dwarfs (darkiron), evil gnomes (shadowcouncil), evil orcs, evil elves, evil dragons etc etc pp. At the same time you work for good trolls (zandarla), good undead (argent dawn), good tauren (cenarion) etc. In WoW, no race is good or evil. At the most, factions are. Even then, often it's ambiguos at best.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
"I mean, if someone at Blizzard observed Jamacians (well, actually Rastafarians, as not all Jamacians are as their stereotype makes them out to be) and then said to themselves, 'well I'll make a character out of that' ...then I'd say that's racism."
No, not really. You forget one essential ingredient: for anything to be racism it also has to carry some kind of negative connotation. If it just presents or borrows from some race, but does _not_ pass any kind of judgment of it being "evil" or "inferior", then it's simply not racism.
E.g., Star Wars borrows heavily from the Japanese, but noone would call it racist for that. E.g., Jade Empire isn't just borrowing from ancient China, but is outright set in an exaggerated fantasy version of China. Yet noone would call it a racist game.
And the Horde are just a different bunch of cultures. (You can't even say it's one different culture, because each of its tribal components has a different culture of its own.) They're neither good, nor evil per se, and in many aspects they're not even that different from the Alliance cultures.
E.g., they still live by the same honour rules. They lose honour for attacking civilians, just like the Alliance does, and they gain nothing from attacking weaker opponents, again just like their Alliance counterpart. I.e., it doesn't look "evil" to me in that aspect. There's nothing in there that says "you're great if you go slaughter their women and children and gank their newbies", and which thus could be judged as "evil".
And Blizzard certainly passes no judgment there. You're not asked to choose a "good" or "evil" side, like in EQ2 or COH/COV, you're simply asked to choose Alliance or Horde. Each one thinks they're the good ones and the others are the enemy, and each one is just as guilty of crimes against the other. E.g., it's damn hard to say "Dwarves are good, Tauren are evil" with a straight face, when the dwarves are the ones desecrating the taurens' cemeteries and such in the name of archaeology.
Basically if you can view one of those cultures as "evil" or "inferior" just because they're different from the RL western culture, then you've just discovered your own bias. Not Blizzard's.
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