I'll avoid naming any particular cultures/religions etc that may or may not be like real life, since politics/religion aren't allowed on the forum. But blizzard did good with making sure they made a statement against racism in real life. The entire WoW is a statement against racism and hatred against those perceived to be different. Its proof alliance are the real evil race, full of hatred of anyone not like them
So lets see. Does alliance have any actual beast race? Nope. They don't allow "beasts" into the alliance. Now I hear you go "WORGEN"...nope. Lore wise, I always see in cinematics and in-game npc worgens are 95% in human form. Even greymane rarely goes to worgen form. If gameplay was accurate to lore, player worgens would mostly be in human form too like the other gilnean worgens. Therefor, lore wise they are just humans that, in intense situations, become beasts rarely.
Blizzard didn't even let "beastly" worgens part of the alliance, just the mostly human civilized gilnean worgens. Why didn't they also get the beast worgens that are almost always in worgen form? Because alliance don't like anyone not like them and only like gilnean worgens because they are pretty much humans with wolf powers.
Draenei - Not human, but "pretty", which is what alliance like
Worgen - 95% human in lore and in-game (ignoring player worgens which aren't accurate to in-game cinematics or anything like greymane), sometimes worgen form comes out. But most of the gilnean npcs are in human form and not worgen form, and even greymane rarely leaves human form
Night elves - elves are pretty
gnomes - cute and human-like
dwarves - human-like
dark iron dwarves - human-like
lightforged draenei - super pretty, obviously alliance accept them
void elves - because they are elves
interesting...all pretty/elves or/and human-like. Why doesn't alliance accept anyone that isn't pretty or like them? This was blizzard's way of bringing real world into WoW.
Now lets look at horde
Undead - They asked alliance to be part of the alliance, but were turned down because they are "monsters". And yes SOME have done bad things since then, but when someone in real life does something bad even if its their leader, it does NOT speak for the entire group of people but the person and those that followed that did something bad. Not the entire group. Not all undead do bad things, its only a small group of them and sadly sylvanas as well. But they don't speak for the entire forsaken.
Orcs - Why can't some orcs join the alliance? Why can't you be an orc working with the alliance? Because alliance thinks they are a lesser race that needs to be purged from azeroth
tauren - They only see them as food
troll - too different
blood elf - The odd one out on horde, they are pretty AND elves. So why didn't alliance accept them? Well they actually did ask, but blood elves hate bigots and those who treat others badly so denied them
goblins - Super different, but all they want to do is make money and invent stuff. Thats like telling a cat not to be a cat, or telling a dog to become a horse. Goblins by their nature just want money and invent things. Most likely alliance just hate their very being
high mountain tauren - food
mag'har orc - they hate them even more than orcs
nightborne - alliance are like rich snobs, they see someone in need and need help with their addiction, and they shun them, laugh at them and even hate them or kill them instead of helping them in their time of need
So, you see horde accepts all kinds of people and races
Alliance only accept pretty races or humans or elves, and wanted blood elves (thats strange actually, further proving me right they only want pretty races/elves/humans because why didn't they ask the tauren to join them or any other horde race?)
So the above to me proves that blizzard designed the alliance has a staunch non-acceptance race that hates anyone not like them, and even tried getting blood elves to join...funny enough didn't give the same offer to tauren or any other race. Just the pretty blood elves.
Which to me, that makes alliance the true evil race...not horde.
It was blizzards way of showing that in real life, people that are not like each other are treated poorly and terribly but doing it in a not so in your face manner. They made alliance not accept anyone not pretty/elves/human-like. and they made horde the faction of acceptance and letting anyone be a part of the horde no matter how they look or what they are like.
But in this manner, people think horde are the evil ones because they are "different", when in truth its actually been the alliance the whole time.
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World of Warcraft never had any intent to offer racism in design. They simply thought of two factions and had fun making them.
If It weren't for recent politics, no one was screaming this word.... I feel we've come a long way and GETTING EVEN BETTER. NOW WERE GOING BACKWARDS.
Proof ?...… This topic !
Another example is warcraft 3, early on you see orcs enslaved by humans and even have to free thrall from enslavement.
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Gnomes aren't terribly good looking either but in traditional fantasy gnomes, elves, humans (blame Tolken) band together against the "evil" races of orcs, trolls, ogres etc.
Blizzard was just following established standards...."good orcs" indeed, the only good orc is a dead orc..
In vanilla WOW Horde were clearly still the "evil" side and many played them as such, at least until the PC police got involved.
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And why did alliance ask blood elves to join them but not tauren or anyone else? Tauren probably be glad to join the alliance instead of following sylvanas, but nope gotta ask the pretty elves.
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High elves used to be part of the human alliance before they lost the sunwell and turned to thew blood elf ideology. Tauren allied themselves with the orcs during the rise of Thrall and hadn't really been a thing prior to that, and races like trolls, ogres, and other ones that were in Warcraft were largely evil and sought to simply destroy when they were first introduced.
That's been reconnected down over time, but it was all establishing precedence long before WoW for the Warcraft world, and that dictated a lot of the basic divisions that went into the game as a consequence.
The humans wouldn't want the undead near them because the undead as the scourge were historically what drove humanity and many of the other living races towards destruction. The undead even still occupy what was once their capital. On top of that they have shown on multiple occasions that even though they are no longer part of the scourge, they are willing to employ tactics that are effectively war crimes and take allied casualties for their own sake and motives. It's amazing the horde still allows them to hang around ever since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
The draenei are just an egregious instance of broken and retconned lore, so that's not really as clean as you'd wanna call it any ways too.
Goblins were used as a foil to gnomes and would have been redundant.
It's a case of many generic tropes that were mushed about over time. Nothing special is going on here.
You can much more easily characterize it by visual aesthetic with the blood elves being the one exception to this.
A more logical question would be why did Blizzard not put more thought into how they could utilize the lore behind these races and factions to create more interesting dynamics and politics. All the way back with Burning Crusade they had an opportunity to introduce the three-faction dynamic to the game and use the blood elves, draenei, and a variation of the naga all into their own Outlands faction that could have picked up timeskipped from where WC3 had left them off.
Their race dynamics have overarching themes, but also has a lot of mess and frayed ends from the changing continuity of the game and it's lore. It's not a notably organized example of fantasy race dyanmics.
Also, aren't blood elves part of the horde?
Perhaps you are ignoring my posts because they shoot gaping holes in your invalid argument?
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And as for draenei, they are aliens but also "pretty"
And blood elves are part of the horde since they don't like the hateful alliance, and are also the only horde race that alliance in BFA lore that got offered to join the alliance. I know poster above gave his reasons for that, but the alliance could at least have asked the other races if they were so accepting of those different than them or didn't look "pretty".
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WOW was originally designed in an age when cosmetics were largely irrelevant to it's mostly male target audiance but quickly adapted to its vastly different (from previous MMORPGs) demographic.
As others have mentioned, Blizzard matched up races based more on traditional conventions than any great regard for game lore.
I mean c'mon, the Horde are the bad guys, regardless of the weird revisionist history WOW has undergone over the years.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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Aloha Mr Hand !