WoW: Examples of Sexism

[jadedmusings]

Courtesy of nagaina "Is WoW Inherently Sexist?"

The comments are...about what you'd expect when fanboys (and occasional fangirl) believe their sacred cows are being slaughtered en masse. To quote nagaina: "BUT IT'S A FANTASY!" is not a legitimate defense of any fundamental narrative flaw, much less egregious sexist bullshit.

I bring this up because last night I had the pleasure of running a few quests in Coldarra in Northrend, and I got to Keristrasza's quests. I liked her immediately and thought, "Aha, a strong female NPC ready to take on a huge fucking dragon (Malygos) pretty much all by herself." (Well, by herself and with my help after I run a few fetch quests for her.)

At one point she has you kill Malygos's lover/consort, Saragosa. She lures Malygos in with Saragosa's corpse and yells, "Malygos, come get your lover!" She pauses to breathe fire on the corpse and then says, "...or what's left of her!" At this point I'm sitting here at the computer mouth agape thinking I'm in love.

And then after completing the final quest, Malygos comes down and says he'll take Keristrasza as his lover. Obviously this is against her will, but there's no fighting (that we see). She just...fades away and goes with him without saying a single word and then I get a dungeon quest in The Nexus to go and save her.

WHAT THE FUCK? How do I go from complete and utter badass to damsel in distress? In five seconds I came up with a few other plausible ends to that quest line that still give you very good reasons to go into The Nexus to kick Malygos's blue ass up and down the Borean Tundra and not a single one of them involves Keristrasza needing to be saved.

Comments

[adalger]

I don't think "inherently" is the right word here. As you note, it would have been entirely plausible to have a good storyline that was still WoW-lore-consistent without being sexist. Thus, the sexism can be fixed without making it "not WoW any more." It is pretty pervasive, though.

Probably the instance that comes to mind for me is Jaina at the gates of Stratholme, who doesn't raise more than a token protest against Arthas. Here was an opportunity to make a meaningful stand for her beliefs, and instead she just walks away with Uther.

On the other hand, all the random mobs with a discernible gender are randomly male or female. Women are therefore fairly equally represented in the world at large. Likewise, so many of the questgivers are female that it's hardly a point of note, and rather a number of them are cast in positions of local authority. Jaina is in charge of Theramore. Therazane rules all of Deepholm. Ishanah is the leader of the Aldor faction in Shattrath.

On the gripping hand, most of the bosses are male, with few exceptions, and those not that notable for their agency or well-developed storylines. The only female end-bosses I can think of off hand are Princess Theradras and Vanessa. (Oh, and Lady Vashj at the end of SSC.)

ALL of the race leaders except Sylvanas are male, and she is portrayed in a pretty poor light in canon. (Moira doesn't count; she isn't the leader who matters for any of the achievements. That's Muradin. And she represents the "evil" Dark Iron dwarves anyway, tending to more support the point if you include her than to refute it.) Grom and Varian don't come off that well either, so it's not blatant "men good, women bad," but the Tauren were a missed opportunity to give at least one race a strong, noble woman leader. Instead, they made a divisive villainous murderer.

I started to write a wrap-up paragraph that said "it ain't all that bad," and realized what I was doing. Gah. Yeah, the sexism is really there. It's not fundamentally built into the premise of the game, but it's as hard to miss as the Christian-centric holiday calendar, the occasional racist bits, the strong Eurocentric orientation, and probably a few other random bits of fail that aren't coming to mind right now.

[jadedmusings]

Yeah, I'm not saying WoW or, by extension, Blizzard is on the level of, say, Duke Nukem in its treatment of female characters and players. In fact, I highly doubt anyone is saying that. However, the sexism is present and calling it out is a Good Thing(TM) in my opinion. By talking about it we can hopefully effect positive change in a game we love.

Over in the comments on that article, nagaina pointed out (roughly around page six) that Kael'thas Sunstrider doesn't even have a mother. I mean, I suppose we can assume he does (then again, there is the potential for some freaky magic to be involved), but there's no mother mentioned anywhere in the lore. She listed a whole slew of lore examples of women characters being downplayed, villain-ized, or just plain left out.

My bottom line is this: I see sexism because I am a woman, because sexism affects me in my day-to-day life. The commenters over there basically said, "Yeah well, sexism exists in real life therefore it exists in a fantasy game. Deal with it." And that is utter bullshit. By virtue of being a completely made-up world with none of the trappings or history of our world, there is every reason to expect we could make a world with equality between the genders. There's every reason I could expect to see more female NPCs who help shape that world and even run it.

[adalger]

I've finally gotten around to reading a lot of the comments. I don't have the strength to engage over there. I'm glad, though, that my points about Jaina, Moira, and Sylvanas were all made by people over there anyway. There are bigger guns than I engaging, with more and better arguments.

Anyway, thanks for posting this. It's nice to see things I can understand and relate to on my reading page. :)