A Warcraft message we need

Words have power. The history of the World of Warcraft is told with the magic of wonderful words that opened up a whole world of Azeroth for us and introduced us to incredible heroes. But this franchise was born many years ago, which means we must make sure that all players can enjoy it today. We want to preserve Azeroth for our children.

Therefore, of course, we need to adjust the language and certain details of our stories a little from time to time. All these recent changes are careful and small in scale, and have been carefully discussed by our team of professionals who support diversity and inclusion in the video game industry. In order for the representation to remain authentic, we turn to the Inclusion Ambassadors for advice and their rich life experience.

After all, most importantly, we strive to preserve the spirit of Warcraft. We absolutely don’t cross out the words of the past authors: just fix some things that objectively become outdated. We understand the key message of Warcraft that has inspired millions of players around the world: “Fight for what is worth fighting for.” This should not be confused with propaganda of cruelty and violence.

However, we still offer our deepest apologies for the terrible pain and grievous wounds that our franchise and its creators have caused over the years to those we should have always treasured and cherished: our players. It is now completely incomprehensible to us that some of these problematic remarks have endured in the game for so long: they are contrary to the values of Azeroth and its characters, which have so strongly influenced entire generations. We hope that with this work we will all remember the power of words.

◉ Cultures:

• Black Dragons and the orcish Blackrock Clan are now called Obsidian Dragons and the Great Mountain Clan. The Whiteclaw clan is now called the Paleclaw clan.

• The word "dwarf" has been changed to "dwargin".

• Pygmies have been removed from the game. In the future, they will be replaced by a culture that properly represents one of the indigenous peoples of Africa.

• In patch 9.1 for Shadowlands, we finally added Incubi to the game. In the future, we will continue this trend so that Warcraft won’t have any cultures represented by just one gender. Right now we're working on harpiens.

• Various changes to the descriptions of nations and lesser focus on the species background in character descriptions.

◉ Characters:

• Giramar and Galadin, sons of Vereesa Windrunner, are now her daughters, Girami and Galadia.

• Durak, Thrall's child, now uses "they/them" pronouns.

• Salandria, adopted daughter of Liadrin, is now black.

• Xuen, the White Tiger, and Sally Whitemane have been renamed to Xuen, the Snow Tiger, and Sally Greymane.

◉ General:

• The Stormwind Stockades and the Baradin Hold are now closed.

• After renaming the warlock's spell Enslave Demon to Subjugate Demon at the release of Shadowlands, we continued the work in that direction and removed references to slavery in the current time period of the game.

• Priest spells and texts related to the Void and the Old Gods will no longer contain references to mental illness. The word "madness", in most cases, will also be replaced by more correct epithets.

• The history of of Azeroth, Draenor and Argus has been partially rewritten to give women more visible presence. For example, the Triumvirate of Argus is replaced by the Quadrumvir: the fourth member was Nuuri, Velen's wife, and she’s still alive. So keep in touch for the future updates!

• We are taking steps against body shaming and we look forward to sharing our progress with you in the foreseeable future.

◉ Last but not least, we apologize for the problematic storyline of the Fourth War, which, in light of recent years and events, now feels even more offensive. In the future, we will prove that the goal of Warcraft is to achieve peace.

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This text was inspired by this article from The Telegraph.

 

While I still think that Puffin is in the wrong here, since I’m no longer a privileged white male I don’t have the strength to waste emotions on such news from the First World.

As usual, the text was made just for fun. To tease both Puffin-like censorship and critics of the things like Incubi. So I mixed stuff from the Telegraph with more neutral things, and even some, dare I say, cool ideas.