oh shut your face

[yukie]

Basically--anyone who grabs onto Kael's 'other insults' phrasing as a justification for Golden's fucking rockbrained probematic-as-shit "characterization" in the Arthas novel?

Is a dumbass retcon-oblivious ass-sniffing fart-whiffing apologist wanking spewing whinging fact-twisting dishonest whiny motherfucking klunk-knobbed smegmawheel tinhat fuckchop stan-wanker who doesn't know shit about shit.

And needs to shut up for eternity.



If you are grasping at fucking straws to defend the shitty treatment Kael and Illidan got, you are cheerleading for homophobia and racism! HERE’S HOW! I'll draw you a little isometric diagram and label it and everything.

1) Kael and the other Blood Elves are coded as some kind of fantasy-Arabian-nights-meets-Heian mishmosh, i.e. even though they are pale for no reason in-game they are coded as not white

2) Illidan and the other Night elves are coded as fantasy-generic-Asia-meets-vikings, i.e. they are coded as not white

3) Kael being reduced to a shrill jealous drama queen at Jaina plays into racist stereotypes about Asian and Middle Eastern men being effeminate/not properly masculine (compared to white manz) and untrustworthy and misogynistic and lolicon-perverts and two-faced, and when you consider this in tandem with the shitty magic-is-drugs nonsense WoW pulled and the doublecross of Illidan for no reason, SHIT STARTS TO LOOK UUUUUGLY for fuck’s sakes they basically made kael into a yellow-peril-meets-evil-maharajah opium pusher *headdesk*

4) The same goes for Illidan suddenly becoming this horrible creepy jealous stalkery douchebag over Tyrande

5) and when you consider that Illidan and Kael had a lot of chemistry in the RTS games it just gets so fucking much worse

6) so if you’re defending this bullshit problematic character defilement that sprung out of nowhere just to make Arthas and Furion look good

7) You’re a racism cheerleader and a homophobia cheerleader and a nasty fucking stan, and you are what’s wrong with fandom. Hope that fucking helps.

Bee tee fucking dubs, dipshits, that line you oh-so-love to use as your basis for your shitwad conspiracy theory wankfests?

WAS ACTUALLY AN ESPECIALLY NASTY FUCKING DIG AT ARTHAS!

which you fucking tools would realize if you would engage your singlelonely dendrite and you weren't so fucking determined to trash the character who's not traditionally masculine.

BY SAYING "AMONG OTHER INSULTS" KAEL IS IMPLYING THAT ARTHAS CONSIDERS THE ATTACK ON SILVERMOON AND THE MASSACRE OF KAEL'S PEOPLE AND THE MURDER OF HIS FATHER TO BE A REALLY CLEVER LITTLE DIG AND NOTHING MORE.

LISTEN to how Kael says that. He's coldly furious and hanging onto that anger to keep his shit together.

His line means this: "arthas thinks his attempted genocide of my people was just a masterfully clever bit of trolling."

It's ARTHAS who brings up Jaina as a bazinga-move. OH OOPS HEY HEY HEY ASSHOLES LOOKS LIKE YOU LOST YOUR ARGUMENT! Best quit while you're behind.

Arthas brings up Jaina first. Jaina, who Kael did care for. Jaina has vanished by this point. She is in Kalimdor. (NOTE: JAINA LEFT FOR KALIMDOR LONG BEFORR KAEL COULD HAVE GOTTEN ANYWHERE NEAR DALARAN FOR FUCK'S ALMIGHTY SAKES. Golden is a hackish little chit.) Most people do not know she is in Kalimdor! For everyone in the East Kingdoms, Jaina went *poof*. Jaina, for all Kael knows, may be dead or worse. When Arthas brings her up, he seems quite certain this is the case. Arthas says "I stole her lol". Kael, from his "you've taken everything I ever loved away from me", REALLY figures she is dead by that point. And no, "everything" does not ~imply~ fucking shit on a stick, asstwaddlers. "everything" is his family, his home, his loved ones. It's not objectification, shut your useless fucking noiseflaps. You don't even acknowledge that word as a real thing until you can finagle a gotcha-moment with it. Fuck you.

Now, I am not saying that Kael is perfect. He CAN be dramatic and snarky and pissy, he doesn't always think things through, he's way too proud by turns, and he was probably a complete awkward fail-at-suave dork about flirting with Jaina. (If you think the shit in the book is plausible or IC, you're a putrid little racist and should fuck off forever. Fuck along into the next plane of existence if you infantilize Jaina in this scenario, too.) Sometimes he's an ass.

But he was not ~omg just always~ nasty and ~a bad seed~ and shit. Fuck OFF already. Same goes for Illidan. He and Kael both got trashed to hell so Arthas would look better by comparison. There is no sign of bad-heartedness in WC3 or TFT, you numbnut fucking kiddies. Shut up al-fucking-ready you annoying little stanwanks.

I shouldn't be surprised at this particular group of numbskull fanstan pasty dudebro loudmouth fuckhead tinhats trashing Kael; they're terrified of men like him IRL. He doesn't present in a "properly masculine" way, he's "too pretty", he's seen as queer by the fandom and he falls into the category of "foreign and exotic" and female fans do like him, so they're terrified simultaneously that he'll take their wimmenz away and also hit on them. It's so fuckin' pathetically obvious and disgusting.


Feel free to not like Kael but don't go mouth-farting shitbrained made-up tortured retcon-humping meaningless reasons for not liking him. And stop fucking trying to impress women by trashing Kael thus and saying he's a "nice guy" type. he's not. that's you fucking tools. Fuck right out of my sight.

Comments

[fakename]

And it doesn't help that - well yeah, fantasy tends to be broad strokes of black and white evil posing against airbrushed paintings on vans. Making Arthas your dramatic heart-throb bad guy to talk up playing death knights / make you excited about fighting him is all very well and good, and it sounds like they did the usual tropes. And making older characters be bad to make Arthas seem great is a typical fantasy thing. It sounds like it's the _how_ they're getting written (and, even if this is corporate calling the shots, there's still choices about how things are written.)

I mean, Arthas is, from my little bit of familiarity, basically a Wagnerian stereotype. He's huge, and incredibly stupid. Impulsive. Young. Got something powerful with drawbacks. Cares about stuff, but not always when he _should_ care about stuff. Massive character flaws and now he's screwed up. Temper issues. Though at least he's not sleeping with a lady in the middle of a ring of fire.

And Kael and Illidan are basically getting coded as the scary bad guys who're worse than Mister Spear and Magic Helmet - but as you said, it's using a ton of tropes that are deeply problematic. And when you notice the "But you know, they're not MANLY" or "But you know, they're not like us" kind of awfulness, it's a heck of a lot easier to start noticing stuff like - that they may not be as bad as they're supposed to be. Or that the way they were written wasn't as horrible until suddenly they needed to put on the felt mustaches and pose near the metaphorical railroad tracks.

So, you could argue that it's supposed to be shades of grey. But if your language is "This is a story with bad guys and our hero," your coding is racist / homophobic / xenophobic, and your plot seems far to willing to ignore the other side - then you don't have an adult shades of grey saga of two flawed people. You've got a black and white story - where the bad guys are bad because the writer says you'd cheer for horrible tropes.

That's kinda what you're arguing, right?

[yukie]

Yeah. The thing was that WC3 and its sequel The Frozen Throne were straight-up shades of grey. When we first meet Illidan he's basically in maxiumum-security magical lockup; he makes some really knucklehead decisions, but he's a very good-hearted character and in the end we learn that he's so prone to showing off because he wants to remain important to his twin brother and said brother's girlfriend. Illidan figures he has to be the uber super mega giga badass awesome guy in order to matter and be loved. And then the novels have him just as this ass who was always an ass and who has no redeeming qualities.

Arthas is like--he gets sympathy but that's a Humans Are White thing. I still like his character though--he started out as a promising proto-paladin prince but then got led around by the nose (by a very evil-as-hell powerful psychic ghost, who is sympathetic in his own right because Ner'zhul himself got duped in his storyline) and so on--and it was his empathy as much as his pride that led him to behave as he did. Entire town infected with zombieplague = Arthas wipes out town to keep his people from suffering as undead. And he goes to greater and greater and less sensible lengths to get back at the demon whom he thinks is responsible (this is why he picked up Frostmourne anyway, it was said to be a demon killin' sharp thing among other awesomenesses). And then the sword eats his brain etc.

Illidan and Kael got villain'd in the game because the first expansion of WoW needed end bosses. The third member of their antiherro trio, the naga noblewoman Lady Vashj, got utterly neglected, and if people pay attention to her at all in books she gets dragon lady'd too argh arghhh.

XD;; yeah basically you summed up my rant. There's a lot of unthinking BS in ANY fandom; I jsut happened to hit upon a whole shebang of obnoxious fauxgressive young WASP het guys trying their damnedest to impress female gamers by slamming on Kael and Illidan--who are liked by a decent chunk of the female fanbase anyhow...

[doomhamster]

Yeah, pretty much. Illidan is reckless and stupid and pretty selfish at times (see: his original plot to kill Arthas which just happened to involve splitting a continent in two, likely would've cost a lot of innocent lives and possibly fucked up Azeroth itself). And he self-justifies A LOT, which is not a good thing but I think it's in at least part understandable - from Illidan's perspective, he's just come out of ten thousand years in solitary for trying to save the world in a manner his brother didn't approve of. And he's power-hungry, but I don't read that as a muahaahaaa-you-will-bow-down-before-me thing; more like wanting to be loved/admired/needed and being convinced that being the Best Ever is necessary for that, with a side order of being not-as-secretly-as-he'd-like scared that Maiev or Malfurion or whoever is going to catch up and stuff him back in jail.

(Don't even talk to me about the Knaak trilogy version of Illidan, 'cause frankly THAT guy is a torturer and a traitor and very nearly a rapist and literally blows up his own allies because he wants to show off, and he deserves all the bad shit that happens and more, BUT if that was what Illidan was really like I wonder why Tyrande would think "let's let Illidan out and he'll help us!" was a good idea? Keep in mind, this was back when Tyrande was still being portrayed as a reasonably intelligent and effectual leader of the night elves.)

As for Kael, he's been retconned so many times it's not funny, and one of the things that really stung me about the Arthas novel was that JAINA SEEMED CREEPED OUT BY KAEL. There was no sense that she was attracted to him (which of course there couldn't have been because this is a Blizzard "love triangle") or that they were friends or even that she liked him at all, right up until the point where he's yelling abuse at her and she is being Oh So Understanding because she knows his pain, which frankly UGH.

[yukie]

Oh god Illidan yes. "IF I SMITE THIS GUY I WILL GET HUGS. BYE NORTHREND QQ MOAR" and meantime Furion is like "ILLIDAN, THE WORLD IS SWEARING AT ME, PLEASE CUT THAT OUT."

Honestly a lot of how Illidan's train of thought seems to go reminds me of the extroverted dudes I've known with ADHD. (I have it my own ridonk self but I'm not extroverted really XD) They want to be liked, and usually they go about trying for this by BEING HILARIOUS OH MY GOD, and when they get downright annoying they self-justify like crazy XD; Illidan was probably like that as a kid, and then when he grew up and discovered mageness he started doing the equivalent of 'watch me make a giant explody science thing in the backyard with mentos'...

And Knaak is basically straight-up racist as balls. I won't even mince words. Furious is the designated Magical Asian guy, Illidan's the Fu Manchu, Azshara is the Dragon lady and Tyrande is the Lotus Blossom or whatever. Oh the urge to rocketpunch...


ANYWAAAAY ranting aside--I CAN acutally see Kael asking Jaina to just call him 'Kael' more than once, but not in a condescending-ass douchey way. Like--Jaina at first defaults to his full name because she's thinking about six different things at once. And Kael is going a 'no seriously it's fine, you don't need to be formal to me, we're equals, it's cool, we are both thaumatological nerds and you're better at ice magic than i will ever be and oh damn it am I looming by mistake again i don't want to be intimidating because i think you're neat.' XD Kael never struck me as especially distant or stuffy. He's a very warm person, and really TRUSTING. Like...he greets Maiev and Tyrande with "ishnu'alah", he doesn't take long to trust Vashj in spite of being crabbypants at first, and even though Illidan has no uber-cure Kael stays with him anyway.

Blargh mostly I just want to hug everybody and abscond with them. Canon made them into mean assholes when they're absolutely not and that makes me wanna bite things.