sneakyfeets replied to your post “Can't believe you guys is making me defend blizzard canon, but...”
Wrathion is definitely a complex and compelling character. He is also definitively a criminal. He's one of three directly responsible for Garrosh's 'rescue' and thus subsequently the events of WoD and Legion. He's arrested for literally being a war criminal as branded by the Alliance and probably the Horde too in WoD at Taylor's garrison. He does a lot, lot of shitty things, and 8.3 is a massive, widely-embraced show of growth for his character. He's also rejected by many people as dark-skinned representation because he's not a human. He's a two-ton lizard that's good at shapeshifting magic. He's not a black or Middle eastern character, he's an intelligent beast - just like Nefarian and Sabellian, which are also dark-skinned characters but not suitable representation. It's absolutely racist that Blizzard picked the Black dragonflight to be the antagonists and gave them dark-skinned human forms, which doesn't extend to literally any other flight, the 'good guys' as far as I remember. While I understand your apprehension, and of course there's always going to be racist shitheels, people poking fun at gremlin Wrathion are remembering who he was in Cata, MoP, and WoD, where he was just a smarmy whelp who kept fucking up and ended up a war criminal because he thought he was smarter than everyone else, even if his intentions were good. And when I say rejected, I am referring to people saying that Wrathion is not enough, and Blizzard needs to properly do black characters and do them better, especially due to the racist origin of the Black Dragonflight and their forms and Wrathion's mixed past.
Okay so from the top: there is a difference between someone committing criminal acts in canon and a member of the fandom choosing to define them as “a criminal”. If the black lives matter protests have taught you nothing else, it should have shown you how harmful it is to attach that label to black and brown people. As much as we joke about “be gay do crimes” fandoms, especially majority white fandoms like warcraft need to recognize how fandoms can reflect and normalize real world prejudice.
I’m not a person of color (I don’t know if you are) but with the risk of putting words in the mouth of actual black and brown people, we cannot just reject the ways harmful tropes are by fandoms enforced upon characters just because they aren’t “technically” a certain race a culture. But also, this isn’t like the trolls who are clearly inhuman but speak in Jamaican accents. Wrathion is shown as a man of color, while in the lore that might not be his “true form” it is very much the way he is commonly represented both within the game and the trans media stories.
Actually, lets rewind for a second, this:
Is who you’re calling “an intelligent beast”, are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that particular choice of words
Nobody is disagreeing that its racist to make the black dragon flight the evil one, but that’s also not what we’re talking about.
What we are talking about is how fandoms repeatedly flatten characters of colors, turning them into unthreatening stereotypes. Wrathion isn’t some little gremlin who keeps fucking up. He has fought two separate gods! He’s a mix between an Errol Flynn character and Artemis Fowl. He’s young, confident, proud, a bit of a show, smart as hell, and tormented by both his and his father’s actions.
The same thing happened with D.Va. A 19 year old war hero, uplifted to pop culture icon and forced to put on a brave and careless face against overwhelming odds or her entire country’s morale might crumble - turned into a mountain dew obsessed gremlin, because lol gamer amirite?
Assuming you’re a person of color then it’s not my place to tell you whether to accept Wrathion as representation, but I think its naive to think we can just flatten him like that for the purpose of shitposting and pretend it has no bearings on the fandom as a whole nor reflects the many un-examined issues regarding race within the (queer) warcraft fandom - just look at how many fanfics refer to the orcs as “savage”.
Also, I think you fundamentally misunderstand what a war crime is. It is not a crime committed during war time (e.g. freeing someone about to stand trial - an action i want to reiterate was a highly motivated if misguided action that has and is being dealt with in canon). A war crime is a breach of the Geneva Convention, and we’ve got plenty of those in warcraft, for example:
Destruction of holy sites (Sylvanas)
Forcing prisoners of war to perform dangerous or humiliating labour (Katherine Proudmoore)
Deliberately endangering or killing noncombatants (Garrosh)
Using military force to threaten or harm civilian populations (Jaina)
For anyone wanting to learn more about racism and how it manifests in fandoms i strongly recommend: https://stitchmediamix.com/
