Quote from Bhogal83 »I think what upsets many of us "alt-right Nazis" is the double standards exhibited by WOTC and the MTG community. It's perfectly fine for an editor of MTG Salvation to publish an editorial implicitly calling for right-wingers to literally be burned alive in the streets, but any criticism of WOTC's heavy-handed far-leftism is labelled racism/trolling.
It's perfectly fine for Medieval-Europe-inspired planes to be populated with dark-skinned people, but no one questions why Amonkhet or Kamigawa are devoid of Caucasian natives.
It's perfectly fine for the WOTC community to complain about a picture of Garruk threatening to punch Liliana in the face, but no one questions when we have pictures of women like Massacre Girl standing over the bloodied bodies of her victims.
It's perfectly fine for Jeremy Hambly to be physically beaten and ejected from the community because he wrote some mean things about some people online, but no one questions why the MTG community harassed and doxxed Terese Nielsen online due to her not following the same childish SJWism as the rest of the community.
And before the tendentious mods of this website label this post as hate speech/racism/flaming/trolling, bear in mind that, since you care so much about increasing the presence of brown people in the game, I am a brown-skinned Indian, and my message is this: If diversity is so important to you, then perhaps you should allow diversity of thought. And if you wish to keep politics out of MTG, then perhaps you shouldn't try to sneak it in.
The reason most people do not bother addressing the comments you called 'arguments' is that they lack that format structure, especially in this instance. But let us try and extract that together, shall we? Based on the anecdotes which have been selected in the quoted message, you seem to be attempting to lead the reader to a conclusion somewhere in the ballpark of 'WotC and the community around MtG are unjustly biased against value conservative people'. Because I am not familiar with the details of the cases to which you are alluding with regard to a MTGS editorial or Teresa Nielsen, I will refrain from commenting on those outside stating that the first one is extremely hyperbolic. Calling WotC 'far-left' - let alone ideologically motivated in said respect, as the use of 'ism' implies - based on their representation of members of disempowered groups as parts of their fictional works is the usual online conflation of 'everything I disagree with' with extremism and a label binarily opposed to whichever one oneself identifies with. This form of hyperbole signals utter lack of nuance which colours whether the take is considered worth spending the time to analyse, whether justifiedly or not.
So, firstly - the alleged disparity in representation between worlds modelled after different historical contexts. I checked every 'human' card in Amonkhet to see the variety of shades in terms of skin colour and as Bloodlust Inciter, Glory-Bound Initiate, Honored Crop-Captain, True-Heart Duelist, and Vizier of Remedies show, there is variation in various directions (including lighter tones well within the range Caucasians exhibit). I mostly focused on the lighter hues because of your argument here. Now, interestingly, that form of variation would have occurred in historical Egypt, too, because of its relatively active trade (and other forms of interactions) with other Mediterranean nations. Similarly, people of various skin tones have been a part of European culture throughout history. While he is a fictional example, the eponymous Othello in Shakespeare's play is a Moorish general of the Venetian army and traditionally gets depicted with deep dark skin. Yet people tend to act as though representations of different identities are a uniquely modern phenomenon and somehow reduce the artistic integrity of the works in question. Rome was an extremely multi-cultural empire despite the city being in Italy. The crusades and similar historical contingencies having made parts of Europe hostile to people of other ethnicities is not something which needs to be represented in fictional works because that period is the exception rather than the rule in the grand scheme of things.
As for depictions of gendered violence - the example you brought up being Triumph of Ferocity - the issue people observe mainly lies in some depictions using imagery associated with real trauma such as domestic abuse. In essence, those experiences are being turned into symbols which then become dissociated from their original contexts and the impact such events truly have. I believe WotC had intended the complementing nature of Triumph of Cruelty to balance such associations out. However, the framing of the two images is very different: one focuses on Garruk's suffering and leaves Liliana in the background; the other focuses on Garruk's anger and uses signs of domestic abuse like choking, Liliana's relatively passive pose, and punching (in the face). The two thus end up not being symmetrical since Garruk is the focus of both. We can also relatively easily imagine alternative depictions of Garruk having the upper hand over Liliana which do not apply these signifiers. Off the top of my head, he could be sending wolves after her, approach her with his axe in hand while she is struggling against vines that are depicted in a non-bondage fashion, and so on. These are still depictions of violence against a woman by a man but not of gendered violence. For the record, Massacre Girl's picture shows a woman lying there dead. However, the bigger difference there is that she is a depiction of generic violence by a woman rather than 'feminine violence'. Assuming that WotC ever made a card where a woman was participating in a form of 'feminine violence' like castrating a man in his sleep, it would likely be problematic but there would be less overall impact since instances of such violence are considerably rarer and do not constitute a systematic societal issue.
I hope you are content at having had your points be addressed to the best of my ability to try and explain the thought processes behind what you dismissed as just 'far-leftism'.
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You're original post was fantastic. I'm sorry the work you put in to actually addressing what was brought up was so ignored...but then I suspected it would be.
I think or at least hope WOTC sees discussions like this and realizes exactly why a character and card like this are needed. You can only go forward with this. Eventually minds will expand.
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Yup. Going to be useful against Uril and Sigarda especially. Player hexproof can save you though.
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I am very curious what they have planned for Will (and I assume Rowan). I was always sorry they had no lore attached to them when BB released.
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Agree. I think Amonkhet and Innistrad were good examples of the villain getting a strong win. If you're following the lore the deaths on those planes (the gods and major angels on Innistrad) were impactful. Gideon's death will likely have even bigger ripples than Avacyn's or the Amonkhet gods' which were all emotional deaths.
Also both those planes experienced major catacylsmic events with minimal major character deaths. So the body count at the end of WOTS is around the same. If anything Emrakul's influence on Innistrad should have resulted in far more death but it didn't.
In fact we don't know what non-planeswalker characters may have died in this story do we? The spoilers mostly focused on the planeswalkers. What if some legendary creatures died? The spoilers that have leaked haven't covered the whole story. Trostani for instance is unaccounted for and they and Mat'Selesnya must have been affected by the animation of Vitu-Ghazi and its destruction.
I'm excited to read the whole novel. Since all we have right now are the major pieces but there has to be more.
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It is sad. But at least he goes out heroic and on his own terms. Unlike some other great white characters that got corrupted before the end (Oketra, Avacyn, Bruna, Gisela). Those 4 hit hard. Especially Oketra.
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I'm curious about that as well. Could be get an orzhov Liliana then?
This is sad though. I liked Gideon. Not a huge Liliana fan so I would have preferred her story end here but that seemed highly unlikely.
WOTC could never really win since all of the Gatewatch have fans. Characterwise at least it makes sense for Gideon to do this.