colapopped:

So during a recent thread on the WRA forums, I made a post (that has since been deleted by moderators) about how Blizzard chose to represent the draenei race in WoW as Jewish-coded (an ok/good thing on its own), but then chose to represent them as also being the victims of repeated genocides (and the women specifically as victims of orcish sexual assault). Which, within the context of the Jewish stuff, is real bad optics. Adding to that, the mag’har orc scenario now also presents at least one group of draenei (the LIghtbound) as also being violent zealots… who are now pushing genocide (it’s genocide, don’t bother trying to say it’s *technically* not) on the orcs.

The post was singled out by Buliss, the GM of Volkar Legion, as problematic and anti-semitic… despite the message of the post being that representing the draenei as Jewish-coded punching bags is terrible on Blizzard’s part. A Jewish member of Buliss’ guild/Discord saw Buliss ranting about this in their Discord, and when the guild started mass-reporting the post, this person gquit and came to me with the information. Supposedly this isn’t the first time Buliss has said questionable stuff, but that’s its own thing I guess.

What’s worse: I got (temp) banned for the post. Despite the situation being an example of mass reporting used as a grudge-tool (which Blizzard confirmed; it was brigading), Blizzard actually agreed that the post was anti-semitic.

Think about that for a moment. Criticism of Blizzard’s representation of Jewish people was stated, by Blizzard’s own reps, to be “derogatory” towards Jewish people. Blizzard writers, who paint the draenei as Jewish-themed punching bags, cannot be criticized for this without stating the facts of how the draenei are written, because doing so is apparently against the ToS.

Draenei are Jew-coded and written as constant victims of genocidal violence, but you cannot state as much because it is “derogatory towards a religion or race.” The women were written to have been targets of sexual violence by the orcs (see: tBC, WoD, Chronicle, some of the books, etc.), but criticizing that cannot be done without violating the ToS by mentioning sexual assault.

After trying to appeal the ban multiple times and only getting canned auto-responses, here is the only one that was actually addressing the issue:

“This penalty has already been upheld. Any further requests on this topic will not be reviewed.

Since it is apparently unclear, the reasons for this suspension are threefold:


  • – derogatory references to a religion or culture.

  • – negative comments regarding employees of Blizzard Entertainment

  • – references to sexual violence.”

Dumbfounding.