Oh World of WoWCraft Lore...how have you fallen, so?

Samtemdo8_v1legacy

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Hawki said:
Samtemdo8 said:
The same reason people felt about the Ewoks in Star Wars.
Those people are silly. :p

And are you suggesting that by this same logic Warcraft should have been JUST about Orcs and Humans? No Dwarfs, Elves, Gnomes, Trolls, Ogres, Goblins, etc.?
No, I'm pointing out the logic people seem to have, or rather, the inability to articulate why pandaren are so obtrusive when everything else isn't.
Mostly because they were the face of an entire expansion.

I mean they didn't make a whole expansion out of the Walrus people in Wrath of the Lich King.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Samtemdo8 said:
Mostly because they were the face of an entire expansion.

I mean they didn't make a whole expansion out of the Walrus people in Wrath of the Lich King.
Ironically, Pandaria was both one of WoW's best expansions and featured some of its best narrative writing.

I will concur, however, that a race of Panda people living on an Asian-flavored continent called "Pandaria" is faintly ridiculous. You can go back to the oft-lionized WC3 for that stupid fucking name though.
 

wizzy555

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BloatedGuppy said:
Samtemdo8 said:
Mostly because they were the face of an entire expansion.

I mean they didn't make a whole expansion out of the Walrus people in Wrath of the Lich King.
Ironically, Pandaria was both one of WoW's best expansions and featured some of its best narrative writing.

I will concur, however, that a race of Panda people living on an Asian-flavored continent called "Pandaria" is faintly ridiculous. You can go back to the oft-lionized WC3 for that stupid fucking name though.
Yes but it was suppose to be a joke. It was the artist's calling card to insert pandas into his work, then they came up with a joke lore reason to explain why panda faces were appearing everywhere.

The actual inclusion of pandaria was most likely to penetrate the Chinese market.
 

Hawki

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Samtemdo8 said:
Mostly because they were the face of an entire expansion.

I mean they didn't make a whole expansion out of the Walrus people in Wrath of the Lich King.
Lots of things have been 'faces' for expansions, the expansion usually dealt with things outside them.

BloatedGuppy said:
I will concur, however, that a race of Panda people living on an Asian-flavored continent called "Pandaria" is faintly ridiculous. You can go back to the oft-lionized WC3 for that stupid fucking name though.
As opposed to native American-themed minotaurs living in a place called Thunder Bluff?

Or inuit-themed walrus people living in a place called Northrend?

Or Jamaican-themed trolls living in a place called Stranglethorn?

The idea of taking a non-humanoid race based on a real-world culture was done plenty of times before the pandaren, yet suddenly it became a problem then. Also, the pandaren aren't the only sapient species in Pandaria either, so, what, the mantid (insect people), mogu (terecotta people), jinju (fish people), and hozen (monkey people) get a free pass?

Even if the argument is made that pandaren were the "face" of MoP (same way blood elves and draenei were the "face" of BC, so that again feels like a double standard), the expansion dealt with more than just them.

wizzy555 said:
Yes but it was suppose to be a joke. It was the artist's calling card to insert pandas into his work, then they came up with a joke lore reason to explain why panda faces were appearing everywhere.
Don't recall any of that. Pandaren didn't appear everywhere, it started off as an April Fools joke that led to the brewmaster being included in TFT. The pandaren's lore wasn't fleshed out until after WC3 in the RPG books. What I also remember is that prior to MoP, lots of people were clamouring for pandaren (in that they'd reguarly come up as a selected race), but when they WERE included, lots of people did a 180.

The actual inclusion of pandaria was most likely to penetrate the Chinese market.
Even if that's true, Pandaria was fleshed out in lore before it appeared in-game.
 

wizzy555

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Hawki said:
Don't recall any of that. Pandaren didn't appear everywhere, it started off as an April Fools joke that led to the brewmaster being included in TFT. The pandaren's lore wasn't fleshed out until after WC3 in the RPG books. What I also remember is that prior to MoP, lots of people were clamouring for pandaren (in that they'd reguarly come up as a selected race), but when they WERE included, lots of people did a 180.

The actual inclusion of pandaria was most likely to penetrate the Chinese market.
Even if that's true, Pandaria was fleshed out in lore before it appeared in-game.
Not as I remember it, at the time the Pandarian lore consisted of basically "hidden in Kalimdor is a shy race of Pandas, they like beer". In fact when Pandaria was announced at Blizzcon Metzin was twisting himself into pretzels trying to explain their ethos.

The most known appearance of the panda face is on the demon hunter glave in WC3 after the previous one was patched out for being too "Nazish".
 

Hawki

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wizzy555 said:
Not as I remember it, at the time the Pandarian lore consisted of basically "hidden in Kalimdor is a shy race of Pandas, they like beer". In fact when Pandaria was announced at Blizzcon Metzin was twisting himself into pretzels trying to explain their ethos.

The most known appearance of the panda face is on the demon hunter glave in WC3 after the previous one was patched out for being too "Nazish".
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Pandaren#In_the_RPG

That basically covers all the pandaren's lore pre-MoP. It's quite a lot of it. And while you can it was declared non-canon, the declaration came in 2011, while the RPG began in 2003, and a fair bit of it remains congruent with what MoP established.