So, for a while I've been wanting to write this article, but didn't get much time to do it since I was working on other things for my website. I got the inspiration to write after reading a few posts by the tumblr user creatingblackcharacters, whose blog is a wonderful wealth of information and educational content about understanding how to create Black characters with intent, and how to identify when writers (yourself or others) are unknowingly or even purposefully creating Black characters with biases and prejudices involved. You should really go read all of her lessons that she's written- it is incredibly helpful not just for writers and artists, but even just people who read, watch tv shows/movies or play video games to be able to identify racism in various media.

I've been playing the game World of Warcraft since I was a teenager. It is an...interesting game. I love it for all the good and interesting things it does in both gameplay and stories...but there are also a lot of things wrong with the game. Namely, the writing, and the way the writers, both past and present, depict non-white and also non-human characters. Especially Black characters, of which there aren't nearly as many as what there could be. I can count on my fingers like, 7 Black characters off the top of my head and most of them are side characters that don't get a lot of quests anyways.

There is a specific topic and a specific character I want to talk about in relation to all of this, because the only other time anyone in the fandom has ever addressed this specific topic was one of my mutuals on tumblr a few years back- and I think there's a reason why people don't address it- it's because they don't know it's even a problem, and if they have noticed it at all, they would absolutely hate what I am about to write, because they would refuse to believe what the actual reason is.

Now, because I intend for this article to be understandable by people who do and don't play WoW, I will be...somewhat oversimplifying a lot of the things within the lore, so non-WoW players can understand what I'm talking about. Sooo...if you're a WoW lore nerd reading this, don't judge me okay? I'd rather explain things super simply and have most people understand it, rather than being super specific and detailed about the lore and losing 90% of the readers to confusion.

There are far too many characters and stories in World of Warcraft to be able to say you're an expert on the lore. I don't even know all of the characters and stories, and I think most people who play WoW tend to have a few characters, stories and tidbits of lore that they primarily focus on or care about. Any time stuff comes up for other characters or races that an individual doesn't know about, they turn to one of their friends who is an expert about it. It's kind of what you have to do when it comes to the lore of WoW. Trying to learn everything isn't feasible for most people, so only learning about things that you actually like is the best way to go about things when you play WoW and interact with the story.

And I personally happen to like dragons.

There is a character in WoW who I believe is the most well known Black character within the game- his presence something that cannot be ignored when he shows up. He's been somewhat of a main character for a while, in the way that his actions have often affected large parts of the world of Azeroth and its politics, and because of this, there are a lot of players who love him, and a lot of players who hate him.

This character's name is Wrathion, and he is a Black boy. But also, a Black dragon.

The way dragons work in WoW is that there are different Dragonflights, or cultural groups, for each colour. The Black Dragonflight, the Red Dragonflight, etc. and each Dragonflight protects something relating to Azeroth (the planet they all live on). The Blue dragons protect the magic of Azeroth, the Red dragons protect life, the Green dragons protect the Emerald Dream (dream land, basically), the Bronze dragons protect time (they use time travelling magic), and the Black dragons protect the physical land and earth of Azeroth.

Dragons live a very very long time, and they often take on "visages", aka humanoid forms, in order to interact with the mortal races. What their visage looks like is fully up to them. They can choose to look like an orc, a gnome, a human, an elf, whatever they like. They can choose the form of any gender they like, and they can also change up their visage's appearance on a whim, such as if going undercover, or just changing their mind on how they wished to represent themselves.

Wrathion obviously chose the form of a Black teenage boy, when he first acquired his visage.

And he truly was a boy when he chose this visage. In fact, he chose this visage when he was approximately a few seconds old, the very moment he hatched out of his egg.

Something that a lot of WoW fans absolutely refuse to acknowledge is that Wrathion has not exactly been treated well by the writers nor the fans, and the reason for this treatment, a lot of the time, is because he's Black. I do not honestly believe that he would be treated in the way he was if the writers who created Wrathion in the first place decided to make his visage form that of a white human, or perhaps a white elf. Some WoW fans reading this might probably disagree with me, and they can disagree all they damn like, because anyone with sense and the ability to actually recognise racism will know that I'm not just pulling ideas out of thin air.

Adultification, for the uninitiated, is when young Black children are treated by their peers, teachers, law enforcement, etc. as being older than what they actually are. If a very young Black child is accused of committing a crime, they are often tried as adults, even if they're only 8 years old. It is a form of racism that you can see everywhere if you actually have your eyes open and know about it. And that adultification can completely and entirely ruin people's lives, especially when it comes to children being tried as adults for crimes they most likely didn't even commit.

This is what adultification is, and I hate having to pivot and be like "lol look, the same thing happened to this fictional character!", because the adultification of real Black children is always going to be more important. But I would suggest that this is more of an exercise in recognising racism within the media we consume, and how it is so baked into our societies that we end up putting it into everything that we produce when it comes to art and other forms of media.

Wrathion, as a character, has without a shadow of a doubt, been adultified in these similar ways. He is treated less like a child (which is what he is) and more like an adult who should know better and not make the mistakes he has made, even though he did not have any proper parental figures to actually teach him how to make the right decisions. He's had advisors and body guards and people who follow him for his ideals and politics, but no actual mother or father figure. He's not even had a proper mentor, besides a white teenage boy who had more life experience than him, who was practically his only friend for a long time. And this adultification is not just something that happens within the narrative of the game, but also what the fans do, as well, whenever they talk about him or write fanfiction about him or draw art of him (Don't get me started on the “smut” people have drawn of him. Remember, he is a child).

Something that must be understood about dragons, so that I can rebuke anyone who might try to say "well dragons are not like humans and they age quicker!" is that yes, baby dragons can start talking pretty much right out of the gate once they hatch. Probably not on the same day, but definitely within a week of hatching.

And while they do talk, they still act like little kids. They play and get excited by fantastical stories and talk like a 6 or 7 year old. While dragons clearly do age quicker than mortal races, given that baby dragons are capable of speech within a few days to a week of hatching (especially at such an advanced level for a baby), they also do still have a childhood. Even the bronze dragon babies who are capable of time travel and are able to see through time since the moment they are hatched, and are capable of appearing in their adult form from the future, they STILL have childhoods and still play hide and seek and still act like children- just children with magical foresight to understand what consequences their actions will have ahead of time. But they are still obviously children, and they are treated as such by the adults around them.

None of this sort of childhood was ever granted to Wrathion.

As for the visage forms that are taken on by dragons, these visages are often chosen when the dragon is a little bit older. We do not know the exact age that the dragon is when they chose their visage form, but we do know it is an important part of the dragon's life, and an entire ceremony/celebration is had for the dragon chosing their visage form for the first time. Whether the dragon is close to adulthood or is at adulthood has never been specified, but they are clearly not a little kid anymore when they choose their visage.

This is another thing that Wrathion did not get to do- be a little kid before chosing his visage form. He hatched, immediately chose a visage form and then turned into it, right on top of his broken egg shell, and that visage was of a Black teenage boy. He spoke almost like a 16 or 17 year old. He is the only dragon in WoW that was given this treatment of not ever properly having a childhood or given a moment to just be a hatchling for a while. It seems a bit suspicious that the one dragon that has been treated this way happens to have the visage of Black teenager.

And then the WoW fandom chooses to believe that this is just how young dragons are, that this is just how Wrathion is, that it must be because of how his egg was experimented on, that's why he came out of the egg seeming older!

But never has anyone come to the conclusion that Wrathion might be this way because he was a Black boy and the writers (who were white) chose to write him a specific way because of their subconscious biases that most white people have against Black children.

For the non-Wow players curious about the "experimentations" I just mentioned: Wrathion, for the longest time, was also the last uncorrupted Black dragon in existence. The leader of the Black Dragonflight, Neltharion, essentially got corrupted deep in his mind and soul by an Old God, and ended up spreading that corruption to the entire Black dragon population. The Black dragons were then culled practically into extinction by the rest of the people of Azeroth as Neltharion tried to take over the world with his flight, but a lone Red dragon ended up experimenting on a bunch of Black dragon eggs and finally cured one of the eggs of this corruption (Wrathion's egg).

I have no doubt that this experimentation did something to Wrathion, but to use that excuse to cover up the real racist writing that Wrathion was given, in my opinion, is just that: an excuse. An easy excuse that you can make so you can continue thinking of Wrathion as a person who did those things "just because", and not as a fictional character that white people in real life chose to write in that specific way, for reasons that are obvious to people that choose to take a step back and ask "Why was this character written like that and what biases might the writers have had when they chose to write them this way?"

Then again, WoW fans have never been particularly good at media literacy, or reflecting, or critical thinking. And I suppose they are simply reflecting that same inability that the writers also have at attempting to do the same.

World of Warcraft, as a game, I feel has gotten a bit better with its writing of Black characters. A bit. A good example I can think of is Faerin Lothar, a Black human woman of the Arathi Empire who is a disabled fighter- she lost an eye and an arm as a child, but found a way of being able to fight within the limitations of her disabilities, and eventually became a Lamplighter (basically a paladin but with a specific task within their empire). Within the narrative of the story she is not treated like the butt of the joke or a mistake or burden or what-have-you. She is treated like an important character and given a well-rounded personality. She is actually one of my favourite newer characters in the game.

But the playerbase, despite the increase in better writing for Wow's characters, are still stuck in 2004. I've seen people on social media say all sorts of horrible things about Faerin, and I even saw "fanart" of Faerin titled "lore accurate Faerin Lothar" in which she was drawn as a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes. In 2025. I've seen a player recently with the name "peeduhphial" and their character's appearance was that of a fat human man dressed in a pink dress. I've seen players complaining in the general zone chats about having to do "the fucking gay centaur quests again" while I was just minding my own business and questing in the area. I've seen players throw racist hissy fits when they see another player whose character's name or pet's name are written in Mandarin.

The playerbase has not matured past that horrible time of the internet in which everyone was saying slurs and people were linking videos of beheadings to each other and anyone who was playing WoW who wasn't a straight white heterosexual male was told to kill themselves. There's a reason that WoW has the reputation that it does. And it creates a stark contrast between the progressive path that WoW as a game is trying to go down, versus the incredibly stubborn un-willing-to-change fanbase that still for some fucking reason plays the game, and resists change in any way they can. You wouldn't think that the players would still be like that in this day and age...but they are.

So it feels almost like a bandaid to a large bleeding gash when Blizzard tries to add more diversity and stuff to the game when it's clear only like half of the playerbase is actually happy with more diversity- the other half are still incredibly bigoted, and it feels like Blizzard has not done much to deter those people from playing their game.

And even if this wasn't the case, the devs still could do much better. Sure, there are way more darker skin tones now for humans and elves and other races that have human skin tones than there were before, but only a select few races with these darker skin tone options (namely humans and Dracthyr) actually have Black hairstyles or Black facial features to chose from. My Black blood elf, Syerith, has the hair and facial features of a European woman, even though her skin is dark brown. And that's not because I want her to look like that, it's because those are the only options. I draw her completely differently to how she appears in the game.

I eventually, out of frustration, made Syerith bald in-game because that was the only feasible hairstyle I could see her having having out of all of the options that were given to me- even though in-lore she does actually have hair. I did the same with another Black woman character a made, this time a Kul'Tiran human, which notably have different customisation options to "regular" humans since Kul'Tiran humans are the only way you can play as a human that is fat. They had much less hair options and all of them were straight and wavy hair, none of the actually curly hair options that the "regular" humans have. So I made her bald, too.

And there's nothing wrong with bald Black women at all, I think it is such a cool look, and I think more people could be bald, actually. But why is it the only actual option to make a character look Black besides skin-tone? Not every Black lady out there is bald. And these characters I made likely wouldn't have been bald had I been given a larger variety of Black hair options.

There is an argument that could be made that the customisation of your character kind of doesn't really matter. For the most part, if you're playing WoW for any length of time and trying to actually not die and be aware of your surroundings, you are playing incredibly zoomed out, meaning your character looks like a damn ant on your screen. The enemies you're fighting are actually rather big when you compare their size to your character, and You need to be able to see your character, the enemies, other player's characters (especially if in a dungeon or raid), all at once, and no one is going to really care what your character looks like when this is the game-play that a lot of people engage with.

But some people role-play (like me), some people really do care about their character's appearance a lot- their physical characteristics as well as the clothes and/or armour they wear. There are cutscenes in the game where your character shows up in them alongside the other main story characters. You cannot just add a few Black hair options and darker skin tones and call it a day and say "There, we did it!"

I remember when I made my character Varéna way back in the day, when I was still a teenager. She looked like a very tanned white woman with short, straight hair. It was the closest I was able to get to making a Black woman in-game, with what customisation options I was given. I was very upset by this. When I took a very long break from the game (about a 7 year break) and came back, I was genuinely shocked that I was able to change her entire physical appearance at the barbershop in-game, so she could look like how I actually drew her. I thought it was a good step forward. But I also thought to myself, "Why couldn't they do this much earlier?"

If dumbass 14 year old Ash from 2012 can think that the character options were lacking when he tried to make a Black character, I think an adult could've, too. They just didn't want to.

It's kind of weird being a fan of this game and liking the lore and characters and gameplay whilst also simultaneously not liking many aspects of the game as well. It could be better. It's definitely been worse in the past. It feels like things have changed on the surface, but also as though not much has changed at all. I can only hope that as the devs add more interesting things to the game (such as the housing stuff they added for the Midnight expansion), that they may also continue to expand on adding more diverse characters, adding more characterisation options, being much more mindful and intelligent about their writing and in general being more opposing to that side of the fanbase that is clearly still stuck in the early 2000s. And I feel like I could actually see it happening, maybe.

But it's really hard to have your hopes up when it seems that the game and the fandom's issues are rooted incredibly deep in many forms of bigotry. The game's early days (2004 and onwards) with its original playerbase and their attitudes, along with the attitudes of the actual game dev's themselves towards the women working for them (the horrendous, awful and criminal acts that they were performing), and the early writing of many of the non-human races, built a foundation that kept getting elaborated upon until they had no choice but to pivot into becoming more welcoming towards minorities within the game, because it was no longer cool to be a piece of fucking shit. And that foundation, I believe, is still there.

You can see it in the almost timeless ways that the bigoted playerbase acts- as though 20 years haven't gone by and the world at large is more aware than ever of all the forms of systemic oppressions of the world and how it negatively affects people. You can see it in the way that the writing of certain conflicts within the story between coloniser and colonised feels very much like “white baby's first lesson on colonisation.” You can see it in the way that there are still only like 7 Black characters that I can list off the top of my head, when WoW is a game with hundreds of named and voiced characters, all with their own quests and importance within the game.

I want to believe things can get better, but I also believe that in order for the game to get better in all of these aspects, something absolutely drastic would have to change, and it would definitely cost Blizzard something in order to do so. Kicking out Afrasiabi and writing more inclusive quests was certainly a start, but it shouldn't be where the changes end.

But I'm not sure they're willing to go nearly that far if they at all value the portion of the playerbase that is bigoted as hell and still giving them money. Blizzard will always want to have its cake and eat it too.