Blizzard is very inclusive, but when will they represent mental illness hero's?

[Detheavn]

Many ogres seem to have some form of mental illness.
Sorry Shrek.

[Topornic]

Does said hero need to be a transgender, black, muslim, suffering from mental disease hero? GTFO with this stupid sh--

Use of word hero is offensive, you just assumed zis gender.

What the fu is wrong with you people. Why you didn't suggest making disabled people warriors now eh?

[Polybius]

Use of word hero is offensive, you just assumed zis gender.

What the fu is wrong with you people. Why you didn't suggest making disabled people warriors now eh?

Like amputated arms? Plenty of those in WoW.

They've got plenty of savants in game already, so I don't see the point of this thread other than starting shit and making this a partisan issue.

[Cosmic Janitor]

They already have enough of that in their audience..

there is also that buddie character, that was seen in Vasjir and Uldum.

[Maarius]

They already have enough of that in their audience..

kind of disrespectful when looking at people with certain disorders... throwing them in the same pot with people who are just behaving stupid

[Deleted]

Autism, like schizophrenia, is highly related to prenatal viral infections. With spells like cleanse readily available, you'd be unlikely to encounter someone who wasn't cleansed while regularly while pregnant. Unfortunately, Down's is likely to be less treated rather than simply treated. Due to it's nature of not being disease or poison like, and the focus in Azeroth on magic over medicine, the specialized care required for Down's children to thrive simply wouldn't be available. I guess you could resurrect them daily and hope they eventually pulled through, but there's no guarantee that the common heart holes would grow together, or that they'd have a clear path to their stomach and lungs.

Of course, since children are completely invincible in WoW, it's quite possible that they could never have a debilitating status effect to begin with. How is the mortality of mothers in WoW, I never took stock of whether or not pregnant women were also invincible, or unborn children for that matter. And does the invulnerability end when they get super jacked up during azerothian puberty?

But if children are invincible how can we see them? /wait

[Nuba]

so many ppl fell for OP's massive troll. Probably the biggest I've seen this year

[Maarius]

so many ppl fell for OP's massive troll. Probably the biggest I've seen this year

Regardless of the OPs intentions it is a topic worth discussing. Judging from the posts here it's obvious that many people see people / characters with disabilities as lesser beings... which is horrible. Hitler killed disabled people during the Holocaust.

Videogames certainly have portrayed disabled people as heroes in a respectful way, it's sad to read some comments here and I can just wish you good health so that you don't find yourself in their shoes and become victim of such discrimination.

[Ielenia]

In none of their games none of their hero's have aspergers or autism. Even down syndrome. When will blizzard realize inclusivity is more than body fat or skin color

Can't think of any Warcraft hero, but on Overwatch, Symmetra is autistic.

Yeah, that wasn't an afterthought or anything...

They're always talking about how important story is to their game and shit, and they can't even make a good story out of it. They're just going with the stereotype that people with autism are also savants. There's nothing about her personality that would suggest she's autistic, and there's nothing in the story that makes that matter at fucking all. Just like Tracer being a lesbian. It's fine if you do it, but if you're going to do it, make it fucking matter.

If that was true in any way, fans wouldn't have picked up on Symmetra's autism before Blizzard has ever made a single official statement about it:


- - - Updated - - -

Regardless of the OPs intentions it is a topic worth discussing. Judging from the posts here it's obvious that many people see people / characters with disabilities as lesser beings... which is horrible. Hitler killed disabled people during the Holocaust.

And... Godwin's Law triggered. Good job.

[Dald]

Completely offended by the lack of an "e" in your heroes.

[LunarOutlaw]

I never realized that about Symmetra... I don't think Blizzard should go out of their way to include major characters with mental illnesses..This is a fantasy mmo not reality.

[DesoPL]

Do we want actually even an NPC with down syndrome?

[Darknessvamp]

But Psychology isn't a part of the First Aid Profession skill list.

-snip-

I dunno, it just seems like another example of Blizzard reacting to fan reactions e.g. gauging exactly how much attention something is getting, seeing if it would be worthwhile publicity for the game and "establishing" something as having always been to exploit it. See Tracer's butt pose "controversy" "revealing" the team wanted to change it all along and Tracer's "reveal" of being a Lesbian after people got "Lesbian Overtones" from the Alive trailer somehow, speculated about it whilst also separately leading to an influx of TracerXWidowmaker porn which the Blizzard Devs weren't actually chuffed about as major examples. There's even some people who have a theory that the fact Terry Crews didn't get to voice Doomfist was as a result of Blizzard analysing the reactions of people in response to Terry's joking about doing so and deciding to go with a vocal minority at the time and so never invited him back after doing some test lines.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Do we want actually even an NPC with down syndrome?

Most people probably not. It's incredibly hard to write such a character and make it believable without pissing off the sissies that bitch about it all the time. Then these characters are very hard to identify with for the overwhelming majority of people, let alone them tending to be annoying as fuck if they take central roles. The best you can pretty much do is the (actually retarded) gentle giant trope (like max from wolfenstein), which is essentially already the basis (minus the gentle part for most) of a whole race in wow, namely ogres.

[Ielenia]

I dunno, it just seems like another example of Blizzard reacting to fan reactions e.g. gauging exactly how much attention something is getting, seeing if it would be worthwhile publicity for the game and "establishing" something as having always been to exploit it. See Tracer's butt pose "controversy" "revealing" the team wanted to change it all along and Tracer's "reveal" of being a Lesbian after people got "Lesbian Overtones" from the Alive trailer somehow, speculated about it whilst also separately leading to an influx of TracerXWidowmaker porn which the Blizzard Devs weren't actually chuffed about as major examples. There's even some people who have a theory that the fact Terry Crews didn't get to voice Doomfist was as a result of Blizzard analysing the reactions of people in response to Terry's joking about doing so and deciding to go with a vocal minority at the time and so never invited him back after doing some test lines.

Perhaps, but all that has been a "reaction after the fact". Symmetra's comics and the hints about her being autistic came before any real demands for such inclusions. Sure, Blizzard could just have said that it was a fancy way of saying she was different from the rest of the kids, but I think that, this time, making Symmetra autistic was the original design idea.

And even before the comic you could see some subtle hints about Symmetra's condition, with her fixation with order and perfectionism and some of her other voice lines.

[Cosmic Janitor]

And even before the comic you could see some subtle hints about Symmetra's condition, with her fixation with order and perfectionism and some of her other voice lines.

The character is called Symmetra, you don't need to be an english professor to notice that such a character is an easy vehicle for some OCD-like tropes to be used, in this case being obsessed with symmetry and order. The thing is, while you can milk that for some backstory, making otherwise use of it besides generating some kind of kryptonite for the character is rather tricky.

[Chinese Bootlickers]

Regardless of the OPs intentions it is a topic worth discussing. Judging from the posts here it's obvious that many people see people / characters with disabilities as lesser beings... which is horrible. Hitler killed disabled people during the Holocaust.

Videogames certainly have portrayed disabled people as heroes in a respectful way, it's sad to read some comments here and I can just wish you good health so that you don't find yourself in their shoes and become victim of such discrimination.

Sperglord here, I play games to escape from my Sperginess, not embrace it.

[Darknessvamp]

Perhaps, but all that has been a "reaction after the fact". Symmetra's comics and the hints about her being autistic came before any real demands for such inclusions. Sure, Blizzard could just have said that it was a fancy way of saying she was different from the rest of the kids, but I think that, this time, making Symmetra autistic was the original design idea.

And even before the comic you could see some subtle hints about Symmetra's condition, with her fixation with order and perfectionism and some of her other voice lines.

I'm not sure that saying stuff like "The true enemy of humanity is disorder." and "Perfect alignment." or any one of her lines really is indicative of her being autistic but rather a lot of them betray her religious beliefs in Hinduism or that she thinks highly of herself. Plus remember she came from an impoverished and poor childhood that was suddenly thrust into a life built on the benefits of progress and she herself lives in a world that has suffered from a nigh uncontrollable robot uprising that brought destruction and suffering worldwide in addition to being plagued with frankly supernatural and highly technological terrorists who fuck things up for the sake of it so it's not really strange that she'd be so set on bringing order to the world when it benefited her.

[pewpmeiser]

We don't need the characters in Warcraft to accomplish the agendas of equality and diversity. We already have Overwatch for that. Also, you could argue that there's already plenty of characters in the universe that are mentally ill.

[mhdoe]

Have you not seen the people who cant stand still, jump around, chat, forums, mmo-champion, etc. they do not need to add them because they are already in and playing the game.