Fictional races don't have to follow real life human facial/hair traits. They're not humans and, most importantly, they're not real.
Therefore they can look like anything regardless of how an actual human looks in the real world.
Shit, ever seen Santa's elves? They don't look anything like a drow, which barely resemble Tolkien elves, which also barely resemble Elder Scroll elves.
This is a super non-issue.
What I worry about is how people who roll dark brown elves are going to be treated. There's some real a-holes in WoW, and I can just imagine someone slinging around racial slurs if your dark brown Blood Elf Paladin accidentally wipes the raid.
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Isn't that your issue? That the dark brown elves don't have "black" features and hairstyles?
This enters the realm of race talk which is sensitive, but...
How do you want black people or black elves to be implemented? Dark Skinned Elves to my knowledge, in most lore has never had anything to do with how black people, it's just that they're darker skin, like how some elves are blue or pink and they dont fall into the same logic as humans.
Elves tend to have finer features than even humans and that usually includes their hair, why would they have african human hair? The blue, pink, purple, peach, pale and green elves(there are green night elves, right?) all have fine hair.
Now the Black humans, it's always kinda bothered me in these lore settings when random black people are thrown into clearly all white nations, for no reason but "inclusion". What's their lore reason, are they from another place that has a mostly black population? If there isn't another place that has a large black population that they've come from, then how do they exist in the first place? In WoW, humans come from the Vrykul who are a nordic race, created by the Keepers who were created by the Titans. It really doesn't make sense to have black people with afro hair pop out of that. And ontop of that, you have most of the backgrounds of PoC actually being used by other races, Tauren, Yaungol and Taunka all have Siberian people cultures(Mongolians, Native Americans) and Orcs and Trolls have more African people culture. It would be really weird to have asian humans pop up, considering much of their origins and culture are used for Pandaren.
So if there's legit no lore reason to have black humans, it comes down to the fact that it's just for inclusion and since it's just for inclusion, then fine let their be black playable humans in game, just dont make black lore characters... because the lore doesn't support their existence.(inb4 racism)
I said it in other thread and I'll say it here. This is a very obvious and rather hamfisted obligatory RL insert.
In my opinion, just like everything else, they could have handled this a bit better, but whatever really. They really could put a bit more effort into this, for example these could absolutely be Sunblade remnants who decided to rejoin their brethren and then it could be a pretty cool bunch of dark skin palettes with or without extra fel features - they literally could go there and it would be both more awesome and make more sense, as opposed to doing this whole RGB 51,26,0 and calling it a day.
The way it's done is cheap, that's why it feels like a blatant woke pandering.
There already was a dark-skinned human option available and an asian face as well, both were just implemented terribly and these new features are them properly putting them into the game.
Furthermore, having real life inspiration does not mean that it has to adhere to real life rules. They could easily make black vikings based on nordic culture and give them all black features and hair, because its fiction.
There is nothing in lore that states humans are all white and even if there was Blizzard can always undo it considering they created this lore. You get called racist because you conflate non-white people being added with being 'controversial' or 'pc pandering'.
Honorary member of the Baine Fanclub, the only member really.
If blizzard decides that its how they are going to look in their fictional universe as elves aren't a real thing so if blue you are not demanding this to every single skin colour like blue you are a hypocrite.
Also blue did exist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Fugates
This world don't give us nothing. It be our lot to suffer... and our duty to fight back.
I honestly can’t help but think if Chris Metzen were there still shit like this wouldn’t have happened. Old school people like him cared about these details too much. Obviously he wasn’t perfect and retconned stuff for the bigger picture(Ala Sargeras and the Eredar), but it’s well known he would put the kibosh on things that clashed with Lore quite often and annoyed his co workers at times doing it.
I dont care, nobody else care, its irrelevant... give me the infraction ty.
I would just have preferred that they'd published it with the accompanying lore rather than just making the fanbase fill in their gaps. Just make up a reason. We understand that you're giving people who just want to be the pretty race the option to be black, fine. Just give me some official justification.