If you’ve been anywhere near WoW twitter for the last day, you know what I’m about to discuss.

(content warning: rape and sexual assault discussion)

Patch 10.1.5 has a central theme of the Bronze Dragonflight, of timeway correction and keeping things on track – with the mega-dungeon of Dragonflight being themed around preventing Chromie from becoming her evil self, Morchie. Okay, cool enough, so there’s a new reputation tied to sidequests that have you enter time rifts and correct anomalies or simply observe them, they’ve brought in all these token items that can reward transmog and even mounts from the past of the game, and overall, it’s a fun-seeming content patch in terms of activities added. Cool!

The sidequests, however, have to have some theme, some hint at the established lore of the game, and so they lean on established events. One has multiple timeperiods of Wrathion talking to each other, and it’s kind of interesting, even if it was also a little meh in terms of flavor on early PTR builds. But yesterday, Blizzard took the cake – they introduced a new one of these quests, which involves retrieving the Demon Soul…and ensuring that Alexstraza is unaware it was not in the Dragonmaw’s possession for a time….so she is left captive to be raped by the dragons in control of the Dragonmaw. Chromie sells it, saying it’s tough but things have to be left, and then tries to pretend in front of Alexstraza that you haven’t been sent on this quest – while Alexstraza clearly knows and evokes a trauma response, grinding teeth and generally being rather discontent with the decision that her suffering is what makes that timeline whole.

Obviously, without even contextualizing the game, developer, or whatever else, this is bad. I shouldn’t need to say that, but the world is full of dullards in 2023, so let’s be clear – this super sucks on the surface of it. A story can dabble in dark themes, and could, even in a deft hand, deal with themes of rape, but you need to be mindful of how its presented. This context – an obviously-traumatic event that still haunts Alexstraza as presented in the same quest has to be maintained because it is a lynchpin holding the timeline together – super sucks. Someone’s sexual assault is not some destined event and it shouldn’t be held up as such, as a thing that needs to happen, even in the context it is presented within. Within the story of this very same patch, the context doesn’t even make sense – we’ve done fucked up things for the Bronze to keep the Infinite at bay before, but in this very same patch, we are also altering the timeline to prevent Morchie from happening – so there’s not a storyline integrity here where we honor all events that happened or will happen as destined, so it is quite a bad choice to pick to allow the sexual assault to happen but not the heel turn of a secondary character in the WoW lore. Pretty gross choice there, folks!

What makes it worse, though, is that this absolutely fits with the public perception of Blizzard after 2021 and the sexual harassment and assault allegations that have plagued Blizzard specifically and their umbrella corporate structure more broadly. You know who would write a story about a rape being an important thing that had to happen? Fucking Alex Afrasiabi, and that guy is trash! It’s insensitive to SA survivors in the playerbase, it specifically targets a female leader within the lore who is one of the key franchise characters this expansion, and the manner of the execution, with Chromie playfully speaking loudly in front of Alexstraza to provide a “cover story” for what we’ve done is just…disgusting, frankly. It reeks of a writing room full of idiot dudes who’ve never once had to contemplate what being assaulted sexually might be like, how that might make you feel and what it would do to your life, pushing things through even if anyone in the process pointed out how uncomfortable it might be and how bad of a beat it was to explore in this way, because they want the game to be “darker” and more “mature.”

And here’s the kicker – I don’t even think, necessarily, that Alexstraza’s abuse during her captivity at Grim Batol is off-limits for lore discussion and a revisit within the game! I think there are a lot of ways that you could touch upon that lore and how it affected Alexstraza, how it might have strained the relationship between the dragonflights and how it might still sour her on the Black Dragonflight. You have a golden opportunity to show her growing, healing from it, and so close to the point where we’ve just been talking about the legacy of the Black Dragonflight, this is a very-real thing they could atone for, that the new leadership of the flight could attempt to make better in a genuine way!

WoW’s play with darker themes is a mixed bag because the writers, quite often, do not have the range to do it justice. At times, WoW has done well with darkness – Mists of Pandaria, quite famously, was an incredibly dark expansion from start to finish, and overall, I think they handled it well – it probably helped that the theme of so much of the expansion outside of the main story was light and whimsical. Dragonflight, ironically, is the perfect counterpart to that – a lighthearted theme of adventure and discovery packed with a narrative that exists in parallel – and so you could, with proper and good writing, explore a lot of crazy dark themes and issues. The room is absolutely there to allow for it! But, of course, that would require the writing staff, especially the senior staff, on the game team to have the range, compassion, and deft hand to write that story, and they just don’t have it. Sorry not sorry, they’ve demonstrated a lack of self-awareness on these things repeatedly, and so I don’t trust them to put such a story together in a way that honors the topic at all.

On Twitter, former employees piped up to talk about how this was an accident, surely, that somehow the heavy-handedness of the story slipped through layers of review, which is…kind of a bold defense, honestly, and one that I find incredibly flimsy. The counter-narrative to the idea that Blizzard’s writing staff has some really bad beliefs about women and depiction of SA in the game’s narrative that completely disregards the experiences of survivors of it is that they’re actually just monumentally bad fuckups who missed something in a supposedly-thorough review process when the quest text, narrative around it, and whole thing is written and built in a way that quite clearly indicates that they knew what they were doing and kept on that path anyways. Like, I get wanting to believe the best of your former coworkers, but come on – this is clearly not a lack of attention, this is just a lack of compassion. Or, the refrain has also gone up, that the questline wasn’t reviewed before being put onto PTR, which is…not great either. So the writing team sucks and thinks having the player enforce rape and sexual assault is fine, the review process sucks, or a rogue quest designer made a bad thing and no one reviewed it before it went public?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but yes – we do know the team and their values, and, uh, that’s part of why everyone is shouting at full volume about how tone deaf and bad this is! A later response from this same ex-employee is that they might not have known the lore, but…it’s Blizzard’s job to have a lore bible or “source of truth” on this, and even still…the quest is pretty obviously aware of the events that happened around Alexstraza there!

The cherry on top of this shit sundae, the thing that takes it to being as awful as it is, is something I left unstated near the top. If this was just a story beat, then I think there would be a more convincing counter-argument to have, but this is a sidequest where you, as the player, are not just told a bad thing happened, but you are told that you, as the player, have to enable this bad thing to still happen. You don’t get a choice, you don’t have agency to stop it or refuse the quest – go do this thing that ensures Alexstaza is assaulted, she cannot break out early or else tHe TiMeLiNe will be ruined, so go do the stuff and ensure she gets raped, please. It’s fucked on a level that little else in the game is. It reeks of the early era of BfA, where you as a Horde player have to help Sylvanas commit genocidal war crimes – you don’t just get told she did it, you pick up a plaguethrower and do the thing, you set the stage for the burning of Teldrassil, you are given no ability to dissent or stop it – the bad thing is going to happen and you are going to help it happen.

There’s a category of internet moron in the wake of this news that does this stupid dance around “oh, so rape is worse than death?” and thinks they’ve scored some debate bro points or something, but like honestly, yeah, kinda. Dead people aren’t playing WoW, but you know who does play WoW? Survivors of rape and sexual assault. You know who the story has already kicked at on this very same note just last expansion? Those people. Because Sylvanas’ character was metaphorically raped by Arthas, and we had to see her turn around and eulogize his little spark of life. At least there, the SA was a metaphor, but in Alexstraza’s case? It’s literal. There’s no room to interpret around the edges. We are, in fact, doing a thing that specifically ensures Alexstraza will be raped more in this quest. The game knows it, the quest knows, the text shows it – there is no grey here, no excuse that makes this okay or, god forbid, permissible. This would be a bad choice by any game, any company, but it coming from Blizzard, not even two full years out from when they were explicitly outed as being exactly this kind of shitty – yeah, it’s all bad.

And that’s a part of the problem. Dragonflight has, for a chunk of WoW’s audience, been a genuinely great expansion! There’s a build-up of goodwill that the team is earning and then continues to squander on shit like…well, this. It’s specifically and needlessly gross for no good reason, and it doesn’t develop the lore in a good way – it’s a throwaway daily quest we do for some currency rewards, 28 gold, and some reputation. It could be literally any other number of dark and gloomy moments of WoW history, but this specific one was chosen (for now) and it just does not pass a vibe check.

That’s what it breaks down to for me. A lot of us want Blizzard to be better – want the game they make and we enjoy to be better – but they keep taking a step forward and then furiously backstep. It’s especially obnoxious that Diablo IV has a much better story that is better on a lot of these issues, and from the same company, but the WoW quest and lore team keep doing…this kind of thing. Even in Dragonflight, there’s good writing like the Blue Dragonflight chain – but here we are now, dealing with this. It doesn’t need to be this way, but, well, Blizzard gonna Blizzard.