Posts with tag ji-firepaw

Patch 5.3 is a-coming, and the Siege of Orgrimmar is drawing nearer and nearer every day. One question that I know is on everyone's mind is, who will be the next warchief? We know Garrosh is getting deposed - we don't yet know if he's going to die - and someone will have to take his place.

So who should it be? The obvious choice is one of the racial leaders, though exactly which one is up for debate. I thought it would be fun to analyze some of the potential candidates and tease out what might make them a reasonable choice of warchief both inside and outside the story. Let's start with some of the easily dismissible, for brevity's sake.

This post contains some minor spoilers for patch 5.3, so be warned!

In our narrative walk-through of the pandaren starting zone, we chose to play a pandaren monk because that's kind of a huge point of the expansion. You will see mild differences if you play a non-monk. Other classes begin in Shang Xi's Training Ground, so it's not entirely a separate experience. When we last left our hero, Graey the pandaren monk had begun his journey to find Aysa Cloudsinger.

Finding Aysa of the Tushui doesn't take much work, but it definitely counts as your first "Run, Panda!" quest. Turn back around the path and follow your minimap to the big, glowing question mark. Congratulations on your first experience as an Azerothian creeper. It doesn't take quite a minute to reach Aysa. There's technically a path, but if you're anything like me, you veered off in a straight line to Xi's student.

When you reach Fu's Pond, though, it turns out Aysa is too busy to talk to you. She's doing her exercises, according to Merchant Lorvo. Since Aysa's busy, Lorvo wants your help instead. He wants you to recover Items of Utmost Importance and rescue The Missing Driver.

Let me translate that for you: He wants you to go kill stuff, loot the bodies, and talk to the driver. No problem, we can do that. We have finely honed hitting-stuff-with-stick techniques. The Amberleaf Scamps are closest, so we'll do that first.

Folks closely following the Mists of Pandaria beta may recall that Ji Firepaw had some problematic interactions with player characters. Without getting too deep into the controversy, Ji praised male characters for their strength but praised female characters for their appearance.

Sharp-eyed Alewen reports that interaction has been changed. Ji now simply greets characters by saying, "You seem poised and ready. I can tell we are going to be good friends." This means Ji is no longer concerned about physical attractiveness; Ji remarks only on all characters' readiness for battle.

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In most games I play, from World of Warcraft to Star Wars: The Old Republic, I make an effort to play mainly female characters. Unlike other males who play female characters, this isn't for cosmetic reasons; I'm not one of those dudes who can't bear to stare at his male character's butt for multiple hours a day. (How this is ever an argument that makes sense to people, I don't know.) This was a conscious decision on my part a few years ago, when I started to become aware of the discrimination faced by female characters.

See, when you make the decision to make a female character, you're intentionally and unintentionally signing up for a number of things. First, you are intentionally signing up to play a female character. This could be because you identify as female, because you prefer the look of female characters, or any number of other reasons (including the butt one). What you're unintentionally signing up for goes further.

You're unintentionally signing up for jokes made at your expense in a raid, like when my priest hit 85 and did BH in leveling gear, and my low HPS was mocked because I was a girl playing WoW. You're unintentionally signing up for harassment, for the catcalls and people begging you to talk in Vent, like you're a rare species of bird they'll only be able to hear once. You're unintentionally signing up to be victimized by other players because you dared roll something other than male at level 1, and you didn't know there'd be consequences for that choice.