The most obvious difference at first glance is that in Azeroth, all men are blocky and all women are curvy. Aside from various facial traits, hair and skin color, humans don't vary from this standard mold. Even in advanced age, Azerothian women's breasts do not sag, nor do men's muscles lose their beefy bulkiness. Some Earthlings have disparagingly compared Azerothian men to gorillas for their tree-trunk arms and their "smashed-with-a-shovel" faces, but others point out that Azerothian humans have been hardened through great suffering. Wars with orcs, demons and undead have reduced their population from millions to mere hundreds of thousands, and so the weak humans of Azeroth have possibly been weeded out. So, while many Earthling humans may enjoy the comforts of working at a desk all day, then coming home to play at a desk too (i.e. via computer game), Azerothians, even old ones, have to keep themselves fit to fight off the various enemies encroaching on their lands, such as murloc flesheaters and forsaken undead. While this may explain the over-muscled arms of Azerothian males, it leaves the question of youthfully curved elderly women quite unanswered.
Another difference which may or may not be obvious depending on the Earthling player's background, is that Azerothian humans tend to look a lot like Europeans of the middle ages, and have little to none of the ethnic or cultural diversity that humans of Earth have. Yet perhaps Azerothian humans feel the need for uniformity in setting themselves against the variety of diverse sentient species which have competed with them for the position of dominant life form since the beginning of their world. To this day, these wars for dominance continue, and no clear victor has yet emerged. For Earthings familiar with the images of western mythology, all this fighting and struggling may represent "triumph over darkness", and "surviving against all the odds" -- yet some of us still wonder, "where's the sushi?" Isn't diversity something that should define human beings, no matter what imaginary planet they live on?
One of the largest, yet least recognized differences between Azerothian and Earthing humans is the vast gap in population size. Azeroth is a much smaller world than Earth - Earthlings often have more humans in one city than Azeroth has ever had on the entire planet! Stormwind, as the largest human city, has all of two-hundred thousand people in it (or so they say - I certainly haven't counted that many). On Earth, Stormwind would just barely be large enough to put on a map. This seems particularly ironic, since Earthlings take 20 years or so to reproduce, whereas Azerothians can simply respawn after about 6 minutes. Still, Azeroth is the world of "Warcraft" after all, so perhaps all the war going on is an instinctive response to help keep the population from spawning completely out of control.
We can conclude, based on such preliminary evidence, that Azerothian humans are a distinct species from Earth humans, despite the fact that they share a name. What's your analysis? Are Azerothians simply mirror images of us in all the ways that matter, or are they really a distinct creation? Have you noticed striking ways that they differ from us?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
6-20-2007 @ 4:44PM
Tiforix said...
Where's the sushi? Well, I don't know, but you can buy Kimchi in Astranaar and you can buy a hanbok in Moonglade. Night Elves = Koreans? :)
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6-20-2007 @ 4:58PM
Omegi said...
I have a sister in law that looks like the Orc on the WoW game box cover.
No, I'm not going to post the picture either. Somehow she would find out and I would never hear the end of it. Just have to take my word for it...she's a monster.
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6-20-2007 @ 5:05PM
Zor said...
could you at least get a human that looks like a Female Human from WoW.
lets compare the pic to Winona Ryder for example
or to be fair, ow bout a hairless tauren female to the above pic
judas..
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6-20-2007 @ 5:17PM
Turall said...
How bored do you have to be to post this kind of drivel?
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6-20-2007 @ 5:20PM
James said...
Better yet, how bored do you have to be to read and then comment on how bored someone must be to post this 'drivel'?
And before anyone comes up with a new response on how bored I am to respond: pretty damn bored.
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6-20-2007 @ 5:29PM
Paul said...
ha
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6-20-2007 @ 5:47PM
xzor said...
lazy programmers. that easy.
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6-20-2007 @ 5:49PM
James said...
Omegi is so busted.
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6-20-2007 @ 6:03PM
Galipan said...
@4 dude, ur as bad as the people that flame BRK...if u dont like the article, don't read the whole thing, or click on the jump...l2blog pl0x?
nice article...i always try to make human chars that look like the hot women in my school =P
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6-20-2007 @ 6:29PM
Pingmeister said...
This is a WoW blog and this is an interesting topic.
I suppose some folks just want hints on how they can gain an advantage in PvP but there are some of us who enjoy this "drivel".
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6-20-2007 @ 7:46PM
BenMS said...
Hey, did anyone else try and click on the wowhead link and get taken to a placeholder page? Please don't tell me wowhead is broken!
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6-20-2007 @ 8:54PM
mxwp said...
Of course Azeroth's innate magic keeps the human women's figures youthfully supple even in old age. It must be similar to the "magic" properties of the one planet in Star Trek: Insurrection where the humans are extra gifted and forever young.
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6-20-2007 @ 9:34PM
Terrant said...
It's all thanks to the secret Plastic Surgery profession!
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6-21-2007 @ 12:07AM
Jeenome said...
@13 LOL! I love it.
I honestly find the WoW humans boring (especially the men) and wish I had rolled a different race for my mage. I only keep her because I don't want to do the work to lvl another. It seems that no matter how much you try they all look alike. So it really is the secret plastic surgery profession or clones. Both of which are boring.
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6-21-2007 @ 1:27AM
rpnguyen said...
Where is the left half of the picture in this post from?
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6-21-2007 @ 10:31AM
RogueJedi86 said...
If you look in Caverns of Time: Old Hillsbrad, there are fat men and fat women. So apparently the weak were culled out in the wars after Thrall escaped from Durnholde Keep.
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6-21-2007 @ 12:21PM
Aziraphale said...
Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense that the human race doesn't have other minorities or races. Most early human tribes in Azeroth, known as the Azotha, were nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers with culture not unlike the trolls. However, during the great sundering, most human tribes were wiped out. http://www.wowwiki.com/Human
This created an evolutionary bottleneck where a great deal of human diversity may have been wiped out. Consider this, before the sundering there may indeed have been several different non-interbreeding tribes of humans: darker colored, lighter colored; every shade of human pigment we know today. Which means that these pigmentation genes were being passed down through generations. After the sundering, perhaps a race of darker skinned people were wiped out (don't read too into that you overly sensitive people) meaning that those GENES were wiped out. Then the only gene pool humans have left to choose from are the lighter skinned humans we see today.
As far as the perpetual youth thing we see today, I like your idea about evolutionary selection weeding out people who are sickly, and unfit for battle. And maybe the tribe that wasn't wiped out were the tribe of really curvaceous women and blocky men. :P
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6-21-2007 @ 12:27PM
Gorewatch said...
Aziraphale has too much time. How about men like looking at curvy women and vice versa for men. It's marketing
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6-21-2007 @ 12:50PM
Kaylek said...
@15 Post it in /r/ for sauce and see what happens.
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6-21-2007 @ 1:44PM
Aziraphale said...
@ 18 yea boredom is fun.
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