Lastpostamorph wrote:ResetEra have now decided that Leeroy Jenkins is racist. Somehow.
I mean, it didn't really go like that, to be fair. The thread was on the release of a rehearsal vid, one of the takes they did & retried before the final take that got so popular. It was kind of funny and it was interesting to see it being scripted and staged.
It was only afterwards that someone pointed out that the guy who came up with the 'Leeroy Jenkins' character, Ben Schulz, has said he based it around 'insensitive' stereotypes:
Joel Warner wrote:One forty-ounce-malt-liquor-fueled night when he was getting his electrical-engineering degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Ben and his friends decided to create the most culturally inappropriate character names imaginable for a bunch of white guys playing video games. Out of Ben's inebriated mouth tumbled "Leeroy Jenkins," a moniker so amusing that he decided to use it for his characters in assorted games -- and, ultimately, World of Warcraft.
A guy in the thread who played with the guild that made the video expanded:
Dank Lotion wrote:Can confirm it's racist and these guys fully intended for it to be racist. My friends and I played on the same server as these goons (Laughing Skull) before and after this video blew up. The entire guild purposely gave themselves "black" names and created black toons. They weren't even attempting to hide the fact that they were racist before this video blew up (if you visited their guild site in the 2004-2005 period you would see them all openly dropping n-bombs on their forums). The whole server knew what kind of people were in this guild it was pretty much an open secret. Most people shrugged off the "casual" racism since they were pretty much the best guild on the server (kinda like people in this thread because the video was soooo hilarious).
Everytime I see it referenced I cringe a little knowing that a bunch of racist a-holes probably got a nice payday from it.
I'm not saying I have some kind of extreme hard-line view against the vid. Obviously the video itself isn't grossly offensive -- you can be guaranteed people are just laughing at the idea of an idiot ruining a bunch of nerds' carefully-planned fun, and for us in the UK there aren't even any undertones because we simply don't associate the name he has, or the accent he was putting on, or the references to chicken with black people.
Obviously the handful of people over there who are having meltdowns over it need to chill out, but the discussion as a whole was quite interesting. I didn't know that the creators openly intended for it to be an off-colour joke and now I do. It's not 'important' or anything but it was at least kind of a bit informative.
EDIT: Facts about Karl and SOK:
- Both simultaneously had nothing better to do with their Christmas Eve than defend a discussion on political correctness on another forum
- Both regulars in the GRcade anime thread
Almost certainly related.
