The tauren were introduced in Warcraft III, and there they were shown as nothing more (or less) than a true-breeding race of minotaur-like people. Chris Metzen -- principle architect of the Warcraft universe and metaplot -- grew up reading fantasy novels, comic books, etc., much like most of the rest of the core Blizzard staff from early on. As a result, the Warcraft universe is a pastiche of all these influences, sometimes introduced without much awareness of where some of those tropes originated. (I'm fairly sure that the idea of the tauren as a true-breeding race of minotaur-ish creatures came directly from DragonLance novels. Chris Metzen being an avowed fan of DragonLance is the reason Richard Fucking Knaak continues to write tie-in novels, despite Knaak's prose inducing bleeding in the eyes... er, excuse me, orbs.)
That said, tauren don't seem to have much in common with bovines at all, other than having hooves, horns, and a similar sort of skull structure. Tauren are omnivores, like the other PC races, and their reproductive strategies clearly have far more in common with homids than with anything quadrupedal. Not only do they have breasts rather than udders, but, as we see in Northrend, their children are born as dependent on their parents as that of any human, tiny (relative to the adult) and incapable of doing ... well, much of anything other than nursing and pooping, really. (There are no cows on Kalimdor, and prior to contact between the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor being reestablished in the course of Warcraft III, tauren had no idea what a cow was -- most of the cows in the game are in Elwynn Forest, and Seahorn, a tauren pirate in Booty Bay, is mildly amused by some of the other races seeing a resemblance between tauren and cows. My own druid takes offense at being called a cow, and has -- in RP -- thrown a goblin off a tall building in Orgrimmar for pushing that too hard.)
I'm actually rather fond of playing tauren, though I think it's largely because I really only play female characters, and female tauren have such dignity and grace. I'm of mixed mind about the cultural presentation, which is a muddled mishmash of indigenous North American cultures, but I was not raised in any of those cultures, nor am I perceived as anything other than Caucasian, so I really have neither the background nor the larger context to unilaterally declare it offensive. (I did, however, blink a bit, the very first night of my trial, when I rolled my tauren druid and, when clicking on a male tauren NPC, was greeted with, "How.")
One woman I talked to was a WoW player and a card-carrying (literally) member of one of these cultures, and she didn't find the tauren offensive at all. She did qualify it by saying that her grandfather would likely find it offensive, though, so make of that what you will.
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Date: 2011-09-14 02:00 pm (UTC)That said, tauren don't seem to have much in common with bovines at all, other than having hooves, horns, and a similar sort of skull structure. Tauren are omnivores, like the other PC races, and their reproductive strategies clearly have far more in common with homids than with anything quadrupedal. Not only do they have breasts rather than udders, but, as we see in Northrend, their children are born as dependent on their parents as that of any human, tiny (relative to the adult) and incapable of doing ... well, much of anything other than nursing and pooping, really. (There are no cows on Kalimdor, and prior to contact between the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor being reestablished in the course of Warcraft III, tauren had no idea what a cow was -- most of the cows in the game are in Elwynn Forest, and Seahorn, a tauren pirate in Booty Bay, is mildly amused by some of the other races seeing a resemblance between tauren and cows. My own druid takes offense at being called a cow, and has -- in RP -- thrown a goblin off a tall building in Orgrimmar for pushing that too hard.)
I'm actually rather fond of playing tauren, though I think it's largely because I really only play female characters, and female tauren have such dignity and grace. I'm of mixed mind about the cultural presentation, which is a muddled mishmash of indigenous North American cultures, but I was not raised in any of those cultures, nor am I perceived as anything other than Caucasian, so I really have neither the background nor the larger context to unilaterally declare it offensive. (I did, however, blink a bit, the very first night of my trial, when I rolled my tauren druid and, when clicking on a male tauren NPC, was greeted with, "How.")
One woman I talked to was a WoW player and a card-carrying (literally) member of one of these cultures, and she didn't find the tauren offensive at all. She did qualify it by saying that her grandfather would likely find it offensive, though, so make of that what you will.