WoW's New Expansion Angers Dumb Chinese Nationalists

It’s only been announced for a couple days, and it won’t be released for who-knows-how-long, but apparently some Chinese gamers have already found a reason to get angry about World of Warcraft’s upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion. The expansion, which is very clearly China-themed and may represent an attempt by Blizzard to cater directly to Chinese WoW players, managed to draw the ire of some nationalist “angry youths” because of a very short moment in this launch trailer. See if you can spot it for yourself:

No luck? OK, it’s here. You see, the characters on that stone aren’t Chinese. In fact, they look Japanese! Well, at least, they look Japanese to people who can’t read any Japanese, but luckily that describes pretty much all of China’s “angry youth” brigade, which took to the net to make comments like these:

“What’s the next chapter in World of Warcraft? The Mists of Pandaria! Everyone can fucking see you’re just trying to sweep up the mainland [Chinese] market again. So how is it that the fucking whole thing is full of Japanese culture, it makes me so disturbed!” (source)

“[…] even though there are pandas [in the expansion], for the sake of the [game’s popularity] you mixed in Japanese culture. If you love Japanese culture so much, why didn’t you just make it Japanese monkeys [instead of pandas] and call it a day?” (source)

“Why is there Japanese on that stone tablet??????” (source)

This issue cropped up way back in Warcraft 3, when the first Pandaren appeared dressed in the samurai garb of traditional Japanese warriors (Blizzard eventually redesigned the characters after Chinese gamers complained). Now, it seems to revolve around the Pandaren script, which some idiots people have assumed is Japanese.

The Pandaren script - a Blizzard original, not Japanese

In fact, the script is an original creation by Blizzard’s design team that is neither Chinese nor Japanese. It’s also not real, just like the fictional panda-people who will be appearing in this online game people are arguing over.

Not everyone is upset about the so-called Japanese influence in the game, though. Many Weibo commenters have pointed out that it’s normal for foreigners to confused Chinese and Japanese cultures. Others have suggested it doesn’t matter because, in the words of a commenter here, “Chinese people invented Japanese people and Korean people.”

To be fair, most of the comments about this “issue” have been much less insane and more along the lines of my own thinking, which is that (1) the script isn’t Japanese (2) even if it was, who cares, this is a fictional fantasy game.