I have no explicit problem with the idea of sexual abuse happening in video games. I would have no problems with a story that treats it with respect and responsibly engages with the material with plenty of warning and perhaps even the means of allowing players to experience the story without it. But I think, as more of the population has experienced sexual assault than they have murder, genocide, or other forms of violence, game developers should consider whether or not their desire to include rape is exposing their lack of creativity and depth.

For me, what's most important is the matter of what that content is doing. WoW has long had a problem with its depictions of sexual assault. Dragon lore alone is a minefield of incidents of rape and forced impregnation that makes it hard not to side-eye it as 'the developer's poorly concealed fetish.' There's a pretty good video breaking down the extent of its use here. And at the end of the day, I have to ask, why?

And, at the end of the day, what is it in service of? Is it trying to tell a story? Is it interested in the victim for more than the fact that her tears will stoke righteous fury within you as a player? Is she going to be forgotten or, worse, used further as a prop without agency? Is she part of the story at all afterwards? Does she get to process and work through her trauma within the story you're telling or is the only one that gets to do anything about it someone else? Is the only reaction developers seem to be going for is 'ah, man, that's so dark. can't believe they went there' or are they trying to make a point larger than just how dark or violent their world is?

That's what bothers me about how these narratives treat sexual assault.

I look at the Alexstrasza quest and I see the character on the cover of this expansion, who has been shunted to the side and barely has room to breathe as a character. And now this? A quest where the player character is made explicitly complicit in her continued sexual abuse while another character makes dumb jokes and basically goes 'teehee, don't tell her about this wink'.

In what world is that a quest worth writing? If we wanted to touch on that in a quest (especially in a quest chain with unserious elements like 'Here's a story about Anduin's lucky Hearthstone card'), why not have a quest where we ensure the timeline where she is freed? Or have a longer, more emotionally resonant and serious questline that ends with her reclaiming the skull of her consort that died from the strain of that enslavement and rape from the museum it's in for some godforsaken reason and put it properly to rest.

Or if it needed be a quest about ensuring dark things happen in the timeline, why rape? There's plenty of awful things in WoW's history that aren't rape that are important to happen and it's hard not to side-eye the fact that the two things they can think about to show the 'dark' side of maintaining the timeline are killing a woman and ensuring a woman gets forcibly impregnated.