The Consequences of Fulfilling a Purpose

Content Note: This entry discusses kidnapping, rape, and forced birth.

"And even if they bear themselves weary, or ultimately bear themselves out that does not hurt. Let them bear themselves out. This is the purpose for which they exist."  - Martin Luther, "The Estate of Marriage" (1522)

Perhaps one of the most sexist notions about women is that they are put on earth to fulfill one purpose and one purpose alone: to propagate the human species, even if it means their death.  As you can see from the above quote, this isn't a recent idea and it's one that's been ingrained into our society for centuries.  It  may be 2014, but my childless female friends often complain about others telling them it's their "duty" to have children and that they're somehow obligated to one day become mothers, or that at some point they'll change their minds or wake up one day in their post-menopausal years and suddenly regret never having known the joy of motherhood.  For my own part I've had perfect strangers chide me for not having enough children and choosing only to keep it at one child (sometimes they swallow their foot when they learn I am an only child myself, other times they're aghast that I'd subject my son to the same supposed lonely existence).

I think this is why I was so disappointed yesterday morning when I checked Twitter and learned that current lore states the dragonflights of Azeroth are now sterile.

The line "fulfilled their function" in particular stood out to me, especially when you consider how often various dragons have suffered forced captivity and breeding in the past.  Alexstrasza, Kirygosa, Nyxondra, and Tyranastrasz (an older male dragon who died from over-breeding while in captivity with Alexstrasza) are a few examples of dragons enslaved and either forced or threatened with forced breeding.  As late as Cataclysm the Dragonmaw orc clan was enslaving dragons to use as mounts, and in the Twilight Highlands quest line you help free the red dragon Lirastrasza who is captured by the Twilight's Hammer cult during the arc.  Crueler still is that Alexstrasza lost a second consort and an entire clutch of eggs prior to Dragon Soul only to then have to instruct Azeroth's champions to kill her remaining young who had been corrupted by the Twilight's Hammer (the drakes before Ultraxion).  In short, the dragons' fertility being used against them as a means of subjugation and inflicting emotional pain is nothing new, but now it's taken on another disturbing trait as their fertility was somehow tied to their "usefulness" to Azeroth.

Lore-wise the Aspects of the various dragonflights (with Thrall standing in as the Earthwarder's understudy) sacrificed their powers to aid the players in Dragon Soul in the final battle with Deathwing.  In addition to losing their Titan-gifted powers, they were no longer immortal and subject to die of old age like the other mortal races of Azeroth.  Now we learn that as reward for performing the Titan's task of stopping the Hour of Twilight the dragons have been rendered sterile and face extinction.  It's sort of a macabre planned obsolescence on the Titans' part and an added smack in the face when weighed against all the good the dragonflights have done throughout Azeroth's long existence.

Let's ignore for the moment that the dragons were around before the Titans and a natural part of Azeroth so taking away their ability to reproduce makes little sense.  Tying the usefulness of an entire species' to their fertility is, to me, sexist at its core.  Granted it's not only the female dragons affected by this sudden sterility (at least, I hope not), but as I pointed out reproduction has historically been viewed as a woman's obligation and sole purpose for existence while  men were created to be the builders and leaders of society.  Add to it Blizzard's history of either disappearing mother's altogether or killing off female characters after they've served a purpose for a story arc, it seems we're yet again stuck in the same old problematic tropes, only this time it's the entire race of dragons.

Kirygosa & the Twilight Father

As was pointed out by a couple of people on Twitter, it seems as though we're supposed to gloss over all the rape, forced breeding, and now sterility because these are fictional creatures so it's OK.  The problem is that while Azeroth's dragons aren't real, living beings, they have been created in such a way that we're meant to empathize with them and identify them as sapient, sentient creatures who experience the same range of emotions we do.  They fall in love and mourn when loved ones die, and we're meant to fall in love or to grieve alongside them.  Also, to only focus on the fictional aspect ignores that this fiction was created by people who live in our reality and have ideas and beliefs shaped by our shared culture, a culture and society in which forced birth or sterility is not as fictional as we'd like to believe.  This isn't to say the writers shouldn't or can't tell us stories with these horrific themes.  Writers have always used troubling scenarios in their works to open up desperately needed discussions about the horrors of real life, or to draw attention to the plight of marginalized groups.  The trouble comes when these scenarios are used as little more than a lazy shortcut to illustrate that the bad guy du jour is evil and needs to be stopped, which is often the way we see rape and rape trauma portrayed in various media and in turn normalizes rape and makes it out to be "not a big deal."

What's always bothered me is that we're witness to these awful events and never see any resolution as far as the victims' traumas.  Once the bad guy is defeated--or sometimes as soon as the victim is freed without necessarily defeating him, there's never any fall out.  The individual evil inflicted upon the victims is never mentioned again, and the next time someone is kidnapped and abused, it's treated as unique and only talked about in context of that victim with no acknowledgement that this has happened before.  Repeatedly.  If the intent was to draw attention to a very real horror of human life, it falls flat by only acknowledging it in the moment and showing no consequence in the aftermath.  Even the dragon's sterility is revealed by a simple, throwaway line in Dawn of the Aspects as if it's no big deal never mind that it's the extinction of an entire species.

And it's all because thousands of years ago the Titans predetermined when the dragons would have served the purpose they needed them for and, thus, no longer needed to exist, which, again, seems to completely elide the fact the dragons were part of Azeroth before the Titans' arrival.

There's quite a lot to unpack here, and I fear I've only gone so far as to open this particular box of "What the fuck, Blizzard?"  However, I do want to touch on one other aspect (pardon the pun) of this revelation: What's our motivation to help the dragonflights now?  What's the point in trying to save a species doomed to extinction?  Naturally, if saving a dragon means helping Azeroth avoid some horrible fate there's suitable motivation, but what happens beyond that?  For the more cynical among us, it might be a matter of watching them die relatively fast now versus languishing for however long they have left now that their immortality is
gone.

From Wowpedia

Conversely, why would the dragonflights help Azeroth now?  They did as the Titans bade them, guarded the various Aspects of the world, and in return they get to die out.  Might some of them be angry about this and lash out at the mortal races they aided?  Might this be the future that Nozdormu saw which drove him to madness and led to his alter-ego Murzond and the Infinite Dragonflight?  After all, what sort of life is it knowing there will be no more of your people after you're gone?

Rendering the dragons sterile seems a bizarre move on the part of the developers.  Aside from the many questions concerning the logic behind the Titans' intention for this decision, there's also the very real question of why do this to a species that's already suffered so much torment and pain.  What purpose did all of it serve if, in the end, they're going to be forced into extinction?