Witches of Azeroth

I grew up in Massachusetts. While I lived in a suburb of Boston, relatively far (for someone from a state as geographically small as Massachusetts) from Salem, New England is an area with a kind of quintessential Halloween climate, and even though my town didn't really push witches as a tourism thing (kind of in poor taste when you think about the fact that the actual trials were basically a bunch of totally innocent people being hanged or crushed to death by angry mobs,) the swampy woods that are leafless for much of the year, generally starting around October, really fit with the spooky vibe. It didn't hurt that my mom would organize the neighborhood Halloween party at the community center up the street.

I'm saying I've always been into Halloween and kind of spooky aesthetics, is what I'm saying, which if you've read this blog you probably gathered from my preference for Worgen (despite not really playing my poor wolf-man that much) and Death Knights, and obsession over the Scourge.

Hearthstone's new expansion (which I just impulse pre-purchased) is the Witchwood, which is set in Gilneas - a place with a sort of extreme version of that New England spooky climate (Boston actually gets gorgeous in late spring and summer.) It looks to have a classic haunted woods aesthetic.

Likewise, in Battle for Azeroth, we'll be getting the zone of Drustvar, where a group of evil witches apparently employ death magic to assault the locals, and use creepy wicker-man constructs as minions. We've also discovered that Kul Tiran humans are going to be a playable allied race, with similar wicker-style beast forms (I can feel my Night Elf gradually slipping downward in terms of priority as "main druid.")

Witchcraft has had representation in Warcraft lore, but there's actually very little consistency behind it. This is actually a common theme in fantasy RPGs - one rarely finds Witch as a playable class, despite it being one of the first fantasy archetypes that people tend to learn about (if you want to talk about a fantasy property basically every American has known since at least 1939 - if not from the novels the Wizard of Oz was based on - you've got the Wicked Witch of the West as one of the most iconic film villains of all time.)

I wonder why this is, though I have some theories. For one thing, Witch often comes with a gendered connotation. Witches are typically seen as female. I don't want to get too deep in this, but there is a tendency in our patriarchal culture to find it more culturally acceptable for women to use a "male" designation than vice versa. "Warlock" is often used as a masculine version of Witch, and few seem to bat an eye at a female character being a Warlock, which some might find a male character as a Witch to be embarrassing. There's a ton to unpack there, and I'm not getting into it in this post, and while I'd also point out that historically, Witch didn't have such a gendered connotation (plenty of men in Salem were executed as witches,) I could imagine that this hesitance to use the term for a playable class as being a relic of a time when RPGs and gaming in general were a less welcoming and open place for all people (including, you know, roughly half of all people.)

But beside this issue, I also think that Witches have struggled with a too-broad, or perhaps multifaceted definition.

In the time of the Salem trials, a Witch was almost exactly what we see with Warlocks in WoW. The source of a Witch's power was entirely infernal in nature. The people in Salem of course had a dichotomy-structured worldview. There was holiness, which didn't involve any sort of magic wielded by individuals; instead, a virtuous person would trust in God to do what was right and hope for salvation after death (I realize that talking about this in the past tense is kind of odd, given that tons of people believe more or less what I just described.) The flipside of this, of course, means that magic can only be derived through pacts with the enemy of God, namely, the Devil.

However, in contemporary terms, people who refer to themselves as Witches are generally more aligned with neo-paganism, typically with a focus on connecting with nature and a divinity more in tune with natural fertility (and, I think largely as a response to the aforementioned misogyny surrounding the witch myth, generally associated with femininity.) These witches, in WoW class terms are almost certainly more closely aligned with Druids. We even see this term used in-game to refer to a kind of half-practice of Druidism - Gilnean Harvest-Witches employ druidic magic, though it's only after their transformation into Worgen that these figures were able to become full-fledged Druids.

Another candidate for Witches in Warcraft are Mages. This largely follows the Harry Potter use of the term, where Witch is simply a female term for Wizard (see "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.") This suggests the more intellectual style of magical practice, but without the fiendish associations and wickedness associated with Warlocks. Mages, which could potentially be broken down into Wizards and Witches, are simply intellectuals - kind of the fantasy equivalent of physicists.

Finally, we have Shamans. In Troll culture, which is largely inspired by a mishmash of Mesoamerican and Afro-Caribbean culture, Shamans are often referred to as Witch-Doctors. Indeed, a lot of these real-world cultures helped to inspire the modern image of Witches as well. Warcraft Shamans always kind of straddle these two identities - one is very focused on the alchemical elements as their primary theme, but the other identity is perhaps more akin to real-world shamanism - namely the belief in invisible spirits that surround us all the time. Beyond Trolls, we don't often see Warcraft Shamans referred to as Witches, though I'd point out that the tier ten set is called "Frost Witch."

While never referred to as witches, the Arrokoa outcasts have a rather witch-like aesthetic in the Spires of Arak. These people employ Shadow Magic, many of them effectively Shadow Priests. One could argue that player characters who go Shadow could potentially qualify as Witches, though I'd argue this is stretching it a bit.

So that's five player classes that might fit the term.

In BFA, we'll be interacting with witches in Drustvar. Unlike these classes, however, these figures seem more like a type of creature than merely people who chose a certain type of magic. In this way, they're more akin to D&D's Hags, who play that classic fairy tale role of the evil witch (in D&D, most Hags are classified as Fey, the same creature type as sprites and pixies, which helps them fit that fairy tale feeling. WoW doesn't really have a corresponding type.)

Long, long ago, before I started this blog and would instead record ideas about WoW in a single Word document, before Wrath of the Lich King had even been announced, one of the first ideas I had for a new playable class was the Witch. At the time, a lot of classes were defined around a magic type or often a combination of two or three types - Mages were Fire, Frost, and Arcane. Warlocks were Fire and Shadow. Priests were Holy and Shadow, etc. My concept for Witches was that they'd combine Nature and Shadow (oddly, that's actually represented by Rogues now,) taking a sort of darker version of Druid magic.

I'm not entirely sure that such a class would really fit into the game as it stands now - as we've seen, Witches are kind of spread out over many classes.

Still, I think that, as both heroes and villains, this character archetype has a lot of potential in-game.