Phyrexians don’t experience compassion and sympathy the way non-Phyrexians do. Any personal emotions they feel are still filtered through a shared Phyrexian ideology: Machine eugenicists who believe the Multiverse will be better if everything is Phyrexian. Just because Urabrask doesn’t preach total compleation of reality as fanatically as Elesh Norn doesn’t mean it isn’t also his end goal.
…Well, that’s dumb.
Create a whole elaborate system of alignments where things are so nuanced that assuming someone is evil from it is oversimplifying.
But then go right back to “hey look an entire race of evil guys!” because you feel like it?
I know D&D has a persistent “do goblins/orcs/whatever get to be people or not?” problem but I hoped Magic would be a little less dumb about that thing.
Especially considering that… people with artificial body modifications actually exist (Hi! How’s it going?) and are not actually less human/don’t have less of a soul than everybody else around. (Did I leave it on an operating table? Did the surgery team just like, forget to give it back to me? Dude.)
I wasn’t expecting Urabrask, Paladin of Free Choice or anything. But this is seriously disappointing, even to me who wasn’t expecting story to go that far.
And, you know, I hate to be that annoying guy pulling social justice language into it, but…
Kind of problematic?
“The cyborgs are less able to feel REAL emotions than the fleshy people” is… grounded in ableism.
I really hope this “wtf?” reaction that the part of the fandom that wanted some Phyrexians to be straight up good is getting from WOTC is just defensiveness about not making those decisions, and that people are actually giving some thought to how promising nuance and then flattening it is disappointing.
I really hope, in a year or so from now, we’ll be seeing something from Maro or whoever where it’s like “at the time we really felt intensely like this is the story we wanted to tell, but six months later yeah we could’ve been more nuanced with it.”
Ooof. Yeah. When Kaladesh came out and someone who had been massively hyped for it was disappointed, WOTC made it clear that, whether or not they chose to change anything, they were listening.
I hope they’re listening to the section of the fandom that is disappointed over this.
Whatever they do or don’t choose to do with that feedback.
wotc really saw passionate phyrexia fans saying “its so cool we get to see stories about how phyrexians are actually normal people deep down and theyre struggling to break free from the oppresive cult theyre ruled by” and said the official take is “sorry nuance sucks actually theyre actually all just evil”. lmfao. lol.