World of Warcraft- a tale of two cities

Being somewhat familiar with WoW (having played it back when 60 was the level cap), I was able to move quickly from city to city in both factions' territories, giving me a unique perspective on the world of Azeroth and its inhabitants. I was immediately drawn to the capital cities of each faction - Orgrimmar and Stormwind, as providing contrasts both obvious and subtle.

At first glance, Orgrimmar is strongly hypermasculine. Even ignoring for a moment the wonky scale that is present everywhere in WoW (The average beam used in construction is apparently larger than the average tree), Orgrimmar is very definitely a city at war. From the seemingly hurried construction of the massive walls to the tent-like nature of its buildings, Orgrimmar feels more like an entrenched war-camp than an established capital city. Its ruling council, all men, meet in a building more akin to a giant tent inside walls than a solid building.

Stormwind, on the other hand, has a completely different set of architectural cues. Though still built of surprisingly large materials, Stormwind is refined and embellished - instead of rough-hewn logs still with axe-marks on the ends, Stormwind is made of nicely squared-off beams and well-cut stone. If Orgrimmar is a city at war, Stormwind is very deliberately a city at peace. Stormwind is humanist, positive, and optomistic about the future...

And yet it's Orgrimmar that has female guards.

This made me double-take. Why would the super-masculine war culture also be more progressively feminist than the enlightened human one? Was this a commentary on humanity being quietly, oppressively sexist? Clearly, more research would be required.

I decided to look into businesses in both cities and see what the gender ratios of shops in a variety of categories were. Though more subtle than the patrolling guards, the genders of business owners provide two important perspectives - how stereotypes of gender roles apply to the shopkeepers, and the progressive nature (or lack thereof) of business in Azeroth.

My findings were very interesting. As I expected, merchants in the armor and weapon businesses are overwhelmingly male - thirteen out of sixteen in Orgrimmar and fourteen out of nineteen in Stormwind. Beyond that, at least in Stormwind, the genders are fairly evenly balanced. The two outstanding fields were crafting/profession-based merchants, where eight of twelve are female, and inns (which Stormwind seems to have no end of), which are 75% male.

Orgrimmar, on the other hand, is strongly male in all categories. The only even category was innkeepers, of which the only one is run by a husband-and-wife pair. Crafting/profession merchants are 9-to-5, magic is 6-to-2, and even the all-inclusive "general" category is 5 to 3 in the guys' favor.

So, where did the female guards in Orgrimmar come from?

I believe (and, being someone other than the Blizzard world-building people, this is only a belief), that their existence comes from the fact that Orgrimmar is meant to be a city at war. Much like Rosie the Riveter, the female guards are a symbol of wartime necessity - but in a world where gender means precisely nothing in terms of combat ability. Rosie took a conventionally masculine job, assembling aircraft, and did it just as quickly and just as precisely as her male counterparts. In Orgrimmar, the female guards are doing the same thing, but carrying shields and axes instead of welder's masks and rivet guns.