How can we put aside personal matters when you’ve admitted that you reasons for your positions are indeed rooted in your personal beliefs? Particularly your belief that people and WoW are conspiring against you, authority, religion in general and your faith specifically?
Why are you dropping all our previous lines of discussions, leaving many of my questions unanswered and your claims unsupported- only to start over with the exact same bad arguments you started with? I mean I at least appreciate that you didn’t start a whole new thread to do it this time.
But you don’t care about lore. Or retcons. Or what actually constitutes good writing. You just want Blizzard to use the Light as the vehicle for your personal views. You have decided this position ahead of time and are scrambling to to try and retroactively justify it while refusing to change your mind or admit where you’re clearly wrong.
Xe’ra is not stated to have been presented to villain bat all the naruu. Indeed, it’s explained that naruu are individuals and have different goals and agendas and don’t all share the exact same beliefs, and Xe’ra exists as an extreme example of that. Because showing is better than just telling. That’s actual good writing.
The Void was not put forward as the ultimate evil, beyond even the Legion. The Legion has been more or less behind the major conflicts of the RTS and central to two out of eight expansions. The void gets, at most, a patch where an old god shows up and gets put down. In Legion, it’s revealed that both the Light and the Void considered the Legion a mutual threat. Additionally, we’ve faced villains and antagonists wielding the Arcane, Light, and other cosmic forces, who have been shown to be wielded for good and bad. That consistency when applied to the Light is an example of good writing.
I trust Blizzard to do what it has done before. Give us an expansion wherein some big cosmic monster shows up wielding some cosmic power, the Horde/Alliance team up, along align with people who also wield that power, and we fight a bunch of constructs/cultists. And in the end, the bad guy is defeated and were more or less return to something approaching the status quo. And I expect lots of the many naruu we’ve seen, Priest King Anduin, Priestess Queen Calia and Prophet Velen (who is still a follower of the Light) to remain good guys because Blizzard has always presented us with plenty of good high profile Light users as well.
The Light is being changed - in that we’re getting new characters, new elements, and greater breadth/depth- because the Light has always been changing in that way. There was once a time when “the Light” didn’t even exist in the Warcraft universe. A time when there weren’t Priests or Paladins. A time when where there wasn’t a Church of the Light. A time when there weren’t Draenei. A time when there weren’t Naruu. A time when there wasn’t Anduin or Velen or Yrel or Turalyon. A time when the Light wasn’t a fundamental force involved in the formation of the universe. A time when the Light wasn’t at war with the Legion or the Void. All of these are changes the Light has undergone in lore over the years. And as of Legion -which was already 6 years ago- it’s undergoing more changes. Changes that actually make it more consistent with how the rest of the cosmology has developed. It’s also maintaining many things it has since near the beginning, like feeding off of conviction and the fact that it can be wielded by bad people doing bad things for bad reasons. The Light’s never been all good or all bad, and this hasn’t changed.
Similarly, the Void has changed over the history of the Warcraft franchise. It was not always called the Void. It was not always at war with the Light. There were not always Old Gods or Void Lords. The Void is now a fundamental cosmic force that’s helped create reality and Azeroth. We have seen non-villainous void entities and entities that wield Void powers for the good of Azeroth. It now opposes the the Fel as well. But one thing since near the beginning is that the Shadow/Void can be used for good and bad. This is consistent with how the rest of the cosmological powers have been playing out.
Scarlets and their ideology still exist and even a scant few members of the Crusade still exist. The Scarlets as a whole and the Crsaude specifically have bounced back from greatly reduced numbers several times throughout WoW’s history. It shows a blatant lack of pattern recognition to deny that they could do so again. Not bringing them back in an expansion about a hypothetical Light Crusade when they’ve so long been tied to it in the narrative and laid down the narrative framework facilitating their return would be bad writing.
I know (not assume) the potential brainwashing/manipulative effects of Lightforging on Mag’har because I’ve seen the actual effects of Lightforging on Turalyon; who never disobeyed Xe’ra, even when it meant imprisoning his own lover. I’ve also seen how AU Xe’ra uses an even more extreme version on her Lightbound forces, as we’ve been told and seen both Mag’har and Yrel turn against their former allies. Turalyon couldn’t resist Lightforging and has expressed no desire to rebel against any version of Xe’ra. There’s nothing suggesting he will be initially more resistant to the more intense coercion, up to and including Lightbinding. Although, this gives him an out in that if he can be brought from under her influence by the intervention of a third party, he can yet be saved. Same with Yrel. And many others.
Grey’ah’s biases don’t matter in that everything she tells us about the Lightbound is also something we also see happening, or is backed up and elaborated upon by Yrel. The Lightbound, led by Xe’ra, turned on their Mag’har allies after the defeat of the Iron Horde, Legion 30 years ago. Now they are committing genocide against the people on Draenor and forcibly converting people to their forces.
The point is that exploring the complexity and moral grayness of the human experience in fiction is not cliche or badly written here. No moreso than any other concept WoW has ever done. No amount of attacking a strawman by pretending that the only people interested in such a story are edgy teenagers, or anti-authority, or anti-religion will change that. Maintaining blind obedience to authority, thinking your faith is the only one that’s right and entertaining black and white thinking isn’t automatically mature or wise. In fact, it can even be limiting and very harmful; trading actual emotional and intellectual challenges for a short term high provided by righteous anger that assures us of our own correctness at the expense of our perceived enemies.
Have you heard the complains about BFA in that people want to see the Alliance go on the offense or experience its own internal conflict? Or the ones about how they want to see Anduin’s leadership challenged? Or how people want to actually see Yrel’s story play out in more detail? Or see the whole Alleria/Locus Walker/Void Elf thing developed into something more than just a dropped plot point to justify not! High Elves in the Alliance.
But you don’t really care about any of the above because your problem is specifically with the Light in general and Xe’ra, Yrel and Turalyon specifically not being portrayed as endorsing your personal beliefs. And you’re willing to engage in retcons and bad writing to make it so.