Well they dont. As I mentioned earlier warcraft lore statement men(and none night elves) can be priest/priestess of Elune. So take it up with Blizzard.
People quit because the game got boring/did not give them new experience. The fraction of people who care about lore, especially this minutia of it, are probably few and far between.
I have, that is why I havent been subbed for years. I only resubbed recently to play Classic with a friend. Which probably wont last the month lol.
Races should be able to have flaws that we wouldn’t want in modern society.
As long as you’re not portraying stuff like slavery or whatnot as an explicitly good thing, go wild.
A little texture prevents a setting from turning into insipid boring trash where sir Goodlington and Elfo the elf constantly save the kingdom of Generico from the forces of Badguydoom.
(As someone who worked for a company that handled wanna be fantasy authors to give them advice and shuttle the few unpolished gems out to Tor or whoever, I’ve had my fill of bland trash tyvm)
well yeah, then they’d be clergy with guns instead of nuns with guns, and that’s way less fun.
One of the frustrating things is Blizzard is entirely capable of writing characters or races as flawed and do it well, but they tend to only do it with characters who aren’t main characters.
Velen’s character arc from Legion through the draenei heritage quest is great. He went from just kind of a generic good guy who just followed the Light’s path to a flawed character who made a lot of mistakes, but was trying to do what was right. He’s still struggling to make amends for his mistakes. Blizzard hasn’t tried to white wash him or tried for force Hatuun to forgive him.
It frustrates me so much that Blizzard can do stories like that and then when it comes to the main story of the game it’s just “Anduin is sad because things that weren’t his fault that no one blames him for because he’s pure and good as the driven snow.”
Anduin being sad isn’t bad writing but having the world revolve around him being sad and recovering is. As is treating him like some unique tragic snowflake when there’s thousands of stinky boys out in Loraedon who lived through the exact same domination experience, but longer, with them coming out the other side deformed.
Anduin gaining his groove back would work as a background plot that ends with him nutting up, not one where he’s constantly agonizing about it and begging the designated Expansion zone buddy for advice. He’s a king of a major world power, nominal leader of one of the 2 major political blocs, is basically just a mediocre warrior, so why’s he here to begin with?
The world revolving around Anduin and his emotional state only made sense when he was a pretty boy twink.
Now he looks like a rugged Chris Pine and no one cares.
Anduin being shoved into stories he has no business being in has been Blizzard MO since Cata when they made the Velen short story about Anduin.
They still never explained why he was even made High King, he just was suddenly out of no where for no reason whatsoever. Didn’t even try to give a half-butt attempt at justifying it like they did with Varian.
… I feel personally called out by all of this, and I do not know how to feel about it. I do not appreciate how accurately you have dissected my Anduin issue, Aki.
I used to really like Anduin. I liked how he and Varian were a weird foil to Thrall and Garrosh, and him tempering Varian was a neat dynamic.
But MOP came out over 12 years ago.
Since then, he’s been omnipresent but not interesting.
Legion: oh no I’m king, better not do the thing Genn! (Genn does the thing)
BFA: Gets pushed around as king, only remembers he likes peace after both sides are all but worn to the point where they can’t project military power anyway.
SL: Damsel in distress. Then mind controlled because the villains realized his mary sue abilities would be useful
DF: Turns out you can take a gap year from ruling a kingdom and everyone’s fine with it. But he’s off screen for once.
TWW: “Well we couldn’t just have anduin get over his trauma without giving him the story he’s due”, blizzard says in an interview as every Thrall/Tauren/[insert ignored race/character here] fan flips the screen off.
Anduin getting a deep dive story into trauma when basically every other character in the setting has been through significantly worse was certainly a choice. It ends up with him just sounding whiny and not being a compelling story.
Especially when they had just beaten one of the primary trauma victims in the setting with the villain bat repeatedly for 3 expansions in a row.
Same writers that wrote Calia telling Forsaken to “just be happy” to the rest of the forsaken despite her undeath basically just popping right up as a special sparklezombie rather than the “coming to grips with knowing what your beloved relative’s viscera tastes like” experience of shedding their domination.
Meawhile Veritistrasz/Duroz Scaletaker in DF prove that someone at Blizzard knows how to write a story that inspires actual pathos, they’re just not designing the big storylines.
Yeah, a lot of playable races have something super messed up that happened within living memory to them.
Forsaken pretty obvious.
Night elves just went through Teldrassil and all that.
Draenei went through a massive genocide and then decades of having to hide on a dying planet.
Blood elves had 90% of their population wiped out by the Scourge and then had to deal with crippling mana addiction.
Orcs were corrupted by the Legion then placed in camps, then had to find a way to live in a desert with limited resources.
Tauren were hunted almost to extinction by centaur and only recently settled down.
You could take any random NPC from a bunch of different races and they’d have awful trauma that they lived through but nah, got to listen to Anduin cry about being forced to stab a robot once.
Blizzard had a wide-open goal and they blew it. They blew it so hard.
Here you go Blizzard, I’m going to tell you exactly what you could have had Golden write that would have made Forsaken players instantly accept Calia, instead of reject her:
Sylvanas’ black arrow, the one that pierced Calia’s chest—reanimates her—as the Dark Ranger ability did in Warcraft III, and she wakes up cold and alone, face down in the mud, in the same field she died in, having been left there by both the Forsaken and Stormwind so as to not aggravate one another further after the meeting failed. She wanders the Arathi plain, until she comes across a Horde camp, and the Horde Soldiers there pay her no mind and allow her inside, thinking she’s just another Forsaken who apparently fell in some mud while out on a walk. Using a bit of her cleverness, she then makes her way into the Forsaken population in Orgrimmar, keeping her identity secret and talks with the various undead about their Queen’s onset “madness” and how it’s harming them as a people. After Sylvanas flies off to setup Shadowlands, she reveals herself to Thrall, Baine, and Theron, and pulls a coup with other notable Forsaken and establishes the Council with herself as a figurehead.
It was that easy.
What actually happened though?
Oh her body was taken by Anduin to get resurrected by a Naaru (nice by the way, that they would do that for her and no one else) in the Stormwind Chapel, only for her to be invited to hang out on Kul’Tiras under Jaina’s protection so that Jaina could try and set her up with her elder undead brother. Then suddenly Voss discovers she exists and is like, “Oh man, we really really need a sparkle-zombie to join us despite the fact she seems quite comfortable with the Alliance and never bothered to reach out to us this entire time even though she claimed it was her primary motivation.”
Zoovies-iron-colored-nipples, I swear that entire plotline burns my rear every time I remember it.
No, it was definitely better to have a Maldraxxi Supermegalich and Voss practically grab the camera and passive-aggressively lecture us about how she is no different than the rest of The Forsaken. It definitely is not forced or contrived.
Even simpler: When Golden asked if Calia could be their mandated super-speshul Light Zombie, they could have said, “No, we don’t think that would go over well with Forsaken fans. Find someone else to fill that niche.” And for bonus points, “Actually, it’s pretty clear you don’t enjoy writing the Forsaken, so how about if we give that book to someone else, and you can work on another project instead?”
Light undead was such a stupid concept to begin with and completely undermined death as a type of magic and a cosmic force.
It would have been more interesting if Sylvanas had resurrected Callia.
Sylvanas and Nathanos together made up the best leadership we ever had.
Yes, I distinctly remember Priests using Mana Burn.
This reminded me of The Brotherhood of Man
