Hello, everyone! First of all, sorry for the delay. I got invited to the Council on the very first day, and it’s my first thread and second comment here. A mix of being ill, depressed and just having a lack of good faith in anything. But I’m getting a little better, the news regarding Microsoft and cross-faction play also feel promising. So expect me to write more threads (both lore-related and not) and comments.
◉ What’s an unreliable narrator?
An unreliable narrator is a very interesting storytelling tool that’s been reintroduced to the Warcraft franchise in Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. With this tool, the story is told from a character’s point of view or via folklore and legends. By nature, information from such sources can be inaccurate. Warcraft had its moments of PoV-based lore before, but usually, it was done to make a so-called “soft retcon” of a previously canon fact. For example, in vanilla WoW the Twisting Nether wasn’t just a demon realm, it was also the afterlife for mortal souls. It was softly retconned around TBC and WotLK, and now the Classic era mentions of the Twisting Nether as the afterlife simply serve as someone’s incorrect PoV.
Yet, there are entire fantasy settings completely rooted in the unreliable narrator system. In The Elder Scrolls, the majority of mythological lore is told with various contradicting legends, and a lot of the events are intentionally left obscured from the player’s eyes. In Dragon Age series, the unreliable narrator serves as the main engine of the story: each new game reveals another part of ancient history and debunks false legends of the past, all of which are essential for the main plot. In Dark Souls, the story is the puzzle that you solve by taking notes from the “visual lore” (like prop art) and the unreliable narrator system: but half of this puzzle exists only in the creator’s mind, so you can’t quite build the true Dark Souls lore. But that’s the idea: you are expected to create your own interpretation.
◉ The Word of God
Warcraft has never been anything like that. Traditionally, Warcraft lore was always told via a different instrument called “the Word of God”. The Word of God and the unreliable narrator aren’t mutually exclusive per se, but they are very different. When something is told from the Word of God’s perspective, it’s always the absolute truth. It’s as if the author themselves have given you the notes of what’s real and not. This was the way for the Warcraft lore for the longest time. To be honest, Warcraft’s fixation on such style was always pretty unique, because the Word of God technically isn’t even a narrative tool, it’s more of a term to describe something like a TV-series producer’s statement on a spin-off comic-book canonicity.
◉ World of Warcraft: Chronicle
The best example of the old Warcraft’s adherence to the Word of God style is the Chronicle trilogy (2016-2018), which was introduced as the lore bible, the “definitive history of Warcraft” (as per Cate Gary in vol.2 trailer). But during Blizzcon 2019 it was stated by Steve Danuser, the narrative lead on WoW, that the series is actually written from the titans’ servants’ point of view, just as any other lore source is written from someone’s PoV. Don’t quote me on that, but if I remember correctly, in one of the interviews on twitch he even said if you are to read the Chronicle, you would actually notice how it’s written from the Titanic PoV.
Treating such big reveals as something that’s supposedly was like that all along opens its own can of worms. It reminds me of the latest interview of Ion Hazzikostas for IGN, where he said that Warcraft isn’t about the Alliance vs. the Horde, it’s about adventure, exploration, and fighting for your home: and it’s been like that since Warcraft III. Which is, of course, true. But it clashes with his and other developers’ quotes during Battle for Azeroth. As always, I won’t assume ill intent, and it’s been a few years since BfA now, and some of those previous developers aren’t even in Blizzard anymore. But a better wording would’ve changed everything: something as simple as “we changed our mind since then” instead of “actually, it’s been like that since 2002”.
But back to the topic. There are two major issues with the Chronicle getting retcon-but-not-really treatment (remember, it’s still said to be canon despite being PoV-based). The first is that it breaks the trust of players in the lore. They had spent money on these books, some foreign speakers I know even bought the whole collection twice: in their native language and in English. Why? Because this series was very much about details and Chekov’s guns sprinkled all over the text. So even small errors in translation were treated as a tragedy. This was the Chronicle’s biggest worth: the depth of how it was written. Which is now lost.
◉ The backlash
Why is it bad? Because there’s nothing that shows a story’s worth better than the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Lots of people all over the various story forums and social media have visibly less investment in the story, the threads appear less often, and on top of that, these people no longer assume a story reason for a weird plot twist or assumed inconsistency. They will immediately brush it away as a flop by the devs.
So, when such players see PoV-based lore in Warcraft, their reaction is rather sour. They feel like WoW tries to use the Dark Souls approach on the unreliable narrator: not to create a brooding atmosphere, but to brew an illusion of a deep story.
Obviously, Warcraft isn’t just about the lore. In a way, the lore is actually one of the less important aspects of the franchise: let’s not forget the classic “gameplay first” Blizzard motto. But there’s still a substantial amount of people who play the game mostly because of the lore: and when they see just how little it matters, they lack the investment to follow the game. To a noticeably lesser extent, it’s also true for the role-playing community.
There’s an air of lost potential with Warcraft books. Warhammer sells novels like cookies, and most of their lore books are of better quality than even the Chronicle both in terms of writing and artwork (things like Age of Sigmar core books). Not utilizing printed media like that is lost profit for Blizzard: maybe an insignificant amount in the long run, but still.
So, what stops Blizzard (well, stopped them before the scandals) from hiring a company like Cubicle 7 to write a tabletop D&D-like game about Azeroth? I assume the reason is simple: it would constrain the devs creative freedom. Hence why places like Kul Tiras had no lore up until BfA: over the years, they could’ve created something that would ultimately clash with the idea of the zones in the actual Kul Tiras expansion. Then again, the new “everything is PoV” stance can actually work wonders with that! Because an inconsistency would be revealed as some character’s mistake.
What really stops Warcraft from becoming an actual setting instead of… a TV show? A weird comparison, but, well, bear it with me.
In terms of story progression, Warcraft’s closest look-alikes are long-running TV series like the Supernatural or Xena and Hercules series from the 90-s. We start with killing boars and end up saving the machine of Death in the afterlife, all with a very small cast of characters. The material gets burned up so fast, most of the villains die in the expansion they are introduced: Warcraft could’ve as well been a series about Thrall, Jaina, Anduin, and Co without any deep lore.
◉ But wait, there’s also a different perspective!
That said, I must also provide a different perspective. Sooner or later, the Chronicle would’ve gotten outdated. Actually, its “titan souls” lore got outdated in patch 7.3 a mere year after the release of Vol. 1. If Chris Metzen was still at Blizzard, I assume that he would’ve tried to keep at least some semblance of continuity with the Chronicle, which was his dream project since MoP. But he’s at Warchief studios now. Steve Danuser is our new lore lead dev now, and, I assume, his decision to shift the lore into PoV-mode came from a desire to help his fellow devs. Remember, the lore team works on books, they usually don’t work on games directly. The game team writes the in-game story, and they don’t want to feel shackled by some book. Not that it really shackles them that much in my opinion, but once again we have examples of things happening just like that: Antorus and titan souls.
It’s somewhat positive for the players as well: because now everyone can homebrew their roleplay with greater freedom. I can also give Steve Danuser a credit for not outright removing the Chronicle from canon.
So, yes, in the long run, the Chronicle became a… mistake. Well, at least, written with the Word of God narrative. But the way it was handled can’t be praised either. Who exactly wrote the Chronicle lorewise? What makes their stance titan-based when the cosmology there was nowhere near Order/Arcane-centric, and the titans themselves were murdered by Sargeras all alone?
It’s also fair to mention that the lore-centered issue of this thread doesn’t really influence the way how the plot and narrative progress in-game. So, in a way, it shows that the problem is rather minor for the game at large. But I hope you will forgive me for talking about it at such lengths, even if the text really lacks focus. @_@
All recent non-novels books are also written as someone’s PoV. Let’s list them real quick.
• Exploring Azeroth: Eastern Kingdoms by Christie Golden (October 2020):
There’s not much to say about this one. The book serves mostly as a recap of known info and confirms various Alliance victories from the BfA mission table. Much of the space is dedicated to the fates of in-game items, but these bits feel more like filler than anything else. Same for tier sets descriptions, instead of lore regarding their origins you mostly read references to their old set procs (which is cool) and Shaw’s opinions about how spooky the warlocks are. I feel like the fixation on the in-game items stems from Christie Golden’s old habit of describing the world of Azeroth as it’s seen in-game as opposed to a more realistic scale (the Traveler series is a good example of the latter).
In terms of production, it’s pretty bizarre. The book uses the same format as Starcraft and Diablo bestiaries (even with the same comments written as scribbles), but instead of a bestiary, it’s just a travelog. The artwork is mostly decent black-and-white sketches. There’s not much value for a longtime Warcraft reader, but it’s also a pretty confusing intro to the franchise for a newcomer.
The series also serves as a canon answer to the old Warcraft RPG books starring Brann Bronzebeard: Lands of Mystery and Lands of Conflict. The older books have their own share of issues, but there was a better sense of scale and a feeling of Brann actually adventuring and exploring.
The second book of the series, Kalimdor, is admittedly worse on many levels, but it doesn’t necessarily put this one on a pedestal.
• Folk & Fairy Tales of Azeroth (May 2021):
A surprisingly solid read. What’s even more impressive is that in terms of production value this book is a collector’s artbook tier. Especially worth the praise when you are to remember the Grimoire. In terms of lore and story, it’s just as the description says: a collection of fairy tales. Most of the stories were written by authors who previously had never worked with Blizzard or even played Warcraft games (also without much restraint put on the authors by Blizzard), but all of them are still pretty genuine and fun.
• Grimoire of the Shadowlands and Beyond by Sean Copeland and Steve Danuser (July 2021):
This one is wild. Many expected the Grimoire to be the new Warcraft’s version of the Chronicle, but it turned out to be a lesser Exploring Azeroth. The artwork is cheap (with lots and lots of reused illustrations), there’s not much text overall given the number of pages, and it’s all just a sassy Broker’s diary with our player character adventures for reference. So, except for the Destiny-esque cosmology part, in the end, it’s a patch 9.0 recap.
The Broker-narrator was a rather questionable choice. Not just because by the nature of his sources (the players) the character usually can’t introduce the reader to a new perspective, but when the new perspective is shown… It’s the Broker making fun of the Azerothian races’ beliefs and the Chronicle cosmology. On one hand, that was almost the highlight of the Grimoire: you can clearly feel that the author had fun writing that. On the other, it shows a lack of restraint. Warcraft’s audience spent years upon years in the Word of God mode, and when this was thrown at them, they read such bits as open disrespect for the older lore and Azerothian races. The Grimoire is written by an arrogant Broker, who views non-Death entities as self-absorbed and biased, but in truth, embodies such ill qualities to a far greater extent. Great concept on paper. But the writers should’ve expected the backlash from such a choice of words.
• Exploring Azeroth: Kalimdor by Sean Copeland (December 2021):
I assume that most of the fellows here are familiar with the criticism of this book, so I’ll cut to the chase. Outside of all the things discussed by the fandom, there are two big differences between the first and the second book in the series. This one does a better job at making Azeroth feel like a big world, and there’s no “list all the loot table” subplot. But it falls short because the narrative bends to an unbelievable degree in order to… return various subzones to their Cataclysm status-quo. When the EK book had the Southshore cleansed by the paladins, the Kalimdor one got the Alliance rebuilding Proudmoore’s keep in Durotar. So much for peace! Zekhan’s comments on such reverse developments are also somewhat bloodthirsty, which clashes with the peace treaty narrative.
I will leave a further talk about the better-known debate regarding this book for another time, instead, I’ll use one page of the book to illustrate many of the issues with it: the Shatterspear tribe.
Long story short: in vanilla WoW, the Shatterspear was a peaceful troll tribe. In Cataclysm they joined the Horde to destroy the night elves, but they lost and their tribe was no more: survivors fled with the Horde. In BfA, the tribe got itself back together… to murder the night elves yet again.
The book portrays the tribe as its peace-loving iteration from Classic and uses some impressive mental gymnastics to achieve this goal. The deceased chieftain from Cata is mentioned: but neither the cause of his death nor his title… the Soulripper. It’s mentioned how the tribe does everything to honor agreements with both the Horde and the kaldorei: then how did they end up trying to genocide the elves two times in a row?
There’s nothing wrong with trying to reintroduce the original portrayal of the Shatterspear from 2004, and it’s indeed sad that they were turned into such monsters without any explanation. But changing them back without any explanation is not a solution either. Now their lore is even more confusing. The original tribe lore now exists only in web archives, while the new one is actually in-game. I guess the better solution would be to tie in both takes together: what if the tribe had different subgroups, some inner conflict, something that provoked them?
Instead, now, on paper, we have a peaceful tribe that loves their home, while in-game, we have a bunch of crazy lunatics… whose shamans tried to burn Darkshore.
And here’s where the unreliable narrator might kick in. In a frustrating way. What if Zekhan was fooled? Then we were forced to read a page of lies fed to him. But you can’t fix all the pages with this magic trick. It would also completely destroy the book’s value.
What puzzles me the most is that the book was written by Blizzard’s lead historian, their lore librarian. I remember Sean’s lore tweets from the MoP and WoD era, and he always gave an impression of a person very invested and knowledgeable in his job. So, when you open up his book that has the Well of Eternity called the Dark Portal instead, and there’s either a lore issue or a strange narrative every single chapter, you just can’t help but wonder what was going on there. Honestly, I don’t know…
Also, for what it’s worth, the art in this one is very pretty and it’s a nice step forward from the first book and, well, the Grimoire.
◉ FIN
So, what’s the verdict? I do love some good PoV-style lore, and maybe this tool does have its place in Warcraft as well. But to make it work the writers need to show more creativity and finesse (Warhammer’s Liber Chaotica/Necris are a good example here: partially because the authors’ identities are important for the narrative). The audience can’t change their habits that fast too if it’s even possible at all: so maybe the core narrative should still be written in stone. Last but not least: being open with the player base. Too many bridges have been burnt, so if anything it’s time to get the trust back.