Eh, Turaylon of all people seem like the dutiful type. Hell, him and Alleria did get married/have a baby while leading the Alliance during the invasion of Draenor.
Wasn’t that before they went through the portal to Draenor? Arator didn’t grow up on Draenor I didn’t think.
He certainly didn’t get his Molten Core armor there.
The Beyond the Dark Portal Novel only has the two of them ending up being a couple after the campaign started.
Please go ahead and tell me a bit about the Kingdom of Stormwind. Not the Wrynns mind you, the Kingdom of Stormwind and the humans inside the kingdom. Tell me about their culture, their knights, their ideals, their traditions. Go ahead. Seemingly the humans have it pretty good because of the “human potential” so please go ahead and elaborate.
The Kingdom of Stormwind is a set of mild variations on the by-now-standard fantasy ‘protagonist’ template, being a batch of vaguely-medieval-europe-ish buildings in a sunny forest with fields that’s peopled with folks with american accents who are ‘ambitious’ and ‘flexible’ and ‘driven’ and ‘adaptable’ and other protagonisty terms, who serve to be the standard by which the game’s original assumed audience (largely white american boys) will define themselves.
Thus, Stormwind not being particularly interesting, unusual, or unique is actually its entire purpose, and why it is consistently important within the game’s story. It’s there to be contrasted against everything else in the game and thereby define it as weird or exotic or bizarre or unusual - and in any case, foreign - by comparison to its own carefully-tepid ‘normalcy,’ which reassures the playerbase that even in an imaginary world designed specifically to be magical and different from reality that everything about their culture and themselves remains unquestionable and important and natural and the standard by which all things are measured.
tl;dr: Stormwind being important and Stormwind being boring as hell are not only both true, they go hand in hand: Stormwind is designed to reassure the assumed playerbase by presenting them with a batch of deeply familiar symbols to identify with while telling them that those are normal and powerful.
Took the words right out of my mind and said it better than I could
“Why is a monarchy acting like a monarchy? This is ridiculous!”. Pay attention and youll find that high fantasy is always politically unrealistic and normally just boils down to “I know these people do the same bad things but this one is good and this one is bad”
Dont you ever tire of spewing out the same stuff everyday?
Oftentimes, not as much as I would like.
Oh my
wow racist much,
I mean you essentially told us nothing, which is the problem with stormwind. Outside the wrynn’s they are just a basic medieval kingdom with absolutely no depth.
Orcs’s have a far more fleshed out background than humans do in this game and even that is pretty shoddy.
That’s the problem. Not only that, but Blizzard tries to force and assimilate all the other races INTO that.
indeed, I really wish blizzard would do more short stories to flesh out and expand the history of the different factions that make up wow, There is an audience for it.
instead blizzard seems to try squish everything into the same box(storm wind) and makes all the characters in said box act and think the same way as its leader.
So yeah they aren’t going to have the worgen be dark and savage, because Genn needs to be that father figure to Anduin now and they have to live along side other humans.
Night elves are going to be resentful of Humans, instead they are going to help them grow pumpkin fields and live in human houses.
Dwarves are basically already just short humans but they killed Anything interesting about they’re dynamic by Neutering Moria and make her female dwarf version of anduin.
Don’t get me started on Dranei who are just basically Humans that lives centuries, Are better with the light and arcane and basically took anything unique away from humans.
Instead we are stuck with books always consisting of the same 3 characters being Anduin, Jaina and Baine that are just inner monologues about why they are sad.
What we need instead is for each race to be unique and that to be celebrated. Sure there is some fricton because of those differences but we overcome that. To have each race bring something unique to the table that others don’t which make the Alliance strong.
Horde Council is gae.
High King is gae.
Anduin is gae.
Know who isn’t gae? Garrosh. He not gae.
You do understand that this is completely contradictory to one another? Who do you want to follow: The protagonist with flaws, an interesting character and backstory? Or the generic Superman-type of person? You also haven’t answered any of my questions, but skillfully dodged them with a generic template.
Also your statement does not work in the first place, because Stormwind is a monarchy and there are quests even still in the game, which talk about forced marriages between nobility. In Classic there was a quest where a 14-year-old-boy got murdered by the Defias in the stockades.
Regardless, Vanilla also requires flavor because otherwise it becomes bland. Let’s make an example: The knights of Stormwind. Prevalent and everytime the Alliance needs some form of “knight”-NPCs the role is usually filled with Stormwind humans. They are everywhere, and yet we know absolutely nothing about them. Do they have squires? Are they still organized into the Brotherhood of the Horse?
I do agree with the overall notion that Stormwind should remain the average human-fantasy-faction with knights, soldiers and generally being simply flexible in their approach. You need such a faction in a way.
However, let me give you an example how it is done right: The Empire of Warhammer Fantasy. It’s as generic as it can get: You have your emperor, nobility which rules the lands inspired by renaissance-Europe in this case, your regular infantry, shining knights in full plate armor, your holy warriors, your wizards and sorcerer. They work together with the dwarves, halflings, and sometimes even elves. Nothing within the Empire is particularly special or outstanding. (The only difference is the slight change in time period being more akin to 16th century instead of the high middle ages, but Stormwind is also closer to that anyway.)
But, the big difference between the Empire and Stormwind is the fact that within the Empire every single group or faction has some information, and we have an idea about them and how they operate and work.
Meanwhile Stormwind: The Church of the Holy Light doesn’t have an archbishop since Cataclysm, the knights are simply there, the Silver Hand is…part of the Alliance again? Neutral? What exactly is their role in the modern day Stormwind? None of this is explained. House of Nobles? What exactly is their role anyway, because seemingly parts of the kingdom are democratic Redridge for example or Darkshire which is run by a major. What about the mages of Stormwind? I could go on but you get my point.
So, please again: Go ahead. Tell me about the human potential.
I’ve said this before. The problem with Stormwind, is the same problem with the rest of the Alliance.
Blizzard does not care. They don’t care about Stormwind. They don’tcare about the dwarves, worgen, draenei. They do care about night elves, but as shown by how much they care about the Horde, that means kicks to the teeth to show how metal they are when they don’t just roll over and die.
But back to Stormwind, yeah. They were meant to be the generic grounded fantasy type. They set up a bunch of stuff in that archetype to at least keep them interesting. Then they just. Stopped. Caring. They use Anduin like they do, purely because Golden has enough sway to actually use him, because had they not we’d likely never see him do more than just sit in Stormwind doing nothing (hilariously like he did thru all of Legion and BfA, except for the times in BfA where he had to be Krillin to Saurfang).
They even created the High King, to try and give the Alliance storyline an anchor like the Horde had which lead them to flesh out all of their factions…and they couldn’t even be bothered to finish the thought.
When people mention Human Potential it’s not about Stormwind itself, it’s about how the Humans take center stage in…every…single…expansion. No other race is allowed to be the main focus for once.
And when they are, like Daiza said, it’s just so the horde can kick their teeth in and than the horde proceeds to look like idiots the rest of the expansion.
I agree with your point except this part. They do care about Stormwind because they have gone out of their way to funnel us players into Stormwind. The new Alliance intro cinematic, after you finish Exile’s Reach, focuses on Stormwind and called it the Alliance hub capital basically.
So they clearly care about Stormwind and want it front and center as the aesthetic and home of the Alliance. Having said that, do I think they care about Stormwind in depth? No. We don’t get any interesting stories about the House of Nobles, or what is going on with how the people feel having all these refugees in Stormwind, or anything like that.
So yes, Blizzard does care about Stormwind and like it the most, they want it to be the “face of the Alliance” so to speak, but it is only surface deep. They don’t care about any lore around Stormwind outside of Anduin and that is because of their hard on for the Wrynn family.
This. Human Potential is stuff like in the Wolfheart novel where Tyrande had a vision from Elune about how Varian was going to be the savior of the Alliance and then he swoops in and saves the Night Elves in their own FREAKING forests because they miraculously can’t beat the Orcs in Ashenvale… Really?
Or how they elected Varian as leader of the Alliance because… or how that defaulted to Anduin even though the title of High King isn’t hereditary. Or how about the entire Azshara patch instead of having Tyrande or Shandris be the Alliance hero front and center, you know because they have history with Azshara, we get Jaina?
Blizzard’s excuse was “we don’t want people to get fatigue with Tyrande”… you mean how we had to deal with Jaina every single patch in the story? It was just straight up Human Potential and they wanted Jaina to be the star.
They care about Stormwind only insomuch that it’s the “capital of the Alliance” because like orcs are the backbone of the Horde, humans are the backbone of the Alliance. So if they are going to funnel everyone to Orgrimmar, they have to funnel them to Stormwind too.
Don’t change the fact it always feels like they have try, teeth gnashing, to write something for them to do and have it not look like an after thought.