Anduin Isn't Flawless

Anyone see Anduins HOTS model?? I Think lore wise thats what everyone thought he looked like instead of Varian Jr.

Nobody seemed to predict the War of Thorns. I don’t see that as a consequence of his naivety.

I feel like someone should have tho myself. I mean the night elves nation borders the major Horde power center. Where else is the horde gonna launch an invasion of that magnitude, honestly? If they gathered a army as big as they did, clearly signifying war, I would have never taken it seriously that they was just gonna trudge it across all of kalimdor to silithus lol. Just my opinion tho.

Maybe they realised they pretty much just turned him into a Paladin.

If they give him a new model going forward I wouldn’t object to seeing him use the HotS model. I think it fits what they claim he is far more than what he has right now. Either that or just make him a Paladin.

What should have happened really is pretty unimportant with Blizzard righting. It is full of ‘geniuses’ making stupid mistakes or decisions for the sake of plot and completely nonsensical actions. Remember “Draenor is free!”. Or Thrall putting Gallywix in charge of the Goblins right after Gallywix tried to murder him and the goblin player character just because Gallywix begged for mercy?

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BtS hammers this point in hard. Everyone from Genn to Sylvie to Anduin himself knows that Anduin is a naive operator who is vulnerable to more crafty adversaries.

But let me ask you a question—imagine you will be sucked into a fantasy world. All you know about the world is that it’s full of heroic tropes and that good almost always triumphs. Would you choose to be a naive hero or a Machiavellian schemer?

I imagine a solid part of you would want to do what’s right just because it’s right. But you should also do it because it confers a survival benefit in a world like WoW.

And if a flaw confers plot armor, then it doesn’t feel much like a flaw.

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But that is the thing, nearly every major character who is heroic in WoW tends to turn their flaws into a benefit. Or more precisely, their flaws are usually temporary things that will end up being overcome later.

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I love Jaina’s arc in Kul Tiras. Her guilt about her past forces her to confront isolation and pain at home. When she achieves acceptance, the past that had been her burden becomes her strength. It’s pretty sw00d, made me do a happy little shimmy.

But I think the key word is that such heroes make their flaws into strengths. They struggle. They grow.

Anduin didn’t need to struggle for his moral high ground. He was just born “wise beyond his years,” and so far I haven’t seen him really struggle with his naivety. He just continues to plough on into the likely plague-trapped throne rooms ahead. But there will always be a Jaina to teleport him out, since he’s right.

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Naivete in pursuit of peace isn’t a flaw of Anduin’s, if anything it’s presented as a flaw of others or the imperfect world as they/it go against his ideals.

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I mean I probably agree more than I disagree I just find fixation of peoples hatred on characters like Anduin funny and odd.

People keep saying this and I don’t get it. Yeah the world is obviously painted as being flawed and Anduins goals as being noble, never disputed that. But his naive methods of pursuing those goals and ignoring the reality of the world he is in can be interpreted as a flaw in his character.

I get it. Some of you want the game to hammer home an idea that peace in reality is not noble and all who pursue it should be severely punished, but that hasn’t been the message of Warcraft since Orcs, Humans and Night Elves teamed up to bring down the Legion.

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“Why do we fight” has also been a question in WOW. Mists had that whole thing about the constant back and forth reprisals. Cataclysm had the questionable warmongering from both sides as lead up. BFA is supposed to be about the morality of the Horde, which ideally would examine the different parts of the Horde and the ignored problem of the Forsaken and the more brutal Orcs, but it just stupidly makes it more “should the Horde as a government exist at all? Are Horde races not actually evil despite following evil leaders?”
I believe Anduin could be more interesting if the war was actually morally gray. Maybe the Alliance should actually have to question themselves at the same time the Horde does. Humans do bad stuff sometimes, and we have some morally questionable people in the Alliance, but why is only the Horde having to go through a civil war that is also a morale identity crisis? Idealists become more interesting when their ideals are challenged, and that does not mean arbitrarily forcing evil actions on his part but having him struggle to deal with the “purge the Horde” types as an inexperienced leader.

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We know that Anduin’s vision isn’t flawed, because it’s possible. It’s possible to do, and it’s a good thing to do.

The bad actors here are the Horde every time, and the writing adheres to this narrative.

Think of the Horde as a petulant child, throwing a tantrum in public.

Right now, Anduin is just another adult watching the scene looking disturbed by
the child’s actions. It’s not his fault this child is acting like a little savage beast, throwing things and screaming. He wishes the child would just behave. This isn’t a bad thing. He believes the child can behave if taught properly, which isn’t a bad thing either.

But if he’s not the parent of that child, nothing it does is his fault. So him hoping the child will one day behave is not a flaw. Unless everyone on earth also has that flaw, in which case it’s not a flaw worth noting since it’s not unique to him.

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Convinient that Anduin became a new character in the Nexus. One of his voice files is he says he failed the night elven people.

Neat. I’ve addressed this above at length in a response to Anyaceltica.

Edit: But apparently my spleen is not sufficiently vented.

This isn’t a flaw. This is moody-cool brooding. Someone else made a mistake and the Night Elves paid for it. BUT Anduin Wrynn, he’s the one who gets to brood about it for the fans. Cause the fans, they want to see his forehead furrow with concentration… they want to see the pain of loss behind those beautiful blue eyes… and yeah, maybe they want to hug him close and tell him, “You didn’t kill all those Night Elves, Sylvanas did. You didn’t fail them, your incompetent spymaster was just fooled by those dirty, deceitful horde.”

Then he cries, and golden light shines everywhere, and ahem people stand up straight and get ready… for battle.

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I didn’t say his vision is what was flawed but his methods and naive assumptions about other actors, such as Sylvanas.