A lot of the information from that questline just makes me leery of the story going forward. Especially with how visible the hand of the author is with Dagran II and Brinthe making such huge logical leaps when discussing what we learn.
Like they keep discussing that the Titans might have been deceiving us the whole time and how their plans for Azeroth may be more sinister than we believed but nothing we’re told leads directly to that conclusion unless you’re going in already assuming the worst.
As many people have already pointed out: When a program stops working as intended you don’t celebrate its newfound free will, you start looking for a fix. Also the Earthen being turned into Thraegar could just as easily be Azeroth’s immune system kicking in rather than a “cry for help”.
And then there was the cherry on top with Speaker Brinthe basically saying:
”Oh no! The Titans’ edicts are, in fact, edicts! Damn the Titans! This is such a betrayal!”
I mean, I get being mad about the Awakening Machine memory wipe thing. Although I’m disappointed it ended up being framed that way since I thought it was a cool concept for a robot reincarnation/reproductive cycle.
But if they hadn’t realized they were on maintenance mode already, then they’re just stupid. Like how could you not already know that? All the facilities were built, the Titans’ plan was in motion, there wasn’t anything left to do anyways besides run regular maintenance checks.
I guess I was just really hoping we were going to distance ourselves from Dragonflight’s attempts to flanderize the Titans from well-intentioned god-beings who couldn’t envision a scenario where things didn’t go according to their plan and still turned out okay, into deceitful control freaks who hate free will.
Especially since they had a perfect chance to steer things back to a nuanced perspective with the Oathsworn and Unbound being a discussion about collectivism vs. individualism and the merits of both philosophies. But it seems like the writers just want to say: “The Oathsworn were wrong and titans bad.”
7 Likes
The whole titan discs chain was unreliable narrator… and doesn’t match what other parts of the game say. For example, the radiant echoes event describes Beledar by talking about void cultists in a memory of Azeroth and says “before the Light arrived” in the description text… which means Archaedas is wrong about what Beledar is… and many threads in this forum have addressed the other problems with unreliable narration.
5 Likes
How can a literal titanic servant be unreliable narrator that makes no sense
Well, I mean, when the servitor is very open about not having all the details, it kinda makes him an unreliable narrator. His own perspectives hold a bias, and one that is ever-present and openly admitted.
I don’t think Archaedus is a malicious unreliable narrator, but he’s certainly coming at things from a titan perspective when discussing Azeroth’s past.
4 Likes
I don’t think you know what people mean by unreliable narrator. While there are some times when an unreliable narrator is unreliable because they actively want to deceive (say… Verbal Kint in the Usual Suspects movie) …that is not required to be unreliable. There are also well-meaning but incorrect narrators like Forrest Gump telling someone at a bus stop that he thinks Jenny frequently came over to his house because her grandma’s dog was mean. Forrest doesn’t have to be willfully wanting to deceive…he just has a false belief about the reasoning for Jenny visiting.
Much of historical analysis involves finding sources (things written down by people who lived at the time) and needing to realize that they may be mistaken, or they may have an emotional bias for believing something they write down which isn’t actually true. But you don’t throw the sources out… you try to find other sources that would have other biases and other perspectives and try to compare and contrast. If Julius Caesar writes in a journal and says he had 10,000 soldiers at a battle and lost 100 cavalry…and a Germanic chieftain scribbles on a wall that his enemy Julius Caesar had 2,000 soldiers and lost 100 cavalry at a battle on the same day…then we can say that both sources are unreliable narrator. But since the accounts agree on the 100 cavalry lost…there is no guarantee, however there is a higher chance of that being a correct account of cavalry losses.
2 Likes
Either he is wrong, or the prophetic vision the emperor had wasen’t literal, depends on which route blizzard wants to take
Archaedas being wrong isn’t even dependent upon a mysterious emperor somewhere (multiple independent and corroborating characters from different points of view like Orweyna and Faerin Lothar and the radiant echoes flavor text that describes void cultists near Beledar and the phrase “before the Light arrived” etc) would be just fine to identify Archaedas as being mistaken. However…even if this mysterious emperor arrives eventually; prophecies and visions from the Light aren’t reliable or precise every time, either. There is room for much more than “he is wrong or” …
1 Like
Or third option, the crystal archaedas showed isn’t meant to be beledar and the beledar model was only used because it was a giant crystal model
Or we can take the Kobold King Arfur as a hint that Beledar is Avaloren(explaining why Arfur and Campalot is in Ringing Deeps rather than in the Arathi Empire) and that the Titan Keepers heard the word Titania emanating from it.
After all the Avalon we know of is sometimes said to be ruled by Titania and Oberon. Furthermore Oberon is mentioned by the Audience at Star Lake Amphitheater as someone mentioned in the Theater’s Plays.
If that is indeed the case then the Titan Keepers were tricked by Titania and her Summer Court. Imagine Odyn and Archaedas’s Reactions when they learn this!
2 Likes
A past he’s had a hand in. So he’s not unreliable narrator in the strictest sense. Most of everything he’s unsure about is what Azeroth the World Soul has been doing. Like if she also twisted the keepers to her side without no one knowing
1 Like
That, and the titan’s motives. He’s basing his findings on flawed information, which is what makes his statements unreliable.
3 Likes
What I find lame about it is it only talks about the Titans from the past even though they’ve grown to spare their powers to mortals and the earthen king (no relation to Khaz Earthen). 

1 Like
It is important to repeat something that was already mentioned in the Unreliable Narrator disc quests topic from months ago on this forum. Because the Archaedas statements are unreliable narration…you have to be careful about not just what he said, but who told it to him, or how does he think he should know this…if he is not the original source of his beliefs. And as such, the very first step of the Discs questline has Archaedas revealing that he is not the original source for information, rather that he thinks Khaz’goroth revealed the information to him. So we have to ask, how does Khaz’goroth know something he believes if these are an accurate account of something he said to Archaedas? Does Khaz’goroth know everything and have all the information he would need to say correctly what crystals deep beneath the surface happen to be? Well, according to the account…Archaedas reveals that Khaz’goroth was unable to simply sense or detect everything he needed to know from orbit; which is why he asked the Titankeepers and the Earthen to dig a tunnel down and scan the World Soul directly to see if it was what the Titans were looking for. That means Khaz’goroth was missing information. If Beledar is an object associated with the Light and exhibiting Light magic…then because the Earthen and Titankeepers were an emergency backup plan to resist and delay void magic corruption which the standard Titan created flesh mortals would have been vulnerable to, it is entirely reasonable and logical and even probable that those same Earthen and Titankeepers would probably be resistant to Light magic and either hear no Light voices, or have it be a rare and delayed success rate at hearing Light magic voices just as much as void ones. If most of the Titankeepers and Earthen are either not hearing Light voices from Beledar or it is rare and so only a few end up hearing Light voices…then they would have reported back to Khaz’goroth that it just seems like a magical crystal that gets in the way of their digging and construction. And Khaz’goroth may believe that at the time. Then when the core chamber is built around the World Soul, some few individual Earthen hear voices and start attacking the core chamber. Well… if Beledar is of the Light and was normally in contact with the World Soul, then that core chamber would be bothersome, a nuissance, maybe even a problem in the plans of the Light. The accounts of the Thraegar do “not” say anything about opposing the Titans or hating order. It was specifically thraegar attacking the core chamber.
Considering that the world soul Magni was hearing during Legion “wanted” him to go save the Titans…I am completely convinced that the World Soul does not hate Titans, nor does it hate order.
I happen to think that the Light was responsible for the Thraegar, and I also think that the Light was eventually and slowly able to influence both Archaedas and Tyr (maybe even Ironaya too) prior to all 3 of their defeats.
Blizzard is slowly revealing that none of the cosmic forces are good on their own and will be shown having ulterior motives that makes them look shady. Titans might not be evil as you see it but they are surley control freaks.
When are visions ever literal.
There’s been a few cases where visions were quite literal. For example, Velen had a vision of himself holding his dying son in his arms. Which came to pass during legion.
Visions that are what I call Pre-destined Visions are pretty rare. Most visions and their outcomes can be altered by the actions people take for the most part