Bad writing vs. Controversial writing

Wyrmrest Accord
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So there are tons of critics of BfA’s story. Some of the plot is just poorly executed… but other stuff, in my opinion, isn’t bad, it is just controversial. Any time one faction beats the other in some area it is controversial, but not necessarily bad.

What do you guys thing? What is good writing, but highly controversial? What is bad writing, but nobody really cares? And we’ve had plenty of bad AND controversial story points lately, which are the worst?

The classic example of writing which was pretty good but extremely controversial would be the entire MoP expansion. Not only did it involve a faction-conflict focused plot, but the entire Pandaria setting caused a huge uproar. But the lore itself generally seemed to have a lot of thought put into it, even if many people disliked it.

As for BfA, I’d categorize some plot points/characters like this:

Bad and Controversial

  • War of the Thorns. From intentionally misleading story comments from the devs and a poorly reasoned justification for war from Sylvanas, this started the expansion off on the wrong foot.

  • Kaldorei Dark Rangers. As if the whole “free will” aspect of undeath hadn’t been muddied enough, killing elves furious at the horde and raising them as loyal horde subjects is pretty silly. I wouldn’t mind this so much if there were in-story characters questioning whether or not they were really free after being raised, but… nobody really talks about it except out-of-game commentators.

  • Inexplicably loyal horde subjects: Rexxar, Voss, Garona, etc. These are all characters with loose connections to the Horde who, for some reason, are the ones who lead the charge against the Alliance. Why? Just… cuz. I guess it would’ve been boring if all the horde champions were forsaken loyalists? Extra points for Voss, who never even explains why she is ALIVE after the events of scholomance, much less her weird loyalty to the Horde.

  • Night Warrior. what was the point of this, tyrande didn’t do anything except get a new model

Controversial but good writing

  • Saurfang. Yeah I know tons of people are sick of him but at least he is reacting in a logical fashion to what Sylvanas is doing, and he embodies how most horde players (other than diehard undead-playing Sylvanas loyalists) feel about the story.

  • Nathanos. A much-hated character who is pretty much portrayed in a consistent, reasonable fashion. He is a sneering Sylvanas loyalist, mostly due to personal reasons, haughty to the horde player, cynical in how he goes about fighting the war… basically just the sort of character who makes sense leading the Horde war effort.

  • Void Elves. A bizarre race choice that outraged high elf fans, but who turned out to be kinda cool and have engaged RPers in a way that no allied race other than maybe Mag’har have. What’s a high elf other than a snooty human, after all

  • Mag’har scenario… maybe. Kinda interesting for Light-followers to be portrayed as domineering and proselytizing when they’re not on the defensive. The whole thing is lacking detail and I’d love to get an alliance side to the story, but I think the idea has potential.

Bad but uncontroversial

  • Magni. His side quest is dumb and nobody cares about how azeroth is cryin’ oot to him. Maybe it will be expanded on well in the future? who knows

And uncontroversial and good, which I may as well throw in for positivity’s sake:

  • zandalar is awesome
  • kul tiras is cool
  • talking fox caravaneers are cute
  • blood trolls are cool and sinister
  • witch hunting is cool
  • ok basically all the plotlines unrelated to the faction war are cool actually

What comes to mind for you when you think of something that was highly controversial but still enjoyable for you? What deserved the controversy?

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Probably the timey-wimey stuff that Wrath and Cata had some of, but WoD (which I didn’t play as current content) just went overboard on. With Wrath and Cata it was, at least, as simple as blaming the bronze and twilight dragonflights and going to specific points to accomplish particular things. With WoD, it was going to a different time period and an AU (alternate universe) and making the entire expansion centered in the timey-wimey weirdness.

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Bear with me, I’m about to go into a serious thing here.

For a conflict to work, there needs to be emotional investment: a means of drawing the reader in through an event or a character so that they’re compelled to see how the conflict turns out.

This is why people kept reading Game of Thrones after the Red Wedding–they were horrified, but too invested in the story to back out.

To oversimplify: when the investment outweighs the repulsion, the conflict succeeds, since it evokes a powerful emotion but does not turn the reader off.

Where BfA’s conflicts have failed is in that emotional investment angle and it’s failed largely by rejecting the traditional appeal of the factions.

Wrath of the Lich King was considered the best expansion by many because it gave us so much to be invested in. We were already invested in the story of Arthas to begin with, but it also gave the Horde and the Alliance powerful emotional appeals.

The Alliance was marching, dauntless and brave, into overwhelming odds to remove the stain on their personal honor that was Arthas. The Horde was fighting, tooth and nail, for revenge, for glory and for redemption. Neither side looked terrible and both sides had good reason to do what they were doing.

In Battle for Azeroth, the Horde are marching to war against the Alliance…for unclear reasons and are proceeding to massacre civilians, steal corpses and raise them into undead slaves. And the Alliance are mostly sitting patiently and waiting for their turn to fight.

It’s hard to get invested in either of these things. Whatever mental gymnastics the tankies might employ, it’s not emotionally compelling to be a civilian-killing, grave-robbing, genocide-enabling lackey of a tyrant. And it has never, ever been emotionally compelling to be the person taking the higher road by choosing not to act.

BfA isn’t controversial because there’s no investment to outweigh the repulsion. Most of the characters are unlikable and the ones that aren’t are too few to justify the headache of the rest of the story. The conflict is convoluted and bizarre and the motivations of 90% of the cast don’t make sense.

We have emotions about the story. We just have nowhere to direct them.

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I think the biggest betrayal of the story (for me and maybe a few other Hordies) isn’t what’s happening. Rastakhan, Bwonsamdi, anything NOT related to the old cast is pretty okay.

The biggest betrayal is the following words: “Don’t worry, Horde, you’re not the bad guys. [The Burning of Teldrassil] is going to be a surprise.” - Ion Hazzikostas 2k18

I am still waiting for that surprise.

As for controversy, I was fine with the Dominance Offensive and Isle of Thunder story-lines. Pandaria had some great stories to tell, and I felt sympathy for the elves being butchered by Jaina.

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Jaina’s entire story. Jaina gets tons of jokes made about her from the starkly misogynistic (Jaina Proud-sex-worker that she got called from Vanilla to Wrath) to the vaguely unempathetic (Jaina is a dreadlord because she hates the people who nuked her city?), but everything in her story follows well from what happened before it and it unintentionally deals with a question that isn’t posed a lot in fantasy: what happens when the people you’ve spent your life trying to make peace with betray you? And betray you, and betray you, and betray you?

What happens when you advocate for peace, for nonviolence, and end up being wrong about it?

Her story is also emblematic of the best sort of interfactional conflict stories. There’s a subtle but persistent undertone, especially since Legion, that the Alliance just hates the Horde because they’re racist colonialists who can’t let go of the past.

But that’s not the reason Jaina hates the Horde. Jaina hates the Horde because they destroyed her life. She doesn’t hate the Horde because they’re greenskins; she hates them because just about every person in the Alliance at this point has suffered a huge tragedy at Horde hands.

That’s the natural consequence of a warrior culture, and Jaina’s story arc is the only one that really owns that.

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And one point I hear a lot of people making… even if you CAN get players invested, it still might be a bad idea, if it is a faction war expansion. Hyping up faction differences makes players act like jerks to each other: even a perfectly executed faction-war narrative might be divisive and unpleasant for the fans.

Maybe it is best to end the faction war or keep it on a backburner: if BfA permanently resolves the conflict I’ll be really happy. And it might…

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I really felt like the dialogue for the Sira Moonwarden in the new Darkshore material was a tad too forced. They could have sold the transition to undeath a great deal better had they had her trying to convince Maiev in the various dialogue bits that there is no Elune, or that Elune betrayed them, or even just warning her former allies to stand aside and not get involved…

… instead they had her just being all out angst and hostilities, worse than some Saturday morning cartoon villains. Similarly for Sylvanas, an added dialogue line here or there about bigger fish to fry than just the boy king, or her opinion on the Horde and its future, would likely have done wonders.

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u put this in front of me after 6 months of me screaming at blizzard about how terrible it is so once and for all im gonna put all the numbered reasons on how the Mag’har Scenario is a dumpster fire in a flaming landfill

  1. could have easily gotten Mag’har from Outland so we didn’t need to go back to the wonky Dads of Draenor world

  2. Yrel sees Grom, the guy who tried to wipe out her entire people and their civilization on Draenor on a whim as a friend

  3. Grom is Warchief of the Orcs AGAIN despite having threatened the Shadowmoon and trying to kill the Frostwolves and the Laughing Skull

  4. The Mag’har scream about freedom yet have enslaved the Ogres as they did in the original timeline, yet we’re supposed to see the Mag’har as sympathetic

  5. no one takes a moment to ask why the sky is turning green when generally that’s associated with some fel stuff, or the Orcs never consider strip mining and destroying most of the nature they came across over their campaign as the Iron Horde may have actually hurt the planet, they just blame the Draenei and the Draenei blame them

  6. Grom is seen as a hero despite the fact that he tried to kill a bunch of other peoples, tried to wipe out other Orc clans, then switched sides only because an old man with a cane and evil wizard powers outsmarted him

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The time jump in general, after having already jumped BACK in time as well as into a different time stream all together, seemed a mite odd as well. They could have done pretty much the exact same story arc and scenario without the time jump, just by virtue of saying the Naaru considered it ‘mop up’ operation following the events of Legion, getting rid of any potential Burning Legion remnants.

For that matter, up until that scenario, I hadn’t realized access to Draenor had been cut off so absolutely. What with mages opening portals between the worlds/time streams on various occasions, it certainly hadn’t seemed so isolated, which again made the time jump seem rather arbitrary.

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Ok fine I’ll downgrade it to controversial and janky but I like it anyway because evil Yrel dunks on orcs

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we could have had Yrel dunking on Orcs if they actually decided to do stuff with her instead of making her a villain

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I liked the Mag’har scenario if for no other reason than it showing blind zealotry to any power (including the Light) is bad. They touched on it with the Xera/Illidan Lightbound snuggle-struggle, but this scenario really emphasized it. They could have inserted any other characters to the same end though, Grom/Yrel weren’t necessary.

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  1. Your not wrong here, Wised blizzard just stop messing with time in major ways since there not good at it.
  2. Again, not wrong but time heal all wounds?
  3. That’s mostly because orcs have a warrior culture and the one who leads are the one that are the strongest among them…that and Blizz just wanted an excuse too have the art team make a old man grom. Im not complaining…much.
  4. Kind of need some sources for that since from what I can tell the ogres didn’t look for feel like they were enslaved. I may have been distracted but Fem trall tho.
  5. To be fair, Dreanor is a planet where the planet life was hurting the planet too such a point that a titan had to create a being too destroy it. And the location of the maghar stuff was in gorgrond with was pretty much how you seen it anyways.
  6. Again see No argument.
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I can agree with that in theory, but I thought it was very strange to go from “you see? Things aren’t black and white” to “anyway, let’s get back to our current story of an undead genocidal tyrant who brooks no dissent and seeks to turn the entire living population into undead slaves vs. the literal golden child who is so good and pure he won’t even attack his enemies when they’re sad about their king.”

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Its almost seems like making her was a colossal mistake…

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It got some bad reviews at the time, but I kind of liked the little ways that Illidan left an impression on Velen during the Argus storyline. It’d have been even better if Velen had taught Illidan some things in turn, but he’s in Space Jail so who cares.

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…no?

Yrel remains an excellent and much-needed female character in a story that had, up to that point, been sorely lacking. Especially amongst the Shirtless Bros of Draenor cast.

Completely disregarding their own lore was a colossal mistake.

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Orcs according to Blizz when they actually care to mention it, have a strong focus on honor and would toss out their leaders if they weren’t considered honorable

if they consider a genocidal maniac honorable then they’re literally all just hypocrites

it’s mentioned in passing when you do the quest to put down an Ogre rebellion in the mines

they had been pushed back there after the Draenei took the rest of their bases, they’d been fighting for a while

30 years isn’t enough

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The Mag’har scenario is so far divorced from what people liked about Yrel and the draenei and from peoples’ perception of them vs. the Iron Horde that I literally cannot help but think that scenario was written out of spite.

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I’ll go to bat for that storyline and say that Velen, who was and still remains the most boring and uninteresting character in WoW, had way more to learn than Illidan.

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