It’s 4am and I have the flu. So this is gonna be long.
It’s no big secret that companies like money, and Blizzard is very much a company. So one has to wonder, what came out in the same year as BfA that raked in a lot of money?
Well, I’m sure there’s a lot of correct answers to that question, but the answer we’re looking for here is: Infinity War, released in April of 2018.
Now let’s take a quick look at a few things about Infinity War and how they translate to what Blizzard tried to do with BfA. We’ll get to Shadowlands and Endgame after this, and then after that we’ll have a bit of an analysis.
Infinity War had a lot of hype around it because of (Disclaimer: from what I’ve seen/heard from others and my own personal opinion) two bit things. First of all, Thanos. Good old Thanos the Titan. The bad guy no one seems to be able to put down, not even the combined efforts of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Iron Man, Spiderman, and Dr. Strange on Titan. Sound familiar?
The second thing is that, like I just detailed at the end of that last paragraph, Infinity War was the coming together of all the different characters and teams that had been introduced over the years of Marvel movies that had come out.
So, I propose that Blizzard tried to copy Infinity War with BfA after it came out, and succeeded in very poorly imitating it at the cost of the overall quality of WoW as a whole (just look at how much stuff seems to be retconned these days).
Sylvanas is supposed to be our Thanos, the big bad who’s just too big and too bad for anyone to put down. I mean seriously, the Mak’gora in 8.2.5 is just an attempt at recreating Tony’s fight with Thanos, right down to the only real injury being sustained by Sylvanas from Saurfang being the same sort of small scratch that Tony managed to inflict upon Thanos. The problem here is that, and I’m sure this will be somewhat controversial, Sylvanas was never really meant to be the type of villain Thanos was, and Blizzard has twisted the character around so much to be that type of villain that she’s basically lost most of what made her the character she was in the 14 years prior.
As for the characters, I’d point to Saurfang’s rebellion as being what Blizzard tried to make their “Avengers Assemble” moment, along with the moments where characters across the factions interact in points of the xpac prior to 8.2.5. The problem here is that Blizzard knows good and well that their playerbase is not the Marvel fanbase. It’s no secret that a lot of players are very polarized on their opinions of different factions and characters, and BfA has suffered terribly by Blizzard both trying to copy Infinity War’s spirit of everyone coming together and trying to keep up some semblance of a faction war expansion, resulting mostly in a confused mess. That’s not even to mention the detriment splitting the playerbase even further with stuff like the Traitor/Loyalist stuff and the pro-war/pro-peace sides of the Alliance that seem to be taking place, but I usually see that more from the playerbase than in the game itself, save for Tyrande.
Now, here’s a small kink in this idea. Infinity War came out only about 3ish months before BfA. Not a lot of time to make an expansion to try and copy it, right? Well, I’d point to the overall inconsistency of BfA’s plot between patches, and even the inconsistencies we saw at the beginning in relation to Warcraft in the past, such as Lillian Voss now apparently being Forsaken instead of a strong, independent undead woman who don’t need no faction. Imo, this is mostly due to Blizzard already having a story for BfA, but mostly dropping it in favor of trying to get some Infinity War parallels into a MoP 2.0 xpac.
So that covers BfA and Infinity War, now let’s go to Shadowlands and Endgame. This part is tricky, because Shadowlands isn’t even out yet, but I think we can pinpoint some evidence to support the point I’m trying to make.
The big one for me here is the fact that we are (once again) dealing with past characters. Characters who are dead, who represent older elements of the franchise, characters with ties to the main characters in this weird story Blizzard is telling, you get the idea. Endgame had a lot of this. Tony seeing his father Howard in the past was a big moment, and Thor getting closure on his mother was as well. I feel confident in saying that Blizzard is going to try and recreate some of these moments for no other reason than money.
I mean, Thrall going in to Shadowlands at this point might as well just be Thor. He’s been downtrodden for quite a while now, used to wield an all powerful hammer and shoot lightning as a Shaman and all that until he went through a personal devastation that brought him low (His failure in Garrosh vs. Thor losing his father) and now he uses an axe, like Thor. I’m more than sure that there is definitely a coincidental nature to these similarities, but if you think that Blizz won’t have Thrall meeting up with his dead mother like Thor did, well, let’s just say I disagree.
And then there’s the basic premise of the story. Now, Sylvanas didn’t really snap her fingers and wipe out half of all life like Thanos did, but just follow me for a bit here.
Sylvanas (Thanos) has torn open the barrier between life and death (wiped out half of all life in the universe) now the heroes of Azeroth (the remaining Avengers/Guardians) have to travel to the Shadowlands (travel back to the past) on an incredibly dangerous mission to set things right, while recieving assistance from important characters from the past like Kael’thas and Draka (The Ancient One and Frigga).
We’ll know more when Shadowlands is actually out, but that’s my take for now.
Time for my closing thoughts, Blizzard got hungry for that sweet, sweet Marvel money, and their attempts to make the universe and characters of WoW more like Marvel’s own has damaged the franchise irreparably (IMO) without retconning all of BfA and Shadowlands. Personally, I see such a retcon being unfeasible and a bit unreasonable, but it’s nice to dream isn’t it? And honestly, a new RPG style game set in Vanilla’s time where we can reexamine characters and create entirely new scenarios in what is in my opinion the potentially richest era of WoW’s history would be my pick before a retcon of whole expansions, but this seems like little more than a pipe dream.
Did this make any sense? Is anyone following me here? Or did I just take too much Flu medication and go on a twisting, nonsensical bout of rambling?
