I’ve mentioned before how I think the failing of modern WoW storytelling was it’s focus on hero characters over the world and our adventures throughout it.
I still believe this to be true. Classic was especially interesting to revist because of how little the big players were involved.
Like Sylvanas only has a quest for you at about level 50, and Varimathras at about level 35 unless you’re a Rogue. You’ve no need to go to the Royal Quarter otherwise and easily could’ve never noticed it exists until you’re summoned there. It feels like a big deal when you finally have an audience with the Queen. You’ve survived countless adventures and proven yourself so thoroughly that not only does the Dark Lady know your name, but has specifically called it - because she’s got a special job and thinks you’re a bad enough dude to handle it.
Compare that to Cata. Where Sylvanas is so wildly impressed by your ability to follow basic instructions that she goes on a special pony ride with you and tells you the Forsaken’s backstory. In Silverpine. After Tirisfal explained all this at length and in greater detail.
It feels like if at 17 after doing an exceptional job stocking those shelves at my high-school bookstore, the President’s motorcade was waiting in the parking lot. I’m such an upstanding citizen that there’s a critical mission just for me, but first we gotta drive there as the President personally regails me about the history of the United States.
So obviously that is thunderously dumb but I guess I cant fault the idea behind that decision. They probably wanted to make it feel like our characters were having a tangible impact on the world, and fundamentally that’s not a bad idea. Just poorly executed.
Our characters obviously can’t be too important. So having us do mission critical stuff for the movers and shakers sort of makes sense.
The trouble is though none of the big name characters feel like characters to me. Because they change wildly not just from book to game to cutscene, but often just from quest to quest.
Now some of this is going to be unavoidable when you have a production this huge that’s this old. WoW could choke a sarlac with the number of writers it’s had over the years when you factor in everything from quest logs to flavor text.
There’s going to be mistakes and miscommunications and even just content that doesn’t add up anymore but isn’t going anywhere because you tell your boss you’re going to have to pause production and call back in voice actors and quest designers.
Sometimes even award winning plays break the 4th wall because an actor slipped or a prop broke. It happens. But I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about characters having jarring personality shifts that they then get over like it was just a mild cold.
Punished Jania is maybe the most egregious example to me. This is a character who had to bear the burden of being reviled by her own people for making the right choice. She believed in a better world where we could all live together so earnestly that it came before even her own family.
The idea she’d engage in an ethnic cleansing years later is absolutely horrific. That is powerful stuff. This character who once embodied hope has had all the kindness burned out of her, to the point where she’s marching down Dalaran’s streets running the Sin’Dorei out of town. Their protests fall on deaf ears - there are no innocents anymore. They are all guilty by association, and will be killed or imprisoned if they do not go quietly.
So thorough is her turn that Varian, a man nearly as hot headed as the Orcish war criminal he stands before, is telling her to cool off.
That’s immensely depressing and has some real world parallels. Fred Phelps, the man behind the Westboro Baptist Church, was a passionate advocate for the Civil Rights movement as a younger man. He was an attorney who fought Jim Crow laws in Kansas with the same passion he’d later use to harass the family’s of dead soldiers at their burials. Not because he hated the war, but because men dying for a nation that allowed same sex marriage were inherently damned in his mind. The world’s a confusing place. Sometimes bad people do good things, and sometimes good people turn miserable and heartless.
I’d have called Blizzard very bold for deciding to tackle subject matter like that. I think the allegory of fantasy can be a clumsy tool for stuff like it. But a video game deciding to try should be commended, especially in a genre that often doesn’t get deeper than “Kill X number of Goblins because they’re disagreeable and stinky”.
But of course they didn’t. Jania abandons the Kirin Tor in Legion. You know during a “ALL HANDS ON DECK” sort of crisis where literally nothing but results matters because failure means the doom of all things? She’s THAT stuck in her warped world view. If she must work with the Horde to save Azeroth, then perhaps it’s not worth saving at all.
And an expansion later she’s risking her life to save Baine Bloodhoof and having the sort of intimate moment with Thrall that would lead to some pretty pointed questions if I was his wife.
How’d she overcome all this? Well she had some ghost ship soul searching, like ya do, and then later Baine turned up with her undead brother.
Now the 2nd part could’ve been really interesting. Maybe like Tyrande or worse even her own people try to straight up ice her brother because he’s one of them now. And suddenly she realizes how she sounds. She realizes how much like her father she’s become. He had good reason to hate Orcs. Bigotry often has a tragic origin story but that never justifies it.
And maybe to drive the point home you could have someone verbatim say to Derrick what she said to the Blood Elves. And then maybe deliberately let’s Magister Hathorel arrest her while rescuing Baine.
It’s clear he’s only here for Jania, only heer for vengeance for his friends she murdered, he doesn’t care about anything else.
She could trade her freedom for Baine’s against the protests of Shaw and Thrall. Yes there are bigger things happening, but this Blood Elf is right. She understands now how wrong she was. She has to answer for her crimes.
And then maybe like Rommoth is going to incinerate her but Thalyssra steps in. Talking about after the revolution there was much public demand to punish the Legion collaborators. But she denied them that, because there is a fine line between justice and vengeance, and once the cycle of bloodshed starts it cannot be easily stopped.
And gee wouldn’t that also resonate with the Horde’s situation at large as the Banshee Queen is about to cause a civil war during a world war?
But we don’t get anything like that. Everybody’s just fine with Jania now to the point where her and Thalyssra are talking about swapping spell knowledge like they’re dinner recipes during the 2nd Siege of Orgrimmar.
And that’s the fundamental problem. No character consistency. These people’s beliefs and personalities change on a dime. Their actions rarely have actual consequences. They treat war crimes like they were hurtful things you said to a friend while extremely drunk.
“Hey I could see you weren’t in your right mind, it’s alright” is a perfectly fine act of forgiveness over calling someone fat and stupid. The sorts of things that would land you 13 consecutive life sentences at an international tribunal - not so much.
And of course now we’re waiting to see the Sylvanas book and epilogue. She is far and away the greatest example of inconsistent characters in WoW. And I’m not interested in whatever resolution they try to pull from this tangled mess of stupidity because there cannot be a good one.
Sylvanas realizing the Jailor might not be on the up and up because he said one of Arthas’s catchphrases is the sort of thing that should be in a parody. That book could be an instant classic that becomes a landmark of the genre that is commonly believed to surpass even Tolkien’s significance.
**And it still wouldn’t be good story telling. **
Because it would only be a very good retroactive explanation to a “so bad it’s actually funny” plot point they poe faced spat at the audience.
So I guess my question is - what am I supposed to care about in this narrative?
If the main characters were just props that added to the world the story was about this sort of thing would be tolerable. Still bad but hey its not really the point of the story so w/e. But the game has insisted this is a story about these characters. While still treating them as props who’ll do and say whatever just to fit with the picture.
So, again, what am I supposed to care about?
