Apparently, this has come up again during recent discussions about Chronicles 4.
What is Flavor Lore?
It’s Lore that is written “in-universe” and doesn’t necessarily agree with what actually happened, but exists in the Warcraft universe to add realism and make the worlds seem more alive. Some of these ideas turn out to be true or contain only kernels of truth, other times they may turn out to be wrong.
In 2019, Steve Danuser (Lead Narrative Designer during SL/DF), who, incidentally, didn’t write Chronicles 1 and 2 and appears to have made only a minor contribution to 3, stated in an interview that the Chronicles series only depicts events from the Titans’ perspective.
"This is just the first step on exploring the cosmology. Chronicle is written from a specific point of view (titans) but it is canon - more stuff did happen behind the scenes though, and you’ll find some explained in Shadowlands." [S]
It’s important to note that he did not claim that Chronicles was written by the Titans and their servants here. Matt Burns (co-author) stated in one of his many tweets that Chronicles doesn’t exist in game and was not written by an in-game character.
Nonetheless, the result remains the same: Chronicles is subjective. The narrator, even if he doesn’t exist “in-universe”, is unrelieable. Everything can be completely different or incorrect because it only represents a point of view - which makes it basically flavor lore.
And this, folks, is the “scam”, because Chronicles wasn’t advertised like this. It was supposed to be a guidebook, hard canon, the ‘book of caine’, the ‘Warcraft Bible’, ‘a series that attempts to codify, tighten up and clarify the history of Warcraft.’ (Metzen, co-author)
It was meant to be a reliable source. And that’s what I bought. I didn’t pay full price for three books of unreliable flavor lore, 90% of which was already known from classic in-game books or WarcraftWiki recaps, alright?
But wait, sometimes you have to do things like this to expand the universe?!
No. An excellent writer is capable of developing creative greatness within the framework he sets for himself. Everything else is inconsistent and barely accessible to the esteemed critical reader, thereby decreasing the entertainment value.
Maybe the players interpreted something incorrectly. Perhaps Blizzard did not mean it in this context and was simply misquoted. But, if not, I’d kindly like to request that the Chronicles series be treated as “hard canon” again now that Metzen is back.
Sources: https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/World_of_Warcraft:_Chronicle
