My point is that once you start pulling the “when the spaceship exists” thread, its pretty hard to stop. To the point that every single decision, every single step, every single breath, the alliance plans, takes, and draws, is now tainted by the “but they have a spaceship”
Like, dont pull your hair out thinking about the plot of a mediocre fantasy series
Its alright
Honestly it feels like the plot has been steadily wandering into deeper grass since the end of Wrath. As much as I loved Mists of Pandaria when I finally gave it a chance, it was kind of all over the place.
Yeah, exactly. I think we’re both agreed that when you introduce a spaceship to one side it begs a lot of questions. I think most of us would have recommended NOT giving one side of a medieval warfare battle a spaceship, but they did.
Thats why we’re suggesting very easy ways they could write themselves out of this corner they’ve written themselves into.
And its been pointed out a billion times that there was a veritable cornucopia of easy fixes for that problem.
Blizzard is lazy so they didnt bother. That is the issue, Blizzard’s laziness which metastasizes into the rest of the game frequently.
What an absolutely gigabrain take.
“Blizzard didn’t think when they wrote it, you shouldn’t think when you consume it”.
Like. Imagine being so close.
That’s literally the point, though.
For a plot to mean anything - even just schlocky, popcorn entertainment - there needs to be a reasonable assumption from the audience that the stuff that happens actually has meaning in the world; that there’s some sense of antecedent and consequence and that the events of the plot follow from one another.
Arbitrarily ignoring story elements with no in-world explanation destroys all of that. If the writers just ignore stuff, what’s even the point of having a story?
They’ve had high notes since Wrath, but the highs never reach quite as high and the lows keep getting lower.
I loved Wrath. I thought Mists was pretty good. I liked Legion a lot.
I thought Burning Crusade left a lot to be desired. I thought Cataclysm was awful. Warlords of Draenor was worse. Battle for Azeroth has been the apex of their awfulness.
Turaylon barges into the Throne Room of Stormwind
“Velen! Those damn Broken just stole the Vindicaar!”
“Ah, that explains why we haven’t seen any Broken NPCs for several expansions at this point.”
How would you want it destroyed then?
I’m down for a cosmic road trip expansion. Dude Where’s My Vindicaar.
It doesnt even need to be destroyed to remove the stakes from the narrative.
Something as simple as “the last vestiges ofnits power hold it in orbit and its not possible to repower it” would work just fine.
Superman: super strong handsome guy who is weak to kryptonite.
We accept dumb stuff about him. We accept his coworkers don’t recognize him when he puts glasses on. We accept that he is a magical alien dude who is also a patriotic american. We accept that he has x-ray vision and doesn’t give people around him cancer when he uses it (or does he)
But we can’t accept that he could ignore kryptonite. That’s like, a rule. If Kryptonite showed up and he just tried really hard to ignore it and it worked, his admittedly dumb pulpy universe is no longer even a logical, internally consistent dumb pulpy universe.
WoW breaks its own rules all the time. Sylvanas is limited to a certain number of Val’kyr except oops a writer said in an interview that she can make more. Super strong weapons like the Vindicaar exist until they don’t for no reason given. Magic and undeath follow certain rules until they don’t. It gets annoying and it shouldn’t be this hard to create an internally consistent universe if they cared.
It doesn’t need to be removed from the narrative period. No one “wants” the Vindicaar to be weak, but a million explanations allow it to both not be a gamechanging super weapon and also narratively engaged / interesting.
But they didn’t want to. So it didn’t. But Sylvanas was allowed to have as many new powers as she wants, because it does fit the narrative. We’re also complaining about that, but for some reason it’s not a point of contention in the counter argument.
Hmm.
Would like “were offworld training new lightforged” work
Since we’re talking about the Vindicaar, this feels like the time to mention Azeroth has access to WMDs. Why hasn’t Sylvanas used the Blight since Lordaeron? How about a Mana Bomb?
Why hasn’t the Alliance acknowledged the fact their little Gnomish Psychopaths have access to NUKES? Or that we’re getting the Adeptus Gnomechanicus?
What about Azerite? They havent even coherently used their current WMD
WoW operates on the same logic as Superfriends, where Batman can breathe in space and Superman forgets he has powers to fulfill a plot point.
Mana Bombs at least have an explanation: the Horde stole the focusing iris from the blue dragonflight and made a special bomb with it. They can’t mass produce them.
I mean, logically they couldn’t, but who knows, maybe the post shadowlands expansion will be “TENSIONS BETWEEN THE FACTIONS SURGE AS WARCHIEF CALIA MENETHIL DETONATES MANA BOMBS ON IRONFORGE STORMWIND THE EXODAR THE HUSK OF TELDRASSIL GOLDSHIRE THE RUINS OF GILNEAS AND ALSO LIGHTS HOPE CHAPEL”
What about Azerite? For some supposed super weapon, it hasn’t actually done anything. They even “upgraded” the Black Anvil with it and I’m just like “Isn’t…isn’t that Titan blood? Doesn’t Azeroth need that back, hence our necklaces?”
And then theres Jainas super magic blight clearing Ice Powers that she totally didnt make up on the spot.
Or Sylvanas’ bag of holding filled with convenient super powers to use on a whim.