Danuser+Ion Sriracha Take on retcons and lore

and the Winter Queen also knows he’s an evil Wild God and yet had him in a seed all the same :stuck_out_tongue:

Reminder Taliesin does have a personal friendship with the Gregory family and Golden

2 Likes

I follow a lot of Blizzard devs on Twitter. I know for a fact they follow Tali and his channel. I know for a fact they are interested in high-profile reactions to their cinematics.

It just feels like something somewhere in the formula has gone astray. Watching Tali’s reaction to the Elune cinematic felt very dead to me, he knew what he was saying was nonsense, he knew the community that follows him would eat it up without question, and he was throwing Blizzard a bone by not overly-criticizing work deserving of crticism. I kept waiting for the “but” and it never came. It’s no longer about Tali reacting to something organically.

It’s like a lion being served up a store-bought ground chuck just to watch him eat it.

/yawn.

EDIT: Just an edit to say my sub is up in a couple of hours and rather than make a long/complicated “I’m unsubbing” post which I hate, I will instead say I will not be back as long as J. Allen Brack remains employed since he knew about Alex Afrasiabi’s abuses and did the bare minimum/nothing about it and somehow failed up into being President of Blizzard Entertainment.

I just wanted to take one last chance to make that clear.

11 Likes

How can the pre-vanilla WoW events be “in-game hear-say” when they’re in the living memory of people who were involved and are still alive!?

1 Like

TLDR TLDR; Consistency doesn’t matter, canon’s whatever we like at the time.

1 Like

True, it looks like every high-profile person who commented on the story was either pulling their punches or deliberately avoided criticizing the work.

We’ve had our disagreements in the past, but I sympathize. Only thing keeping me on WoW at this point is the friends I’ve made here.

All the best whether you come back or not. I also hope the employees at Blizzard who are innocent and want to do good work either get put in charge or can move on to something better.

Caregiver Selenis - but was understandably slammed out of the PTR.

It is not just that, it is greedy corporate bullcrap ontop of it.

They try to explain it the way they do, both because they do not want their “hands tied by canon” and because it allows them to sell new books repeatedly.

They could invalidate the chronicles one day, and then sell new chronicles the next day, and repeat the procedure to really milk the fans.

7 Likes

You are absolutely correct. And that’s one Blizzard game I will never play.

1 Like

Bit late to the party but I actually like Danuser’s take here?

It’s kind of cool that we don’t know everything. That Chronicle talks largely about the Titanic “ordering” of the cosmos, but doesn’t really delve into the other metaphysical realms. Unreliable narrators can be fun.

Greetings, Blizzard employee.
:wave:

6 Likes

I can assure you I’m not employed by Blizzard. I’d have to learn coding :scream:

Maybe he’s talking about how the Titans are witholding or misinforming us.

In BfA it set up that Azeroth was a Titan experiment they were using the planet to create Titan constructed Old Gods like G’huun. They never really explained that and why the Titans were doing that. It’s in stark contrast to the loving and nurturing image of Azeroth that they portray in the Chronicle history. Uldir was some explosive lore and everyone seems to have just forgotten about it.

Unreliable Narrators are fine, for the most part.

The main issue with Chronicles isn’t that they’re written from an Unreliable Narrator viewpoint. It’s that they were written to be objective guides to the lore, and were only designated as “unreliable” afterwards.

Chronicles was sold as a comprehensive guide to the lore. An encyclopedia that contained the foundation of the story. Everything in it was written, and intended, to be factual.

It was only after they finished writing Chronicles and began retconing information contained within that they pulled the “Titan’s Perspective” excuse out of their bums.

Unreliable Narrators are fine. Their recent books, such as the Grimoire and the Guides to Azeroth are written from an in-universe, first-person perspective. And it’s mostly fine because that’s what they’re sold as. You know what you’re getting going in.

Chronicles is ordering a 2-topping pizza with extra cheese and a garlic butter glaze on the crust, but getting a pan of lasagna instead.

Lasagna is fine, but it isn’t what I ordered.

20 Likes

Well, you got your wish. I think it was the expected outcome, but I suspect it will take some time for the company to heal itself back to some respectable form.

7 Likes

congratz on resubbing in record time lmao

11 Likes

Chronicle’s 1st Chapter is Mythos so that is Titan, Titan Keeper and Mortal point of view while everything else is by the omniscient Narrator’s point of view.

Fun fact: the entry on the Emerald Dream is in Chapter 2 yet the Narrator makes it clear no one knows how Freya created the Emerald Dream only giving out the 2 most popular theories.

BfA sets up that the Titan Keepers decided to experiment on the Old Gods’ desire to corrupt and ended up creating G’huun and his Underrot Corruption.

Naturally his lieutenant Mythrax was revealed in interviews to have partook in the Troll-Aqir War alongside the founder of Azj’Aqir: Kith’ix.

Fun Fact 2: the entry where Sargeras found the Old God infested Planet is in Chapter 1 Mythos which means that even that is a Myth as far as the Chronicle is concerned so we know nothing about what actually turned Sargeras down the dark path aside from Chapter 2 mentioning his fear of Void Lords already claiming Titans and deciding to purge the Universe before the Void Titans get their paws on it’s denizens.

Chapter 2(the start of everything that isn’t Mythos) doesn’t mention where Sargeras got his fear so we don’t know what happened! The Void Titan he killed(the Titans wouldn’t put forth Myths of him killing a Void Titan if he didn’t kill a Titan he thought was Void after all) for all we know could have actually been a Nathrezim corrupted Titan.

The thing is though, one of the lead writers for Chronicles (Matt Burns) said that Chronicles doesn’t cover everything and not everything is in it. But that doesn’t mean the things that were omitted are no longer canon. Most of Chronicles are just summaries of events that have other material going into further detail. So there was no reason to say it was written with a bias towards the Titans. Any details that are added by the game after the fact can just be one of those “missing details”. Considering that Chronicles only covers the start of WoW up to and including the end of Cata.

1 Like

The Chronicles series were a mistake. It gave a God’s eye view to things that, wisdom would say, should’ve been kept mysterious (with only hints and clues to ‘what might have happened’). And the fact that those accounts were ‘supposed to be factual’, but now they’re not, make this writing team’s world building laughable.

Now, the idea that there are ‘differing views’ on what actually had happened is an interesting take on the lore. You see that in historical records of certain events that, depending on who recalls it, would say that is the ‘truth’ of what had happened from their point of view - in fiction writing that’s a clever take on ‘emulating history’. But you have to be very careful how you do it, and not do it willy nilly because, like I mentioned before, people would start taking your world building a lot less seriously if it’s done whenever you want. If it’s all a ‘perspective’.

Retcons are necessary when there are real plot holes. But they shouldn’t be done to fit whatever narrative you’re trying to deliver. That defeats the point of having a lore to begin with.

1 Like

I’m actually more than okay with that. After all when it comes down to it, History in the main is simply a collection of legends that you trust the most.

IRL history and storytelling is not the same thing.

A set canon is incredibly important in storytelling - it adds foundational rules to the world, it builds the world, and it is what essentially pulls the player in and makes the world immersive. If it is ever changing, we will end up being confused over and over again as to why something happens the way they do, and if something is supposed to change in the narrative it should end up being explained. Not having a base-canon, will give the narrator more work or the ones who read the story is going to be extremely confused and taken out of the world.

One of my personal problems is the direction of the Horde that thus far have been in the same loop of ‘evil warchief rises, some follows others don’t, defeat evil warchief, peace’ and when the next time that happens you will sit back and ask: “Did you learn nothing from last time?!” not to mention “How the heck does these bad Horde guys keep getting power, if the majority of us are good Horde guys?!” and you can add to it: “Why the heck do we not just leave evil warchief and his/her lackeys to themselves? Ez dealt with” this is a major problem I have with a character like Lor’themar, who ended up indifferent and anpathetic to Sylvanas’ concerns and problems, to threatening to kill her himself, and then comes BFA and suddenly he follows her like a willing lapdog. He does not question her, he does not try to pull away from the Horde like he tried with Garrosh (Doesn’t have to be joining the Alliance, just distance the Blood Elves from the Horde)

A set canon is important, otherwise it leaves players and readers confused. Blizzard does well with minor stories here and there, but overarching, large scale stories? They absolutely fail at that.

12 Likes