Also let’s not kid ourselves here: this is absolutely a case of “this character is actually extremely powerful lore-wise and the fact that we haven’t done literally anything with him is due to this while also not being sure what exactly to do with his character to begin with”.
So, instead of being able to completely ignore his existence (just like the super alien ship the Alliance got from Legion that could have ended the BfA war, as the writers admitted to which is why they didn’t include it) they feel like killing him off to “balance the power” instead of just having him awkwardly around Tyrande as a plot point for getting her Sad or using him as a nuke button or whatever.
Alliance characters/powers and being completely useless, name a more iconic duo.
Horde:
Baine because lol
Thalyssra for being unironically a bad leader for jumping from one dictator to another
Thrall just die dude please
Alliance:
Velen cause he’s outlived his usefulness
Tyrande cause im just tired of her as an existence, she’s Sylvanas levels of unbearable to me but for different reasons
Mekkatorque because I just think gnomes shouldn’t have nice things
Velen he needs a good nap, dude’s been around for eons lol.
Jaina/Tyrande I’ll be happy with either of them gone
All the Wynns or however you spell their name.
The whole lot of the lore characters are so absurdly marysue that I am positive fanfic writers could do a better job.
Magni, please just let him sit in his Silithus hole like a gremlin with his piles of Azerite and never acknowledge him again.
…Honestly that’s it. I don’t particularly mind having race/faction leaders that are stronger than most other characters, in some cases that’s why they’re the leaders. It’s just when they’re overused and overstay their welcome that it becomes a problem. When they’re a mythical figure that you hear about their stories through the grapevine, that’s one thing. To be the pointless tagalong on the misadventures of Gary Stustrasz and the McGuffins, that’s when we get into indulgent fan fiction territory. And even indulgent fan fiction can be fun if you understand that’s what you’re doing and lean into it for all its stupid campy glory, but the writers genuinely believe they’re making Game of Thrones when they are. Well, not.
It just dawned on me that I don’t know a ton of Horde NPC’s outside the very main ones. I really should play red side more often.
Horde:
Thrall - I’ve had enough Go’el Go’el Go’el to last a lifetime.
Baine - what is the point of this guy anymore? Cairne would be disappointed.
Alliance -
Tyrande - mainly because of how she’s been written. She could have been an amazing character, but even though Blizz sucks at writing as a whole, hoo boy they really suck at writing for women.
The entire Wrynn family. We need a patch that involves overthrowing the Kingdom of Stormwind.
Considering their recent legal trouble, it doesn’t surprise me they are out of touch regarding writing women. Reminds me of that meme about men writing women in romance.
“She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards” Will get you the pic, if you google it.
ez, Malf, Tyrandae, Jaina need to eat dirt. dunno who to put up for the horde since about everyone over there is six feet under. I found Malfurion to be the most boring MF that was built up as a brick spit-house and would of thought him interesting as a chariter, turns out the guys is as compelling as a dirt clod and just as useful. Double trash he goes.
I remember our introduction to him was rescuing him from a bunch of Centaurs in the Horde mini-campaign of The Frozen Throne (Basically WoW 0.5). Baine’s always been a complete wet noodle.
So Tyrande has lost her home, thousands of her people died horribly and were sent to super hell, got superpowers which were pointless and resulted in nothing…now her god’s sister (who is a robot) says her husband has to die for uh…balance or something in order to bring back a dead dragon.
But she got that egg or seed or something so she can maybe sit on that a while and maybe something will hatch?
It’s 2022 and female nelfs still have the tiddy bounce animation.
Tyrande: “I’m so tired my love” bouncebouncebounce
I get such grief from a couple players (that occasionally post on these forums) about how much I seem to ‘not care’ about the story/narratives.
I would like to care, I really would. I’m here because I love this game and this universe, but if Blizz doesn’t care about their own story (which seems to be the case) I can’t be bothered to invest in it anymore beyond hey man, cool hat transmog.
All I know is this is going to end with the 10,000 year old war leader of an entire species getting lectured on grade school level principles from a 40-something.
This whole scenario with Malfurion is just… sigh Blizzard, really?
I’m not that upset over Malfurion dying in itself - he’s been around for a while, he’s been part of plenty of stories, and he’s absolutely the sort to go out serving a grand cause - but this just isn’t the time for that.
After the War of Thorns and the intentionally emotionally draining death of so many night elves, after Tyrande’s spotlight-stealing but ultimately useless and pointless Night Warrior arc ending in ‘but you must rebuild tho’, after the night elf souls already died and chose to imbue the seed with their essence - that’s not the time to add ‘oh, and also Malfurion dies before you can go anywhere’.
The night elves have already been hammered down plenty - they need to narratively climb back up a few rungs and get a little breathing space before smacking them with a major character death.
I’d have been fine if Malfurion died fighting the nightmare and rescuing Cenarius - sad, but fitting. And I’d have been fine if Malfurion died to rescue all those caught in Teldrassil - again, it would be be sad, but fitting (and that would have made it much easier to forgive the Horde if a skilled combatant died rather than hundreds of defenseless innocents - and because Malfurion himself would have forgiven them). But right now? It’s just another strike in a list that we’d hoped had finally ended already. And it just adds more fuel to the fire of the ‘Blizzard hates night elves’ theory.
Besides, while Ysera’s death was abrupt and has its criticisms, the story has spent time on showing her spirit adjusting to Ardenweald and on Merithra facing the challenges of stepping up as the new leader of her flight. It’s jarring to go back on all that, especially by sacrificing one character to do so.
There’s a lot of story potential that could come from Malfurion’s death. But there was a lot of story potential that could have come from the War of Thorns, too, and Blizzard dropped the ball on that. They need to build back that trust by building back the night elves as a capable, secure faction before they try something like this again.
