I feel like y’all are just overlooking the beauty here.
Any bozo can utilize a racist stereotype in their narrative, making the “dark tribe” intellectually inferior.
But it takes a special kind of person to double-dip the stereotyping and make the Asian-inspired fantasy elves also be the super smart ones.
They got a two-fer!!
Right. But like, my point is Day of the Dragon was written before Warcraft 3 was deep into development.
Thus it was written before WoW was deep into development.
Like, at a minimum it was written before it hit the halfway mark.
Nope, WoW started the very earliest development in 1999
My dude.
Day of the Dragon released on February first 2001. That is, at best, two years into development.
World of Warcraft was released in 2004. That’s a 5 year development.
Warcraft 3 was released in 2002. It was like, a year and six months after Day of the Dragon.
Day of the Dragon was published in 2001. That means it was written, edited, checked, printed, shipped, etc all before. The average time between start to finish on publishing a book is two to three years.
This means, even if the earliest work was 1999 for WoW and Warcraft 3, Day of the Dragon was before that.
EDIT: Obviously, assuming standard trends and publication steps, etc.
Nope, it means it was concurrent to that <3
Fun fact, trolls were not even considered a playable race in WoW during pre-alpha development. Here’s one of the earliest screenshots of the WoW character creation screen.
Gnomes and Trolls were the last two races to be added to development, and they were added late in development as well, which is why neither race featured in the original WoW cinematic and why both had relatively minor roles compared to the other races which had been implemented and worked on much earlier. Both share similarities with each other in the sense that neither have their own unique start location. Both races existed in another races starting zone (gnomes in the dwarf zone and trolls in the orc zone).
My point being, Trolls as we see them in WoW and WC3 likely didn’t even exist at the time of writing of Day of the Dragon. Especially since we know late development changes happened based on released articles and the like.
This feels like funny evidence to the fact that they did not plan to make her the Aspect until the community pointed out how awful the Ysera idea was LOL.
On one hand like retconning the generic tolkien-esuqe “First Race to Awaken” vague description from Wc3 is okay. But like… even though it’s been said since Vanilla, there’s nothing really trollish about them?
Sounds like the Gnomes have been stealing their math homework
This feels like funny evidence to the fact that they did not plan to make her the Aspect until the community pointed out how awful the Ysera idea was LOL.
Merithra could have actually been more interesting than a dinner with water, white bread and mashed potatoes with no gravy or butter if they kept the original plot with the Green Dragonflight being divided on whether or not she should lead them
Now imagine if they had gone the next step up and had the Green Dragons not believe that moving all your focus back to an isolated chunk of the world and seeking lost powers you gave up for the world, and that dragons should adapt to the state of the world and grow as people within it…
Nah, just get powers back and re-establish stagnant status quo where your own inactivity screwed the world.
Funny enough some of the earlier videos for Warcraft 3 looks like it could have been really fun. Definitely see where the split happened comparing that to videos further in development.
I believe I’ve got a video of a troll speaking in a potentially Caribbean accent in 2000, but yeah. By that point Day of the Dragon would have been WELL underway of being written. (Not the video I linked)
And Knaak himself (though I doubt I can find the article anymore) has said Day of the Dragon was basically Blizzard just dumping information on him and telling him to write a book. It’s not like they micromanged him.
I thought this wasn’t even in question anymore at this point. The idea that the green flight’s entire plot had to be reworked late in development seems… Pretty much the sole explanation for what they did with Ysera.
It starts off in the early questing with all “yay, Ysera’s here, and she only cost a single Malfurion deposit!! Bet she’s gonna do something really special…” Then it ends with “hi, final major patch, I’m here also too now, guys follow my daughter 'kay? Hugs, gonna go now, byeeeee!!!” And there’s just… Nothing in the middle of that. She doesn’t even really show up between her appearance and sudden reappearance in this patch. Like, if she never returned, the only thing that would change is Malfurion would be there also when Tyrande was around.
I assumed we all just accepted this to mean they had a plan, nobody liked the sound of that plan, so they scrapped the plan and tied things up messily as they could at the end.
… jesus what a video lol. On one hand, I miss when blizzard tried really ambitious stuff like this and could see this possibly being fun. But Warcraft 3 as it is is prolly way better because they cut their losses with this idea.
Oh I think it’s been clear. But it’s just really funny seeing more confirmation of it just by accidental slip ups in their writing.
It matches up with the lore, oddly enough.
Merithra was the de-facto leader of the Green Dragonflight after the death of Ysera, but it was stated in an interview in 2022 that not all Green Dragons believed that Merithra should be the next Aspect, which is why Merithra didn’t take her place at the Seat of the Aspects with Alexstrasza, Nozdormu and Malygos until later after the quests played out that saw her become the next Aspect.
We are definitely feeling the drawbacks of basing fantasy races off of real life cultures.
all fantasy races are based on real life cultures
there is no fantasy race that is not derivative of real life
there is no fantasy in general as a whole genre that is not derivative of real life
the drawback comes from western gaze vs Not, examples:
Kul Tiras grapples with popular media and popular folklore of the West with Western appreciation for its own heritage (good pirates vs bad pirates, evil salem vs good spooky druids, Lovecraft)
Zandalar is instead Western Gaze ie Western Perception of Latin America and Africa (ruins, cannibal savages, evil governments, etc), it is not how Latin America and Africa sees ourselves and grapples with our own folklore and our own fantasy (eg Magical Realism, eg Voodoo folklore and myth).
and this problem is something blizzard keeps slamming themselves into
For WoW Walmart Wakanda to land, the end of the Zandalar questline would’ve needed to result in a bilateral harrowing re-unification plot of all Trolls
This actually would have been cool af to see i’m ngl. Empire of Zul or something adjacent to that returning would be based.
Even if they framed it as Super Tech Advanced, the Walmart Wakanda stuff wouldn’t have landed because the point of the movie is about Global Black Unity and how the Motherland (Africa) abandoned and does not support the Diaspora in reconnecting
For WoW Walmart Wakanda to land, the end of the Zandalar questline would’ve needed to result in a bilateral harrowing re-unification plot of all Trolls
For WoW Walmart Wakanda to land, the end of the Zandalar questline would’ve needed to result in a bilateral harrowing re-unification plot of all Trolls
This actually would have been cool af to see i’m ngl. Empire of Zul or something adjacent to that returning would be based.