Dumb Thoughts: Conquest from Invincible, and the loneliness of 'success'

Wyrmrest Accord
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This popped up on my feed.

https://youtube.com/shorts/9PHNMo8bDMA?si=5bBTq6bSzWing9iK

And it kinda got me thinking, on several points actually.

  1. First of all, how absolutely terrifying. Conquest just manhandles Mark like the protagonist of the story is a ragdoll, and what he says after this clip is simply the purest form of menace in a simple sentence I have heard in years. I will not spoil it for you, it is that good.
  1. Secondly, Conquest is being absolutely honest here, and it is the cinematic mastery here that as he’s speaking, the camera only shows his scars, his physical injuries, highlighting just how damaged this character is, how disfigured he has become both mentally and physically from thousands of years of being the Viltrumites’ wrecking ball, sent out where ‘normal’ Viltrumites might be in danger of failure, because they are aware that no matter what, Conquest will get the job done. And he is fully aware of who and what he is in the great Viltrumite Empire, and has come to love the fear, hate the loneliness, and embrace his role of the weapon sent in when there is only violence, pain and fear to be delivered to the enemies of Thragg and the Empire.
  1. What makes it even worse is that Conquest truly does not have a name. He’s been de-personed by his own people, and they are genuinely terrified of him with the exception of Thragg himself, and that might even be a bluff on behalf of the Biggest Bad himself because Conquest is unmatched by any other Viltrumite in terms of slaughter and fighting. Only Battle Beast might be able to come close, and a fight between those two would shatter Solar Systems, not just planets.

And it kinda hit me … the Player Character is the ‘Conquest’-character of Azeroth. Everybody wants us around to do the MurderDeathJustice, but who wants us to stay? We’re only on call when people need to die, or monsters do, or Gods do. Do we get called in for weddings? Funerals? A night in the tavern getting blootered?

No.

No, the Champion is just a cudgel, a blade to be pointed at the heart of whatever is the greatest threat to the Alliance, or the Horde, or Azeroth itself, to be whetted and sharpened again and again, over and over again, until there is nothing left but that oh-so-keen edge, that bloody tool that can cut down anything and anyone it is pointed at, so it is always pointed away from the people it protects, at all costs.

I am hoping that, at some point, the very success of the Champion(s) gets turned against them, that we’re so successful, so powerful, so dangerous that we become the only threat that our Factions can see. What stops us from turning on them, from using our power to take what we want, because to the people who would do such a thing, if they had that level of power and influence, that is precisely what they would do.

So why haven’t we?

Because they cannot conceive that anyone that powerful would not be just like them. And the thought that they might be the aberration, not the Champion? That they are not the ‘perfect example’ of their people, we are?

And that would be the itch they cannot scratch, the twist of the knife they cannot ignore. That no matter how much they take, they twist, they turn to serve them, true power does not answer to them, and that would burn such individuals even in their sleep.

But what of Champions who do fall into the Conquest archetype? The Death Knights who have lost all sense of connection to the living and feel isolated, outcast and denied the simple company of being in a room and simply existing without everyone around them being terrified of them, despite all they have suffered, just to keep the Living safe.

The Demon Hunter whose blind eyes see what others dare not, the whispers, the looks, the shifting of armed guards and the flinch of the civilian, after all they have given, all they have sacrificed, for the Great Hunt against the Legion and the eternal, spiritual battle every Demon Hunter struggles with every minute of every hour of every day, from now until they either fall, or turn, to the Demon within.

There’s other classes, other character concepts, that can fall into this, of course, but it just struck me how … isolated the Player Characters/Champions are. We have no friends according to the Lore, no families, no real connections. We’re just unbound power roaming across the land, drawn to carnage and conflict, chaos and strife, and grow ever stronger as we conquer it all.

And it just struck me how … lonely that is. We, as players, have our guilds, our friends, we have lives outside of the game. Our characters, if we went strictly by our in-game representation through the questlines, is just … alone. A solitary, unstoppable monster kept on a leash of duty and obligation to our Mega-Factions, a leash that grows more threadbare and more frayed with every passing year.

How long until we look in the mirror and see only the monster that others see? The ‘resource’ that has to be carefully managed and nudged to avoid raising concerns and directed away from ‘messy’ situations where overwhelming carnage would only make things worse?

How long until we’re asked to do something, and the story finally lets us say that one, magical word that can throw the whole of Azeroth into chaos.

How long until we say “No.”, and our Mega-Faction Leaders and DM-NPCs have to stop and do a double-take because their most useful hammer just decided to grow an opinion, and they’re not sure they can force us to comply anymore?

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“Tell me of the loneliness of good, He-Man. Is it equal to the loneliness of Evil?”

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Ah, Gentarn getting the old brain juices buzzing again! It’s this line in particular that I want to hone in on from a roleplay perspective:

I don’t play Thomas as the in character unstoppable Champion, but his very sanity is attached to his oath of duty to Stormwind. And he is painfully aware of this. It’s one of his greatest fears that the current Stormwind army will discover he’s real and not just a folk legend, and try to strongarm him back into proper service. Because he doesn’t know if he has the power to say no.

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I really, really wish I’d kept the receipt of my brain, because it has been making odd noises for decades now, and I just want to sleep!

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In regards to the question since this is getting very, very little traffic and that’s criminal…in a meta sense the player characters are frighteningly powerful. But where Scrublordaddy and Makattack exist as hypotheticals, for us here on the RP side of things, most of us tend to limit our impact in regards to what we do or don’t participate in.

Take Vanndrel here. By all rights I could play him as The Best That Ever Was since I’ve established him as an Elven Ranger during the Second War. But I’ve made sure his impact in the conflicts since were mitigated.

Family dies to the Scourge, flees to help found Theramore, and is effectively there until Silvermoon ends its isolation and returns home out of a sense of patriotic duty to the Horde during TBC. Canonically never sets foot in Outland because he’s helping clear out Eversong, which leads into Wrath where he’s very much helping tackle the Lich King. He fights in and around Icecrown and I’ve established he goes on to help the Argent Crusade after the War officially ends to keep a check on the Scourge. I keep him there until news travels there that Theramore was destroyed by a Mana Bomb.

Mists of Pandaria to Legion Vanndrel’s story goes dark because with the destruction of Theramore, Vanndrel goes into self-destruct mode on Bloodthistle and somehow ends up in Pandaria working out his survivor’s guilt and getting clean with the help of my Pandaren Shaman. He only re-enters things during Legion because - duh - but I deliberately make him one of the severely wounded on Broken Shore so he sits out the majority of that conflict. This is where the return to the Alliance happens and while I initially had Vanndrel be a Void Elf since we got the cosmetic changes, that’s been dropped from his story. Vanndrel’s 100% Sin’dorei (Quel’dorei technically. Just like how the Blood Elves got gold eyes from the renewed Sunwell, Vanndrel’s eyes lost their green hue and went back to Blue). Battle for Azeroth saw him follow Lady Jania to Kul’Tiras where he actually ends up settling down in Stormsong Valley, starting up a small tobacco farm because one of the longest quirks of the character I have is thanks to the Second War, Vanndrel is absolutely smitten with the native Draenor plant known then as “Peon Leaf” because the Peons would grow it in pig dung piles to take the edge off their day. Since the Second War it’s been rebranded as “Durotar Black” and remains surprisingly popular among members of both the Alliance and Horde.

It’s probably the most significant contribution to the lore of WarCraft I’ve ever made, and it’s to make a mild sedative/narcotic.

Regardless, Vanndrel’s been working his farm from BfA up until Jania called for volunteers to help deal with the Nerubians and well…Vanndrel is qualified from years in Northrend.

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20 champions of Azeroth approaching Gallywix yelling “Stand ready for my arrival, worm.”

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What’s genuinely terrifying about Conquest is that he’s older than the Empire he serves, by a considerable margin, meaning he’s from the more enlightened and elgatarian era before the current Viltrumite Empire, and was then given a front-row seat to the eugenics ‘conflict’, and the great plague that ravaged the Viltrumites from a population of billions down to a few tens of thousands, or thousands, at best.

The ring around the Viltrumite homeworld is not made of rock and galactic debris, but the bodies of those Viltrumites who fell in their civil war.

When we put this into the concept of the Player Character/‘Champion’, it gets worse, especially when you apply it to Draenei or Elven characters. Elves have lifespans that are measured the millennia. Draenei have lifespans in the tens of millennia, at worst, and both races are notorious for living even longer when they are heavily using various magical energies.

A Draenei vindicator who grew up on Argus might only be hitting the final stretches of what their people consider ‘middle age’. A Kaldorei might have lived longer than a whole Human’s bloodline. And they’re here, still in the fight, still going at it, an endless succession of carnage and conflict that has become their whole world, and they don’t even know what ‘normal’ life is like anymore.

Decades of conflict can turn anyone into a shell-shocked caricature of a person. What about centuries? Millennia? Long periods of training, waiting, finally breaking out of that shell only for the fighting to start again and you have to pile back into that shell, seeing the people you finally let see the real you die horrible, miserable deaths, until the fighting ends, you stop, you start to heal, it takes centuries, you finally creep out of your shell and start to let people know you … it happens again.

The more I think about it, the more being one of these incredibly long-lived races must suck, because you’ll outlive everyone not of your own species, you’ll likely outlast the very stones used to build your great cities, you’ll survive long after the land you grew up in changes from environmental pressures and the endless growth of civilisation, and the staggering destruction of war. You have no constants that matter, but the people around you, who themselves may alter and change from influences beyond even your control, and you’re just … an island of self in a world that seems to flow and change around you in the blink of an eye, in a life where you have the time to master every possible skill and every form of art, philosophy, martial prowess and science … but it is never truly enough to fill the long, lonely years and the crushing realisation that you’re just going through the motions, that nothing matters, nothing lasts, not really.

That you’ll never advance because there’s somebody above you who’ll also live for tens of thousands of years, that there’s nothing left to explore because generations before you have already done it all in a desperate attempt to fill the long, unskippable void of their lives with something that sparks joy or happiness, that you can’t just quit and go vibe with the shorter-lived races because that’s ‘not living up to your potential’ and because by the time you get accustomed to their way of living, all of your new friends will be dead and their children will have children of their own.

It is kind of sobering and sad when you consider many of these long-lived races have literally survived through the collapse of several societies and watching whole generations of their friends and loved ones die pointlessly horrific or violent deaths, and due to their own prowess, they carry on. There is no release from the prison of their own competence and duty, only the dim and now firmly-faded hope that, somehow, if they just make it through to the next battle, they might find something that sparks something in their hearts again.

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I dunno, I mean I’m eminently likeable so ain’t got none of these problems, but on the other hand nobody takes me seriously so it’s pretty doubtful I’ve actually done any of the stuff they said I did during those vacation days.

I probly ain’t gonna be too long-lived neither…fuel leak or sumthin’ one of these days. I mean I still got a job

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