painfully disconnected from an identifiable human experience. The writers are trying so hard to make something original and “with the times” that none of it feel in any way authentic and relatable. The morality that it seems to be trying to put forth doesn’t really have an analog in reality, making it feel forced. Every time I watch a cut scene I can only cringe.
WoW has never really had good writing but there were always easily identifiable tropes that smoothed it all over.
Given that its written by a human. There is still a connection.
Just what folks do with fiction. Use fictional things to talk about the real world
But they aren’t talking about realities in an abstract way. This isn’t how humans relate to one another.
It really does have that feeling of being written by someone without much life experience with only a surface level understanding of the human experience.
Provide an example
Worse is that the story is entirely pointless, we don’t NEED to re-empower the Aspects, we haven’t needed them for years now, and we’ve faced down threats equal to the Incarnates before with the help of artifacts and equally powerful entities we have direct ties to, in fact with the Heart of Azeroth we STILL possess we could just kill the Incarnates ourselves… just like with N’zoth and Zovaal…
There is no continuity here, and a soft reboot has to take continuity and prior events into account when it doesn’t entirely erase said past events.
Androgynous dragon monsters created with magic to be war machines suddenly develop a conscious and a deep psychological wound from being what they were created to be?
What is this an analogy for?
I’m actually liking the story so far. It’s far better than what we had in Shadowlands. We finally get a good villain who knows how powerful we are and we know of their plans from the start. We didn’t chase them, feel ghosted, just for them to not tell us their reason until they die. I’m actually invested a lot in this story.
To be real. What they need most is high grade cinematics for all types of stuff. I honestly want to make a fresh character accept a quest to kill wolves then bam there’s this in depth cinematic of what some lone frenzied wolf with not just snippets of it killing and terrorizing to get the idea. I want a full fledged Naruto fight to go down where I watch my computer screen from my bed for 45 minutes, or maybe an option to watch on second monitor or skip it in-game and play it on YouTube.
My favorite part of the story was trading Malfurion for Yserra only to be told 10 minutes later that Merithra was the aspect now and you never needed Yserra. Top notch writing.
Ysera was still needed to get all that ice broken away. And she’s going to help teach Merithra before returning
I do think the entire titanic order verses primal nature thing is a bit weird.
Anyone who has studied nature know how absurdedly orderered, interdependant and cooperative it actually is. Even the laws of physics are relative in such a way to preserve consistancy…
This is one excuse people often throw out to defend the writing of the past few expansions and it really is ridiculous. Yes, it’s a subjective idea, but people often forget there’s a difference between Camp and Kitsch where the “bad” writing is a very obvious style choice because everyone gets a kick out of scene-chewing comic book style characterizations, and Cringe where you can tell the writing is trying way too hard to take itself seriously and is proselytizing.
Oh she had to melt some ice? Yserra said only the dreamer could use the ancient defense mechanism which defeated the primalists assault on the emerald dream. Merithra was the one that used it. There was no transfer of knowledge or power. It’s flat out bad writing.
Yeah the writing is a joke, especially the dialogue. My god is the dialogue cringe.
Why can’t they hire better talent?
It felt like a forced attempt to cram her into the story, simply to appeal to (some) players’ attachment to the character for cheap engagement points. Admittedly, I haven’t seen what happens beyond this chapter to know if there’s more to her return due to my enjoying playing more than one character, and not enjoying grinding expedition rep.
Which is fine if you want to bring her back for engagement points, but it still needs to make sense. You can’t have the beginning of the story all high stakes “We need Yserra”, then 10 minutes later have Yserra telling Merithra, “You had it in you the whole time, never even needed me.”
i love real life loot boxes (the dumpster behind mcdonals)
My main issue is that I simply don’t care about the theme or story of the expansion. Say what you will about BFA as an expansion, but the world and story had me super invested into everything happening from patch to patch.
Even Shadowlands to a certain degree. I HATED SL, but at least I cared a enough to hate it.
It’s a basic identity crisis, something used in writing since…um…the Bible. Gilgamesh. All mythology. Probably every TV/movie/book you’ve encountered.
“Who am I?” can’t be more relatable or universal if they tried. Are you hung up on the androgynous part and thinking this is some hidden trans story and not something most people go through in their lives? Did you complain when Harry Potter didn’t know where he ended and Voldemort began and wondered what his purpose was? When Luke struggled against turning to the Dark Side? Gollum fighting his inner self, deciding if his master was Frodo (good) or Sauron (bad)?
I guess I’m asking…what’s not to understand?
If that is what you read from the Dracthyr story then I suspect the onus is more on you that the story writer.
More like this:
Dragon tries to make unfeeling war machines by mixing dragon and mortal DNA, finds out that he is unsuccessful, that you can’t just make them unfeeling. So he conditions them with brainwashing and ultimately using an artifact that gives him total mind control. Then the artifact is destroyed he gives up on them and locks them away out of fear he won’t be able to control them as their personalities start to emerge.
They get free thousands of years later and suddenly they are without the controlling aspect of their creator, without the bedrock they were conditioned to follow. So they are now experiencing the world with fresh new perspective and trying to deal all the feelings that had always been suppressed. Discovering who and what they are, their angers, fears and hopefully joys.