Who is “they”?
Like… How? How do you get to that conclusion??
Tyrande existed, sure, but unless you were night fae, she only came into the narrative in 9.1 long enough to get depowered and be told by Elune vengeance is bad. Then she faffed off (thank you Ain for reminding me of that term) until the end of 9.2 to say “Sylvanas, go in the Maw now”.
And like… That’s it. Wank fest? Didn’t night elves find out Elune was bad at her job and unwittingly let their souls fall into the Maw???
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Losing her evil boyfriend should be the one consequence that sticks.
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Who knows how one would get to that conclusion. There isn’t even a night elf spirit you even engage with in ardenweld like there is a human spirit in Bastion (Uther) or and orc spirit in Maldraxxus (Draka). I would guess it’s any time a night elf shows up they just get unreasonably upset. Tyrande literally does nothing this expansion other than giving Sylvanas an extremely merciful penance for what she did as well after being gone for 95% of the expansion.
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Hey now. That’s not true and you know it!! She also got to use her night warrior abilities to not win a duel that ends with her learning that renewal is fun and all the cool kids do it.
TBF though, I do wish the night fae covenant story was less about “gotta prep to depower Tyrande in 9.1” and more about the night fae. But even that had you work more with the pony couple, the OG of highmountain taurens and Ysera more than any night elf.
… Of which there were all of two present all expansion!! Just Tyrande and Shandris!! Two night elves barely existing is not a wank fest!!
Gahh!!!
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That post was about them always being the center of morality not about them being too present in the narrative.
Oh true, I forgot about that. Elune also used her as a telephone and she changed her mind for unknown reasons. mb, shadowlands was all about the night elves and tyrande! sylvanas who?
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You whine constantly about sylvanas more than I whine about nelves. I can put up with nelves. But okay!
But Tyrande literally was told by her goddess that she needed to just stopit and go renewal.
That is the opposite of being the center of morality.
And neither would be a wank fest!!
GAH!!
I’ve concluded you just use words and phrases without fully grasping their meaning. I’m sorry if I’ve been too rough with you. It’s pretty clear now you just don’t know the real meaning of some of the things you say.
So, truth be told. I’m not a big night elf fan. I like them, one of my favorite races on Alliance-side, but between you, me and Spathy? Their stories don’t do much for me.
All that to say, on my second viewing of the 9.1 Elune cinematics?
I got heated. I was angry as heck.
Because in the end, Elune now canonically let her people die because she knew Ardenweald needed anime, but didn’t know the Maw was a thing, but gave Tyrande a power boost when she asked, but took it away right when she was going to finally use it, because… Renewal?
What.
The.
Cosmic Flux?!?
Not only does that make no sense, it’s some convoluted logic that gets made worse in 9.2’s epoligue when Tyrande’s all like “oh, maybe this is why Elune powered me down. So Sylvanas could Maw Walk!!”
Yeah, no. Allegedly, according to Elune herself, she didn’t know the nelf souls went to the Maw until after she depowered you, sister. Elune’s gaslighting you, Tyrande!! And if she could foresee that Sylvanas would be needed to gather nelf souls from the Maw? She should have seen those souls were being sent to the Maw, so she sent them there willingly!!
That’s an interesting take on “wank”.
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You’re thinking about diagetic contexts more than themes and meta contexts here.
I’m literally paid to write words and was in the 94th national percentile of the verbal component for the SAT’s so you don’t have to worry about playing soft ball with me. xD
Anyways, thank you for at least trying to apologize.
Yep, that is how I felt when I saw it too. They literally threw Elune under the bus for the Sylvanas story in Shadowlands. Dispelling the mystery of this goddess for this? We didn’t even get a nice cinematic where Elune talks to an on the brink Tyrande and helps her deal with her anger, just talks to her sister a bit, says she sent some soul fuel to the afterlife but didn’t know that it never got there and then Tyrande opens her eyes. It was pretty lousy…as were a lot of the things in shadowlands.
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In 9.0, I was very upset. I was livid actually. I was on the verge of full blown Alynsa rage, a state I’ve managed to avoid on these forums since literally the Burning Crusade.
But when I saw the datamined stuff regarding the Night Fae and how we’d have two short chapters for Vol’jin and the bulk would be about Tyrande? And that Night Fae was not only my aesthetic choice for Alynsa’s covenant, but also the best one for MM hunters overall at the time?
I wanted to break something. Screw the Alliance! I want more Vol’jin!! Why’s it gotta be all about helping one of their people and not one of mi-
Oh. Oh, 9.1 happened. They went and did a whole that to the night elves. And now it is canon that Elune is bad at her job, and maybe is actually kind of sinister.
Oh.
Oh, okay, yeah, no, I’m happy they just forgot my bestie Vol’jin. Thank god they stopped when they did!!
Because this “wank fest” just destroyed a cultural foundation of the night elves four years after destroying their home and their lives. All in the name of some ambiguous “renewal” that literally renews nothing.
Thank god Baine sat around Oribos and Vol’jin was forgotten. Best thing to come out of Shadowlands. More competent devs might come in later and do something with Loa’jin, and Baine is no worse off for being worthless than he was when he was worthless in BfA.
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things that have been ruined for Sylvanas story:
Elune
The Lich King
Zovaal, the Jailer
Arthas Menethil
The Horde
The Alliance
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You forgot two:
Death itself as a concept and as a cosmic force we could interact with.
Uther.
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I think the story since ulduar has been thematically saying that faith in powerful divine beings is risky; that beings that you cannot always see and cannot interact with may not be what they seem, and may not be trustworthy. Such as naaru actually being extremely sketchy, and the titan pantheon being dead this whole time with folks not even knowing about it.
I don’t know about since Ulduar. Titans were still titans, still alive, still distant creator figures. Naaru were still light wind chimes who hate the Legion are are no more or less sketchy than when they were introduced in BC (meaning: Still pretty sketch, because of that whole void cycle).
But since Legion? Absolutely. That’s where we’re finding out the titans were dead all along, but they got better. Naaru aren’t just sketchy because of the whole light and void cycle; some are also just fanatical. The whole deal about only three old gods came into question with Xala’tath, and we’re seeing the void might not necessarily be antagonistic, just holding a radically different way of viewing the universe from the Light.
Legion is absolutely when the WoW devs said “eh, screw divinity. Just a future raid boss, imo”.
What about Ulduar struck you as the starting point?
Yep, pretty much. Not to mention pretty much everything with did in the ardenweld campaign in 9.0 was pointless, we don’t find Tyrande, she just shows up randomly, we don’t cure Tyrande, Elune just cures her. At least Bwomsomdi got a cute dungeon and shows him as an actual god of death that at least cares about what happens to his followers. Elune just gets tossed away like trash to serve sylvanas’s story.
I would like to say I have hope that the next expansion won’t be complete trash, but I don’t think they have respect for any of the races or understand what people like about them. They essentially just threw most spiritualities and religions in the trash for the shadowlands story, but this goes back to my thoughts about how they just want to homogenize everything so it’s easier to write. Just like their reluctance to write about non humans in the alliance, I think Thalyssra even made a joke about the nightborne becoming too homogenized if they joined alliance.
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It could have been earlier, but Ulduar is as far back as I can remember when we start seeing thematic beats in this vein. Ulduar was the moment that you find out from Algalon that Azeroth is marked for eradication due to a curse of flesh-- which is understandable from a divine perspective but monstrous from a human(oid) perspective. That the big powerful order gods are fallible and scared and programmed fail safes in case of disasters that they don’t have the power to fix mercifully.
Honestly, this is the big travesty of Shadowlands for me.
Through Cataclysm (sorry Cata fans, I just did not like it), through WoD, through BfA, I would always look towards the next expansion and say “they’ll get that one right. It’ll be fine. Just the good-bad curse, where every good expac leads to a less good one”.
Shadowlands was supposed to be the good one, to make up for the bad one in BfA. Instead, Shadowlands made me miss BfA.
Which is weird, right? BfA is where this all went wrong. No BfA, no Shadowlands! But at least BfA had a second plot with N’zoth I could kinda enjoy. Its B or C plot existed, and if I ignored the A or other B plot of the faction war, I could find something to delve into.
Shadowlands has no C plot. It has no B plot. It has one single plot: SylvanaZovaal.
And the more they developed it, the worse it was for everything else around the game’s lore and mythos.
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So this is more a matter of perspectives, but that plot point?
It really worked for me. It fit the vision I had of the titans in my head. Up to that point, they weren’t personal gods (so to speak). They were distant creators who came to the world the old gods ran, reordered it, and made it fit their vision before leaving. Titans to me were the impersonal architects through Vanilla and BC. The idea they put a failsafe in if old god corruption went out of control fit neatly in my head with the titan lore we saw in Uldaman. Builders who build a thing and then ghost.
I mean, I get why you’d see it that way and in retrospect, I do see the thematic trail leading from there. Just personally, it more fits with what I’d seen and knew from before.