Its a meeting that happened in Shadows Rising, iirc.
I got into the beta. It is one of the first lines you see doing the SL intro quest at the Frozen Throne. It is fully voiced, as is Calia’s line.
5 Likes
Well we all just had another bitter war and the Forsaken have lost their homes and friend/family while people from the Alliance have lost their homes/families as well. I doubt anyone is interested in another Gathering and even if they were we have new crises popping up to bother dealing with it.
And as we have seen not everyone is pinning everything on Sylvanas. And I’m not just talking about Tyrande here.
That’s actually a big problem I’m having with the narrative, Zerde. We know so very little about what the Alliance’s attitudes even are right now, citizens and leaders both.
From the sound of it, all leaders except for Tyrande is A-OK with the existence of undead and don’t mistrust them. Jaina still loves Derek and has had more time developing her relationship with Calia than any other character at this point besides perhaps Anduin. Which is weird since Calia is being signaled to be a Horde leader!
Do the random citizens of the Alliance hate the undead? Would the citizenry of Stormwind take out pitchforks and torches if undead were allowed in? I know that canonically they’re wary of undead. We just don’t know, but we should know as this is a vital question at the center of the relationship between the two factions. Are the Horde even outcasts at all?
7 Likes
Iirc, Calia first appeared in the Arthas novel. Written by Golden. I don’t believe it to be a coincidence that, relatively soon after Golden officially joined the team, Calia popped back up. (See: Draka, a Rise of the Horde character, being chosen over literally any and every warrior-type character ever, to be Maldraxxus’s chosen one)
5 Likes
Calia popped back up in early Legion before Golden joined the team. Golden joined in the lead-up to BFA and strictly on the cinematics team. She didn’t even have anything to do with writing the Burning of Teldrassil. She was speculated to be a potential replacement for Sylvanas even before she appeared in Legion.
Golden is a very visible, vocal and controversial figure, but the buck still stops at Alex Afrasiabi last I checked, who has 0 social media presence and is thus mostly invisible. And while Danuser seems to have a soft spot for Nathanos, I don’t think his position as Lead Narrative saved the character from an existence of being pathetic and being hated in-universe and out before being thrown into the garbage bin in a pre-expansion patch.
Writing teams don’t work the way you might think. Unless the character is Afrasiabi’s pet, I guess?
12 Likes
For this reason, I criticize Calia the same way I do Turalyon: what the heck does she know about the current politics of Azerothian superpowers? Influential she may be, but she’s been out of the political loop for however long. Forget her allegiances or sympathies, she has no qualifications for the job, and may as well be a space alien who just landed and was given a leadership position.
Calia’s non-Forsaken-ness can be somewhat forgiven, but she sticks out like a sore thumb because she’s an in-universe amateur.
4 Likes
I think the line was straightforward. Calia, for better or worse, is now part of the Forsaken leadership with Voss. Tyrande points out that the Forsaken are responsible for heinous crimes. That’s pretty much it.
6 Likes
To Turalyon’s credit, he is a paladin, and is basically the ur-paladin of the Warcraft universe
It’s kind of their thing to enter into a situation and impose their ideals onto the world, taking current events into account but not compromising much for them
1 Like
She’s a senior writer, as of 2017. Cinematics may be what she’s talked about writing the most, but I highly doubt, as a senior writer, she just pens a couple minutes of lines every couple of years, and calls it a day.
12 Likes
It’s simple, Calia is now considered part of the Forsaken Faction, and its true the Forsaken went along with Sylvanas in committing atrocities against the Kaldorei.
Golden joined the team in 2017. Calia was put back into the spotlight as an important priest in 2016. The decision to put her in the priest hall 100% happened in at least 2015 when Blizzard was hashing out class halls and deciding which NPC’s would fill them.
To write a cinematic you have to decide what is going to happen in it and deciding what is going to happen in it in a narrative as expansive as WoW’s in a game as important to ActiBlizz’s finances as WoW is, that takes a lot of work and co-ordination. Narrative designers and creative designers will want specific things and have the ideas. The director will have a general vision of how it should look and play out. The writers work with both and interate in a process that might take weeks. As more and more cinematics pile into WoW, especially since BFA - which Golden was hired for - Golden will find she has plenty of work to do. She also still works on other projects such as the Exploring Eastern Kingdoms thing and she wrote the Maldraxxus Afterlives short.
Writers’ rooms are weird beasts but that’s how it all works. A strength of them is that there’s enough voices that it’s hard(er) for any one writer’s weakness to show through too much and it’s much more likely that the writing will be professional quality.
Not…that it particularly pays off in WoW, but WoW seems more of a case of incompetence rather than focused bias in favor of/against particular characters or races or what-have-you.
7 Likes
We know from Golden’s own tweets how it happened. She was directed to put a Light Zombie into Before the Storm, but she was not told who the Light Zombie should be. She’s the one who lobbied for Calia Menethil to be the one made into a Light Zombie.
14 Likes
I feel so conflicted. If we were going to be forced to accept a light zombie regardless, I’m not sure if making Calia the one was a terrible idea, or a great idea which minimizes the awfulness of the directive she was given.
2 Likes
Which is more or less what I was trying to get at (I just didn’t know there were tweets about it). Not that she’s in charge of the entire narrative, but that she has enough pull and leeway to include some of her OCs in the narrative.
1 Like
Calia is present because the meeting is at the Frozen Throne and Arthas was the Lich King. She says this to Lor’themar in the pre-patch quests: “The legacy of the Lich King is forever entwined with that of my family. Regent Lord, though I serve only as an advisor to the Forsaken, I ask to stand with you as you face this threat.”
She’s there for personal reasons more than her affiliation with the Forsaken, she’s just using her position as an advisor to travel with the Horde entourage. If she were still hanging out in Kul Tiras with the Alliance when the Scourge invasions started, she’d probably say something similar to the Alliance leadership and travel with them.
6 Likes
Part of that is because this part of the narrative is not important. Regardless of what happens the Forsaken are not gonna leave the Horde, nor will the night elves.
We do get some snippets of how the common folk is reacting to the war. And some snippets from the various leaders. They range from not wanting to forgive the Horde, to wanting to move on, to regretting their rejoining the Alliance because now the Alliance’s war is their war.
Anduin of all people doesn’t trust the Horde. I doubt most of the Alliance trust the Horde(which include the Forsaken) at best, most seem to at least be willing to not go out and actively fight them.
If you mean are they welcome in Alliance. No, they are not except maybe as envoys. Like Baine.
She appeared in Day of the Dragon, long before the Arthas novel.
1 Like
Huh. Do you have the tweet? I know that’s a big ask…
1 Like
I’m only guessing, but I think Tyrande might kill Calia just for being Forsaken, the Forsaken are the Horde, and the Horde destroyed Teldrassil. Who’s leading the Forsaken or the Horde in general doesn’t matter to her.
2 Likes
For now.
More likely Blizzard is trying to normalize her presence so they can make a sneaky swaparoo later. They seem dead set on forcing her down Forsaken players throats.
6 Likes