Interesting Article: GoT's Influence on (Bad) Writers

Lore Story Forum
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I know it’s been said a few times in this thread already, but Sylvanas and Daenerys pretty much have the same writing issues in BfA and season 8 respectively.

Female leader who suffers some pretty horrific stuff, but through the virtue of their own will (and some helpful magic), manages to free herself and others from captivity. Those people aren’t the ones she was naturally born to, but through her deeds, they flock to her as the Queen they choose to follow. She leads well, but certainly not perfect. She has many dark and cruel moments, and people do have a right to fear or hate her for those. She needs allies for her goals, and joins arms with foreigners who her former people certainly had a troubled relationship with, but that she manages to make work.

Then as the story progresses, she suddenly gets to a point where those people she has allied with are the ones that the writers want to be “the good guys”, and she’s a major player standing in the way of that. She is suddenly written to have bouts of irrational emotion and jealousy for another female character that threatens her power, and all of this culminates in a story that turns her on a heel into an outright fascist who burns down an entire city of civilians.

We’re told that this was always her character, that these small moments from her past are why we should have expected full-scale genocide all along. The moral of the story seems to be that her natural state of existence as crazy and evil was inevitable, and we were just waiting for the coin to drop. All that’s really missing from Sylvanas is that instead of her Jon Snow completing his turn against her after starting to doubt, and killing her, his story just never continued.

The big issue with both of these characters is that foreshadowing and the potential for great evil doesn’t entail doing great evil. It has to actually be built up to and given reasonable motivations, rather than existing to provoke the other characters to hate her and push her out of the good guy team.

You can’t jump from Daenerys having major doubts about executing two military leaders to city-wide genocide, just like you can’t have Sylvanas jump from explicitly not wanting wars to keep a target off of her back to city-wide genocide to spark a war intentionally.

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LOL, really? That’s a new one on me. Guess I’m out of touch! :smiley:

When you lay it out like that, it’s kind of spooky.

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Except GoT was expected to uphold a certain standard of entertainment value.

Warcraft doesn’t have to. They’ll be riding that fact into their grave.

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I still feel like they are trying to copy GOT writing with the current Anduin fiasco. I feel like he is Jon Snow of Warcraft where he has the best intentions however bad things keep happening to him. We are supposed to feel sorry for the character and hope he will rise above it. (especially with how they keep trying to drive this relationship between Sylvanas(aka daenarys), him and the Jailer)

However Anduin is always protected from any negativism and all around supported by those around him. Even this latest situation (spoiler) With him becoming the new lich king he is protected from any consequences of it. The writers have stated multiple times that he has no control and that he hasn’t fallen at all, they even telegraph with the ingame cinematic that he hasn’t fallen. They still want us to worry about him however but nothing indicates like he won’t come out of this ordeal and be fine.

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I knew I was right to believe that GoT would set a bad precedent, intentionally or not.

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This is an important point. Because Jon Snow had some pretty major negatives happen to him as a result of his choices. So far, other than feeling mopey here and there, Anduin has had none. Maybe the Divine Bell incident, but he healed from that pretty quickly and gained magic bones out of it.

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  1. Grimness and nastiness are the key to winning our hearts
  • This is that M E T A L kick they’ve been on for the past decade or so.
  1. Viewers still love the “smartest guy in the room”
  • Except instead of “smartest” it’s “strongest”.
  1. Women are either badasses or victims
  • A woman is either badass and can mow down thousands, a victim to be killed by a villain, or irrelevant to function only as an accessory to someone else’s story. The last point is not specific to women however.
  1. There are no good people, just fools, bastards and monsters
  • This is incorrect for Warcraft. There are good people, they just happen to either be killed or impotent.
  1. War is fun and awesome and we love it
  • This series is called Warcraft. I want to be at war with something. Doesn’t have to the enemy faction though, we used to have dozens if enemies just running around but we’ve killed all of them.
  1. Complexity is automatically interesting
  • The only logical explanation to us still not knowing what the hell Sylvanas wants despite her being the primary antagonist for an entire expansion.
  1. Shocking events are an end in themselves
  • The sad state of affairs now. The story now exists just to justify big set pieces.
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grimdark can only get you so far.

i have no idea what this means on a narrative context but i feel the need to quote jim raynor “nobody likes a smartass”.

They arent even well done, ill take a well done normal than a mary sue badass any day, trying to uplift those women ends up dehumanizing them in a binaric selection.

There is enough cynism irl, you cant just go full grimdark and expect people to keep caring about your universe, same problem as point 1, if everything is dark and hopeless why the frick should i care for these people?

“Well” done war with believable motivations can be pulled off.
why the frick they wanted to attach morality of “you’re bad and should feel bad for playing war” on a game that runs on war beats me.

these two are just lol… i aint a pro writer but it just feels like a wrong way to go writing your story.

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to be fair, sylvanas was never portrayed as a moral character. she always skirted the lines of amoral and immoral. You could tell she was going down a dark path that skirted full out right villain land, but with with daernerys it was a nose dive.

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He’ll have White Hair at the least as he needs match up with the Son of the Wolf Comic’s ending without it being the result of aging which would require the Fans become Old Men ourselves!

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Son of the Wolf was already retconned by Blizzard. They said it was a possible future and we’ve already moved away from that possibility.

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I don’t think it’s been retconned. With Dreadlords being involved in 9.1, it can still happen.

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Gotta love how they never have to commit to anything ever.

“Here’s the definitive lore bible for WoW. What is in here is CANON!”
Months later…
“Actually it’s from the perspective of the Titans who aren’t omniscient so it’s not really 100% accurate and open to interpretation.”

“Here’s a vision of the future.”
A couple years later…
“Actually it’s just a potential future which makes us showing it completely pointless because it’s also a potential future that Anduin tripped down some stairs and broke his neck but we didn’t show that either.”

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Hopefully this is the case. I’d love for Anduin to stay away from any position of power in the Alliance.

One of the things about this that bothered me the most was Derek Proudmoore. I’m pretty sure in those books they confirmed that he was burnt to a crisp by the Dragon’s Fire. So this guy was killed by Dragon fire, resting on the ocean floor for like 20+ years yet the Horde was still able to find/identify his remains? And they were in good enough condition to be raised?

It’s even more annoying at the end of the day because i’m 99.9% sure that was done for nothing more than SHOCK VALUE. And that nothing else is really going to come from it. So what was the point?

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Functionally, its because they needed a catalyst for the Horde to be able to turn against her; since they could not allow Teldrassil to be that catalyst as it would have interfered with letting Sylvanas do what she needed to to settup SLs. Sigh … its functional, but absolutely trash writing. That often stems from starting at a conclusion point, and working your way back haphazardly to fill in the blanks.

As for Derek now … well, he’s mommy Menethil’s boy-toy. He, like nearly all of the very recently Alliance raised undead are sort of there to allow her to pretend to be getting to know here people. While ensuring Blizz doesn’t have to deal with pesky things like “How she would actually interact with the Forsaken people”.

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I would not be surprised if that is why they threw it out. Since Anduin is inexplicably High King since BfA, SotW cements that nothing significant will ever happen to the ever-static Alliance. Anduin will never experience any real danger or threat. The story was already almost over. Blizzard doesn’t have the writing talent to keep that storyline and still make it interesting.

Also they need to stop trying to force the wolf motif on the Alliance. If I want wolf this and wolf that, I’ll freaking roll Horde.

To be fair, it could still be canon. Anduin after merely got mind-controlled…

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They’re prone to succumbing to writers pets. Have zero interest or respect in the Old World content, or what stories could be told within it. Are not fond of World Building on a Macro level, even if they are capable of it on the more micro level. And have no idea how to write nuanced stories anymore.

That is a whole lot of troubling writing pitfalls and philosophies to contest with.

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I REALLY hope they did because the Alliance story would be dreadful going forward if that’s the case. It’d be incredibly boring knowing that this annoying, perfect, everyone loves him character was still going to be around for AT LEAST 30-40 more years storywise. That’s absolutely dreadful.

I don’t care for the High King position, but if it has to remain (even under a new title) i find Turalyon to be a much more interesting choice. And makes more sense. I also prefer Turalyon as the King of Stormwind & racial leader for the human’s. It’s a bit of a breath of fresh air.

This i never really understood either. Outside of Gilneans/Worgen the wolf doesn’t fit the Alliance. It’s like the Lion has been forgotten. The Lion is more of a Stormwind/Human thing but still.

Hopefully not :nauseated_face: :nauseated_face:

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Because everything surrounding Varian was a lazy copy+paste from the Horde. Also much of the old Blizzard guard are obvious Norsephiles.

Blizzard doesn’t have any interest in the Alliance outside of a few characters.

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My favorite is still retconning Sylvanas meeting the Jailor into Edge of Night. When she dies again at the end of the Silverpine Questline, where we don’t see what happens to her in the afterlife.

Also - I’d just accept the Jailor could’ve contacted her at anytime. But no. We had to go with a story told almost entirely from her perspective. Sylvanas is such a next level schemer that she has plans not even she saw herself making.

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