This entire story arc just leaves me confused.
Warcraft has never felt this much like a Saturday morning cartoon. The power of forgiveness is the ultimate power Tyrande, you silly goose, vengeance against the conductor of a genocide is never the answer!
blizzard: lets male employees harass a bunch of women and even drive one to suicide.
in-game story: actually VENGEANCE is wrong, victims should NOT seek retribution of any kind
“Do not seek justice” is a hell of a hot take for the company, and to a FEMALE character, given…gestures
wow. that’s uh, hm.
I got nothin.
apparently Elune just let it happen. She did admit to trying to send them to Ardenweald, but all she did was put them to sleep while the city burned and they went to the Maw anyway
I did say somewhere a few months ago that Elune let it happen to empower her own realm with souls. Turns out I was partly wrong, she was sending them to her sister
friggen lol
I just straight up ignored the “Vengeance or Renewal” due to its sheer absurdity due to… Several reasons, both in-and-out of universe.
However, I do think there’s been a lot of misinterpretation of Elune’s role in the burning of Teldrassil. Elune as an entity has kinda had her hype built up to massive amounts. However, she’s never been omnipotent, omniscient, or known to directly intervene in catastrophic events, such as the War of the Ancients, the Third War, or the Third Invasion of the Burning Legion (i.e. Legion). Frankly, to me… I’ve always thought she was powerful, but never omnipotent. It’s a fairly-common practice in real-life religions for gods to be powerful, but non-omnipotent, to be limited to acting within their domains. Not always, but not uncommon.
I think Elune has historically been the psychopomp for the kaldorei. She’s guided their souls to whatever afterlife/afterlives they might typically go to, which does not necessarily seem to be the Shadowlands (could be wrong!). Thinking of the souls we have seen, very few are actually kaldorei, save the ones rescued from the Maw.
Point is, as has been demonstrated, Elune was incapable of stopping Teldrassil. Why? I’m not sure, power levels in WoW have historically made no sense. At the same time, she was asked to assist Ardenweald by her sister. Remember that sad cinematic of all the wild seeds dying? That’s what Elune was trying to help stop. So, she made the best of a bad situation and, instead of sending the souls where they might otherwise normally go (one of her afterlives?), she instead directed them to Ardenweald. How did she not know about the Maw? Because the Winter Queen didn’t know at the time of the request to inform her. The Winter Queen didn’t learn about the souls going to the Maw until the Maw Walker told her (because the Eternal Ones are incompetent). And, Ardenweald isn’t necessarily a bad afterlife for a Kaldorei. Maybe not ideal, but that might be alright, especially if it’s just temporary.
That’s my interpretation. However, my bigger problem is that this took information jumbled over three years to make sense. It’s really frustrating to try to piece together what happened, because Blizzard insists on their wait-and-see trickle-feed method of storytelling, where everything is kept hidden to be revealed later. Even stuff no sane person would keep hidden, things like what is this character even doing? They do it to drum up hype and get speculation videos to advertise their game for free, not because they care about telling a good story.
EDIT: I guess my point is… I don’t like the new cinematic, but I also don’t hate it. I’m at that new standard of indifference to anything Blizzard churns out. So, I’m not saying it’s good by any means. I just want to dislike it for the right reasons: it’s another sloppy beat delivered far too late to have an impact, not because Elune crapped on the Kaldorei.
This is pretty much in line with what many here joked/anticipated would happen and, given the cinematic at the end of the current raid, leans heavily towards everything else we laughed about back in the last expansion, even being destined to happen.
Yes, it’s bad!
It’s almost as if recent news highlights the fact that stories resonate not only with audiences but from within, and the company being horrible echoes out to the narrative.
I hate this. I hate this so much. I hate it so, so, so much.
This feels so jarring that I feel like a lot of the Shadowlands storyline is a massive kneejerk/attempt at course correction for how BFA was received. There seems to be too many writers in the room, without focus, scrubbing the forums for ideas because they’re disassociated with the franchise, and then just gumbo potting it all together.
Guys. Shadowlands is a whole new level of bad. We’ve reached mythic+ bad. Terribad.
There actually aren’t that many writers in the room if you look at the credits to these games. It’s just that they aren’t great at storytelling OR prose. The only redeeming quality of this “story” is stuff the RPers have done with it IMO.
I was talking to a friend about this this morning. The absolute most optimistic and generous take you can get from that cinematic is that Elune is a friggen idiot.
There was a call for aid, right? She heard that call for aid. She never thought to clarify what kind of aid was required? Like clearly the Maw was the problem here… But no she just yeeted the souls straight in and actually wound up helping the enemy.
It’s like somebody asks you for a drink so you tip over a friggen water bottle and pour it out on the floor, hope the person who asked drinks it, then never check in again.
Elune’s attempt to help, even if she just repurposed the souls of her people and didn’t directly cause or aid the burning of Teldrassil itself, was the most stupid, idiotic move. If I was a night elf and I’d devoted my entire life to the worship of this MORON I’d be so embarrassed right now. What a pathetic excuse for a deity.
Edit: as for renewal vs vengeance?
Like Tyrande can get vengeance (although I would use the word justice in this case) for the immense wrongs suffered by her people, and still rebuild and renew afterwards. In a sane world.
You know with all that’s happened and everything that’s going on right now with Blizzard I think enough has been said about the lawsuit that I want to give my 2 cents about the narrative.
This is fanfiction trash tier writing. We’ve now fully gone beyond the level of shark jumping ridiculousness that is acceptable. Golden and Danuser are clearly seeing that their plots are being negatively received both on twitter and on forums and they just do not care. They do not care about set-up. They do not plan ahead about overarching plots. Handwaving decades of lore down the drain for “this sounds cool let’s do it”, or something that is extremely agenda driven. They are pushing the idea that strong-powerful female characters must be at the forefront(and they can’t even do that right) yet ironically enough they treat women like garbage at their own offices. That is not how you write a story.
Something that annoys me is the new cosmology chart. The Titans have been completely thrown to the side in favor of the first ones not even 2 expansions after we’ve defeated Sargeras. It’s like they don’t even matter anymore. And they’ll defend that by saying “well the book was written by a broker so the viewpoint is skewed!” I don’t believe that for one second. This is a deliberate attempt to throw out old lore in favor of an entirely new pantheon.
Now for the big Godlike elephant in the room. Elune has had her first in game appearance since first being mentioned in Warcraft 3. And the best they can do is an almost comically bad version of “bush did 9/11” in WoW by saying she tried to solve the anima drought by letting Teldrassil burn… while also not being aware that the anima drought was being caused by all the souls going into the maw… while also forgetting that Bwonsamdi was able to circumvent this by keeping Troll souls(including Vol’jin and Saurfang’s) from going into the maw. The entire reason a dungeon happens in Ardenwaeld. I guess blizzard forgot about that. Elune has always been this mystery figure. Is she this primal being? Is she a Titan? Is she Eonar, or a Naaru? No. She’s just one of the first ones and she’s just a klutz that condemned her own people to superhell accidentally.
We now have no other reason to assume Sylvanas burned Teldrassil than out of malice. She knew that all the souls of the night elves that died would go to superhell. There was no saving them. The tree wasn’t being corrupted by N’zoth. Nor any other reason. Now the entire reason that Tyrande was pursuing her vengeance is also completely gone. She decides to do what Ellie does in the Last of us 2. Kill everyone except the person responsible for her loved ones dying. It’s like Guts saying to Griffith “It’s ok I forgive you.” Unacceptable. Terrible. Tyrande has Warglaives and she decides to strangle someone that doesn’t breath. Another genius move.
We also have the Jailer, Sargeras, and the Dreadlords. The entire undead campaign in Warcraft 3 is now just all the Jailer’s forces infighting with eachother because that’s what retconning without thinking about the implications does. The Jailer is now responsible for the Corruption of Sargeras through Mal’ganis who is back again. Sargeras just didn’t go insane trying to decide how to deal with the void gods and think that the pantheon weren’t doing enough to stop them from consuming the universe. He had some weirdo whispering in his ear telling him what to do. I wonder when we defeat the Jailer we find out that the SUPER JAILER was telling the Jailer what to do.
All in all. Warcraft’s lore is an awful dumb mess. I don’t care about it anymore. Neither should anyone at this point. Like I said before the writers are too self absorbed to listen to what others are saying to try to write something decent. 9.1 wasn’t written until 9.0 came out. Sorry for the long post. This is Grimmox signing off.
Like, Elune was one of the last slightly unspoiled still-cool mysteries about the game and they couldn’t resist making her an unbelievable idiot complicit in actual genocide. I’m actually sad.
I mean this is really small potatoes compared to the, uh, actual harassment and discrimination going on but while we’re here
“lol.” said the sint.
“lmao.”
“rofl” said the slitherkin.
“roflmao”
GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
To be fair this was probably done way before the suit came out, so it’s probably unrelated. Unless, I guess, the story and/or animation teams knew there was going to be a reckoning beforehand and just have poor taste and actually you know that’s entirely plausible.
This cinematic feels like if a fan-fic was submitted for a story/writing contest and and Blizzard intern made it canon.
Except we’ve had that happen before (Shadow of the Sun) and that one was good. This is not. Not. At. All.
On a positive note, the Night Elves can instead come worship Bwonsamdi, that one deity who actually looks after his charges.
Pretty sure the Nelves can swing it since they can point at the evolution tree and make the convincing case their on the same tier of evolution that the Darkspear are on technically.
From the look of it, Tyrande generated a Tear of Elune, and probably a chance to reincarnate the victims of the War of Thorns. This is one of the few ways I see her giving up vengeance making any sense at all. If I were in the position, I’d take any opportunity to just have all my people back like the war never happened and give up shredding my body to pieces just to chop one undead elf’s head off.
I can see it working if they write the next parts very, very carefully.
I’d frankly lol so hard but support Blizzard doing that since it would remove the stain of BfA and SL from a story standpoint.