Its understandable as the Gods take a very Macro view to the cosmos and as such tend to forget that balancing the scales tends to result in horrific situations for the sapient life under their care, while Mortals tend to have the ‘Micro’ view since they’re restricted to a very small and focused view-point and are oblivious to the greater whole around them.
It will be fascinating to see if Tyrande can even keep her faith in Elune after learning her people were willingly sacrificed by the Goddess that she’s been serving for 10,000+ years and Elune’s just sad over it. Like, that’s a lot of faith and belief that just got shredded and left to blow in the wind, and it didn’t even work in the first place.
Kaldorei religious schism when? Everybody but the die-hards jumping to the Light simply because it obeys them if they believe in their course of action strongly enough and Elune gets a ‘whoopsie’ moment again when she realizes she’s just lost her last mortal followers, by her own hands no less.
If the genocide of Teldrassil was all a part of Elune’s keikaku, then how could the Night Warrior even have been a thing in the first place? Did Tyrande like, channel Elune’s anger at her soul delivery sack getting intercepted by that wily Jailor or something?
Anyone who thinks we’re playing a game and not just turning pages in a graphic novel at this point is, frankly, deluding themselves.
We’ve been on this “okay you had your moment, now you get to play with all MY characters” train for a bit, with - really - only Legion as the break where the story was about us and our ambitions and goals and successes and failures, then it was right back to being the proxy fill in, patted on the head for figuring out how to turn the page in the Great Sylvana-Thrall Jain-Bain-a-Verse and they’ve been on a bullet train towards erasing any and all of the goodwill and unity Legion created anyway - the Deathlord, the wholord? You mean Bolvar? Lady Liadrin fighting the Silver Hand within a week at the behest of a necromancer demigod? And that’s not counting the Halls and organizations that just suddenly disappeared overnight because clearly there’s no more globe ending threats to solve.
We occasionally meet a new POV character but they’re just swept off the table as soon as they start taking the spotlight away from The Real Main Characters.
Like, I don’t need a game to be all about my character, but knowing how many times we’re reduced to either “The [Title] Who Assisted My DM NPCs” or, given enough time, replaced entirely by a main character and/or the Kor’kron / Honorbound / 7th Legion as a faceless mook is a little bit too far in the other direction.
A good way to undermine your own setting is to constantly change the context of everything that happens in it, such that none of its consumers ever actually know what’s going on and you can made as many Not Technically A Retcon-s as you need by necessitating MatPat-style conspiracy theories to figure out the motivations and knowledge of characters.
In other words, they don’t retcon stuff anymore. They just write in such a way that it’s impossible to know what actually occurred in the story, so they can call you an unthinking idiot for not getting it when they change stuff on a whim.
That’s what it felt like in this expac for sure. The premise of Shadowlands just feels too foreign. It’s like they rolled the dice and picked some random things to put in. It doesn’t feel like it built very well upon anything other than making Sylvanas the center of the story.
There were no real clues dropped about the Jailer leading up through prior expacs. The direction they took the Night Warrior and Elune oppose what one would expect and want to see. Of the characters they’ve re-introduced, the only one I have any interest in is Uther - and I really wanted him to play a bigger part.
Nothing about Shadowlands zones are really appealing. I wouldn’t want Kirsy going to Bastion. She’d hate the memory loss too much - and I don’t think she’d be happy anywhere else, either! Honestly? She’d probably be freeing souls in the Maw (which…if the Maw was what Sylvanas saw that made her fear death…it just doesn’t feel that terrifying to me. More like boring).
As far as Elune and Tyrande, I feel like Blizz writers have borked them enough now. They can move on to the next set of characters to ruin. Who’s left?
This is really sad. There is no one left to root for. They are all either incompetent, ineffectual, or insane. Sometimes all three at once! Seriously there’s no one left.
I’d like to see Wrathion become the WoW version of Loki. I’d like to see Mayla Highmountain be similar to Brienne of Tarth. I want a rom-com with Flynn and Shaw.
What annoys me the more I think about it. (“Oh wow, Opherial, annoyed, you? Really? Wow.” go away) is they could have at least had it work. They could have at least had the Night Elf souls under divine escort bypass the Maw and actually be why Ardenweald was standing and it wouldn’t have really had any impact on the story because Tyrande’s people would still be dead and she’d still be hypercharged and ready to detonate and hungry for vengeance but no, they just went with “haha, moon lady dumb, not know about maw.”
Meanwhile former mortal turned Loa and his boss, Mozilla’Firefox who’s existed for five minutes and got speedbagged by mortals knew what was up.
Anduin. Oh wait… they aren’t going to ruin the holier than thou Golden boy who is the Human Supreme leader of the Alliance. Anduin is the only safe character in WoW.
I hate that they ruined Genn by tying him to Anduin. Don’t get me wrong, I like how Genn adopted a foster father role with Anduin, but they took it too far. He cares more about Anduin than his own daughter or his people at this point. I am tired of Genn bending over backwards and kissing the ground Anduin walks on do something for your people who are homeless OLD MAN!
