Because this is materially the case
The CDev team is visibly under staffed and the Quest/Encounter Teams have a lot of leeway in what goes into the text.
There is ONE (1) Historian and he does not have a sub team that serves as Lore Editors for all quests
Now, according to Questifer in a tweet a few months back, every sub team has a WoW Writing and/or CDev person
But that doesn’t necessarily translate to Editorial Purview.
So unlike Every Other Major Game, where they have IN-HOUSE IRL HISTORY TEAMS and ACTUAL WRITERS having a chokehold on the world building
The Devs™, who are not Professional Writers nor Trained Historians Or Academics Otherwise, are allowed control over world building
Ergo why we get odd hyperspecific references (there’s a venthyr couple at the ember court to the side that have names but aren’t interactable that are references probably to a fairly popular Filipino soap opera that even Christie Golden is watching because other Blizzard people are watching it, or how the four mini bosses in front of Lady Darkvein in CN are four Romanian words that form a half sentence) or incredibly basic western hegemonic references (eg Muh Dracula’s Castle, Muh Angel Psychopomp, Muh Thanos Lucifer Sauron Zovaal)
Because it’s all to the whims of individual devs who do the material labor of building the game world and have been loaded with the creative labor of world building
I will not have faith in WoW’s writing team until:
- They admit the monster races based on POC are representation
- Say they are working on adding more phenotypic diversity to the races in general, eg curly hair for all
- Add an inhouse historian team, or at least 3 historians in CDev
- Add at least 5 subhistorians with editorial purview
- Take world building eg quest text out of Game Dev hands, or at least have mandatory editorial approval