On the topic of this book itself. Well, we’ll see. Since seems to be slated to come out after the conclusion of the Raid, either its meant to postmortem window into Sylvie’s journey to her end destination … or its a window into her psyche meant to garner wiggle room for some form of redemptive path. Depending heavily on the outcome of the Raid. Either way they go though, I can’t see her being validating in her acts.
I guess … we’ll see.
There’s literally nothing left to enjoy about this narrative; it’s a garbage fire. I try my best these days to outright ignore the story they write and just busy myself with old world content and RP. It’s been a much more enjoyable experience ever since.
I don’t think it’s about forgetting, I think it’s about Blizzard not having a grounded sense of what the difference is between a deep and emotionally driven narrative, and a shock and awe factor in their stories.
Teldrassil was served as a means to shock people into saying “They can’t do that; that’s my city!” or “Yeah, that’s what they get!” rather than examining the emotional burden/consequences imposed by the choices that are/were made. Blizzard ignored every single opportunity to explore the emotional cost/outright revulsion towards genocide when instead they so casually trotted it out for shock and awe. Teldrassil could have honestly been the climax of the narrative, not the opening, and it would have made more sense. But instead we got… gestures at everything.
The only character anyone ever saw an emotional reaction from was Saurfang, one of the designers of the war, which is problematic for two reasons: 1) some people believe he went about opposing Sylvanas in the wrong way, and 2) his objection was that people were murdered without honor, rather than him being concerned about the fact that children were killed in the first place.
Saurfang didn’t object to the murder of the innocent, he was objecting to how they were killed, and that it painted him and the Horde in a bad light. Think of the prison cell scene with Anduin; he never expressed remorse for the murder of the innocent, he was whining about how he wants his Horde back.
There’s no moral argument in the equation for him. We’re dealing with a parallel to something like Rudolf Höss and Heinrich Himmler arguing over how best to kill people during the Holocaust; they’re not arguing the morality of the act, they’re arguing the efficiency of the method.
BFA/Saurfang’s story (regrettably) focused on humanizing mass murder, and thus far Shadowlands has seemed to be about trying to justify Sylvanas’ actions, or prove that she’s not all evil after all and that genocide isn’t the worst option on the table. Neither expansion or story has yet to explore the human cost of wars fought for stupid reasons.
This is on purpose, though. Blizzard deliberately avoids this subject because it’s what they’ve always done. They didn’t explore it after the betrayals and conflict in Wrath, nor after Cata, nor after the Siege of Orgrimmar, and they have continued to avoid it now, when it matters most.
The writing has been, through and through, insensitive, lazy, and poorly thought out when it comes to addressing the actual questions being presented by the narrative.
Personally? I enjoy the faction conflict when it’s done right, but it hasn’t been that way in a long, long time.
Well, from somewhere they got ideas for death camps in Darkshore, that’s for sure. They only took it out when people raised hell on the beta forums.
The fact that this company would double down on portraying the Horde as genocidal maniacs, at any point in the story, is just thoroughly disappointing.
Interestingly the most successful resistance to the Axis I’ve read about was in Vietnam. Though a lot of history books don’t like to mention that because they went on to give three winners of that war a black eye with the same strategy in short order.
Lord of the Clans, The Shattering, and especially Rise of the Horde were also great.
Even though I loathed the Forsaken’s treatment in BtS, I’ve defended Golden before. Her writing is solid and at worst adequate for multimedia genre fiction.
My rancor is more with Blizzard. Someone there ought to have known the most interesting quality to the Forsaken was their personal liberty. The earliest quests in Deathknell stress that the Forsaken do not gang press the undead into service. They’re free to leave if they’re disinterested.
Even the Rotbrains aren’t hostile to the PC until plans to attack Deathknell are discovered and Voss never joins the Forsaken. They’re disappointed as clearly she could be a powerful addition, but so long as she’s not pointing her knives at them she’s free to go and do what she wants.
And later in the Plaguelands you meet an Argent Apothecary who use to be in RAS but left due to ethical disagreements. This is a government scientist who probably has some sensitive Intel and he’s completely free to go join the Argents.
So Sylvanas losing her mind because one old deader wanted to live in his daughter’s basement was completely asinine. That sort of thing would’ve been allowed up until that exact moment.
Many of the Forsaken are shown to be aware of living relatives. I just assumed they didn’t want to live in Stormwind for the same reason a human wouldn’t want to live in the Undercity. Even if you were completely accepted by the populace, the living and undead could not have more drastic differences in terms of what they need for quality of life.
The undead don’t hang out in crypts and haunted forests because of brand recognition. Undeath doesn’t change a person’s personality, but it does change their style and what they find attractive. On Tutorial Island for example one of the undead mentions she use to find spiders repulsive but in undeath she can’t help but fund them cute. A haunted mausoleum with a giant vampire bat in it looks like a cozy cabin with a big friendly dog to the undead.
So obviously even if your family would accept you, and their neighbors would tolerate you, an undead just isn’t going to be happy in a brightly lit ranch house in Elywyn. Because that’s the eerie crypt with scary creatures in it to them.
One, the “moral superiority” is not a goal. No one should have the moral high ground. Especially in the world that was created for us. Whenever people think they have the moral highground, the story should (as it often did) remind us that none is without sin.
Two, mass murder is the appropriate term, even for many real life acts that are generally accepted as genocide. When everything can be genocide, then nothing is genocide. Thats why, no matter how many times a dev or writer or character repeats that refrain that Christie started in Elegy, it never becomes anything more than one way to paint it.
Changing absolutely nothing about the event, you can accurately call it mass murder. It doesnt change anything for people who are enraged by it, but allows people who try to rack up thousands of honorable kills to feel ok about it if they want to, without basically being labeled a national socialist, a crusader or an ottoman.
A position that oddly enough tends to be held mostly by people who don’t have it.
Sure… or someone who likes the morally grey themes of WoW.
Also what material difference does it make to call it mass murder instead of genocide other than one word is better for your ego than the other?
Why?
In my experience, people will inevitable justify anything. You have some people saying the genocide is fine because Sylvanas is trying to free the universe from the injustice of the Shadowlands.
Even besides that, you have people saying the Night Elves deserved it. And that total war is normal and fine.
I don’t really see the difference when the same amount of people are being killed.
Thats part of the problem. It is a phrase that is not effectively describing the event any better than mass murder, but effectively slants the narrative much better. Genocide is a bad word. Anyone accused of genocide is a bad guy. It doesnt matter if any actual genocide has occured. The word no longer means what it was supposed to mean because its politicized. Its bad journalism. In this case, bad writing; where you have 2 factions that you hope to have mostly equal (but actually biased toward horde because of bad development) there is nothing to be gained by accusing one side of genocide. Even worse if you actually write them as genocidal. Which didnt happen, but even if it did, thats not an argument in favor of the writing.
The fact that you cant see the difference is part of what is wrong with that word. English speakers butcher language in the name of dishonesty or poetry. Lust for example… it was descriptive of a sort of mania, but we poetically made it just mean really strong desire. Hilarious, hysterical, etc. As for dishonesty- racist, xenophobe, homophobe, genocide, terrorist… these words are losing their meaning because the political sphere uses them dishonestly. Christie Golden doubled down by also using it poetically.
I don’t think it slants it any differently.
That’s also true of mass murder.
Sure it does. An accusation is just an accusation unless it has backing.
See what I mean? People will deflect regardless.
Language evolves, that’s what it does. That’s fine.
Also, this is basically a TERF argument. If words change over time, that’s fine.
Is it really fine? Is using words incorrectly so often that it alters the word’s common use, actually “evolution”? It seems a lot more like de-evolution to me.
I mean, if you wanna word police then go ahead, but it’s a losing war.
Yes. Language is a tool to describe things. If people are using it to describe something differently, clearly that use is preferred.
We can observe this in a lot of things. Like the word wicked. I sure never see people complain that’s come to have a new meaning as in cool. Because hey, people have found that useful. That’s the reason it is being used that way.
And as Arlifrex said, it is a losing battle. Some words will change meaning over time with enough people and repetition. If you think it is better that genocide doesn’t change, you can think that. Doesn’t really mean that’ll be respected.
Oh, I think they did do that. They just didn’t do it in the timeframe after the release of Warbringers: Sylvanas. They made it in advance because they knew there would be backlash and for some unfathomable reason, they thought four minutes of Saurfang being sad in high-res CGI would help.
I thought that Old Soldier was great by itself, it just sort of sucked that Saurfang got 3 CGI cinematics while the Alliance didn’t really get any.
At least the Alliance’s reclamation of Lordaeron was memorialized in the expansion cinematic so that event did get some of the weight that it deserved.
I remember watching it for the first time and when I saw the Alliance’s battlelines I was satisfied in a way that I hadn’t been for years. “This is what should have happened after the Forsaken’s actions in Cataclysm” I remember thinking
It was so good.
I think the one had Anduin in it more than Saurfang.