Unfortunately, I think this topic is here to stay until/unless Blizz does something with the story that’s so overwhelming/shocking/etc that it holds people’s attention more.
These topics never die - the best they do is go to sleep for a while, until people get bored and bring them up again. The best way to avoid them seems to be to a) not post in them and keep them alive, and b) find something else to discuss.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem like there’s enough lore on TWW or Midnight yet for the forums to sink their teeth into. So, the forums is going to bring up the good ol’ workhorse of faction grievances, of which the Burning is the most egregious and fairly recent example. (I still hope that Blizz just goes out and retcons the worst of it and removes their approved “genocide” label, so it becomes less contentious.)
I was going to mention Taurajo as an undying forum bone of contention, too, but I haven’t heard much about that recently. I think the Burning knocked it off its pedestal. I guess that goes to show how shocking something has to be to supplant the former shocking faction grievance.
Yeah, it was a dumb move on blizzs part. Could have just labeled it a war crime and left it at that. Or a horrible accident gone wrong, anything really but labeling it a genocide.
And now we’re stuck with that labeling and all the baggage that comes with it while trying to discussing it.
(And I do apologize for our argument over discussing the lore a while back. I was sick and a tad cranky and combative. Sorry for being dismissive towards ya)
It’s the reverse. People are comparing the fantasy thing to the Holocaust usually when talking about it. Which is cringe. Really really cringe and takes away from what actually happened during the Holocaust and the horrors that my family faced.
But like… are we really discussing anything new here?
I feel like we come to the same conclusion over and over again within these threads to the point that they’re really nothing more to say.
And I definitely don’t think that bringing up IRL genocides is constructive to these kinds of conversations at all. At worst it’s traumatic to bring up, at best it muddies the waters and infects the conversation with real world political charges.
Seems to be that way, unfortunately.
Bottom line is, this was a terrible writing mistake and it seems that Blizz is making efforts to try and bury or bring conclusion to it as best as they’re capable of writing it.
I agree, that’s why when they make those comparisons, it’s best to point out how unlike WoW the real world situation is. There’s no Jewish wisps flying around Isreal, because Isreal is a real place and Teldrassil isn’t.
This was my point. Expecting characters to react to in-game events like we would in real-world ones is inherently flawed, because the two worlds operate under entirely different sets of rules.
I agree that doing that doesn’t help the point someone is making and often detracts from the topic. I’ve seen some really good points about Teldrassil get derailed because someone couldn’t resist and try to compare it to a real world event.
People often struggle to seperate reality from fantasy after all.
It’s fine. I was the same way at the beginning of Dragonflight when the leaks for Amirdrassil happened. I was like everyone else. “Oh it shouldn’t be too bad. I mean all of Kalimdor was essentially Azeroth.” And trying to be positive. And maybe secretly hoping that they might have made a mistake. That you know maybe they’ll change their minds. A lot can happen between the beginning of the year and now.
And then the realization hit when Emerald Dream hit. They were intending on this for the word go. And I’ve been just tired the whole expansion. Blizzard has a story in mind, they’re going to write how they want, even if it doesn’t make sense to me. Granted I’ve only played WoW for six years, middle of BFA. I haven’t picked up a single Warcraft game aside from WC III Reforged, and I’ve got to like…the undead campaign where you fight orcs and then the game corrupted. But I’ve read up a lot of the lore, and still re-reading things. (Because my adhd gremlin mind has a limited capacity. My brain is a representation of Windows 98. Complete with dialup half the time.)
And honestly rping on MG has made me used to being dismissed lol. For me it’s another day.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t help that Blizzard almost added a damn concentration camp to 8.1 before it got hastily scrapped from the PTR. I think the Holocaust comparisons were very much intended to be made at the time.
I know there were allusions to the Forsaken Banshee Loyalists also being carted off somewhere too at the end of the Fourth War when I played Horde as a Banshee loyalist.
Part of it is that Teldrassil was so bad that it forever altered the moral balance between the factions.
Taurajo already struggled to be recognized as a legitimate grievance for the Horde because the narrative, itself, did it’s best to smooth the whole thing over. #LegitimateTarget
Now imagine trying to argue that the Alliance was in the wrong for Camp T in the current day and age after the Horde willingly abetted in a story-defined genocide.
It should be noted, this isn’t new or isolated.
Golden has gone on record stating that she drew significant inspiration from the Nuremberg Trials when she was writing Warcrimes.
Yeah I feel you, this is hardly something new to this topic alone.
Trust me, I’ve felt this same way hundreds of times when it comes to Blizz’s story writing.
Interesting really cool worldbuilding set pieces with so much potential then they just…
Drop it…
Like, completely shatter it, not even drop it gently or anything…
Shatter it to the point that it’s entirely gone and unfixable.
Then they just leave it and move on to the next thing.
Worst thing is when they go back and retcon it to fit with that new story-shattering and remove everything I found interesting about it previously.
Or go back and retcon it to recontextualize it to something hardly related to it just because it’s the new big theme of the new big expansion…
And then proceed to shatter any potential within that big theme as well lol
I blame that on how Blizz tends to write the story. With multiple teams working on seperate sections and none of the teams communicating with each other, that’s how blizz ends up with retcons down the road to try to make sense of their own garbage.
If ALL THE TEAMS worked on the story together, with a coherent basis, instead of trying telling a Horde or Alliance version, things wouldn’t be soo bad.
I wish they would stop with that. Say what you will about DF, but it’s a great start to trying to tell a coherent story without getting different teams involved with the whole different perspective sides of the story nonsense they tried over the years that never works out.
Taurajo already struggled to be recognized as a legitimate grievance for the Horde because the narrative, itself, did it’s best to smooth the whole thing over. #LegitimateTarget
Besides, the Horde already killed the dude responsible: Hawthorne.
Yeah, that’s what gets me more hopeful about this whole ‘Worldsoul Saga’ thing.
It seems like they actually have a coherent idea for what they want to do with the story going forward and have a basic outline for how they want to go about it.
All past expansions always felt like Blizz was pulling a rabbit out of a hat and trying to fit it in with what they wrote previously… Which always turned out either fine or really bad.
I wish they would stop with that. Say what you will about DF, but it’s a great start to trying to tell a coherent story without getting different involved with the whole different perspective sides of the story nonsense they tried over the years that never works out.
Facts; leads to more coherency and stableness rather than inconsistency, an example of past storytelling gone wrong that immediately comes to mind is the Purge of Dalaran; Horde-side Jaina fireballs without issue fleeing civilians, Alliance side it’s a bug and she only teleports them to the Violet Hold.
The WoT was essentially a check that Blizzard wrote to us that they quickly realized they could never actually allow us to cash. So, what they attempted to do is trade back that check with another plot arc that did not really get the support it needed to feel justified. on top of that, intentional or not, they kept pausing every so often as if to say “is this enough?” and then when the backlash came in they would seemingly lay down more track in front of themselves. Not a good look.
In their mind they have likely paid pack something equal to that WoT check with Amirdrassil.
In the end, for a lot of people I wager, Teldrassil is still the elephant in the room that hasn’t been properly addresssed.
Instead they painted the room grey and gave us a pretty new world tree in hopes the problem can be swept under the rug. I’m sure it worked for some people, but it still feels like the story never properly dealt with the consequences of the WoT
Not sure if I’m alone in that feeling or not though
The biggest symbolic thing they could of done is have trials for the sylvanas loyalists and have Belmont and Nethanos be the embodiment of that in their unrepentant natures subsequent execution after guilty verdicts.
I agree with OP, the idea that the night elves would just up and forgive the Horde so quickly is pretty laughable. Anduin or the rest of the Alliance suggesting that they just get over it came off as extremely insensitive and naive.
In the end I mostly blame Blizzard for doubling down and continuing this cursed storyline that explicitly brought genocide into the limelight instead of owning up and just retconning the entire thing. They, the setting, and much of the fanbase isn’t mature enough to talk about that subject.
In a way not precisely? She was one of the main Night Elves drinking Anduin’s koombya kool-aid in BfA, and focused on redirecting Tyrande’s vengeance off of Sylvanas in SL. If someone was gonna guess a night elf Blizzard to use as a sockpuppet for peace with the Forsaken, a lot of people would finger Shandris.