Was wondering, do we have any example in WoW of stories or elements which were oficially retconned after being originally…retconned? Thinking mostly about the Chronicles stuff. Thanks
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Right off the top of my head is Frostmourne.
Originally the blade was forged by the Lich King, then it was the Nathrezim, and now it was created by the Runecarver.
Potentially the Spell of Conjuration that ended up shattering Draenor into Outland, could be another. At the very least we’ve had three different explanations for why it occurred as it did.
- The Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos Game Manual stated that “the tremendous magical storms caused by the portals’ converging energies began to tear the ravaged world apart,” implying it was simply a consequence of the spell itself.[6]
- The Beyond the Dark Portal novel implies the transformation occurred because Ner’zhul had a moment of inattention that caused the spell to go awry.[3]
- World of Warcraft: Chronicle Volume 2 established that his desperate desire to succeed and recklessness caused the energies at his command to spiral out of control.[4]
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All of TBC. Making the Illidan gang evil. Cataclysm to whitwash Theramore expansion.
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The blood elves’ dubious relationship with fel is a good one. Nearly every source that touches on the topic retcons the previous one.
It WC3, it was no more than hinted at through their blood mages, whose spellbook brushed up against the warlock fantasy.
The Alliance & Horde Compendium depicted them as a full-blown, fel-mad villain race who outright abandoned the arcane for fel, despising and despised by literally every other race and faction on Azeroth. The other sourcebooks downplayed this a bit.
TBC debuted the entire blood elf race with fel eyes, but also made an important distinction between Kael’s group on Outland and Theron’s back on Azeroth: Kael’s guys went mad with fel magic, but Theron’s stuck to the arcane, as sucking down demon juice and a public alliance with Illidan Stormrage would’ve been too hard a sell for the average citizen of Silvermoon. The blood elf levelling zones focused entirely on the race’s addiction to the arcane.
To square this with those spooky green crystals holding Silvermoon together, the writers clarified that Silvermoon’s blood elves weren’t draining fel, but rather inadvertently absorbing it as the orcs did before them, since fel works like radiation and taints its surroundings. This was our general understanding of the issue for a long while.
Earlier Warcraft lit like the comic and Knaak’s novels made no real distinction there, and instead had characters like Broll and Valeera treat the blood elves as one big demon-sucking family under Papa Kael’thas and Uncle Illidan, but newer stuff with an actual focus on the race (Blood of the Highborne) made it clear that their addiction to the arcane was the real struggle, bringing focus back to that in-game blood elf experience.
Chronicles 3 cemented that quite thoroughly. A good chunk of the book was dedicated to explaining Kael’thas’s fel-fuelled fall from grace, and he was even made the focus villain for Silvermoon’s faction of blood elves, who specifically turned against him because of his addiction to fel magic.
Exploring EK retconned all of that, with Shaw’s blithe report that the blood elves replaced their addiction to the arcane with an addiction to fel, only for the Sunwell to purify them of it. The rewritten race blurbs on this website similarly state that “the people of Quel’Thalas sated their magical thirst with demonic fel energies.” You could dismiss the former as an in-universe error, perhaps, but the latter is a pretty staggering retcon… to a retcon… of a retcon…
I’m pretty sure that’s where we’re at right now. Eagerly awaiting the next one if this ancient topic ever becomes relevant again.
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Keep in mind that Exploring EK is written by in-universe characters and clearly Shaw might not have the whole truth or is writing from a place of bias.
Although there is also the whole argument of “writers are only hiding behind unreliable narrator to cover their butts over their bad takes”. Which is kinda true unfortunately.
Anyway, in relation to the topic, I would say the state of Gilneas and how blizzard kept on flip flopping between who controlled it.
By the end of Cata, after rogues killed Lord Creed (a black drakonid in disguise), you could reasonable assume that the Alliance still maintained control over Gilneas because that is how the Silverpine storyline ends. Darius recalls his troops to Gilneas and Sylvanas does not kill Lorna and make her undead. However at the end of Siege of Orgrimmar, Varian comments that Gilneas is a blighted hellscape. So… what happened inbetween the rogue legendary questline and Siege of Orgrimmar? But by the time we get to the reclaim gilneas storyline, where is all the blight? The intro to that mini story makes it clear that the Forsaken had just arrived with Tess.
Oh and there are those images of the forsaken just flinging blight into the city because reasons.
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OG Wrathgate = Sylvanas caught unawares, Putress, betraying Sylvanas
Chronicles = Sylvanas may or may not have known about wrathgate
Afrasiabi in an interview = Sylvanas did Wrathgate
Golden in her Sylvanas book = Sylvanas did not do wrathgate, did not know about wrathgate
Likewise the Sylvanas motivation for Teldrassil was retcon’d multiple times over both in-game during BFA, in both BFA short stories therein, in-game during shadowlands, and in the Sylvanas novel.
Etc etc etc
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To be fair, this is Jania and what she’s been through to continue(?) to keep the peace between the factions. 
Then she shouldn’t have invaded the barrens. Simple as that. I pray the next Chronicle volume won’t Paint her as victim.
Garona
Retconned so many times not even blizzard knows what her lineage is
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Sunstrider isle questing gave a strong impression even at release TBC that it was a mystery to a lot of people (there’s a strange corrupting force that is driving everything crazy on top of the scourge problems, I think it’s not outright stated that fel radiation is involved until either the end of zone blood elf intro questing or later; afair alliance side it’s only first brought up at Allerian stronghold)
Also Exploring EK makes a couple mistakes that I don’t think are meant to be retcons (when and why blood elves took up their current name is restated in-game and it still sticks to what had been canon since TFT when Tyrande and Kael’thas have their first meeting, Shaw just mixed up three bits of information because he’s incompetent)
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Illidan’s lore has been retconned at least twice.
Sylvanas’ lore has been retconned several more times.
And despite this people still think that Fel itself can be good, how!?
The Sundering has four different versions at the moment.
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The original, where in the final hours of the War of the Ancients, the forces of Kalimdor stormed Azshara’s palace and the Well of Eternity to try and stop them before they could summon the rest of the Legion and Sargeras. During the battle, Azshara targeted Tyrande deliberately, managing to badly wound her, and causing Malfurion to engage her direction in a magical duel. This duel was so cataclysmic, the strongest mage versus the strongest druid, that the already destabilized Well finally gave out, causing the Sundering.
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The Knaak novels don’t have Azshara participating at all, and instead the entire final battle has her lounging in her palace being waited on by Vashj, until the very last moment when the waters hit the palace and she’s swept away.
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The dungeon version, which is almost like the Knaak one except Illidan has his glaives and is a demon hunter, and Azshara actually fights the party for a bit instead being absent the entire time.
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The Warbringers cutscene, where she’s making some sort of speech to her people at the height of the battle, during the day (all other versions happened at night), and then uses her magic to hold back the waters for a while before finally succumbing. The conversation with N’zoth is also unique to this one, as even in Knaak’s version it’s just a brief offer that she immediately takes.
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TBC was atrocious. If any expansion deserves a retcon it is that. Like WoD can be ignored as a different universe with no impact.
There’s some stuff in TBC I like, but it does seem to suffer from being created before the writing team really figured out how to approach telling a narrative that flows through an entire expansion. Which is understandable, given that it hadn’t really been done before.
It’s understandable that later installments have contradicted or retconned things in TBC, I’d hate to be a writer and shackled to the decisions made for that expansion.
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The real question is: when are we gonna start seeing more of this for Shadowlands’ retcons? Because turning the entirety of Warcraft 3 into “the story of how the Jailer is literally the most important person ever and everything revolves around him” is not exactly an improvement.
BC feels like it should have a modern WoW story campaign with cutscenes but its missing
wheres the kael steals muru cutscene
and the scryers have a whole backstory not ingame
when you reach outland the elves are trying to get across hellfire to meet up with kael and then… nothing. like literally 0 quests about horde blood elves.
a few lines of dialogue change after silvermoon city is raided and muru disappeared that are basically “kael betrayed us”.
lorelol
Making Kael’thas evil was the single worst plot point after making Sylvanas warchief and doing a Garrosh repeat.
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I… i actually agree with you. He should have had a redemption arc and eventually lead the horde.
Being dead and all, I say he’s well past that point. Unless they bring in a AU Kael
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Nah. I hate the brought back from the dead stuff. Like, imagine had he not been killed in bc.
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