If that’s the case, then the forum needs to acknowledge that and concede that both Night Elf fans and Sylvanas are equally victimized because they were. I would be happy to talk about this as fact, but I have found this to be a very divisive point of contention in these forums. People don’t want to admit Sylvanas fans were equally victimized by this story. What I said the other day still stands, if Afrasabi did intentionally lead Sylvanas fans into cognitive dissonance by believing Kosak’s Sylvanas was real subtext, only to pull the rug out from under us in the Loyalist ending, then the that was on them not on fans who has still hoped in the end she could be made into an anti-hero.
She was in the end a subtextual victim of SA who was continuously re-victimizied and villainized just for Afrasabi to hypothetically “stick it” to women who disagreed with his misogynistic personality and lifestyle and his irl vicitms. To assume he was coincidentally sexist, seems like the middle ground, not to upset anyone, and I can see why T&E would take that stance over one that may lose them followers or views.
But I do believe that BFA, especially the Horde Civil War had sexist undertones, I recently got a LOT of pushbacks for even saying that that other day, people just don’t want to hear it because it forces them to reflect on how they may have participated in, an were unwilling accessories to Afrasabi’s abuse.
The story beat of destroying Teldrassil and UC is an interesting one on paper, how it was written was not. I was very skeptical about BfA because I did not believe that Blizzard could write a proper war story or understood what “morally grey” was, I was proven correct on that front, also I found it very weird that the factions would start a war right after they worked together to defeat arguably their arch nemesis, however the idea that this “war” would result in actual losses in the face of lost capitals was pretty much the only thing that sold me on the story.
Speaking for myself here but I never did get on board for SLs story, exploring the death realm always felt like a jumping the shark moment for me and sounded like something that would involve a lot of retcons. That and it’s never a really good idea to break the concept of death in a fictional world.
Just quickly give the Nelves and Forsaken new home cities, then never refer to anything sucky from BFA and SL again, only bothering to keep the good elements. Which would be… Zanadlar and Kul Tiras themselves? Azshara’s still out there. And I guess Sylvanas is Missing: Presumed ‘Good Riddance’, and Anduin is mopey and no longer front and center of every single Alliance quest.
Some time in the far future, assuming that WoW still has one, when new developers have replaced all the old ones who were too busy being permanantly curled into balls so they could immediately huff their own farts and croon “Smells soooo beautiful!”, MAYBE someone much smarter than any of us can go back and try to slowly and carefully bring back the …less good BFA and SL material in ways that organically fit in with everything else.
Ignoring the elephant in the room isn’t a solution though? In fact after a while the elephant will start stomping around, eating the furniture, and taking monumental dumps in the room.
It is best to simply undo/remove the elephant.
Which we can literally do in the narrative (because of their galaxy brained writing) for the love of God.
Could you elaborate on that, I fail to see how fans were victimized.
Pulling the rug was never really intended because the Loyalist ending was never intended, the only reason you got to choose to side with Sylvanas was because there was a lot of backlash during the PTR because players that were on board with Sylvanas were forced to side with Saurfang in the narrative. It was a last moment decision to actually let you choose, everything after that was made on the fly and was never really planned.
“In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information. … The discomfort is triggered by the person’s belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.”
I can see that being true, because from a Loyalist PoV we were told that Sylvanas has the best intention for the Horde, and then the Loyalist ending cinematic pulled a 180 and told us she never cared about the Horde or Forsaken, and she was just killing as many people as possible to serve the Jailer. That’s not all what people have believed this whole time was her motives. It was actually the anti-thesis of Sylvanas’s character up until that point, and it gave a lot of Sylvanas fans and Loyalists whiplash. a lot of people left the fanbase over this.
The victimization came from the other players who gaslit Sylvanas fans into believing the Sylvanas they knew and believed to be true, never existed at all, and verbal and emotional abuse, and harassment that ensued as a direct result of this narrative. I pointed out two examples of this in this very thread by two very radicalized posters, who do this regularly.
Here’s my problem with that: the elephant exists in both in-universe and out-of-universe. Using Zereth Mortis to re-write reality only removes the in-universe elephant. But nothing, EVER can remove the out-of-universe elephant. It exists in our own memories, and can stomp, rampage and poop in there FOREVER- but only if we give it the power to do so. Which will you will do every time you think about it enough.
Again, DC comics tries to remove their elephants every decade or so- and never ever works.
Strongly recommend reading Virtual Worlds by Castronova but
When you agree to the game, you agree to the premise and basis upon which you entered.
Some of this premise/basis is core, ie cannot be altered or else it’s a fundamental breaking from the game, some of this is periphery and can be altered because it doesn’t break from the game.
MMORPGs are unique in that the game is the creation of Virtual World with naturally existing and evolving cultures and social rules; it is a world.
We access this Virtual World via a chosen Avatar that fits into this Virtual World via a chosen Fantasy. In our case, our Chosen Fantasy is primarily Race + Class (with gender, specialization, etc being secondary).
Castronova describes the boundary between Player and Avatar, between Real World and Virtual World, as the Magic Circle.
This Magic Circle, this boundary, is the permeable barrier between the Virtual World and Avatar and the Player and Real World; it is composed of the Rules we agree to, which includes the Chosen Fantasy.
The Burning of Teldrassil and the Faustianization of Sylvanas (to her S Word Attempt no less) broke the chosen fantasy we agreed to when entering this game as Forsaken players and Night Elf/Worgen players; the Evil Horde plotline where every Horde player was forced to commit acts of evil and war crimes broke the chosen fantasy when entering this game.
This is further exacerbated by a secondary layer of meaning given the Night Elves have always been a “feminist” race and Sylvanas is a 3-fold survivor (Explicit Genocide Survivor, SA Allegory Survivor because Golden describes her as having been “violated” by Arthas in the Arthas novel, and Explicit S Word Survivor after she jumped off Icecrown).
for a quick rundown, but I really do recommend buying the book if you’re a Gamer.
The Psychological Elephant can be removed, or at least shrunk, if the writers openly recognize the chaos and unrest and misery they’ve wrought and perpetuated.
The Burning, since the devs insisted that it be put in game, should have been handled with grace and the devs should’ve realized the burden of guilt it put on a lot of players.
As for the Shadowlands, the death realms should’ve always remained a mystery to mere mortals, so that the in game belief systems weren’t completely destroyed.
Ok I can agree to that, but calling this victimization, especially considering we are talking about fictional character is a bit over dramatic. But sure I can agree that the Sylvanas writhing was not a love letter to fans of the character. Speaking about cognitive dissonance though I believe that that’s what pretty much what most (if not all) players are experiencing right now in all aspects of the story. Zovaal being the mastermind behind everything pretty much ruined the whole lore for me and I think I’m finally done with the franchise as a whole. I have asked this before and I will ask it again, is there anyone that plays this game actually a fan of Zovaal? He is just a Med’an with a different coat of paint.
That was the original and ONLY plan they had, everything concerning the loyalists was the result of a last minute change to a questline. If your interested you can also track down the videos on youtube that show you that the Saurfang side was the original and only path, but was later changed to a branching story due to Sylvanas fans.
Exactly, finally someone who understand the importance of death and religion in fictional world building.
The War of Thorns was removed from the game completely after the prepatch. People can’t go back and do those quests. They’ll never feel bad about not being able to save all the Darnassus civilians. Blizzard might consider that enough for people to get over it.
Because when you have a character that is a Genocide Survivor, self-evident SA Survivor Allegory, and S Word Attempt Survivor, and people who are those things IRL relate to her because of it, and then they make her commit Genocide, tie her Faustian pact to her S Word Attempt, and do the SA Allegory that was done to her to someone else, that is violently harmful.
For the reasons I’ve outlined in my response to you due to the nature of the Magic Circle.
Blizz developers (laying down naked on a bear skin rug in front of a roaring fire and cradling a glass of red wine while crisp $100 bills flutter down upon them in a constant rain): MMMmmm… we hear that some of you don’t like the story direction for the past couple of World of Warcraft expansions. We’re sorry about that. So, soooo sorry… that you feel that way. It seems we’ve had a couple of naughty, naughty boys working here all this time, but we’ve gone and gotten rid of them, so everything going to be good now, trust us! (sips the wine) Oh, oh yes! The money!" (grabs a handful of the money piling up on the floor, and rubs it sensually across their body) Keep on sending it. As much as you can. Forever. We promise, we’ll be good to you now.
Sorry but I don’t find a heel turn of a character someone relates to, or the breaking of someones suspension of disbelief as victimization. Bad writing happens, deal with it, you are not a victim. If that were the case us comic book fans are genocide survivors.
So the “excuse” as far as I know is that all the bad writing so far is because Afr-whatevercantbebotheredtocheckspelling had some really “bad” ideas that were pushed on poor little Denuser to pull off, and that poor little Denuser was not invested in the story or didn’t agree with it so he didn’t pull them off properly… I work in character design and a lot of my contract work involves someone coming up with a poorly though out or bad idea (you have no idea how many “she needs to be strong and a female” I have had as the only descriptions these past few years) and for me to “make it work”, and you know what, that is part of the job. Also executing well poor ideas is a whole lot better than completely ruining the entire franchise, so on this part I can blame Denuser a whole lot more for this mess than Afrosalami. If we are to believe that 10.0 will be Denusers baby then 10.0 will be equally or more world breaking than SL.
Again, though, are you saying “the fact that the tree was burned is interesting”? Or are you saying “the fact that the Horde was responsible for destroying all of Teldrassil when it was full of innocent noncombatants is interesting”?
But there’s fun investment, and then there’s “I just want to make the pain stop” investment. Also, if this forum is anything to judge by, BfA also drove away a lot of players, at least some of whom left because of disstisfaction with the story.
I don’t think getting people with shock is a smart move, unless you can back it up. And yes, it’s the player’s responsibility to deal with it up to a point, but I think putting it all on the player is too close to equivalent to saying a storyteller’s decisions are all good.
I haven’t heard this before. Do you have a link to the source?