You make me smile, thank you.
The most inept leader of all time who was introduced as basically impotent the moment you meet him and Definitely Not At Fault At All for all the things the Zandalari have done since the Cataclysm because that was, uh, er, uhm, THAT GUY!
Like goddang I would’ve taken a Lore Hole leader before trying to pretend to be proud of Rastakhan. At least Talanji is a boss.
Aysa Cloudsniper or whatever her name is has a better track record than Rastakhan.
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I mean, they kept true to his character, at least, in a king grown indolent and lazy in the might of his kingdom, to the point even Zandalar half sinking and only a third of the landmass actually belonging in any viable way to the Zandalari, let alone a huge swath of his navy and enough soldiers and recruits to field a army leaving was not enough to snap him out of that rut.
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Do you guys remember how the whole reason we allied with Zandalar (and the Alliance with Kul Tiras, by proxy) was because of how really just wonderful and good their navy was, best in the world and all that, only for Azshara to sink a couple ships once and make the idea of naval combat completely irrelevant for the rest of the expansion?
Ah, what memories.
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BfA was kind of notable for how little any of it actually ended up mattering, wasn’t it?
Let’s remove the giant sword! Wait, no, let’s get a navy. Wait, no, let’s defeat Sylvanas. Wait, no, let’s defeat N’Zoth–that’s right, he’s been behind it all, apparently.
And through it all, the thing that ended up mattering most to the story was a zone in Kul Tiras full of trees and bones.
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Something something Azerite will revolutionize warfare
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We’re going to rebuild Orgrimmar out of Saronite!
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Remember how the Alliance went “we’re attacking your miners to prevent you from using this new material to make a dangerous superweapon” and the Horde went “how dare you just assume we’re going to use this stuff to make a dangerous superweapon, this is why the night elves deserve to get genocided” and then the Alliance showed up to Lorderon and went “look, the Azerite Superweapon!”
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Remember how the Azerite superweapon was just a big tank that literally got slapped to pieces by Anduin, the Light’s Chosen Paperweight, and this was supposed to impress us after we had just gotten off a literal magic spaceship with a laser not moments ago?
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This is one of the most important revelations to have when engaging with Warcraft. The franchise has always been both a parody and a pastiche: it has always rather obviously imitated a motley array of sources, celebrating them all by degrees and in its own particular and peculiar ways, but it also, perhaps unintentionally and blindly at times, often also makes a tremendous and playful mockery of that which it is imitating (perhaps most notably when it is a parody of itself, and progressively less coherent the longer it persists at that). The end result of it all, as you say, of it being taken inordinately seriously by its authors and fans alike, is that it then becomes even more utterly farcical on the whole. One of the most entertaining aspects of this for me personally is how oblivious some, maybe all, of the franchise’s own creators seem to be regarding the actual genre they are enmeshed within and churning out material for expansion after expansion. Do they take it seriously? Do they expect us to take it seriously? I don’t. /shrug
If it weren’t for the insulated fantasies of various roleplayers and their interconnecting headcanons with which I find myself to be simpatico I doubt I would maintain a subscription, beyond the simple joys of playing the game itself, but even the stories we’ve created over the years feel less and less tenable in light of the official story as it has developed since, I don’t know, WotLK or thereabouts. I don’t spend a lot of time on WoW anymore, but I think at this point some of the few threads that keep me around are simply the strange habituation to a certain nostalgia, friendships and community, and the detached amusement observing the absurdity of the train wreck itself.
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I don’t think they’re at all aware. I think they just haven’t evolved from the point where shirtless sweaty dudes screaming about honor was still cool. They either didn’t want to or it just didn’t occur to them that the world would move on.
Though it’s kind of hilarious when they abruptly realize how weird they look and change suddenly, a la going from WoD and Legion’s “boys trips” to three women leaders in BfA. I’m not complaining about that, mind you, I just thought it was really funny how desperately they scrambled and how little they actually learned, since all three of those leaders ended up being less important than Anduin and Saurfang, anyway.
It’s interesting that you note WotLK. I always had this vague inkling that they’re really aware it was their last unambiguous win, so anytime the game starts lagging, they start invoking WotLK more.
BfA was probably the worst-performer in some time, for example, and now with Shadowlands it turns out the Helm of Domination and the Sword Of the Most Popular Character are all part of the plot. Wow, how convenient.
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Imagine needing to look for every excuse to try and take shots at a callout against the Alliance rather than simply going 'yeah, they did wrong and the writing for why was horrid."
Frankly, I hope humans for the next few expacs get put in the same role Night Elves have had. Will do the Alliance good.
Ah, Battle for Azeroth: the Girl PowerTM expansion featuring the three strong female WARBRINGERS,
- One who commits genocide as part of a temper tantrum (except it was secretly her plan all along despite making no sense with how this is presented.)
- Another who just resets all of her character development back to the status quo from like ten years ago because it was inconvenient.
- And the last one, who just shows up completely out of nowhere and immediately gets defeated before she can even interact with the war.
But more importantly, we can’t forget Honorary Feminist Icon, Saurfang! And… Talanji, I guess? Maybe? Not really?
The marketing for BfA was so weird
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I mean I at least Azshara entertaining. I just enjoy evil characters that are hammy. I DO wish she’d done more during the war though.
Also a quick aside to say that I just really liked the setting for her fight in the Najatar raid. It was neat to look out through the bubble we were in and see more of those giant eels she kept as pets, and then from time to time you’d spot her circling the arena like a shark. 10/10 would fight an evil ocean woman again.
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Imagine the humans suffering a world changing genocide. That’d be totally original.
stares at total ruin of Lordaeron, Stromgarde, Alterac, Theramore and Gilneas, and at one point, Dalaran
stares at the entire population of Stormwind becoming refugees during the First and Second Wars
Srsly the only human kingdom to never be fully dismantled in the last 30ish years of lore time is Kul Tiras. And even they almost got taken over by pirates last year 
Humans got rekt way before anyone else. Pick on someone else, or they just get more screen time haha
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What? Who? What?
gets out the spray bottle and aims it at Lok
NONE OF THAT…
I do think that Sarestha points out a valuable point, however. Night Elves going off about losing their home and most of their people, completely ignoring the “… Really?” from the Humans, the Gnomes, the Sin’dorei, the Ren’dorei, the Draenei (good lord, the Draenei), the Mag’har, the Orcs, the Tauren, the Darkspear Trolls, the Sandfury … look, just all of the Trolls and … pretty much every sapient race on Azeroth at least once in their recorded history.
Every race has blood on their hands. Some are just a lot fresher than the others. We don’t see the Kaldorei wringing their hands over butchering the Twin Empires ‘just because’, or accepting the blame for the Sundering, but happily blaming all Orcs for Cenarius’s death and then The Burning happened…
TL:DR, the raging hypocrisy and lionizing/demonizing of the nations, factions and ‘Champions’ has always been, to me at least, one of the strongest points of the game and the part that kept me invested long after everything else faded to a bland ‘meh’ status.
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It rather had shades of that moment from the Avengers movie where the female characters who had been largely ignored for a generation of films killed like, four bad guys and it was intended to be this big “girls get it done” moment, but actually became a “well hold on” moment.
That’s what Warbringers felt like.
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It has to be completely unintentional on Blizzard’s part and just not wanting to go through the motions of updating whole zones and dialogue that aren’t immediately relevant, but boy does art imitate life with how much bad stuff happens to whole swathes of people and everyone else just kinda shrugs and sends care packages
Inb4 morally gray
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I’ll go to bat for Blizzard and say that, yeah, a lot of it just isn’t feasible. Like, if we’re being attacked by the Legion, it’s hard to justify spending the energy and time needed to show the Tuskarr feel about all this.
That said, I think they’re kind of…too brazen about it. Specifically, by just sort of shrugging off criticism of obvious plot holes like the Vindicaar.
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