Your basic understanding of what Chronicle is seems fundamentally incorrect. It is not “all the story to be told.” It would be like saying The World of Ice & Fire hamstrings GRRM’s unreleased sequels. Providing structure is an important part of storytelling, because (as the original WoW devs, particularly Metzen, knew well) the world is a character. If you want people to maintain the ability to suspend their disbelief and otherwise buy-in, they need firm footing and points of reference within the lore/setting.
It also helps to not have the creative control changing hands all the time, but that’s easier to manage when it’s a dude writing a book vs. a company paying people to write a game.
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I understand this. My point is more that, since it isn’t, its ill-advised to try to canonize everything that isn’t already explicitly canon. You never know when a new writer comes along and has a great idea for how to retcon something but it is kind of ruined by the word of God stating such and such is true and cannot be questioned. As a writer for a franchise that is not solely one’s own, it’s impossible to predict the limitations you might impose on future storytelling.
Metzen did not burn down the tree and did not say so. He even expressed surprise that it occurred. He’s pretty clear about his involvement on WoW’s story direction in a podcast he did with a few years back with Scott Johnson.
No, you’re still not correct. Chronicle was trying to clean up the stuff that was already explicitly canon. Because these details were getting lost/confused and the lore nerds who obsessed over those details kept rubbing their noses in it.
And I’m sorry, but the creative considerations you just laid out are actually insane. Don’t clarify or explain the myths, cosmology, or history of your setting because someone years down the road might not be able to shoehorn their incompatible ideas into it? Why are we putting the blame on the person/people trying to inform a consistent setting and not the people who lack the self control to resist smearing their proverbial diarrhea all over everything that came before them?
But it is more interesting if the narrator is unreliable. For instance we already have strong indicators that if Xalatath isnt Azeroth, she was certainly equal to the “four” old gods mentioned in Chronicles. If she is an old god, as she seems to claim, she makes 5, right?
At the very basic level, the story can be told from at least 2 points of view and being that it was told from the point of view of Titans who only seem to be aware of 4 old gods, chronicles is, by necessity, unreliable.
But that is also okay. It is okay fo be uncertain of the story, or to be curious if there is missing data or context. Much of WoW we spend learning secrets and unlocking history. It should be a surprise!
What is less okay, to me, is to take parts of lore we dont like (that ended up in the game!) And be like “we can and should freely ignore this”.
A good writer can cover it up. A great one can take that story and make it mean something. But throwing in the towel, intentionally, because we are mad about Shadowlands is a shame. Because i want to see what can be done with all that in the hands of a better writer and world builder. I want to know what he’ll do with all of that. To say “shadowlands is not canon” (when it is!) Or that “metzen would never have had us go to the shadowlands” when there is foreshadowing as early as legion (three times!) And absolutely in early BFA, which Metzen would have had some hand in.
Would the storytelling been as awful? No. But we would have gone. We would have dealt with the fallout of killing Argus.
So given all those truths, having to ignore it all because you want that book to be sacrosanct?
Seems like a waste.
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If it was explicitly canon, then that supports my position that chronicles was a cash grab. If it was not just canon, but explicitly canon, it didn’t need cleaning up and there was no reason for chronicles.
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Nope, because we’re back at the canon becoming too bloated for the creators to keep track of all of the details, which is why Chronicle was undertaken as a project. That is why I reached for World of Ice & Fire as an example, because it was a very similar circumstance.
And that is why the writers fail.
Ill have to look up the source, but i recall him saying something like “people are angry about Sylvannas, but i was still there when that was being decided” or something similar. We may both be right, he was shocked by the idea, but he also knew about it before we did.
To be honest, i really liked the idea that Elune stepped back to try and save her sister and all the souls trapped in the afterlife. Regardless of how foul the writing was, that plot absolutely gave my heart some resolution after being so angry with Sylvannas i quit the Horde and played Alliance for BFA and most of Shadowlands.
We do know that Alex pushed through Sylvanas and Teldrassil against the wishes of cdev at large. As I understand it, Metzen was increasingly uninvolved with Warcraft after the Ulduar patch in WotLK. I doubt he was completely uninvolved, as I’m sure he was at the very least in the loop with final say on things like expansion concepts. All of the Thrall stuff in Cata was, regrettably, his call.
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No we don’t.
Maybe if he said it I’d buy it. But some people unofficially blaming the unpopular story on the unpopular guy who isnt there is meaningless.
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is the operative word here ‘unofficially?’ i thought this oft-touted attribution was something corroborated by other writers on the team, but it’s possible i’m just falling victim to the pervasiveness of the claim.
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I have yet to see it being the official statement of blizzard. But even if it was it would be meaningless. Remember the official position on Area 51, MK Ultra, the efficacy of the covid vaccine, and the lab peak theory? Official positions are meaningless. Just because someone places the blame on someone or a group of people doesn’t make it true. None of us know what happened and none of the really good writers who worked on this project knew how poorly this story was going to be received.
Golden tried to dismiss criticism about her part in ELEGY saying that she has very little control, then turned around and tried to take credit for her part in shaping popular lore.
These people have lots of money on the line. Whole careers that depend on their reputations that are tied up very much in this one IP. If one guy whose career is already burned is a convenient scapegoat, I imagine everyone will use him if they can.
Just because Bellular heard it from a friend whoooo, heard it from a friend whoooo, heard it from another that all these noble cdec people tried to object and Afrasiabi was crazy and couldn’t be reasoned with, doesn’t make it true.
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uh… sure. i think that some ‘official positions’ being duplicitous (which is not, notably, the same as ‘meaningless’) doesn’t invalidate them all, and i also don’t really think i see much sense behind assuming that afriasiabi became the victim of a rumor purely because he was a convenient scapegoat, but i also have very little interest in the question from this angle.
The part people made up was that Afrasiabi did it out of spite to deliberately derail the story and assassinate Sylvanas’ character. The actual information provided was his plans for Sylv and Teldrassil were wildly unpopular within the team, but he ignored their protests.
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Idk how true that is (maybe it is)
What is true is that people started blaming Alex Afrasiabi for all the things they didn’t like when he made a poorly thought out, offhand comment in answer to a question about Sylvanas’ story in BFA-
“I’ve heard these discussions on the internet about ‘she’s going off the rails’, but is she? I’ve been writing Sylvanas personally since 2006, and this is pretty much – the Wrathgate and the Blight and the Forsaken – in character. Those were all under Sylvanas’ orders. What we’re seeing now is an escalation of the plans Sylvanas has, clearly, and we’re in the middle of that.”
This was not an official retcon at the time. Nor was it a confirmation of a possible theory. It was an accidental contradiction of the 3rd person omniscient narrator of the undead starting zone from cataclysm, the expansion directly following WotLK. People ran with it though and it grew legs. It’s hard to take much of what people said about Afrasiabi’s involvement in the Sylvanas narrative seriously after that. That one quote was not as meaningful as people made it. But people latched onto it desperately.
Except none of that was under sylvanas orders and he just wanted a reason to trash the horde and the forsaken
The only thing you have to take out of that sentence for it to be a relevant argument is “the wrathgate”.
She certainly did order the Royal Apothecaries to create blight. She certainly did have plans for that blight to be used on “the rest of Azeroth”
And all someone has to do at the time the question was asked was go “WAIT A MINUTE! The Wrathgate? I thought that was a coup?” And he could have gone, “I’m sorry. You’re right. Not the wrathgate, but everything else.”
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Nah the plans for the blight initially were just on arthas, she intended to die after that, there was no master plan
From “A New Plague” in vanilla wow-
" Why don’t you go see how the Captured Mountaineer enjoys this special drink I made for him? It contains a subtle hint of what The Dark Lady has planned for the rest of Azeroth."
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