Funny how that no longer matters cause if you read sylvanas you learn she had no greater plan
Yeah. Golden sucked. SL sucked. I am very critical of the way the story went.
For me, the biggest tragedy of the storytelling is that it didnât turn out that she did everything she did for her people. Yes, that would have been cheesy and cheap, but it would have been consistent with her character growth from Edge of Night onward.
They ruined the Valkyr. They ruined Sylvanasâ development as a character. They ruined everything. Not just Alex. Not just Golden. It was a group effort.
It wonât be long and weâll be blaming lava eel vore on Alex Afrasiabi. WoW has never been a narrative masterpiece but where they went wrong in SL was breaking that covenant between the audience and the storyteller in the same way that House did in the final season. Throwing out all the character growth because there was some meta-narrative they wanted to tell, making their Sherlock Holmes analogue come full circle.
Nah sylvanas was great, until they had to explain any of bfa and SL but it was absolutely great before that
I loved her.
But do you think she was only great while Afrasiabi was working on Titan? If so, I could see that as a flimsy but compelling conspiracy theory in support of Afrasiabi bearing responsibility for Sylvanas writing being bad.
Mate she was all over the place, sheâd have books where sheâd say one thing in her thoughts and then have a completely contradictory thing happen, I genuintly believe there was no internal plan for her and individual writers all had a different idea of where they wanted her to end up, i loved sylvanas she was a great leader for the forsaken, but my god could the writers just not pick a lane
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That was part of her character too though.
Her sigil is a broken mask.
The example I like to point out is in TBC when you bring her the necklace that belonged to her family.
She basically says âWhatever. I donât care anymore. I feel nothing.â Then throws it on the ground. Then in the same breath she picks it back up, cradles it in her arms and summons banshees to sing lament of the highborn.
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I recall doing the quests back in wrath. Up to the wrathgate, with the full understanding that Sylvannas had planned it all. I was okay with it because i presumed it was for use on the Alliance too.
Then it was also used on the Horde. I went on the forums back then to ask why Blizz thought Sylvannasâ âoh nooooo it wasnt meeeeeeâ actually made any sense. The quests i did made it seem like she knew what that plague/blight would do to living people and she blew us all up with it.
In my mind, she always knew. And then she framed Varimathras.
Im not clinging to a statement. His statement confirmed what we already knew. He created those quests specifically to destroy her character, and the wrathgate was only the start. He did his very best to turn her into a heartless, unlikeable villian, just like he did with every other female character he did any writing for. He made Jaina look like a weak crybaby. He made Lady Ashvane (who ought to have been charasmatic) an ugly bully people hated. He made Talonji into a hesitant waif with no agency. He made Tyrande go nuts and kill a ton of her own people. He made Elune abandon Tyrande when she was about to get her revenge. He made the winter queen a heartless butcher. He made a woman violate the story of Arthas and Uther.
He has a very, very observable pattern when it comes to female characters. He has always pushed to make them unlikeable, spiteful, cruel, wimpy and duplicitous. Letâs not mince words: he did this enough that it can be pointed out. He never made a female character who has any level of authority over male characters act with strength or charisma. They are always either crumbling under pressure or vile with men being left in dismay at their foul behavior.
The dude wrote from his heart. It isnât a stretch to say he has done these things. When the story was under his direction, when he was head of story, established âstrongâ female characters were ruined, and characters who looked great on paper were all turned into heartless b-words.
Can you imagine if the following were true?
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When Jaina returns to Tol Barad, and is jailed for her crimes, the crowd of nobles who follow Ashvane also laugh and sneer instead of looking scared and miserable? Or all of Ashvanes shenanigans written with nobles cheering her on? She needed to be written as having more clout then Jaina. Instead she was written has having de facto power with no meaningful connections to other characters. She was written to be extremely unlikeable, and her hold over the throne barely made sense.
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Jaina, facing Ashvane, would have had a much better story if she was facing the social issues of returning as a pariah instead of as a mere criminal. Instead we have Jaina be in hiding for most of the campaign. Charismatic Ashvane would have just dismissed her from court, and let her be ostricized. She could have remained in Tol barad and been a hub where we would have seen her develop into a leader. Instead all that gets shoehorned in right ar the end of the campaign.
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The winter queen is a ruler over the single silliest gaggle of characters imaginable. To show her as having no kindness, no love, no gentleness, no empathyâŚis such dirty pool. If I had written her, i would have had her sit beside that seed keeper and had her weep with him. Instead she just glides through and kills without mercy, having her guards beat and bully him. The fact that we had to have the whole zone beg her to spare Ysera is disgusting. Imagine if she was regal, but knowing and deeply caring? Imagine if she had one single bit of love or nurture in her behavior. She is such an interesting figure, but what we were presented with was nothing less than a âcold hearted b-â. She deserved better than that. WE deserved better than that.
And it just goes on from there.
I believe him when he says that Sylvannasâ arc started with the wrathgate, AND that it was intended to make her into a throwaway villian.
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That predated wrath though. So. Yeah. Recall the timing. Also she may not feel anything but still felt it appropriate to try to feel something. A lot of the early forsaken quests deal with the mourning of their humanity, and how they recognise they should feel. And that they want to feel. And that they remember feeling. And they ask you to do things to see if you can evoke emotion for them. It doesnât work, but even if they give you back the item or what have you, they often have a period (written into the quest) where they mull over trying to do something extra with the object, to make it more meaningful.
I can see that here. The song is from her family and she may well be trying to make the moment make her feel again. A last ditch effort. It doesnât work and cant, however, as all forsaken lack emotion.
It takes more effort to believe he was not the architect of Sylv and Teldrassil than to believe otherwise. Between anonymous sources, what little came out publicly (like one of Alleriaâs voice actors), and his Blizzcon comments (make Garrosh look like an amateur) you have to work against the evidence to arrive at it not being his call.
People blaming everything else on Afrasiabi is irrelevant to that.
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Iâm not even saying he didnât plan it. That it wasnât his baby. I just donât full-heartedly believe all the reports of resistance.
Maybe I should. Maybe it sucked so bad because EVERYONE working on it phoned it in. Maybe everyone who said they were against it wrote crappy dialogue. They designed crappy quests. They said âThis is so dumb! You know how dumb? Like⌠Iâm gonna design a stupid quest that doesnât fit the previously accepted lore, dumb. Iâll show Afrasiabiâ. Maybe the reason that A Good War is the only good telling of that story is because Brooks was the only one who was on board.
Golden sacrificed her work because she stands with all Afrasiabiâs victims. What a hero!
WoWâs creative process up until at least Shadowlands consisted of cdev being tasked with making sense of whatever Rule of Cool idea got decided on for the expansion. I would expect that the few people at the top (Alex being the creative lead at the time) signed off on it, and the rest got their marching orders.
I think they did the best with what was foisted on them, like usual. It seems rabidly unlikely to me that the strong progressive-left presence at Blizzard were comfortable with the Sylvanas arc we got, where she was actually still a victim all along, and became her abuser.
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That seems unlikely, considering-
I donât see them doing their best with that.
I would hang more on their notoriously underpaid and overworked staff than some self sabotage scheme.
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The burning of Teldrasil was a complete change of character (for anyone but the haters) from what had been presented before. What Afrasiabi claimed was that it was in line with what he had been planing, as if that retroactively changed the story. He was full of it.
And it was, assuming he was telling the truth, the same sort of arrogance that would be involved in pushing the Burning of Teldrasil over everyone telling him how bad of an idea it was.
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Circling back to this, there was nothing in BfA that really screamed that to me. The transition from BfA to SL seemed so disjointed that it made practically no sense. The fact that we finished with that, and that cinematics were so unpolished and the story seemed so forced leads me to believe that the pitiful and weak tone of Sylvanas in SL was not what Afrasiabi had in mind.
I am much more apt to believe that (like everyone suspected) we were meant to get Kerrigan 2.0 and the vehement rejection of that idea by the community, and the dismissal of Afrasiabi, necessitated in the minds of marketing, a shift in narrative.
Sylvanas wasnât punished because Afrasiabi hates women (though he may.) Sylvanas was punished because the community demanded it.
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Best guess is that he got ejected from the company after setting things in motion but without looping in everyone on where things were headed. Who knows, though? They could have had a clear outline and chose to scrap it just to erase his influence as much as possible.
Shadowlands was definitely the remaining team twisting in the wind and trying to placate an increasingly furious or apathetic playerbase. On one hand, they were left in potentially no-win situation. On the other, I donât know if the IP will ever truly recover from the rancid dogturds that replaced existing lore.
In my experience, they tend to create incontinuity.
I donât mind unclear points being clarified or filled in, but I do mind clear points being deleted and replaced. Especially if itâs re-written by someone else who thinks their idea is better than the original authorâs. 99% of the time this is not the case.
I havenât seen this film, so I canât say much about it. Are you sure this was a retcon and not a plot twist that was planned from the beginning?
I disagree. If Iâm interested not just in individual stories but in the whole world-building, I want the pieces of the puzzle that I get to be reliable. I have no interest in things being changed afterwards. Lore built on the retconned part becomes inconsistent. Itâs annoying and the money I spent on this part of the story, the time I invested, feels wasted. The original version made me a fan, the new version is mostly worse.
Humans like certainty, not constant uncertainty. A fundamental truth.
This does not apply to Flavor Lore, of course. Legends, rumours, stories about characters in the game. Thatâs something else. But if something is presented and sold as hard canon, then Iâm counting on it.
Itâs too early to tell if sheâs really an old god. That can only be discussed when her true nature is revealed. It must be said that five Old Gods were mentioned in the past. This was then reduced to 4. Blizzard seems to be playing with this fact. But technically it would be a retcon of a retcon, if itâs actually true.
Apart from that, Iâm not saying anything against different perspectives on the story. But it doesnât change the fact that there is only one true sequence of events.
A good writer is able to develop creative greatness on the foundation that has been built for him and the limitations that come with it. A bad writer has to tear down part of the foundation and rewrite it because he canât think of anything better. And that turns out badly for the reasons mentioned. It hurts the flow of the story and creates inconsistent and therefore unpleasant worldbuilding. Thatâs what happened with SL.
It will always happen. Itâs in the nature of things.
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Yeah. It was a retcon. It was like a fun little short they threw in between phases.
Ret cons should never feel jarring but you are right, that a lot of times a ret con creates less continuity.
Shadowlands was crap in that department.
I wouldnât have minded a complete retconlands expansion if I came away like âOh wow⌠Thatâs pretty clever and goodâ but thatâs not what SL was. You gotta do call backs and re-contextualize things and all that. And they did try, but in ways that felt cheap. And they didnât offer any explanation besides âThe Nathrezim were tricking everyone!â
The helm of domination and frostmourne being made in the Shadowlands and not by demons is a good retcon, on the surface. The Nathrezim demons being originally from the Shadowlands is kinda cool. My interest was piqued. The amount of Nathrezim skullduggery we actually got in any given patch was not enough to support those big retcons. And thatâs just an example.
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Probably a lot more than half judging by comparison to Arator. They are essentially Humans with some elven blood.
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It really does call into question why was Malâganis trying to kill Arthas back in Wrath.
Originally it was because Malâganis was angry that he was used by the Lich King (Nerâzhul). So in a way it was to get revenge on the Lich King due to them betraying the Legion. But now with Malâganis saying âoh that? That was part of the plan actually. Arthas is a favourite pawn Iâve ever conned because of thatâ (seriously, why is that little text on the shield he drops even there). Was it because Arthas was not meant to usurp Nerâzhul? (Nerâzhuls encounter in SoD), was it because the Lich King was a flawed and failed herald as Zovaal did not have control over them as he thought he did? Who knows. Shadowlands never gave a crap to actually address that plot hole.
I still reckon the original plan was to have Xalâatath as the â5th Old Godâ. The WC3 manual said there were five, but Chronicles vol 1 says that there were four when the Titans found Azeroth. At the same time Legion had the âoutlandish theoryâ that Xalâatath was an Old God that was defeated and sealed away by their kin (the artifact lore book). Given that Chronciles vol 1 and Legion were most likely written at the same time, it cannot be just a coincidence that they put that little hint in the game.
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