The Calling - Anduin's Short Story

i think the notion that something like trauma could really be earnestly explored in the warcraft universe from the first is a bit of a laugh, as evidenced, honestly, by the history of discourse surrounding the justification of different characters thru timeline of the franchise and its fans.

setting, briefly, the absurdity of the thematic elements aside, the other lasting issue with the story itself is that it’s just not terribly deep or inventive. if the tidbits of anduin’s dialogue from the quests in hallowfall are any indicator, anduin’s characterization in this short story is going to be something of a boulder to push up a hill. we’ll be seeing a lot of the same trite beats consistently.

i really don’t think things like short stories or novels should be required reading for players to understand the crucial plot points of the story, but they should at least give some sense of reward. golden is colorful and often bombastic in her writing, so i guess there’s that to enjoy. this really doesn’t seem like a cross they need to bear. they’re not equipped to do it well, and they really aren’t going to improve the franchise (or, even more simply, the story) by doing so

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Yeah. I don’t mind him being around, in the background. But foisting him as the major character every time, dealing with his sad issues, is tiresome and grating.

He should be like 80% in Alliance Only stories, and maybe 20% in the main plot. I think most if not all Faction Characters should. Same goes for Thrall in Cata - I can understand why Alliance fans roll their eyes about him.

There has been too much Anduin, Thrall, Jaina, Sylvanas, Tyrande, Baine… over and over. They need to swap the focus, share the spotlight.

If they want to tell the same stories over and over, maybe switch up the characters. If we need someone sad and crying all day, idk, throw in a Forsaken sad about their plight, or an Orc grandma who lost her kids in war, or maybe a different Human instead of Anduin all day.

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I’v just never cared about anduin, he just kind of exists to cry into the camera like a sad puppy and boy does someone on the dev team really like making him cry

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100 % agree with this. I’d like to see more lower tier characters to interact with, more in line with the variety of faction themes and let the bosses just go back to the castles and pontificate.

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To be fair, for someone as gentle and sensitive as Anduin, the fact that he wasn’t in control of himself-literally being used as a meat puppet with zero control over what he was doing, doesn’t change the fact that he was fully conscious and aware of it as he was used to hurt and kill to carry out the jailer’s mission (and at the end of the raid, if he hadn’t been stopped he WOULD have killed Jaina, Thrall, etc). And for Anduin, part of that trauma is a tiny part of him enjoyed the power and he’s worried that part of him enjoyed hurting people. We as players might shrug and absolve him of those crimes because duh, he was being mind-controlled and had no choice in doing what he did, but that doesn’t magically make HIM see it the same way, hence the trauma. “oh it’s a fantasy game” doesn’t mean you can’t realistically approach mental and emotional trauma- in fact using ‘oh well it’s fantasy’ is a reason some people turn up their nose at fantasy as a genre. Any genre should have realistic approaches to things as basic as character development and growth, that’s called good writing. If Anduin had been instantly fine and back to his normal cheery self after what he went through in Shadowlands, THAT would’ve been horrible writing.

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Anduin doesn’t drink because he’s “better/holier than everyone else”, he doesn’t drink because he’s scared to lose control. He’s not condemning anyone who does, but he doesn’t use it as his vice to deal with everything. He uses physical labor and isolating himself from everyone as his vice. He’s too scare to lose control again so instead of dealing with that right away, he just throws himself into physical labor to work himself ragged. Can’t hurt others if he’s tired, or at least he hopes.

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Exactly.

It’s not that I think Anduin’s emotional distress is un justified- quite the contrary.

It’s that I’m not interesting in exploring that issue.

I’m here to solve problems with swords/explosives/spells, not therapy sit-downs.

Can a character who needs them express that to the players, in order to make themselves seem more rounded and realistic, a real person having real problems? Yea, sure, but have it just be mentioned, not actually played through.

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Wow, what a toxic statement.

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My problem is the narrative fawns over him as a good boy in a way that never actually matters because he’s always spineless in the moment.

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Well. Varian was just as broken in his own way, it is just something which was mostly expressed in the books and not the game. For a long time he was prone to fits of blind rage, which is when Anduin would go stay in Theramore with Jaina.

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And that’s fine. My issue is just with people reading Anduin not drinking as him being too good and not him being afraid of what would happen if he lost control again. Just because he says no to one vice doesn’t mean he isn’t using a different one that is any less destructive or ‘better’.

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Send Anduin to pandaria, make his PTsD become a sha encounter.

I think that just kind of shows that the Horde fans on this forum just don’t understand what trauma is because they’re fortunate enough to not have it, or they don’t interact with it. A lot of people do this.

Keep in mind that Garrosh’s actions are also from a place of trauma. No one questions those because men are only allowed to display anger. If Anduin was angry, you’d get a lot more rooting for him. Men are not allowed to show their pain in any other way.

I could say a lot more uncharitable things, but I won’t.

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interesting idea for therapy, but in-universe I think the curse of the sha has been lifted by destroying the Sha of Pride?

Pandaria may seem laid-back, but only because if you felt a negative emotion too strongly, weird black and white cloud monsters literally pop out of the ground and kill you. That’s actually pretty horrible- pandaren culture is so laid-back purely as a survival mechanism.

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Until they ruined her character, one of the biggest Horde characters was a woman with horrific trauma issues?

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Yeah and it’s really funny we weren’t having these comments about how trauma is cringe with Sylvanas.

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There absolutely were lol.

I don’t think Sylvanas trauma is an excuse for anything she’s done, but people absolutely have waved off the effects of Arthas torturing her and her being puppeted as his slave for however long when talking about how she was “never good” even as Ranger general.

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There were not. We were not having discussions or comments on Sylvanas’s trauma. We had plenty of people who disliked Sylvanas just as a character, for what she did, etc., but we did not have comments about how trauma is cringe and we don’t want to see it in WoW. I’m reasonably certain we didn’t get any comments like real Ranger Generals don’t get PTSD, etc.

The people who didn’t like Sylvanas didn’t like her not because she was traumatized. Those that disliked her, disliked her because she was a ruthless, Machiavellian character who tortured people and manipulated them even before her character was “ruined”. For some people, that’s why they liked her. I’m not saying she was necessarily a bad character even if I didn’t like her.

We straight up have people saying exploring trauma has no place in WoW with Anduin. That “real kings” don’t get PTSD, they just suck it up. We have people who hate him purely because he shows emotions that are not anger. Like I said, if he was angry and wrathful like Garrosh, people would say he’s based.

I don’t like that Anduin took up so much of the spotlight either. I don’t like that Golden treated him like her literal son for so much of the story - although lets be fair, Golden also had preferential treatment to Sylvanas. I think it’s fair to not like him the more it feels like he gets shoved down your throat as a main character, and everything that happened in SL was garbage so it’s really hard to empathize with. And as I said above, it’s uncomfortable to confront stories about trauma unless they’re told in the “right way” for most people.

But we really, really did not see the same level of comments that we do see about Anduin supposedly crying and moping all the time. Anduin literally stood his ground against the God of Death to make sure the player character could leave the Maw, and people still call him a crybaby - and you even said he’s spineless - because he has shed a tear once or twice. That’s because he is a man, and a man who shows vulnerability makes us feel deeply uncomfortable.

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It is sadly very easy to dismiss things that you have never experienced as unimportant or trivial matters to overcome. Paired with how we are culturally primed to see mental illness as taboo or embarrassing and you have a primed storm of very poorly thought out opinions on traumatic characters.

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Pretty sure the shas are gone now/only remnants remain.