I will try to stay within the guide lines, but I need to express my frustration with how things have turned out in the story so far. I’ve been thinking about why it is that every time I come back to wow I can’t stick with it. There’s plenty to do in shadowlands, but I feel no motivation to keep with it because I have nothing to be excited for anymore. The story is fundamentally why I keep coming back, and it’s the characters who make the story happen, and I just feel so dishearten with how my favorite characters have been treated and how they are now perceived. I hope someone on blizzards writing team is reading this, because I feel like my worries are on deaf ears here, but with no where else to vent these frustrations, this will have to do.
I’m going to start with the largest one, Sylvanas. I will start by saying that she is the last standing character in the story I have hope for, but nothing so far gives me any hope that she will come out of this Xpac unharmed or worst of all, unable to return to the forsaken. Point of order, the reasons I love her character are from before WotLK. She was the conduit to my second favorite race of the game, undead. Her ambitions were not to be the good guys, but to right an injustice done to her and her people by the Lich King. Following her was great if you didn’t perceive yourself as being some goodie two-shoes hero, but a ruthless avenger who stopped at nothing to see vengeance. This is how I imagined the forsaken, and I don’t perceive Calia as having those same ideals. I don’t want to be a hero, I want to do ugly stuff to insure what is necessary. The way I perceive the recent Sylvanus story, she had no right being crowned Warchief. Had this pivotal moment never happened, the story could have been done in a different direction from the collision course it is on. Her obligation is to the forsaken, not the horde in general. After the fall of Arthus, the motivation for the forsaken is a bit aimless, but taking them on this holy redemption path is not the faction I signed up for. If the aim of this current expansion is to conclude her story for good, then I’m done. My forsaken no longer exists.
Next character I want to talk about is Garrosh. This really stings for me because he is proof for me that there can be likeable characters added to the Warcraft universe post Warcraft 3. I used to like Thrall, but when I saw what Garrosh was doing in Cataclysm, I understood why making him the leader was a brilliant idea. He was THE orc. He was a warrior and he got results. Being next to him was like being a nervous little kid, worried about the situation around you, but you looked to your right and saw daddy Garrosh and thought, “we’re going to be okay.” My favorite moment I still love is when you are on a zeppelin, attacked by dragons, he screams, “GET. OFF. MY. SHIIIIIP!” and just tackles the thing! It was hype! Then they put wrote him as a tyrant who would make drastic choices to see the alliance destroyed once and for all. This was obviously the breaking point for his character, but they could have gone a very interesting direction with it. If he loved the Horde, but hated the Alliance because of stories he’d heard about them, then there was a perfectly missed opportunity to have a moment similar to what Varian had during the Saurfang reunion. The problem with the faction war storyline, is that there are character who are trying so hard to resolve things peacefully, but it has to keep happening because the core mechanic of the game is that there are two faction who kill each other on sight (if you play a pvp server).
(As an aside, I hate the concept of factions because it splits the player base in half for content some people probably don’t participate in. Why not let the orc warriors tank for human mages!? makes no sense to me.)
Back on track, Garrosh had a lot of potential that was squandered by the fact that there needed to be someone to incite the next Xpac, which in itself was just an Xpac to incite the REAL Xpac people wanted. He filled the shoes of warchief well and if he kept that role, I can’t help but feel that the warchief concept wouldn’t have become the joke that it became.
I love Illidan, and I doubt I’ll never see him again, but where is he? It felt to me like his story in Legion was a fanservice apology for how unjustified his role was treated. I will accept the apology because we have him back now, but now what? I’m not surprised with where they put him at the end of legion, but if I had to put my emotions to words, it feels like there was no intention to use him after Legion, so they put him away in a place where people can be “satisfied” without him having to be written into the story anymore. Here’s a question, what would have happened if he was there to witness the burning of Teldrassil? How fascinating would it have been for him to form this new target for his hatred in the horde? He could be the one pushing Tyrande into the crazy person she is becoming, OR BETTER YET, and I’m still hoping for this, is the one who speaks sense to her! He could teach her how to control self destructive power like he did! This would be an amazing spit in the face of Malfurion who time and again refused to give his brother his due credit. We can’t have that though, he’s on reserve for Burning Legion story.
Those are my biggest three, but I want to talk a little bit about Thrall, because he’s still treated like he’s everyone’s favorite but I don’t know if people actually care about him anymore. I used like like Thrall because he cared about his people, the orcs, and was going out of his way not to fight glorious battle, but to establish a foothold in a world that outright didn’t want them. He made allies by showing people that Orcs were not complete Savages, and it was endearing. Now it feels like his desire for peace makes him unwilling to fight any battles. I never liked him being some master of the elements, especially when it makes you look like a slave to those elements. I hated how who gave up on doom hammer, it was HIS iconic weapon. It brought me to tears to see it handed off to the player who I’m personally a fan of being writing off as a nobody rather than “chosen hero” that we all seem to be, not because I see my characters as nobodies, but because the less main characters expect of my character, the more I can roleplay my own story for myself.
What I hope to get across is that characters like Sylvanas and Garrosh have and had reasons to be adored. They are antagonized now, but they used to mean something and new characters I’m supposed to care about, Anduin, Baine, Calia, I don’t like them. That isn’t to say that I don’t want them in my Warcraft, but they’re the new spotlight and I can’t care about them as much as I do the meaner characters. The “Garrosh did nothing Wrong” meme is a joke, but I think it’s also a statement with how disappointed we are in his character arc. I expect there will be more story from him this expansion, but I don’t expect to see characters return from the shadowlands with us, so I can just expect this to be my last goodbye with these amazing characters. I’m finished with Warcraft for now, but I’ll try to stay optimistic with whatever happens. I reckon if I get my way, a lot of people will be very angry.
Thanks for reading. Some me too stories and Blizzard insider knowledge would be delightful to read through.