Those spoony bards…
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The story forum hasn’t been a fan of Golden since Before The Storm.
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you mean since before before the storm?
I certainly thought she was weird and and creepy and obsessed with her favorite chars
Before The Storm was so awful that it caused people to realize her tropes. People use to praise her. That book flipped public opinion. I suppose War Crimes started getting people suspicious though.
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I was gonna say!! But yeah, War Crimes got a lot of people giving Golden’s books some side-eye, but we’d had worse books by that point so a little bit of “wait and see” seemed to happen.
By BtS though, the broad majority of vocal opinions were at best ambivalent, at worst antagonistic.
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IMO, this book is a good step forward for her in improving. I can see that she put a lot of care and effort into this book, unlike Before The Storm. Characters do things, other characters ask why they did it, then it’s talked about so that there are clear and usually reasonable explanations. I do think she’s taken criticisms and fixed problems she’s had. I suppose we’ll see if she continues to get better or relapses.
She also had the unenviable task of trying to salvage Sylvanas, the worst character in WoW
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I think the fan perception of her in this moment is also tainted by how much work the book had to do. The effluent stream of lava eel vore biowaste, shimmering in the moonslight that was the Shadowlands narrative needed to be cleaned up in a book not even intended for that.
We needed retcons explained, motivations explained, historical events recontextualized and re-explained, and more all because the game itself forgot to even consider them. Because without them, even a cursory examination of Sylvanas as a character makes no sense.
Golden not only had to write her book as her book about Sylvanas, she also had to write her book as the A plot of Shadowlands.
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How is this lazy? Plenty of people IRL have been named after their grandparents.
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But this is a real thing that real babies sometimes do.
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She managed to do 95% of that. The Shadowlands story has been a bunch of loose strings and she’s managed to tie them together. Most of the plotholes are filled. The WoW narrative overall could’ve been better but in this book she’s working backwards and using what’s been given to her. I think the only important part that should be explained now is how did Sylvanas get sent to the Maw.
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This isn’t new
And I give Golden plenty of ish but I believe in credit where it’s due. She’d probably be a better poet but there’s been no money in that since the 19th century. So here we are.
She just doesn’t seem too interested in writing non human characters, or basically human characters like the Quel’Dorei.
So just let her write about that. Just take 1% of the next CoD’s marketing budget to pay for it, that’ll probably cover at least short story fees for the rest of the races.
I don’t even know where they are going to go from here outside of minor faction conflicts.
Maybe dragon isles will be a good palate cleanser. I guess we will see in 19 days if there’s hype.
I’m gonna be dead honest here, and shockingly optimistic. I think whatever 10.0 turns out to be? It’ll be great.
Because they obviously stopped long term support for SL early on. Patches were slower than the last two expansions before it. In spite of this “three act play” late day spin doctoring, everything points to a whole patch missing. The final clean-up patch seems more about moving us out of the Shadowlands and back to Azeroth, judging by all the datamined stuff so far. What has been outright told to us about this clean-up patch is that we’re getting a refresh on content (IE raids, new mythic dungeons, etc), and that is obviously a delaying tactic to avoid a complete content drought.
I think Shadowlands was so rushed and abbreviated, and the direction changed to reskinning pre-existing content to make it fresh, is so they could try to pull another Legion with 10.0 and build back some of the much-lost player trust.
It’s purely my own speculation and opinion, no doubt fueled by a distinct lack of sleep and excessive amounts of pure copium injections.
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This feels a bit unfair; I don’t think a character being prodigious in something makes them a sue or stu. Is Raymond from Rain Man a gary stu by such logic?
Uh… yeah dude. Nobody can count money like that.
Edit: /s
I even have it on good authority that Everybody Loves Raymond. A Gary Stu trait if there ever was one
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People said the same thing back in the ending of BfA. “8.3 was so rushed because they put everything they had into Shadowlands” was a common sentiment I saw. And look where that got us.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
…Okay but that doesn’t make him a gary stu.
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Just being silly.