Also, your description of Garrosh’s actions are remarkably romanticized. The fact remains that his overarching storyline is a complete mess. He was never intended to mirror Arthas’s storyline; in fact, he was going to have a heroic redemption arc that resulted in a “strong Hellscream leader” for the Horde. But when Thrall started getting screentime they explicitly chose to make Garrosh “the dark to his light” because it was “what was needed for WoW.”
When you get references in recent expansions, as seen with Anachronos, that point to the potential Garrosh had, it reads to me like a twinge of regret with what ultimately was done with Garrosh. This was the guy that was built up since the days of BC, and while you can ascribe heroic intentions that simply aren’t there, it’s really hard to look past the sudden turn towards an Ethno-state that characterized his MoP itinerary.
His story could have ended so differently. It seems like every time they’re at a loss, they pull up an old god out of Lovecraftian public domain and make them the root cause of someone’s transformation from anti-hero to mustache twirling villain. It gets annoying after a while.
The remarkable thing is that it was totally unnecessary. The storyline of MoP requires enmity between the Alliance and Horde, sure, but it did not require Garrosh to become irredeemable and force the Horde to turn against him. The war in Pandaria could have ended in a stalemate upon the realization that it reawakened the Sha, and the Heart of Y’Shaarj itself could have just been the final boss. Removing Garrosh as Warchief seems to have been a really poorly thought out plotline as it only served to kickstart the plot of Warlords of Draenor, which itself is often reviled as a major jumping the shark moment at best and ‘filler’ at worst, and his replacement, Vol’jin, was quickly killed off anyway.
For it rippling into modernity. General MacArthur basing the post-war Japanese economy on Catholic Social Teaching is what made it so successful that communism could not take hold because people were so happy.
Peasants now owned the farms their families had worked on for hundreds of years. The rich, no longer needing to be landowners, put their effort into manufacturing companies that were worker-owned. The rest is history, until the Japanese economy ate itself by turning to capitalism in the mid-70’s.
It was so successful that Taiwan hired General MacArthur to do the same there.
For even more modern examples:
Gore Industries
Mondragon Corporation Cooperative
Which itself is a contrived “whodunnit” considering the biggest question is now “who whispered in Vol’jin’s ear to make her warchief?”
There is a fallacy in the world of literature that the best storylines are those that take something like twenty-seven twists on the route from A to B. I heavily disagree with this. If point B was for Sylvanas to be warchief and kickstart the conflict in BFA, then it would have been completely in-character for her to have simply seized power from Garrosh/Vol’jin.
Hell, imagine if she cheated in a Mak’gora against Garrosh, ultimately killing him the same way he (albeit accidentally) killed Cairne? That would have been totally in-character for Sylvanas and carry a bit of dramatic and morbid irony to boot.
But instead the narrative seems to be trying to take cues from Game of Thrones, as if people won’t keep tuning in unless you keep them guessing about what’s going to happen next.
That you would hold the the dark ages of Europe up as some paragon of enlightenment is absolutely hilarious… especially when you contrast that with the Ottoman empire and the Ming dynasty. To frame it in WoW parlance. it’s akin to saying Orgrimmar compares favorably with the Temple of Karabor.
Yeah, well that would have made too much sense and therefore not plot-twisty enough for these writers. Honestly I don’t know who these writers are but they have middle school level literary tastes.
The “dark age” was a term invented by “enlightenment era” rhetoriticians.
Ironically, the “dark age” was the brightest era in actuality and the “enlightenment” onwards the darkest. This inversion of reality is key to totalitarian control as we see in the “revolutionary” societies.
Yes, I am contrasting the basis of all you know and take for granted with pagan warlords. Not a fair comparison either.
Personally, I never thought it was out of character for Illidan. I thought it was cheesy and angsty and had no place in a story of such import.
The writing wasn’t bad because illidan was written wrong, it’s because they opted to go with the most cliched, cheesy, angsty, character they have and they had to basically retcon a bunch of stuff to do it. If professional writers can’t find a believable and more realistic way to tell a story, well… that’s not good.
Yeah and that’s a thing. They idolize Lovecraft yet never take into consideration that he never had to retcon a thing. Retconning is just lazy, unimaginative and insulting to one’s readership.
I suppose comparing a major inspiration for the atrocities of the 20th century for a character in a blasphemous satire play might be why your reasoning is skewed here.
Did you know that voltaire went into a monestary for 6 months to write down all the contrary statements that St Aquinas put in his works to refute? In the Classical, Question/Dispute system you are required to make your enemy’s case before you make your own (question), and you only make your own case as a dispute of your enemy’s position (dispute). In fact, you would be required to make your disputes from multiple perspectives, even secularly.
Meaning that St Aquinas was a more competent devil worshiper than anyone else since, and as a joke, considering all modernism and post-modernism seems based on his questions. St Aquinas made a case for why sex is everything better than freud did, of course St Aquinas also refuted that multiple times over.
marxism was stolen wholesale from St Thomas More’s Utopia, which was a satire book meant to warn against the totalitarianism of henry viii.
As Chesterton said (Chesterton has a quote for every topic):
“voltaire asked the same questions as St Thomas Aquinas, but St Thomas actually answered those questions.”
You know what REALLY feels forced? Having to team up after events like the purge of Dalaran and Teldrasil. Calling those “faction differences” is quite the understatement.
You rely far too much on Chesterton, or as I like to refer to him, the Oscar Wilde of oafishness or the Dale Carnegie of armchair philosophy. I mean, I enjoy a good Father Brown mystery as much as anyone, but really…
