In A Game of Thrones, Lord Baelish betrays Ned Stark, and I personally enjoyed that little story. I’d like to contrast it with how Sylvanas betrays the Horde in BfA.
Littlefinger’s betrayal makes both psychological and logical sense: Baelish wants to rise in power and he has bad blood with the Starks, so he misleads a naive Ned into political blunders that destroy him, creating an unstable environment where people like Baelish can rise. We know why, we know how, and we know all that well in advance of the betrayal so we can see it coming.
However, there’s still the possibility of surprise because Baelish also has a plausible front. Maybe he does love Catelyn so much that he’s willing to help Ned. In a different story, that might well be his arc. Thus, the writing sets up a genuine question with real stakes and creates tension.
By contrast, Sylvanas burns down the elf tree, leads a disastrous war effort designed to stall out as long as possible all so she can…live forever? What? How? Why would that work?
This is the exact inverse of Game of Thrones. We know THAT Sylvanas is going to be evil, just not why or how. And the answers are ultimately going to be plot devices the writers will pull out of their butts—“she found the power of DEATH and no longer needs the Horde!” And that’s going to be totally unsatisfying because it will completely fail to make Sylvanas look smart or tragic or conflicted or even threatening.
This brings me to a core criticism I have re BfA: the writers hide characters’ motives to make plot twists “surprising.” However, plot twists only work when they are the inevitable result of previously established characterization. Tension should come from conflicts between and within characters, not from the writers arbitrarily hiding critical information.
Well the ‘cool thing’ in writing now a days seems that writers want to ‘subvert your expectations’ and ‘shock value’. This can be done right like the red wedding in GoT (good example). But whats (mostly) been happening is that this generally comes at the cost of the plot and characters. See, Danny at end of season 8, the new starwars trilogy’s, this game with WoT.
But you know what subvert your expectations really means? Its jut another way of saying were being random as frick because reasons.
They just use, ‘subvert your expectations’ as an excuse for, WE NEED X TO HAPPEN to hell or high water how we get there.
Right now wow is in the ‘because reasons’ phase, which tells me, their reasons aint really that good if they’re hiding them this much.
Felt really bad playing horde, cuz you know why we started the war? “Because reasons” and she “has a plan”. We’ve gotten nearly anything we know about her and her plan from leaks in bfa, not playing through the actual story ourselves. So ya it is the exact inverse of (early) game of thrones.
For me BFA has not subverted expectations at all, 90% of the lore theories I have read over the course of the expansion have been more interesting twists than anything in the game or datamined so far. If anything the lore this expac has been remarkably paint by numbers. I wish they would try to be subversive at this point. Maybe they are saving the subversions for 9.0
Subversiveness is not in and of itself a bad thing. It can be used to great effect when it is paired with verisimilitude.
Sylvanas has always been evil. What makes the Sylvanas arc unfulfilling is the complete lack of motivation. We all know it is because the authors want to get from point A to point B without stopping to explain how or why. Some will argue “well she always served death” which is fine…but why blow the horn to retreat at Broken Shore? Some will argue “she’s always only cared about herself” which is fine…but why put herself in danger at the Wisp wall in the War of Thorns? Why try to save Varian in the Legion cinematic? Some will argue Sylvanas doesn’t care about the Forsaken except to pity them…but why include the passages in Before the Storm where Sylvanas would rather be in Undercity among the Forsaken rather than in Orgrimmar as Warchief? Why include the passage about Sylvanas respecting Vol’jin in Before the Storm?
This is all bad writing…or it is leading to an eventual payoff. I hope it is leading to an eventual payoff.
Well I’d say at the start of bfa they tried subversion, because we were all like who burned the tree? No way it could be her! That would be to obvious, i mean look at the picture, she dident look like she was lovin’ it. Was almost like she was taken a step back horrified. Was it an old god?! An inside job by alliance war hawks!? Something as simple as panic and a fire spilling over!? Was she framed for it?!
But here is where that subversion fall flat, we are given no reasons for it. So I guess they really ‘got us’. /yawn.
I dont know what ‘payoff’ would be so good that over two years of waiting for it with no prior development would be that satisfying without any development. Like seriously? There is such a thing as dramatic irony.
I don’t know what the payoff will be. But I suspect it will involve the words Yogg-Saron. We are obviously headed into a Lich King expansion. Blizzard has a penchant for wanting to tell the older expansions again to do them correctly this time. There have been a million-and-one references to the Lich King this expansion. And there are many, many reasons to suspect Sylvanas is being controlled/manipulated/allied with Yogg-Saron. We know from datamining that defeating N’zoth does not end the Old God threat based on the Alleria and Tyralion dialogue.
That’s all just my opinion at this point. As a Sylvanas loyalist obviously I’ve been known to be wrong on occasion recently. (althoug I did accurately predict the 8.2.5 cinematic would be a duel between Saurfang and Sylvanas where Saurfang dies an honorable death, but anyone paying attention could have done the same)
We don’t know. They haven’t told us yet. Because we don’t know who she’s working for that is making her those promises.
Well, see, that’s HOW they subvert expectations. People go in expecting a clever twist. But then SURPRISE, it’s actually really straightforward and uninteresting.
At the end of the day a character can only be about as clever as the person writing them. This is a hard fact about writing. You need to know what you can actually pull off in a satisfying way and what you can’t. You also need to be mindful of the limitations of your medium. Not every medium is ideal for every type of story beat.
George R.R. Martin has mentioned in interviews that he isn’t very quick witted. He mentions that it can take him days to come up with a good one liner for Tyrion to spit out, but the luxury of a novelist is that you have the time to work out those clever one liners so your characters seem more quick witted.
But grand schemes? Master plans that the characters also took years to develop? Those are really hard to come up with. Even more hard to write in a way that doesn’t end up feeling contrived. And even more so if you’re very cramped for time and you have a hard deadline to meet.
The current writers aren’t very good at writing subversive and intriguing schemes. People guessed the outcome of every twist very quickly and the only way the writers could throw the players off their trail is by outright lying about where the story was going.
Now to be fair to the writers they have a dreadfully hard job. They don’t get to choose the big story beats. This is all planned out by the game developers. They have to then craft a story around the game developers’ big raids and scenarios. This leaves very little room for both actual creative freedom and for planning ahead with big plot twists.
This is why the best way to write WoW’s story likely would be to just… Embrace that fact. People still love watching shows and movies even if they can be a bit predictable. You just need characters people enjoy and want to see interact in new situations. You can sprinkle small plot twists throughout to keep the player engaged. But these huge meta plots? They can’t really be built on twists like they have been. I don’t think there’s enough narrative freedom to flesh them out and develop them like there is in a novel or even a movie.
If the story must conform to the gameplay then make the story reflect the gameplay more. Have the story be about big epic heroes fighting big epic enemies and stop trying to write in some sort of political scheme if you don’t have the time and ability to pull it off in a way that won’t just feel like a string of plot contrivances.
Done poorly maybe. Done well subverting your expectations means they anticipated exactly what you would expect and prepared an even greater surprise that totally blindsides you. Like in Prey even the most averagely savvy person would have pegged you were a typhon but I doubt anybody saw the exact circumstances of it all coming.
I’d argue it also helps that at no point did you know if this was a moment you could actually trust Baelish within the story. That kept you guessing and thus made it more interesting.
Despite Blizzard dropping very very subtle hints that Sylvanas isn’t a total monster, just about all of her highlight moments were of her being a total monster, with the sole exception being the Legion opening which might as well been from an entirely different timeline.
Actually I’d argue with that. They are writing Sylvanas and Nathanos to be some immortal and powerful masterminds and yet they’ve managed to ruin the story in every possible aspect.
I’d argue another thing is that sylvanas is more annoying them impressive as a villain is she relies heavily on JUST AS PLANNED to do things. Now villains benefitting from their plans being foiled or adapting to the changing tides is nothing new, and some of the best villains do that. Difference is in implementation.
There are several ways to do a good chessmaster character, you could be like David Xanatos, who sets up situations that have a large, obvious goal, and a more subtle, smaller one that would serve as a fallback incase the first goal fails. Or maybe like Palpatine, who manipulates other people to be the figureheads of 2 different sides of the conflict and set up events that will take decades to come to fruition. Maybe you could be a highly adaptable villain, able to change your plans on the fly to benefit the most from a certain situation.
Whatever you do don’t just say “FOOLS, BY DEFEATING ME YOU PLAYED RIGHT INTO MY PLAN MWHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA!”, the only character who does “JUST AS PLANNED” right is Tzeentch from 40k, because his plans often rely on being beaten…because he has no actual idea what he want’s to do with them, he is just the god of plotting so must constantly plot. Sylvanas i don’t think is supposed to be a self defeating villain like tzeentch, so yeah.
That’s just because Sylvanas and Nathanos are the writers’ favorites. It’s obvious now that they won’t kill them off and have some really really… REALLY stupid redemption planned for them that will satisfy absolutely nobody.
Everyone in the WoW Universe thinks Sylvanas is some kind of military strategist mastermind, Saurfang was literally falling over himself listening to Sylvanas’ ingenious plans.
The answer slammed into him with such force that he literally staggered. His knees buckled, and he caught himself against the table with both arms. After a moment, he looked up at Sylvanas again, the blood draining from his face. She had led him to a truth he had not seen, and it felt as if the entire world had changed. Onlyseconds ago, he had known to the very core of his being that war was impossible.
It speaks volumes of the WoW universe if Sylvanas is suppose to be the Sun Tzu of WoW.
I’ve been saying and thinking this for longer than I want to remember. A surprise twists comes from being given information and then having made a wrong estimation or prediction.
It doesn’t come from being withheld vital information then having it thrown at you with a, “you didn’t see that coming, did you?” I guess I didn’t, but that doesn’t make impressive storytelling.
I could be wrong, but I have a hard time imagining an answer to this question that will somehow make Sylvanas retroactively interesting. And that holds even outside WoW. Because solid build-up earns solid payoff, the best surprises usually come at the end of the best stories.
Can you think of exceptions I’m missing?
I don’t have much to add, but I didn’t want to post without highlighting how this is the best post <3
I’d put more emphasis on the medium than the story, frankly, which is an MMORPG. It doesn’t need to be increasingly super-powered heroes and foes—I’d even argue that this approach is collapsing under its own weight as it continues to steamroll lore into dust with every BBEG that we overcome. Where this game tends to succeed is the local narratives: the zone progressions and world-building. In a nutshell, the narratives should serve to highlight the game world first instead of twisting everything to serve the function of propping up whichever cringelord character the next expansion wants to revolve around.
These characters should just be elements in the tapestry. WoW is not a single-player game. I don’t know how many characters they have to toss into the wood-chipper before they figure this out, but you are writing for an MMORPG.
Honestly at this point, with all this twisted whims in writing I won’t claim I know anything. For all of blizz writing Sylvanas can suddenly start farting trees and become leader of Nelves vs a crazy Tyrande, cause…reasons.