Man of Steel is a 2013 DC Comics film about Superman. It aimed to reboot the franchise by presenting the superhero’s conflict between hiding his powers to evade a world that wouldn’t understand them and the need to use those powers to save that world. It’s eight years on, so I don’t feel bad about partially spoiling the ending in telling you that the film’s villain, General Zod, forces Superman into a choice between snapping the General’s neck or allowing the general to kill several civilians. Superman chooses the former, but is clearly distraught at the prospect of having to so viscerally take a life in order to save others.
Oh, and as critics pointed out, he and Zod in their flashy superhero fight levelled a city and probably caused incredible numbers of civilian casualties.
I would point out to those critics that if Superman and Zod had a dust-up in an abandoned field, it first of all wouldn’t have made for the dynamic and well choreographed fight scenes that the cityscape could provide. Second, it wouldn’t have established the right kind of narrative tension to serve the overall theme of the film - General Zod is an extremely destructive threat that Superman has to stop then and there before he can do even more damage. He can’t be careful with his powers anymore. Third - to be perfectly blunt, the city doesn’t matter and audiences really don’t care about it. What matters is what the character of Superman has to face and how that ties in to his story arc.
Superheroic Storytelling
I get the feeling that Horde players and Blizzard tend to feel this way about storytelling in WoW - and I pull Horde players into this because they’re very focused on what’s going on with their characters, and how Blizzard likes to yank them away. I feel that, certainly moreso than with the Alliance, Horde player investment is vectored through these characters - such as how the Orcs for two expansions were personified and expressed with Garrosh. A stronger example though would be Sylvanas, who the Forsaken are absolutely nothing without - to the point where she has her own fanbase who, bluntly, don’t actually seem to care about what happens to the Forsaken as a playable race, but DO absolutely care about what happens with Sylvanas - to the point where they will cheer their dark lady on even if she is likely never going to lead the playable race again.
Outside of the humans, Alliance playable races don’t have this kind of strong character identification, and the appeal of the various races is instead focused on those races in them of themselves - with a big part of this having to do with reactive, passive, or just poorly written characters who are weak by comparison to their more charismatic Horde counterparts. Night Elves stand, for instance, in stark opposition to the Sylvanas example. Prior to Battle for Azeroth, before she was established as the champion of an inter-alliance struggle against Anduin’s approach towards the Horde, Tyrande’s character had been so thoroughly vandalized that there were widespread calls for her replacement or removal from what should have been her own fanbase. Malfurion wasn’t much better - his popularity nosedived after Cataclysm, recovering only when his interests were placed in alignment with those of the playable race. The common people, or the idea of them matter. The major characters? Not as much.
Now let me finally get to the Elune cinematic, and my specific problems with it.
Excuse me, why should I care about any of this?
In assessing a story beat, I try to consider the objectives of that beat, and I see two of them here. The second one I will discuss a bit later - but the first one appears to be to resolve the already-established tension between the Winter Queen and Elune. Blizzard does this by revealing the cause behind the sisters’ fallout - the anima drought and the Winter Queen’s feeling that her sister had betrayed her. Elune answers that she didn’t betray her, and instead made an immense sacrifice out of love for her sister. Realizing what this sacrifice was, and being struck by the tragedy of that sacrifice being made in vain - something that her sister doesn’t yet know about - the Winter Queen’s rage is replaced with her somberly and sympathetically informing Elune that her sacrifice was entirely in vain. Elune is visibly destroyed by the news. She proceeds to blame herself, and stylistically sheds a star of a tear that the Winter Queen uses to console and restore hope to her Sister that perhaps the sacrifice may be in some way restored.
If you see these characters as characters then: this moment was expertly arranged to guide the audience through the emotions that each character feels. One can’t help but to feel as Elune does at the empty feeling of knowing that the terrible sacrifice may have been for nothing, and then the hope that maybe it can be restored. It’s powerful stuff - and it certainly doesn’t say, paint Elune as a genocide enabling monster.
Or at least it would, if, like Superman, Elune didn’t level a city to get us there.
What makes it different here though is that for the audience that this has the most importance to (and unlike Man of Steel) the “city” and the people who lived there are what matters, and not the characters. That they are faceless is not the point. Night Elf fans fell in love with an independently minded race with the prowess, and the distinctiveness, and the culture that this race had. We liked the concept and invested in that. Were this Man of Steel, it would be like if we spent the whole film actually watching Fever Pitch [1] and getting invested in that, and then two-thirds of the way through, Superman and Zod fly in and destroy everything. The narrative has no apparent plan to make things up to us, and instead it’s demanding that we care about Superman’s drama. We don’t! Bring back Boston! I don’t care if you put a Red Sox cap on Superman and a Yankees cap on Zod. Their garbage wasn’t what we were there for!
In fact it might actually be worse if you put a Yankees cap on Zod, which brings me to the second thing that I think Blizzard was attempting to set up.
What do you think should happen to a genocidal maniac?
Chapter 15 of my old Fraud Examination textbook [2] covered fraud interview techniques - this is where you sit across from someone suspected of committing fraudulent activity and ask them if they did it. Suffice to say, it doesn’t include “pound the table” or “press X to doubt”, but it does contain a question that I think is interesting for our purposes:
“How do you think we should deal with someone who got in a bind and did something wrong in the eyes of the company?”
The chapter explains the reason for this question as: “Similar to other questions in this series, the honest person tends to want to punish the criminal, while the culpable individual will typically avoid suggesting a strong punishment, for example: ‘How should I know? It’s not up to me’ or, ‘If he was a good employee, maybe we should give him another chance’.”
With that in mind, I am in no way the first person to remark on the unfortunate timing of this cinematic’s release given the recently revealed avalanche of depravity detailed by the State of California’s sexual discrimination and harassment suit. It sure isn’t a good look to push out a message that victims should shut up, go away, and focus on rebuilding their shattered lives without seeking justice, which the narrative has cast as a bad thing for reasons that it won’t explain outside of its own contrivances. Do I think it was deliberately planned as a response to recent allegations? Absolutely not - but I would bear the desire to evade consequences in mind when discussing the second objective:
Which is plainly, bluntly, and unmistakably to provide a narrative reason for the Night Elves to not hold either the Horde or Sylvanas to account for the reprehensible things that they did. The narrative needs both for other reasons, and because the Night Elves are narrative tools, and not a concept that the development team treats as deserving of its own agency, the needs of those parties come first. This is not and never was intended to be a serious conversation of the deadly sin of wrath, but rather, a way to force the Night Elves into an amicable place for the both of them without having to do the work of actually resolving the problem.
And, for me at least that inspires this kind of reaction. (Through 3:49)
But that’s IF I thought this was serious, which it is not. It’s cynically focused on that objective, and it doesn’t care about how we feel. It never did. It’s entirely unsatisfying and insulting to the target audience in the meantime.
Can we fix this?
No.
Some people harbor ideas that retcons are nuclear options that can unmake reality. The reality is that those are stickier things due to the audience’s memory. The Night Elves’ religion was really the last thing holding up the ceiling, and I and others considered the concept to be dead before we even got to this pillar. Now even that has been smashed - and you can’t unring the bell here. Maybe you can just say that it wouldn’t produce the cultural and religious reckoning that it probably should or that most Night Elves wouldn’t know what’s going on in the Shadowlands, but the players do, and we can’t unsee or unhear what we’ve seen and heard.
Now for some people, that doesn’t matter. The entire concept of the Night Elves are as meaningful to them as the city in Man of Steel. But for the people who lived in that “city”? It was all there was to care about. Now it’s gone, and it’s not coming back.
[1] Reference for those who aren’t familiar with the film Fever Pitch
[2] Principles of Fraud Examination, Third Edition, by Joseph T. Wells
, yes…