As far as gilneas goes, I think it’s best that it’s left abandoned at this point. With Ivar and the Bloodfang controlling Fenris Isle, it ensures the forsaken won’t make a move on the place again, since they got embarrassed the last time they tried.
As far as helping the Kaldorei? I want them to them to the boogie men, the ones that when the kaldorei are being attacked by their enemies, they can look their enemies in the eyes and basically say I’m the least of your problems right now, those wolf men back there? They have no problem playing dirty if that makes any sense.
I’m like you though, I just want ONE moment where as a worgen player, I can feel proud and feel like the worgen are actually adding to the story of just being side kicks or being used as the Kick the puppy trope for the alliance as a whole.
I think I’d probably quibble just a tad with your middle paragraph there, but I think I see where you’re going, and I agree that we come from a similar place on this. The worgen certainly deserve to be that terrifying boogie man, and there is SO much unused potential with that.
But you’re right, the Kaldorei do deserve to be shown as the powerful but NOBLE warrior women that they are, and that they should get their moment in the sun too. My main objection is that proud moment doesn’t have to come at the expense of the horde players feeling like crap yet again.
Yeah, and this is where we have to be careful to thread the needle. I don’t feel that Horde players should be made to feel bad about fighting the Alliance. This is why I think that the Kaldorei should be shown going after Horde civilians - briefly - before the Horde player puts a stop to that. There needs to be something that underlines that the Horde are fighting for something important, and that if they fail, bad things will happen. Past that? While yes, I do want that big onscreen moment that ends in what appears to be a victory, I think we need to be SUPER careful to ensure that to the extent that there is Horde content to match, that it ends on something that is framed in the way that you might a victory.
Admittedly, I will need help from Horde players in constructing that moment precisely. I previously thought I could use that as a moment to rehabilitate Baine, and I was tersely corrected. Rokhan seems to be emerging as a better option.
Argh, Gan. You just beat me to it. I was going to say the same thing. Just because some events are not shown in the game doesn’t mean they didn’t happen in canon.
They happened and you have to look at the whole and not a segment. Just because a majority of players didn’t read Elegy/A Good War doesn’t mean you can dismiss the events that happened in the novellas.
You know this is the Story/Lore forum, Kyalin. People in here debate topics and include everything - in game stuff, books, all of it. So, to say that NE Player IluvLegoas or the Tauren player EatMorChkn didn’t read them doesn’t matter. So what? We don’t care about what Impaddy the mythic raider thinks because he barely pays attention to the story.
That may not be your intent, but it feels like you are dismissing the novellas as inconsequential and the in game stuff is far more important.
That may not be your intent, but it feels like you are dismissing the novellas as inconsequential and the in game stuff is far more important.
It kind of is my intent.
I’m well aware of this forum and how it is. I’ve been paying attention to it for ten years, and have participated in it for six. There is a tendency to lapse into persnickety lore discussions about elements that general audiences largely miss, and that aren’t well understood by the overwhelmingly visually oriented human brain. I acknowledge that those elements exist, but I disagree that they are anywhere near as important as we hold them on a board such as this one.
I think this forum needs to do a better job in considering how the story is told, how well it uses the medium, and how well the objectives of the story meet the objectives of the game that the story should be improving. A detail that comes out of page 47 of a book, or from a developer interview is nowhere near as impactful as a cinematic that was constructed to get the viewer to feel a certain way.
If you want to have a better understanding of the frame of reference I use - I would recommend looking at Filmento’s work - which can be found on Youtube. He does a good job of explaining why certain elements do and don’t work from the perspective of general audiences in a visual medium. I probably tack closest to his style of critique.
Edit: Start with his review of the Sonic movie - he makes some comparisons to Warcraft’s general style of expecting the audience to know and incorporate information that they likely wouldn’t - into in that particular case: the Warcraft movie.
So, in your opinion, Varian’s death was more impactful (or holds more weight) to Alliance fans than Cairne’s death was to Horde fans because it was shown in a cinematic?
Don’t need to. It’s preposterous and, frankly, incredibly arrogant especially since these discussions always go back to a subjective interpretation of the game and its media.
That’s a common complaint me and other worgen fans have. We’re always told something cool happened, but we never get to actually SEE it. I get where you’re coming from though. It’s one thing to read X cool moment happened but it looses its impact when you are constantly SHOWN that your race looks like a bunch of incompetent idiots in their own territory(the Kaldorei in this case)
Even if you read the Shattering, Cairne’s death was not given anything near the weight that Varian’s was - and if you didn’t read the Shattering, he just sort of disappeared. Varian’s death was a big deal, spanning multiple cinematics across two expansions.
So, if you’re going to ask me which one had more impact - it’s Varian’s - far and away because that’s the one that Blizzard chose to emphasize. Now if you tell me that’s unfair to Horde players, I absolutely agree with you, and this highlights the problem with shoving something in transmedia narrative versus actually depicting it in visual and interactive media.
We’re not talking how much weight it’s given by Blizzard but how much weight it holds for the players. Varian’s death, despite the cinematic, holds zero weight for me. He was not a character I cared about in the least.
I think you’re missing her point. Most players don’t even know or care Carne died. But a lot of people were talking about how Varian went out like a badass. And in a VISUAL media like a MMO, Varians death holds infinitely more weight
Which is fine for you, but you’re also not the only person engaging with this franchise. You’re also in a small community of people who have a command of all of the facts of the lore, versus the vast majority who don’t and instead go by what they see.
I am respectfully asking that you step out of that box. “Show don’t tell” is not a controversial storytelling convention.
Just like Cairnes death holds little weight in a MMO where things need to be SHOWN and not told to us… And I hated Varian, but still found his death to be way more impactful. But that’s me.
My parting comment to you on this point is that subjectivity is not the same thing as abject chaos. Rules and frameworks can and are applied in just about every arena - including storytelling. Subjectivity on the margins does not undo the common and studied drivers of how people generally interpret media.
Past that I’m afraid that we’re going in circles though.
It holds massively more weight for the Horde than Varian’s death did because it gave us Baine as a race leader. And we’re still dealing with the fallout of that.
I didn’t hate Varian, I was completely indifferent to him. Zero impact for them and zero impact now. But, that’s just, like, my opinion.
