So, as I was watching the newest cinematic, it occurred to me that this entire plot with the burning of Teldrassil, Ardenweald and Elune’s intervention or lack thereof was mostly set up to give Tyrande a Story Circle.
What’s a Story Circle, you ask?
Created by Dan Harmon of Community/Rick and Morty fame and loosely based on Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth/Hero’s Journey, it’s all the rage with writers these days and is a very popular structure for making stories be story-shaped. Basically, the protagonist or focal character exists. They want something. They set out to get that thing, and face challenges. They adapt. They get what they wanted…and they pay a price for it. Then they realize that what they thought they wanted wasn’t actually what they wanted all along, and change and growth happen.
Here’s someone explaining it all a lot better than I can:
So Tyrande wants revenge for Teldrassil. She leaps into the portal. She faces challenges, and confronts Sylvanas. She is beaten back as Elune’s power fails her. Elune finally comes down and directly offers her the vengeance she wants, or to give up on that and opt for regrowth. Tyrande realizes that she doesn’t actually want revenge, and moves forward.
Story circle! /jazzhands
Here’s the problem, though.
Each circle is always overlaid by other circles. If all the circles are working together, you get the inner workings of a complex machine where the gears turn other gears and fit together. This is easiest to accomplish in works created by one writer, like book series. The Game of Thrones books (the books). The Harry Potter universe. The Lord of the Rings universe.
But if you have a circle, laid on top of a square, laid on top of a funny triangle shape, and parts of the circle are hidden or missing or happen offscreen or are filled in by other media, it doesn’t work. This can happen when there are a lot of writers who all have different ideas on the characters and where the story should go, or the single writer is just kind of winging it, looking for heavy story beats without properly setting them up or any consideration to the broader story.
Story circles written by multiple writers on one project work best in two, fairly specific scenarios. One, in a show like Rick and Morty where there’s a bunch of writers, but everything is sort of “reset to zero” with each episode and only passive nods are given to any change, growth and story development. So things don’t need to fit together in the long term, just for a single episode before the slate is largely wiped clean. This kind of structure largely isn’t possible in one big continuous world. The format of a MMO makes it hard to “start a new episode” that just ignores most of what came before.
OR, the other scenario is where you have a strong, central showrunner calling out the broad shots from above, supervising and enforcing codes on the overall construction. Like in a Kevin Feige situation, where his guidance has kept the MCU shambling together with passable amounts of discontinuity and duct tape into a story that largely works as a whole, at least to the point that people can largely suspend disbelief and just roll with it. Compared to the DC…CU? Where each director just kind of takes a stab at their own story and doesn’t bother to work with what was laid out by the others much at all. And this isn’t just speculation, several writers and directors on DC movies have complained about this in public.
So, to wind this down back to the situation with Tyrande, she has a pretty defined Story Circle. But how does it interact with Sylvanas’s circle? What about Elune’s? The Jailer’s? We’re missing cogs, and the shapes don’t necessarily fit.
Knowing what we know about the way stories get made for the game inside Blizzard, I’d say a couple of factors are the main culprits in the disconnect in how they clearly wanted it to go, and the way her story was received. One, while the broad strokes of the story are dictated by one person or a small team, tons of it is written by quest writers, writers in other mediums like Christie Golden, and by the writers that fill in low-level in-between events, between the big moments that they do cinematics for, and I’m not sure how well all of those separate writers communicate with each other - especially the external ones. And two, they’re not putting in the time, effort and money to laying out all of the necessary pieces of the story, which has been a problem for a very long time, but only seems to be getting worse. And I’m not even talking, like, having the big story beats in a book instead of in a cutscene. It’s nonsense, but at least there’s a place to go to find out what’s going on. I’m talking more about - what is the Jailer’s primary motivation? What were the sigils that he’s going for, and why are they important? If they can just remake the Tear of Elune, what’s the big whoop? These things may eventually, retroactively turn up in other media, but for now they’re skipping the vegetables of plot setup and laying out character motivation and worldbuilding so that they can get to the dessert of big emotional showpiece cutscenes, and the end result is that the punch of those scenes is mitigated.
For a classic example, the story goes that back in the day, Afrasiabi dictated that Garrosh should be made into a sympathetic character, but didn’t back it up with filling everyone in on the story beats that he was looking to fill in with that directive, or where the story was going from there. So the quest writers knocked it out of the park in Cataclysm, having him focused on honor and proving himself, but then when the eventual plan to have him do a face-heel turn was revealed, it didn’t fit with what they’d previously laid out.
It’s hard to say if it’s a budget thing or a problem with the “showrunner” not putting in the elbow grease. But long story short (too late!) I can see what they’re trying to do. I’m just not convinced that it’s working.
