I cut my teeth reading narratives in Dune, where every narrator had an axe to grind and you couldn’t trust any of them… especially Princess Irulan.
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The point was that an unrelieable narrator only works as a hook in the story itself, you should not have a unrelieable narrator for the overall world building, which is what blizzard currently have with their entire titan point of view bullcrap.
Stories are always flexible, a story is never really locked down as long as you have can have a logical explanation to continue it - and that is much easier to have with a sturdy foundation that is not being changed. If you keep breaking up the foundation every time, then it becomes a convoluted mess that you as the author can not find your way around, and your readers and those who follow the story, will get extremely confused and have a hard time actually following.
Other authors will also have a hard time actually writing for the game. Take some of the recent Warcraft comics. A Blood Elf who is now 7000 years old and still young and spry, although Anasterian was said to be quite old at the age of 2900. And Anasterian was old with the Sunwell, while the Blood Elf at 7000 was still young and spry despite the destruction of the Sunwell, that was also said to have killed the youngest, oldest, and awfully ill High Elves.
We have Vereesa’s bipolar personality that is just crazy, going from one end of the crazy spectrum to the other.
Certain events are being forgotten and/or changed, because the story does not have a sturdy foundation to build upon, so we just get a whole lot of random crap from blizzard and the authors they hire to write stuff for them, it is insanity.
And blizzard is also being influenced by fan-misconceptions, but in blizzard’s defense, this also happened in Star Wars, so eh… but I would still argue that it is the result of a sturdy and good foundation that has not been set preemptively.
Blizzard should do an actual lorebook, a corner stone, the holy bible which they said that the original chronicles book would be. That would their rock, that would be THE lore. WHelp, turns out it is just an unrelieable narrator, because blizzard’s writers are a bunch of talentless hacks… I honestly suspect them of using chat GPT to write all of their lore.
So what, we can’t have a pretty normal story line of someone powerful is lying to us?
I’m just not seeing where they’re breaking up the lore all over the place as opposed to introducing new aspects that change how past events are seen looking back.
What does that specifically look like?
Is it like a design document that’s an easy to reference rough guide for the intention behind the various aspects of the game so that people can go to it to help them make content that fits into the feel of what they’re working on and add their own touches?
Or is this like setting up a book of trivia that never can be departed from without a cluster of pedants acting like old comic book geeks going all swear to god some people come off like they just care more about being able to do the old school comic book nerd “But on panel 4 on page 5 of issue 3622 of the Spectacular Spider-Ham Peter Porker said he was allergic to eggs but in the new issue he’s clearly eating a quiche!” with the wow lore?
This is an ongoing work that needs flexibility and room to work in, There’s nothing wrong with natural progression in this world where new information comes out to reveal details we didn’t know before, or that some things we thought we knew end up being wrong or being told in a way that is just true from a certain point of view.
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That should be done in game from said character, not an out of game lore book.
There’s a lot of other popular settings that frankly don’t have the storytelling issues Blizzard frequently pulls. You can have flexibility and room while also having respect for your setting and working within certain confines.
And if the book didn’t use the framing of being titan passed on history and then later the story changed naturally in a way that made the stuff in there not the full story of those events is it still a problem?
If the story progresses naturally it is whatever, I don’t really think that’s what has happened.
The greater issue is they break from prior stuff because they’re lazy, the PoV is just an excuse for that. So in that sense a bad change from prior lore is a bad change either way. But the pov stuff is worse in that regard because it encourages the lazy behavior.
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I flat out refuse to shuck out 150 bucks every couple of years for lore that’s not written by the same people who write out the in-game lore and gets revised about as often.
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It’s definitely taught me not to trust anything that happens in the game.
You could have a situation like this new Lothar just flat out hack off every limb off of a prisoner and cackle like an Old God worshipper while Anduin watches in horror and—
—a tell-all book comes out a year later saying “Lothar was the goodest good that ever gooded for goodness. Any evidence to the contrary was just Old Gods.”
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Totally fair for IRL history books. That’s the nature of any sort of scholarly work.
I think I feel the way I do because I lump WoW story in with pure fiction. Like if I read the Lord of the Rings, Sauron is evil, the One Ring is bad, Aragon is honourable. There’s no questions raised in the material or supporting works about the authenticity of that. Tolkien scholars can argue the finer points, and obviously LoTR is a literary masterpiece. But even thinking about something like the Drizzit series by RA Salvatore; entertaining, but not Shakespeare by any means. The trust I feel towards the story being told helps me form attachment to the story and enjoy it more.
This contrasts with the WoW story, where I’ve gotten to a point where I know the events that have happened. But their context and significance has dissipated because I have no idea anymore if anything or anyone is remotely reliable in terms of motivations and connections.
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Personally… I don’t really care. The material either engages me or it doesn’t. Whether it’s “world truth” is a secondary concern. I’m far too cynical to blankly accept anyone’s pages at face value. I’m always hunting for the axe being ground… again… Dune will do that to you… that and reading lots of Kafka.
If you ever want to dumb your brain back down, there’s always the Brian Herbert Dune prequels.
That’s what social media is for.
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Yeah but that’s like using a jackhammer when you just need a chisel
I prefer my Algernon effect to be done quickly.
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Chronicle isn’t written as an in-universe history.
From the Preamble,
“Twenty years of storytelling. Tens of Thousands of moments, races, and monsters, all forming dense strata of concepts and ideas over time. This book—this chronicle—is meant to bring it all together and reinforce the overarching narrative that lies at Warcraft’s heart.”
The primary issue with the ‘Titan Perspective’ argument is that Chronicle I-III are written from an omniscient point of view by the actual story directors of the Warcraft franchise. There is no framing of any sort otherwise.
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Me when I just make stuff up:
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Believe it, dont believe, its no skin off my noses.
It’s not that I don’t believe you (though I don’t), it’s that what you said is patently false and incorrect. Like it’s not even a matter of opinion.
Warcraft (not just WoW) very seldom uses unreliable narrators. The huge overwhelming majority of its storytelling is either omniscient or seen in the first or second person. There is simply no room for unreliable narrators in most of Warcraft’s story because most of Warcraft’s story is not narrated to begin with.
I would argue it has been doing so for at least since Legion with Odyn, the Light and the Void all being unreliable.
Then dont its your lose.
Warcraft story has for the most part been made on the fly. Yes Blizzard tries to keep some consistency but it has always been malleable to whatever game play demands. And sometimes just malleable to whatever is a better story, consistency be damned.
But that is the thing with first or second, they can be unreliable narrators to the audience. That is part of how some of the retcon were explained in the past. Whether it be the Broken Front or The Broken Shore players themselves dont experience all it(unless you play both sides) and even then alot of is shrouded in mystery until Blizzard decides to make something “canon”.
Hell, for example we dont even know which of airship battles is canon and we all experienced it in first person.
“Since Legion” is not the strong point you think it is when I said “not just WoW”. Legion was only 3 expansions ago, it’s not exactly old.
“Made on the fly” does not mean unreliable. “Malleable to whatever” is inherently NOT the ingredient for a better story because adhering to the limitations established before actually requires some creative effort from the writers. They’re writing fiction, it’s hardly strenuous work, just be smarter and don’t uproot nearly 30 years of existing material because you thought you could do it better.
The Broken Shore doesn’t support the idea of an unreliable narrator either, because that still isn’t narrated to the player from anyone in-universe. Do you think “unreliable narrator” means any deliberately obfuscated information in the narrative? That term has an actual definition.
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