Imo I think it’s apparent most of the devs or at least the writing team is irreligious, Anti Theists, or New Agers who don’t dedicate a modicum of time to determining where they stand on theology or metaphysics
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I ask myself this same question every hour since I learned of this book
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Is it at least interesting?
Golden is at worst competent. Which can ironically be worse than a bad writer. Because I’ve read books where I keep rereading sentences because I actually can’t understand what the author is trying to say and that’s it’s own value as now it doubles as a meta mystery story.
Golden has command over prose. I’m never confused at what the story asks me to picture or how something happened. And the Nathanos thing just sounds so textbook bland story to me.
I never wondered where they met. Probably the woods. It’s not really important. Two characters can just be in a relationship. Stories about how couples met are rarely interesting to anyone but the couples.
‘He followed her home one night (because women you don’t know just love it when men do that) and she decided eh why not he’s something new at least’ is as serviceable as anything. Because it wasn’t going to be more interesting than the Ghost White & The Huntsmen thing we already saw.
You can do interesting meet cute stuff. Shaw and Flynn met on a pirate ship and hunt for buried treasure on date nights. That’s fun at least.
And really I would’ve appreciated a more day in the life, low stakes stuff like this in a different context. I liked the short story with Lor’Themar but I genuinely knew so little about him as a character that I felt he really needed that. Him being this warrior poet and veteran of athousand battles that still panics when he’s talking to his crush was cute.
But with this - the stories already over. I’m probably not seeing any of these characters again. It’s not late in the game to be doing this. It’s after the game. Everybody’s already left.
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Yeah it’s a good read.
There is a lot of Lorethemar but it doesn’t get very much more than surface level.
The important thing whith Sylvanas’s romantic relationships was, she was never gonna be with anyone who expected her to change. She saw herself as messy, and wanted someone as equally messy, and I like that. Golden uses some cringe tropes but it’s not bad.
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IMO, the problem isn’t that Shadowlands is as fair as the living world of Azeroth. It’s that the afterlife of the Shadowlands is objectively less fair.
On Azeroth, if I want to be a good warrior, all I need to do is train very hard, study very hard, exercise very hard, and so forth. My goal and destiny are in my own hands. I might not achieve my goals, but I have the choice to work towards them.
In the Shadowlands, the Arbiter could say “yeah, you want to fight every fight there is to fight, but I’m’a send you to Bastion because of how devoted you were to fighting, BYEEEEEEE”. And my options from there are “serve or do not, period”. Unlike on Azeroth, there’s no avenue to carving my own path.
The Afterlife is significantly less fair than life. And that’s before we talk about the spaghetti strands of AU souls “merging” into my own.
If 99% of all Alynsa’s everywhere were vain, greedy sinful Alynsa’s and I’m just the best nature-loving hunter ever? Either those sinners get a free pass from Revendreth because the Arbiter decided my hunteriness outweighs everything, or my hunteriness gets punished for what AU versions did to me.
Not only do my own choices mean little, once you factor in AU soul-strands shenanigans, my own choices are irrelevant unless every version of me made similar ones.
My fate is less in my own hands than the conglomerate hands of all Alynsa’s in the Azerothian multiverse and the arcane choices of the Arbiter.
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I think thier writing leans more towards Epicurean philosophy and less about religious doctrine.
The FrAcTaLs Baal… it’s all about the Fractals, singing in harmony… her voice … must find a vessel!
…
It’s gibberish.
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Alleria yells at everybody a lot.
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You are assuming the Arbiter even got a say in it. The various ways the Arbiter gets bypassed has been showcased in Shadowlands.
This honestly just reads like a post-hoc desperate explanation to try and make Sylvanas sympathetic. If it was always planned as her motivation, then why would it not have been revealed earlier? She never even hinted at it before.
And if we’re supposed to dislike Shadowlands’ system (I know people do but I mean the authorial intent here) then why would maintaining the status quo be displayed as the objective good in all of the questing? Like seriously we just put a new Arbiter in charge. The villains of Bastion were rebels against the system, but who were also working with Satan and were portrayed as baby-eating monsters. Draka never once brings up her feelings on being separated from Durotan, she seems perfectly content in Maldraxxus. Clearly the author intent is for you to walk away with the idea that the way things are is fine, so trying to make a sympathetic villain by having them say they were trying to change things is a narrative contradiction.
It’s just all so obviously made up on the fly.
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Did golden even cover what was happening in Sylvanas’ 7d chess brain while she was burning teldrassil?
You know the crime she is about to be judged on for what seems to be a significant community service duty worth multiple life times?
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I believe so, towards the end of the book, I’m just not there yet I will update you later tonight.
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Thanks I appreciate that.
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Muh familuhhh
Seriously. They actually do an excellent job of showing why it’s a fairly good system.
In the Maldraxxi questline you go to Bastion with Alexandros to sort out that rogue Lich incursion.
And he asks them - why aren’t I here? This is pretty damn Paladiny afterall. Was his soul cursed by undeath? What’s the deal?
Well they show him. His experiences, even his worst ones, were instrumental in making him who he was and is. Alexandros is horrified at the idea of being forced to forget his wife and children and does concur Maldraxxus was the right move.
What’s worse though is as that and indeed the whole storyline demonstrates- you can go to other afterlives. I can see why they’d discourage that sort of thing generally speaking. But there isn’t anything actually preventing souls from visiting.
So idk. Can we at least try to see if we can reform this to allow visitation first? Blowing it up at the first sign of trouble seems a bit much.
And it really is just weird Sylvanas just took Zoval at his word. Slyvanas you know how to BS people. You’d think of any character she’d tried to get some more Intel or perspective before declaring war on the concept of existence.
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She was reluctant at first to join the Horde because they murdered her family. She naively believed that the humans would just welcome the Forsaken back and families would be reunited, basically why she later became so opposed to the Gathering.
The Forsaken are sold as a powerful ally that could give whichever side chooses them a finite amount of soldiers who were unable to be felled like a mortal, so the Forsaken had something huge to offer to which ever faction chose them. She sent four emissaries to the Alliance, one was from Stormwind and having living relatives there. They were all heroes of the Alliance she selected, none of them returned.
When she presented the Forsaken to the Horde She actually has doubts she says “How can, I trust the Forsaken to those orcs who have so much blood on their hands” (ha!) It was Nathano’s suggestion that she really doesn’t have to give the Horde anything, and they could be an alliance of convenience. Her dad being a diplomat taught her, “you can’t accomplish anything unless people are willing to come to the table.” She sent spies first to confirm that Thrall’s Horde was different from the Old Horde, and she settled on the Tauren because they were not orcs and had a peaceful nature. She sends an emissary to the Tauren and actually gets a reply, she’s invited to Thunder Buff, (same story we all know) to present her case in front of Cairne, Baine and Hammul.
When she gets to Thunder Bluff she is asked to leave her weapons and her rangers, she calls them arrogant cows in her internal monologue, she’s lead unarmed into a room and is startled by Thrall, an orc, and she’s unarmed, so she bristles a bit, Golden wastes no time
with her shipper heart having Thrall invoke Jaina and how he’s okay making human friends. He judges the Forsaken for being once part of the Scourge, a faction that did terrible things, and Hammul reminds Thrall that the ORCS did terrible things.
Hammul thinks the Forsaken were created to teach the world empathy.
Sylvanas is absolutely insulted by this notion, obviously, because she doesn’t want to be some philosophy for the Tauren to talk about amongst themselves.
She chooses in the end to try and spin the Forsaken as a people who are trying to understand what lies beyond Death, because Hammul confirms that death is not the end . Thrall thinks about if for a bit and says that he’ll accept the forsaken, but he won’t trust them right away and Sylvanas is like “gee thanks, I don’t trust you either.”
Thrall basically says if the orcs can be redeemed, the Forsaken can be redeemed.
Sylvanas then monologues on how the Horde can now be her weapon against Arthas.
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Considering her very first act was betray Garithos(as much as he deserved it) I am not sure exactly what she was thinking.
Again, this leaves alot to interpretation. For all we know they were killed by some random humans or got offed by Varimathras/Onyxia who would not want a united continent.
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Interesting. I want to believe Thrall’s hesitation concerning the Forsaken is a nod to his (glossed over) prejudices in WC3; I still remember his loathing for the Amani trolls.
Anything about how she brought the blood elves into the Horde? How did she feel about dealing with Lor’themar and Halduron again after realizing just how far she’d fallen in their eyes?
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With regards to the Battle of Gilneas it was meant to be a lesson of unfairness that the jailer wanted her to experience. She was meant to see herself in Liam Greymane and how he jumped in the way to protect his father, because she did something equally dumb to protect her sister and she would have done the exact same thing to save her own Father.
There’s a lot of repeating patterns here that’s hit home in her story. Life is unfair, and she can see herself in everyone else’s suffering. She sees Genn as an equal and wants to punish him because she wants to punish herself most of all, and she sees herself in him.
It also doesn’t help that she also has the jailer breathing down her neck trying to convince her that life is unfair and meaningless, because he’s a master manipulator.
The Battle of Gilness wasn’t really about the Gilneans, to her. Yes, they were mirrors of her own suffering, but her real enemy was Garrosh. She really hated Garrosh. She doesn’t actually hate Genn, she sees her own father in him, so when Liam dies she’s really upset by that. She’s really moved by Liam’s sacrifice because it was done with courage and love.
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hahahahahaha
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Gosh maybe she should have said “you know, I don’t want to do this. I’d rather fight Garrosh. I should reach out to the Alliance again and tell them the truth”
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