I wondered about this when they revealed nothing is lost in the shadowlands and it all gets reused. My first thought was Anyone want to remind they created the maw, where things get obliterated or turned into sentient weapons and armor?
It’s kind of sad when they can’t even keep track of their own lore within the same expansion 
I don’t think that’s fair to the 90s/00s. You had stuff like Deus Ex which has some points about corporations so large nobody has any idea who they even work for having more influence on a society than it’s citizens. Haha what a wacky Sci fi premise thank God that doesn’t become more depressingly relevant with every minute.
Then the sequel was the world’s clumsiest racism allegory and also wouldn’t shut up about the myth of Icarus. It reminded me of crap sci fi where the ships callsign is 4 Horsemen or the experiment is code named Pandora’s Box.
So video game narrative quality has sign waved quite a bit over the years. For every Spec Ops: The Line or Bioshock you get a Battle For Azeroth where genocide is a marketing stunt.
Thing is I think WoW’s best stories have always been the smaller quests that explore the world, it’s societies and the people therein.
Like a fetch quest in Classic was so much more emotion than anything in SL. A Forsaken in the Scarlet torture chamber uses his dying wish to beg you retrieve his wedding ring and return it to his wife. The torturer ripped it off his finger and gave it to his gf.
So you oblige and sort those Scarlets out. And when you return the ring there’s no bombastic speech about how we’ll eat the screaming faces off those human bastards. There’s just a completely broken woman who has now lost everything.
And SL couldn’t really do stories like that. Because everyone’s already dead and quite possibly was an alien before then. So, not a lot in common and also you can’t do much for them. Because they’re dead.
Anyhoo, so I have a new speculation post
https://wowloreaddict.tumblr.com/post/680437847697784832/speculation-could-calia-be-a-dreadlord
Is this coercion through peer pressure? Because that’s what it sounds like.
You’re expecting realism in fantasy. It’s more like a fantasy superhero story.
I mean shooting her in the head works just like it does IRL so since when is gravity easy going in Azeroth?
As someone who uses Mind Control and Shining Force a lot I can say its still a pretty immensely useful tool.
Godfrey has a comparative power level? 
No, not at all, however that would extend to nearly everyone. Arthas did not deserve to be put into a no-win situation that broke his humanity. Again, as much as Arthas is being maligned for Sylvanas, Arthas while he was fully human literally refused Blackmore offer offer of taking advantage of Taretha.
Arthas was manipulated to end up taking Frostmorne, which we know did have an affect on him. The blade supposedly took his soul(or more likely a portion of it) sure he was strong enough to eventual wrest control but by then he was not the same person anymore then Sylvanas could be considered the same person before and after her death.
maybe, just maybe, Arthas refused Teretha because she wouldn’t put up a fight. Both this new book and the Arthas novel says that Arthas enjoyed subjugating women who fought back against him… do you know what that is? it’s a rape fantasy.
It’s said time and time again, that even under control of the helm and the sword, Arthas had his own free will, just like Sylvanas had her own free will.
Just for clarity here: The word choice, as far back as WC3, set the allegory.
Don’t forget that the Valkyr flying around means The Maw was not locked too!
And yet never once did Arthas do that to Jaina(even though she broke his heart and would have put up a fight). Maybe, just maybe, people are not as black and white as well all like to believe. That we are never just our worst moments, nor are we exclusively our best.
Be that as it may, he is effectively a victim of trauma. That had that particular trauma not been inflicted on him he’s fate could very well be different.
Because he loved jaina. Rape isn’t usually something done with love. I think the narrative actually does paint Arthas a pretty black and white and continues to do so over and over again to the point where it’s irrefutable.
Arthas had qualities in life which hinted at this path. His hubris and his unwillingness to take “no” for an answer, for example.
Only if you decided to ignore all the other narrative. It would be like me saying Garrosh was irredeemable evil while ignoring that in a good chunk of timeline he apperently did become a hero.
In Jaina’s nightmare during Cata where she was show that she could have ended up Lich Queen if she followed Arthas, in said timeline she would have enslaved Arthas, with its own hints of sexual undertones.
For the longest time Warcraft has made it quite clear that the majority of its characters are not purely good or evil. That even the worse of them like Sargeras did have sparks of good in them/had a reason for why they did what they did.
Sorry, I’m just not buying Arthas as a good guy who could have been redeemed. That’s not the story we have been told time and time again. I thought he got a fitting end, one that he justly deserved. I’m willing to just leave it at that.
Well believe it, and Golden of all people wrote an Arthas that never got corrupted and is happily married to Jaina in a different timeline.
Did you miss WoD where people in different timelines are not the same people as their main timeline counterparts?
Golden’s copium fanfic doesn’t negate the fact that he’s therapist in Warcraft canon.
In the only timeline that matters, both arthas and garrosh are irredeemably evil. It’s not even debatable
It is not fanfic considering it is canon lore. There was an Arthas that did not become the Lich King, and for the most part remained good.
I’m going to answer this together because they are generally related. Yes, different timeline effectively make them different people BUT what makes them different is the circumstances. They are still the same “person”.
In a different timeline we saw a cowardly Anduin because Varian died too early, in another one where Jaina went ahead with her Tidal wave we saw a crazy Kalec, in another Baine became a blood thirsty warchief. If anything it is proof that we are as much a product of circumstances and fate as much as our choices. Circumstances that may or may not be beyond our control.
All those versions? They all get merged in to the main timeline version of themselves eventually. Nothing you just said negates what I just said 