As in you still feel Blizzard handled Garrosh poorly? Or its not as bad as what’s going on with Sylvanas or past examples like Kael’thas.
If Kosak wasn’t involved in Cataclysm’s Lore Afrasiabi would have made Sylvanas into the Villain of MoP…
Afrasiabi was in charge of the Revamped Zone Quests while Kosak was in charge of the Expansion Quests(Vashj’ir, Hyjal, Deepholm, Uldum and Twilight Highlands). Afrasiabi is the one who made Garrosh be a good person in Stonetalon Mountains while Kosak had him recklessly attack the Alliance in Twilight Highlands!
Garrosh being handled poorly led to Sylvanas being handled even more poorly!
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So Kosak won out in the end?
Yep! At least where Garrosh was concerned. Of course Kosak provided an explanation for Sylvanas’s motivations(“bulwark against the infinite”) in his Short Story for her but that Short Story was all he wrote for her it seems according to Afrasiabi who claims he was writing for her ingame since Vanilla WoW.
Kosak added flavor to Sylvanas’s actions(which were on the side of Evil) so that they would make sense(why she would spread her curse onto others).
If Kosak wasn’t there Afrasiabi would have had her passing out the curse of Undeath out of spite for Humanity which Arthas originated from. Now she has survival as her main reason to reanimate the dead Humans!
Unless you follow the tin-foil hat conspiracy theories that Kosak was shuffled over to Hearthstone after he made Sylvanas warchief and now Alex Afrasiabi is free to villain bat Sylvanas as hard as he wants to, so Alex Afrasiabi wins now instead.
What are Alex Afrasiabi’s contributions to wider WOW lore and far back has he been working?
Was Slyvanas his creation or Metzen’s?
Alex Afrasiabi is Creative Director, and according to him:
- "I've heard these discussions on the internet about 'she's going off the rails', but is she? I've been writing Sylvanas personally since 2006, and this is pretty much - the Wrathgate and the Blight and the Forsaken - in character. Those were all under Sylvanas' orders. What we're seeing now is an escalation of the plans Sylvanas has, clearly, and we're in the middle of that."
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I feel like the complete destruction of Teldrassil is really out-of-character for her.
As for the topic, I think the misstep with Garrosh was his arc in Cataclysm. There should have been some significant Alliance aggression that exacerbated his views on Orc superiority.
But we know now Cata Garrosh was a result of miscommunication.
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Garrosh could have been great if Stonetalon was any indication.
Imagine if Anduin could have redeemed him, or if Warcrimes put more emphasis on his the flailing hypocrisy of other Horde leaders throwing Garrosh under the bus
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The problem with turning horde characters villian thAt hijacks the entire faction is that it is a story that has already been told and a lot better than in BFA. We know how this story ends there aren’t a lot of surprises and it’s generally disappointing. BFA could have been an entirely different story on the faction war but instead it’s the exact same thing and yes they may scream this will end differently but it doesn’t really matter it is in essence the same story told in a worse way than the first time
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I was very unhappy with the Garrosh storyline at the time, and I still think it was a bad direction for the Horde story as a whole. But BfA has really made me appreciate how much better it was handled by comparison.
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Garrosh was the turning point for the Horde.
The alliance has had the same identity since vanilla. Thralls horde from Warcraft 3 was turned evil because of Garrosh in cata/MoP. It felt like we were fighting for a different and evil faction. Vol’jin tried to bring thralls horde back, but here we are. Evil horde again. Villain bat. again.
Garrosh should’ve been a mix of hot headed Grom and Thralls wisdom. As the story goes on, Vol’jin and Cairne temper him into a strong Warchief that doesn’t seek out war, but absolutely does not allow the horde to be pushed around by the alliance. Without burning down a tree full of innocents or making PoWs fight each other in front of their children for amusement.
I’ll never forgive the devs for the horrendous treatment of Garrosh and the Horde since. The story as a whole would be a 1000x better if the Horde kept its identity.
Now we are stuck wondering how the heck can horde characters save the world and be heroes after we let Teldrassil happen? And why the alliance heroes would ever allow them to live?
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Blizzard’s office politics sounds far more interesting then BFA right about now.
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Oh so the Wrathgate was retconned to be Sylv’s orders. Cool.
The burning itself no, but the WAY she screamed like a demented monkey was.
Never ending circle of bad writing. There’s no winning against biased writers.
When you do the Mag’har orc quest and you are going to fight the Shadow of Garrosh, there’s a time drake that says something in the lines of “In many timelines he was the greatest warchief the Horde ever had, he led them to victory and glory[…]”
When I read this I just wanted to alt f4 the game out of frustration.
Sticking a screw under my toe’s nail and kicking a wall sounds better than BfA lore
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I mean…
One of the problems for me with WoW is that everything happens too damn slowly and then when it finally happens, it’s over too quickly.
Like, the Horde followed Garrosh for longer than they probably should have with no examination. But at the same time, giving him like 3 patches to chew on the scenery and be bonkers wasn’t enough time to give us an understanding of Garrosh as a bad guy. He did a lot of jerky things, he was sending out crazy vibes and making trouble, and maybe everyone should have been a lot more concerned.
And Garrosh actually got some of the longest buildup of any of our “new” villains. I could have done with a bit more of the guy instead of Thrall kill-stealing and taking away our new hatebuddy way too quickly. A good antagonist should be allowed to simmer.
I DUNNO, I LOVED HATING GARROSH AND I MISS HIM
I MISS HIM MORE THAN I THOUGHT I WOULD
Also, it’s just bonkers to me that no one, in game, really wants to talk about “Hey, so the Warchief’s acting sketchy and excessively homicidal again. Are there any parallels we maybe want to discuss? Our emotions on it? Oh, you say we’re going to talk about how Saurfang feels bad about how the Horde is being duped while simultaneously feeling NO PERSONAL culpability for planning a sneak attack against civilians with overwhelming force because that’s totally honorable? Yeah, fine. Manpain for DAYYYYYYYYS.”
Not that I’m somewhat irked by all this or anything.
This made me laugh. Thank you.
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You may be right, though of course we can’t know for sure. I wish someday someone would write a tell-all behind the scenes story of how these stories got made. Especially this one.
Supposedly there’s some of that in 8.2.
Juggling serious stuff with sarcasm and sass is my specialty, glad you enjoyed <3
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Sylvannas story arc is fine. bandwagon hate does not make it bad.
storytelling in vanilla and bc was awful in general, it wasn’t until wotlk that they started to focus on integrating meta story elements in to the actual game.
Garrosh was always going to be a villain, as the horde are villains. Players of the horde need to embrace the villain roll.
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I’m still a little salty about it yes. I could deal with his aggressive orcish nature but the super evil old god corrupted time traveling tentacle man was a bit much. He could’ve really been a compromise between Thrall’s Horde and the Old Horde, but instead he just went insane. Even his ending just seemed…like a waste. Maybe that was the intended feeling.
Is it as bad as Sylvanas or Kael? Kael was arguably worse, but Sylvanas could be expected to go down this road based on her history. I think part of what makes Sylvanas so bad is that this whole situation is happening while Garrosh is in recent memory. On their own they might be bad but you can still look to the future. Right now we’re basically on Mr. Bone’s Wild Ride. It never ends.
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