In Vanilla, The Scarlet Crusade were pretty good antagonists. They had nuance, a good story reason for existing and style. Since then, Blizzard has stripped them of all that to make them story punching bags where so much about them, right down to their continued existence, is a plot hole. This is even more evident with their offshoot groups the Scarlet Onslaught and the Scarlet Brotherhood.
The Lightbound of AU Draenor have even more plot holes, and while I wouldn’t call her an antagonist (though some may disagree on that), so does the Naaru Xe’ra. Having yet more imperialist Light zealots - especially if they go this route with the Arathi - will not help the story. Look at the Void antagonists who vary in approach and scope. We got the imperialist Void zealots with the Black Empire. But we also get Azshara and the Naga, the Cult of Twilight’s Hammer and the Mantid to name a few. Let’s have some diversity.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be in the story, they absolutely can work. But if we have Light antagonists can we get something better than yet more jobbers, all-powerful yet totally powerless story punching bags (wonder what Umberto Eco would make of that writing) or mustache-twirling zealots?
I don’t even register them as imperialist really, imperialists expand, wanting to get ahold of something so you can destroy it, (Along with all of your other holdings) doesn’t feel very imperialist.
Which, then okay, there is the black empire. But the old gods after the black empire’s fell don’t seem like they want to return Azeroth to the black empire status quo, they want to do the hour of twilight, which I assume is destroying Azeroth pretty much, not conquering it.
I could be wrong, and maybe the hour of twilight doesn’t destroy Azeroth, it just destroys azeroth “as we know it” and makes resisting the black empire 2.0 impossible, but during the end time dungeon we don’t see or hear about New Ny’alotha.
People shoehorned their own headcanons of them being supreme racists, bigots and basically all the negative stereotypes held by Catholic Church — and Blizzard conformed to it and pretty much went fully into that narrative.
Some features here & there I can understand sure, but as a TOTAL supreme defining factor of the order and every single one of their individuals? … I don’t know, that kind of makes it boring & cliche.
Ultimately?
It’d be cool to see them be the good guys for an expansion or patch — and some lore insight reveal that like any government or nation, there’s different political parties and individuals who hold different views, takes desires for their direction(s).
Perhaps give a reveal of former villain or character who was commissioned to help the Scarlet Citadel in Tirisfal Glades or the Scarlet Enclave in Eastern Plaguelands and how they fell to the Forsaken or Scourge (Death Knights) along with much of their family – Bring some dark horror elements back into the story and make the players sympathise with them a bit.
That way if or when they re-emerge, you know that they may have a good reason; albeit still our enemy — or that they’re a political-extreme faction of their greater society that simply need to be stopped before they grow too great in power & threat to us.
The scarlet crusade basically became the Azerothian version of Third Reich Members, as it is easy to punch a Third Reich Member and not feel bad about it even if they are wearing clergy outfits.
We cannot have any more well-written Light antagonistic groups until we have… Just plain old well-written antagonistic groups, period.
Individual antagonists, or those only barely affiliated with a cohort are usually fine (ignore Zovaal and Sylvanas, nothing to see there).
The primal dragons? They mad because the titans wanted to make them changed. Ok, understandable. Their swarm of followers? They, uhh… Wanted power? Teldrassil happened and they blame Titans maybe? I truly am at a loss with their basic structure and movitation.
Xal’atath, she wants to do what the old gods never could, to serve her void masters. Gotcha!! Makes sense. The nerubians following her? They want to recapture the glory days of old, y’know when nerubians were the slaughtered foot soldiers of the void and watched their entire civilizations collapse due to following the void? That… Seems like a strange choice, okay I guess?
There are very few villain groups that have a stated motivation that also makes logical sense.
… Someone’s gonna come by and point out how I’m wrong now.
The Primalists are… a mixed bag. They were seemingly a bunch of disaffected people looking for someone to blame for the ongoing suffering and war on Azeroth. The Primalist Founders harnessed that and made sure the Titans became the scapegoat of everything bad ever, if we could only get rid of their influence then you would all have bread on your table and happy families.
The Nerubians are a lot more simple, unfortunately. The ones who went team Void were young and did not understand what they were really signing up for. For them it was “Make the Nerubians Great Again!” without any notion of what that even meant. There was a desire for change and Xal’atath exploited it to make them think they were improving their homeland when they were actually being played by a con artist.
Nah, you’re right. It isn’t even a problem unique to antagonistic forces, really. Everything tends to follow from a decision to tell a story using certain characters (which is fine) but it just bulldozes any considerations or boundaries that need to be navigated to tell that story (which is not fine). If Character A can’t perform Task X because Character B’s entire central motivation is opposing Task X, then Character B will just not exist. You can swap characters for entire organizations.
We need Primalists. Why do they serve the Incarnates? Because we need Primalists. You think maybe The Earthen Ring or Shamans in general might have something to say? Nah. I’ll give them some kudos for some of the Druids of the Flame during the Amirdrassil stuff, but more broadly speaking, a bunch of people helping Starscream Fyrakk Shadow-Flame the new World Tree and burn down the Emerald Dream doesn’t seem to serve any purpose other than WE ARE TEH VILLUNZ! IMPOSSIBLE! THIS CANNOT BE! ENOUGH! YOU ARE TOO LATE!
Speaking of DF, I feel like three of the Incarnates were actually pretty well written. Vryanoth, Iridikron and Raszageth all had their own relatively unique motivations
Than there’s Fyrakk, who was just a big angry fire dragon that just wanted to burn the world. Felt like Blizz wanted to do a cooler version of Deathwing with him.
The primalists are pretty generic bad guys. Which is fine in of itself. But I suspect Blizz just wanted generic foot soldiers for us to fight and knew most people weren’t going to think too deeply on why any of them joined.
As for light antagonists, eh. I don’t really give much thought to them if I’m being honest. I punch them in the face while thinking Well, this is stupid that X group showed up again but still have fun doing so.
How do you write a good Light antagonist though? That doesn’t eventually boil down to Purge the non believers, light good, you die for being a heathen?
Just make them a mixed bag. Let them have some good points and convert/appeal to people we know, like, and/or respect. Give them a sympathetic goal that just happens to be at odds with something the rest of us want. It does not even need to be a sympathetic opponent either. It is just nice in general for characters to have motivations that we can understand or relate to. Villains for the sake of villainy is okay in moderation, but that only really works (for me, at least) when we’re dealing with a Burning Legion or Psychotic Black Dragonflight.
Not so much when a playable faction surrenders agency to Sylvanas, or the nerubians are just fanatically loyal to Ansurek’s regicide in the name of Team Void because…? It will be equally unsatisfying if the Arathi Empire ends up just being all “GOD WILLS IT, BURN THE HEATHENS WHO SELFLESSLY AIDED OUR EXPEDITION BECAUSE ME EMPEROR SPICY-DIAPER LIKE FIRE-LIGHT!”
I felt like they had the PERFECT opportunity to do something really interesting with them after Lilian Voss’s death/undeath. They went the predictable route unfortunately.
I think they could still redeem it – with the notion I wrote above of detailing they have different political wings in their culture, but these days I’m doubtful Blizzard have the capacity to write something that well successfully lol - but who knows, “never say never!” right?
This game doesn’t have well-written antagonists period, as the discussion above has gone over. But yes, I’d like them to at least try something different with a Light antagonist. I like how you bring up the different variety of Void antagonists in contrast to the Light-based villains always being the same thing.
Another year, the same Thad Thread crying about Xera and the Light.
Sure it will - especially if the story is leaning towards filling us in on information regarding different facets of Light worship.
We are engaging with a new group of Light folks, and we have met a small portion of them, who are on the back foot in a strange land - so they are somewhat pragmatic.
How their mainland will react is still unknown.
Yrel doesn’t seem to be any of those things, and she is being built up as an antagonist with her Lightbound forces.
She seems to have true conviction, and does not take pleasure in her actions (twirling mustache). And she defeated the Maghar (not powerless), forcing them into exile on Azeroth - and doing Light knows what with those who remained.
And this is why he was my favorite. All the other Incarnates are like “look at me, I am deep, I have motivations!! Bathe in the opulence of my emotional depths!!!” And he’s all like “Fire, fire, fire!!! Hehehehe!!! I burn things, I’m Fire-AKK!!”
Some Incarnates aren’t looking for anything logical, like story or motivation. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some Incarnates just want to watch the world burn.
Mathew Mercer really brought Fyrakk’s mental instability to life with his voice work for sure. He was literally the embodiment of “Some men just want to watch the world burn”.
He was originally like “Avenge Raszageth! What’s that you say? Void-fire can help with this? Ok!” then as soon as he started bathing in Void-Fire he went all “Burn! Burn! Burn! Take over the World!”
As Alexstrasza stated the Fyrakk was once an idealist like the rest but became a power hungry maniac due to embracing the Void’s One Truth: “Only the Strongest survive”.
Fyrakk ironically is the only success the Void has had to date giving them a foothold in the Firelands after we killed him sending him there.
The Void almost had a success with Deathwing but made the mistake of exposing him to Shadowflame Elementium Armor disrupting the sanity he had filling him with the instincts of Fire which were added onto the instincts of Shadow creating a monster with no subtlety who failed in the Void’s goal for him.
Deathwing’s success was owing to the Titan’s Oathbinder which corrupted Deathwing with the desire to enforce Order. That desire passed onto Deathwing’s descendants including the Nether Dragons whom Malygos ate throwing him into the depths of Order’s desire for Control.
The Oathbinder’s rendered unusable but that won’t stop Tyr from following Aggramar’s order to infuse it’s energies into a single Red Dragon(instigating the prophesied attack by Alexstrasza) so that said Red Dragon can create a large enough amount of Red Dragonfire corruption for Aggramar to gather and infuse into Eonar(whom I’m certain is the Moon with a gash in it floating above Draenor which was Aggramar’s project) for the sake of bringing her to Order.
That right there is exactly what I’m hoping for rather than bad writing, like yet another stereotype-filled power fantasy ripped from the crusty underbelly of r/atheism or a cringe 90’s comic.
That doesn’t work when some of the groups punching the Scarlet Crusade in the face, like the Forsaken, are closer to Third Reich members than the Scarlet Crusade ever was (they even had concentration camps at one point, unlike the Scarlets). By that logic, the Forsaken should be more satisfying to punch in the face, don’t you think?
Because it makes no sense to talk about her when discussing poorly written Light characters, eh? Another year, the same attempts to strawman me from you.
That’s why I want something different.
I said “all powerful and totally powerless” as in referring to the Light users being treated that way by the story. Like if Yrel’s faction were suddenly pushovers we steamroll.
They always were after a certain point, there’s a reason why we no longer saw any non-human members and why they attacked anyone not part of their ranks after a certain point very early on.
The Ashbringer comic merely took that xenophobia and made it a pre-Scarlet Crusade phenomena.
I think they could still redeem it – with the notion I wrote above of detailing they have different political wings in their culture, but these days I’m doubtful Blizzard have the capacity to write something that well successfully lol - but who knows, “never say never!” right? 