I’m getting back into the lore after not caring about it in SL, and I’m seeing a lot of stuff saying the Titans are bad. Experimenting on dragons and demanding total compliance from the Earthen or else a giant robot will wipe them out. Orin enslaving protodrakes.
I always thought the Titans were the good guys. The Burning Legion was bad. Black and white. I’m all for having fun moral quandaries and realistic characters, but my question is this: Are the Titan’s being reconned, or was it always like this? What are some examples of them doing bad things pre-Legion? (real life time, not wow time since that deals with retcons)
Also think it was in wrath they started to flesh out the titans more and show they aren’t just benevolent.
Titans are a higher plane of beings and to them, the living are neat ways to experiment with the different cosmic forces and the titanforged are their robotic helpers with programmed responses.
It is when said computer developed sentience is when things got iffy for them and the curse of flesh infecting their stuff.
It’s like a person culling their garden because mold has started to spread.
Might seem evil to us, the little beings, but for them it is just spring cleaning…or that is how I see it.
The Legion has always been bad. Even if they are a force against the uber BBEG which is (so far) the void, they are still pretty solidified in the bad side of the scale.
Titans are… Embodiments of order. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are the good guys. They impose and end to chaos and void through order and arcane, which might trample smaller creatures on the way.
Think building a dam to prevent a river from overflowing and destroying an entire city. Some of the forest and wildlife will be lost, but the end effect is solid.
I think it’s been pretty clear since Wrath that the Titans aren’t always on our side. As beings of pure Order, they view us mortal as tolerable at best and prone to corruption at worst. So long as we continue to be useful in their grand plan, they’re fine with tolerating our existence. Soon as we are no longer useful or fail to keep Azeroth from being corrupted, they’d have no qualms in hitting the reset button and wiping out all sentient life on the planet.
I can square WotLK. Mortal life is insignificant to them compared to Titans/World Souls and Void incursions. Not great if you’re mortal, but I get it. Now we’re being outright told they’re liars and perpetuated some grand cosmic conspiracy, which … I guess it could theoretically go the other way, but the in game signaling is not being subtle at all.
That I agree with. Dragonflight was subtle about it. We knew the titans did some questionable stuff with the dragon eggs.
TWW has been really on the nose about it though, especially the weekly Titan Discs quests and the earliest quests Khaz Algar. With their keepers outright putting down rebellions and forcing non compliant earthen to get Factory Reseted as it were.
I mean, hell, we even have Azeroth herself creating the Thraegar as a means to combat what the titans and the keepers were doing to her.
Vanilla until the start of Wrath they were too mysterious to really call it, it erred to the Old Gods being the baddies but at the same time every Titan construct we encountered tried to kill us. They also were revealed to have made the troggs at some point during this time, which added ambiguity to them. It was thought we would probably fight them at some point.
Wrath until about mid-WoD they were seen as morally grey and many people thought they would be the final bosses of WoW after we beat Sargeras. This was before World Souls as a concept, before the Void Lords, and before the Light and Shadow were written as so antagonistic to each other and having so much agency. For much of this, their order was seen as something imposed, with Azeroth only being an outlier to a point because the Old Gods were on it. Even with the encounter with Ra-den it was thought we would kill the last of the weakened Old Gods and then Sargeras, and then the Titans would show up to ‘fix’ us.
Chronicle releasing in mid-WoD changed this, making their goals seem much purer, and this was increased with Legion when we actually met them. Even in BfA, every uncorrupted Titan construct we met was actively helpful to us, and self-sacrificing against Old God corruption. Shadowlands of course had little to no references to them.
Dragonflight’s portrayal of them is more a return to form, trying to revert somewhat to their initial portrayal for the first decade or so of WoW, and they’re trying to stick to it somewhat as the expansions progress.
To be fair, according to the play and their own historical, and lost, records, that titan keeper went off the the rails…in a big big way.
So it is more like the titans made the titan keepers and the titan keepers said to one of them, “hey, manage this area”. And then he got one small taste of power and went full on Karen mode.
The rest, I can see. But also the titans views on the titan forged is like…“why is my Roomba not listening to my remote and why is it s diamond now? I need to reboot it”.
In the RPGS they were described as lawful neutral. This was subtly implied throughout vanilla and confirmed with Algalon the Observer’s actions in Wrath.
Now, I DO think the Titans have become a bit flanderized. I miss when they were distant over-gods of legend. I’m not the type of person who thinks you should never show the cosmic level forces of your setting, but I do think titans should have remained larger than life with agendas beyond our full comprehension.
Yeah. When it was just them waking up their sibling baby gods, that was something else. “YOU WILL BE BORN THE WAY I SAY, KICKING AND SCREAMING, AZEROTH!” is … I don’t really see a bridge back for Aman’thul.
Tbf, the titans made Roombas which kept glitching and starting saying some very weird things and kept rebooting said Roombas to work properly. They didn’t program them with such things.
Never once have any of the titan constructs been depicted as simple robots, they have always been depicted as fully sapient beings. they were having rebellions and what not before the curse of flesh did anything.
If my toaster becomes sentient but is otherwise chill and unable to harm me, I’d probably just let it do its own thing and buy a new toaster rather than trying to enslave it into doing nothing but making my morning bagels for me
Heck, the Earthen are still carrying out their tasks for the most part now that they actually have a choice in things, there’s probably a loss of efficiency due to various Earthen dedicating them to wholly different things, but its not like they flipped a 180