Bull.
Evil characters who do evil things deserve to get the axe, sooner or later, regardless of the specific structures of their Naughty Bits.
Did Bad Things happen to them in the past? LOTS of people have had Bad Things happen to them in their past, and yet not all use that as an excuse to continue to do Bad Things to other people. A sympathetic backstory does not make you sympathetic by itself.
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I don’t agree with all of this comment, but most of this comment.
To add to what you said, Illidan himself forced Akama to serve him by splitting his soul and threatening to have his evil half consume his good half. Xe’ra trying to change Illidan from a Demon Hunter to a paladin - love it, hate it or meh it - is tame by comparison (and perhaps poetic justice, given Akama).
They had the same goals; end the Burning Legion. Xe’ra just wanted him to use the Light to do it. The way some fans rage about Xe’ra, you’d think she killed their childhood pet. It’s also pretty silly to me that Xe’ra’s death was a one-hit-kill, straight out of a 14-year-old’s power fantasy.
I disagree, I think there’s a double standard here. If a male character has a tragic backstory he’s seen as sympathetic and redeemable1. If a female character has a sympathetic backstory she’s seen as whiny and irredeemable.
The narrative of the Sylvanas novel recontextualized Sylvanas’s evil acts as her being heavily manipulated by outside forces.
Thad have you considered BOTH Illidan and X’era to be evil and one evil act doesn’t purify the other?
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afrasiabi was an infinitely better writer
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I agree. The sacrifice theme was just lost when it came to legion.
Illidan and Xe’ra was painful mainly because Illidan has no repercussion for his behavior.
Illidan’s overall story relied on sacrifice and making tough decisions for the greater good. He faced consequences and isolation for his actions.
In legion, Xe’ra ignored that and chastised the player for thinking Illidan was a bad guy. Then she tries to forcibly convert Illidan and he kills her, thus making his actions justified.
Legion felt like it was trying to say Illidan did nothing wrong. Defeating Xe’ra only reinforced that. It misses the nuance of the character.
It was also goofy Velen and Turalyon did nothing about the situation. I would have loved if they confronted Xe’ra.
Edit- Also have to say, I love your parallel between Illidan and Xe’ra. The fact that Xe’ra assumed he would be open to conversion because he has always done what was needed to fell fel provides such an interesting take on the character. I like that more than “Like the light or else” take people seem to push.
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If what you said was true, the story doesn’t treat it that way; one of my many problems with that cinematic, Ren.
Conversion from a Demon Hunter to a Paladin? And how were Turalyon and Velen supposed to confront Xe’ra when she’s dead?
If Xe’ra had used Illidan’s “Sometimes the hand of fate must be forced.” line before trying to Lightforge Illidan, it would’ve reinforced those parallels you speak of and (for me) made that cringe cinematic almost bearable.
You damn him with faint praise. And even that is an “agree to disagree” from me.
I love the biased narrator as a device in settings like the Elder Scrolls. It allows the setting to be interpretive, which is what one of it’s big contributors, Michael Kirkbride, wanted. It allows subjectivity and the nature of the gods, magic, history etc to be fascinating to talk about on all levels.
But the bias narrator is one of the worst tropes when it’s retroactively added to something where it makes no sense. This is the most glaring example of it that Danuser’s done, and it’s riddled throughout the last 2 xpacs. He’s NOT writing things as possibilities, unless they’re obviously just -wrong- because it’d make no sense (I.E. the idea from one of the new excerpts that Azeroth pre-dates the concepts, which just wouldn’t make sense.) He’s adding a bias narrator twist to ideas retroactively, even to things sold to us, the readers, as objective and not in-universe.
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Not just that. The Chronicles were, in Blizzard’s own words, supposed to be “the retcon to end all retcons”. Look how long that lasted.
How long until it happens to the Shadowlands book?
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And to be clear, I don’t think all the lore from chronicles was amazing… but I don’t think they’ve actually fixed the dumb moments from it, they’ve just made dumber moments?
For me, I think they made Wild Gods boring and overly emphasized just the titan aspect of the worlds origin, when prior lore implies the Wild Gods should’ve existed on the planet around their arrival (I.E. “They’ve existed as long as life has” & Tortolla speaking a language from that era that nobody in modern times can naturally understand.) They aren’t adding mystique back to the setting. They’re further erasing it if anything by diluting it with vapid ideas that fall apart upon faint inspection. They don’t realize that when the overwhelming majority of something like Elune’s lore isn’t actually ‘life’ based, that this means that anyone knowledgeable of her will immediately see the innate contradiction of her core identity in saying ‘actually you always worshipped her like this’ and it’s actually just watering her down and reducing her to a one note entity with no nuance.
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The cinematic treats it like x’era was a villian.
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Blizzard is so revisionist regarding Illidan. To some extent I wish they’d just go outta their way OOC to acknowledge that YES, by the original telling from Wc3’s Manual (which can be found easily in pdf form online), he was just a crackhead incel who got mad someone he was overly reliant on for support didn’t love him beyond the level of a friend. Legion tries so hard to hype him up like he’s HIM. TBC went too far into the extreme, mustache twirling with his character imo, but Legion made him too nice. And if we wanna be consistent with TBC- Illidan has done to an entire race of people being deformed by dark magic, what Xe’ra was going to do to him.
Like, at best, he’s a hypocrite and just as bad as her, but they’re too oblivious to their own setting or banking too hard on a preferred plot to think about it or address it.
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I agree. “Biased” narration can be very helpful in fleshing out a universe. It provides the reader with insight into the various cultures, beliefs, and histories of the world’s inhabitants.
At the end of the day, I think a fictional world can have both types of narration. However, retroactively changing objective accounts of history into subjective accounts is so disheartening.
I was excited to read Chronicles and finally get codified Wow lore. Now it doesn’t matter. So much of modern was has just been retroactively injecting things as if they have always been there.
I do wonder how Metzen will fare as he was one of Chronicle’s writers and proponents of it being objective.
Side note- I like how Elder Scrolls has human civilizations that are analogue cultures to our own. I wish Wow took a page out of Elder Scrolls when looking to add depth to human lore.
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To be honest, I think some of the weakest TES lore came from revising the human races to draw more directly from one group or something. Cyrodil not being a jungle wasn’t so bad, but they got watered down heavily in Oblivion. Nords in Skyrim too. A lot of the mystical elements of them and their deeper perspectives got axed for simplicity.
Warcraft kingdoms, to me, actually do have a lot of potential as is. Stormwind, just by focusing on a few forgotten elements of it’s lore, can become a vastly more interesting place made with bloodlines from every other kingdom due to it’s reconstruction in what is -still- fairly recent human history, it’s place as one of the last real bastion’s of humanity after wc3 and it’s efforts (resulting from being so multi-cultural) to reclaim those lands or restore them. The individual customs of each inherited by refugees or settlers who moved in because of the opportunities a rebuilding kingdom had.
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Interesting, I’m more familiar with later ES lore. I’d love to know more about what they were originally meant to be.
Stormwind always struck me as a melting pot too. I suppose from it being the last bastion of the human kingdoms, relatively untouched by war, and a commercial hub. So I hear you there.
But I would still love to see more human cultures in Wow (European, African, Asian, etc.).
I remember when people speculated that Kul Tiras would be Mediterranean given its maritime roots. The colonial vibes also make sense given it is an off-shoot of Gilneas.
I accept Varian’s death as a plot device.
It was completely unnecessary to kill Vol’jin. It contributed nothing and destroyed a decade of character development.
Sylvanas plot was completely out of character.
Which is why I say he didn’t understand the characters. Not understanding Sylvanas’ history, motivations, resilience (particularly to something like “domination magic”). He wrote her as if he looked at some pictures and cover art and said, “OK, got it”.
(Narrator, “He did not get it.”)
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- I never said Yrel and Sylvanas were killed off. I said you took issue with the only two “good” female main characters that have been killed off.
- I don’t recall Lightforged being in WoD at all.
- Which non-villanous people call out Odin in Norse mythology?
- It doesn’t matter if fan theories are canon. Canon states that Illidan one shots Xe’ra.
- I’m not moving the goal posts on immortal. Illidan has an immortal demon soul and a mortal body.
- Dragons were sterilized in Cata not Legion.
- It does explain their inaction. Not that they could have done anything anyways. They likely lost power just as Turalyon did.
- Yes, liking a characters one liners is obviously subjective.
- So do you believe what Illidan did to Akama was right or wrong?
- What proof do you have that those ideas came from Afrasiabi?
- Delaryn is not a main character.
- You got eviscerated in those comments my dude.
I’m truly curious where you think I’m wrong. I simply think that female main characters in wow are just as capable of self sacrificial actions as the male main characters in wow.
Nice to hear that coming from someone else. When I say it, it’s usually met with a barrage of disagreement at best.
Illidan literally went to join a world-destroying demon army because his crush friend-zoned him and he wanted that magic fix (I’m surprised Elliot Rodger idolized Garrosh instead of Illidan). He’s in no position to lecture anyone on freedom or choice, including Xe’ra. Or destiny either; we’re supposed to believe the ancient, mind-reading, future-seeing Naaru knows less about destiny than the much younger, blind junkie who spent nine-tenths of his life in a nine-by-nine underground cage?
- You said, quote “You’ve taken issue with the only “good” female characters that have been killed off.” Stop moving the goalposts.
- Who were Yrel’s forces? If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck… would you call it a shovel?
- Gunnlod with the Mead of Poetry, for one.
- Repeating actual canon doesn’t make fan theories canon.
- Not sure that’s what you meant at first, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here.
- Legion retconned that into the earlier expac. Otherwise, show me where or who said that back in Cata?
- No it doesn’t. Turalyon and the Draenei were still Lightforged, your theory is wrong.
- So I can call them cringe as much as you call them fun and we’re equally right.
- Trying to trap me in a position that condemns Xe’ra or exonerates Illidan in your eyes? Shredding the soul to consume half vs replacing Fel with Light isn’t the same ballpark. It isn’t the same league. It isn’t even the same sport.
- He was the one speaking about those in interviews, one of which stated the Burning of Teldrassil was his project.
- You just tried to move the goalposts on “main character”. By your logic, Helya wasn’t a main character either.
- Only in your imagination.
that’s a weird whataboutism.
There are more male characters in this franchise all together, so basic math, more males are going to die. Your logic that female characters haven’t had it as bad as male characters falls apart easily, Considering there are far less female characters in this franchise, what about the deaths of Teretha, Tiffin, Delayrn. I remember Shalasyr’s death was pretty moving all were very tragic or fetishizing.
For the longest time there were only two female racial leaders, there has only been (in this history of World of Warcraft) two male racial leader deaths, Varian and Vo’jin. it’s pretty balanced if you ask me. Now that there are more promenant female leaders, there are more opportunities for them to die, either by noble sacrifice or not.
The reason Sylvanas herself has plot armor is because she’s been vicitmized by both the narrative and the writers and it’s bad optics and also bad faith to kill her off.
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