Remember when Chronicle said that Spirit Healers were rogue Val’kyr that decided not to follow Odyn or Helya and to just help lost spirits move on to the afterlife?
NOPE! Not canon anymore!
Now Spirit Healers are dead people who were big into service of a higher cause, went to Bastion, became Kyrians and that’s their job now.
Now we are getting a new Lore Compendium about the Shadowlands.
But what’s the point in buying and reading a lore compendium when nothing means anything?
Pretty much this. I regret buying the Chronicles now.
If they were just going to go back and rewrite old lore because they regret the avenue they took, they should never have bothered filling in the blanks. Take a page from The Elder Scrolls and leave the lore open-ended.
Makes lore debates more fun anyway.
Ah, but you see, Chronicles was from the Titan’s point of view! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
This just tells me that they don’t really plan ahead in terms of lore and are only thinking about what they think is cool in the moment.
Which I suppose we could have already guessed by now.
I’m pretty sure that the current staff either don’t care about some of the last things Metzen worked on or actively hate it. That’s the only way I can rationalize them doing things like de-canonizing Chronicle in its entirety or the direction they decided to take BFA.
Even when they do plan ahead, it seems like nobody in the story department talks to one another.
Yeah, I fortunately only bought a couple of the Chronicle books.
Once they started retconning those I knew that they wouldn’t be worth the investment.
They also seem to have nothing but disdain for past writers’ ideas, judging by how things are going.
They’ve talked about how they don’t allow “negativity” in “the dojo”. It seems like the end result is everyone just talking over one another until they have to hammer something down for a deadline.
Most of the Chronicles is still true. I think retcons are just necessary from time to time. WoW’s an ongoing story and there’s only so far you can plan into the future. The first Chronicles came out back at the end of WoD after all. I doubt they had decided on the specific covenants back then.
Sometimes past details need to be tweaked to suit the narrative as it goes. Expansions are usually expanding on huge vague and open areas of lore that haven’t been mentioned much, like the Shadowlands. Not everything is set in stone, it’s always developing new things. Retcons will happen.
Given what kyrians are it just makes sense to make them the official spirit healers. But everything in the Chronicles and WoW is still fact and canon until said otherwise.
This seems to be a common trend with Blizzard in general; there’s a need to prove the new generation of ideas aren’t just as good as the previous, but that they’re better. It’s why every expansion seems to be them attempting to reinvent the wheel. And I understand it, trying to make something your own, and put your mark on it rather than live beneath someone else’s shadow. But none of what they do is as good (especially in regards to story) as those who came before. And not only are the new stories disappointing, but they’re also stepping all over the graves of the previous stories that everyone fell in love with.
That said, the writers are decent when given the opportunity to invent something entirely disconnected. MoP is a prime example; those stories were more original than just retreading old ground. But then we circled back to pre-established characters, and they’ve horrifically butchered so many of those it’s not even funny anymore.
Shadowlands will be…interesting. But WoW is beginning to have a hard time supporting the sheer amount of retcons and writer fits for fame, I worry where we’ll end up next.
Or just that the old ideas were outright bad in the new generation’s opinion.
A big problem is that they’re trying to tell stories on a global scale. Except they can’t get it right. We need to go back to leaving the world-wide consequences open-ended for later story. Both times they’ve tried to shift the view of the expac (BfA and Legion), the story’s suffered for it.
Both Argus and N’zoth deserved to be new expacs, not afterthoughts. And the more we kill potential villains at breakneck speed, the more truncated the story gets - and the more often we’ll have situations like Sylvanas going from antihero to villain.
The revisionism is bad too. Remember when trolls were extremely hard to kill? In Vol’jin’s book, there were disemboweled Zandalari stuffing their guts back inside because they could actually live through it if nobody finished the job. Garrosh needed a poison specifically designed to kill Trolls, which Vol’jin survived, only for him to die to… poison (if there were any doubts of the writers’ ingenuity).
Man, the storytelling has fallen hard. They should put me in charge.
Things like this are why I largely gave up on the lore a long time ago. Blizzard has shown numerous times that they have no qualms retconning lore to tell whatever new story they want to tell, rather than have new stories fit in with already established lore.
Chronicles is Lore on the Great Dark Beyond(which makes it clear the Narrator is not omniscient by telling us that there are many theories on the actual origin of the Emerald Dream without telling us the true story) while Grimoire of the Shadowlands is Lore on the Shadowlands.
They are books detailing the recorded history of the things they focus on!
There’s a difference between a retcon that happens because years upon years of storytelling made old lore fit poorly with the current iteration of the narrative…
And retconning brand new lore with newer lore because “oh wait we have a better idea”.
The later just makes any and all lore untrustworthy and meaningless. Anything can change at any moment on a whim.
I don’t even want to go down the path of how bad Vol’jin’s death was. To be killed by a poison we never saw before OR after, with no explanation as to why it’s somehow more potent than a literal poison designed to hinder troll regeneration, is one of the biggest insults to a character’s story. I think the only worse one was killing Cairne in a book and not even acknowledging it in game with a quest or a cutscene outside of the funeral.
The storytelling is what really brought people into the game because it stood out. Now…you’re right, the universal threats are getting old, and it almost feels more like they’re rushing through villains to end WoW’s life. Because your’e right; Argus and N’Zoth could have been their own expansions. We covered essentially four or even five expansions in the span of two, and it shows badly.
Only reference I could find mention Val’kyr doesn’t call them Spirit Healers. In fact Spirit healers are not even mentioned in the 3 volumes of Chronicle.
Not all Val’kyr continued to follow Helya after Odyn’s defeat. Some of these spectral beings disappeared into the Shadowlands. The few who still retained a glimmer of nobility in their souls dedicated themselves to watching over the physical world. From within the Shadowlands, these Val’kyr would at times guide the dead back to the land of the living.
Chronicle Volume 1 Page 57
Noble Souls dedicating themselves to watching over the living realms sounds like what the Kyrian of Bastion does. These Val’kyr when disappearing into the Shadowlands could have gone to bastion and joined up.
But again the term Spirit Healers are not mentioned in Chronicles even though that what they’ve been called since Vanilla and before Val’kyr were created.
Asana. I don’t know what it is but I have never found myself (or remember) ever disagreeing with you on WoW related stuff.
It’s kinda scary. So uhhhh…
This.
for deep developed massive lore - there’s tes/eso.
Wow was always about retcons and writing on move.
The Valkyr within the Shadowlands are probably going to appear in Odyn’s Patch of the Shadowlands to lead us directly to him in the Great Dark Beyond.
The fact that Wowpedia and the Red Shirt Guy both automatically assumed the Chronicle’s statement meant that the Valkyr were Spirit Healers despite not actually saying that is embarrassing! They jump to conclusions just as much as I do!