So, you really wouldnât care if a fictional part of the lore you enjoyed was retconned?
To look outside WoW, if Babylon 5 was retconned to make the Vorlons right about everything including their methods, and the story said the best civilization was a Vorlon-worshipping society, that wouldnât bother you?
If The Elric Saga was retconned so the gods of order were morally flawless heroes and Elric became a loyal servant of the gods of Chaos and the storyâs main villain, that wouldnâtâ bother you?
You do realize you can have both some things being mysteries and other things being concrete facts in a story?
I would actually prefer being gaslighted like that since it requires actively changing things implemented in game (because letâs face it, they arenât just going to 100% stop retconning things every expansion), rather than just retconning something and leaving a quest a few expansions back stating the opposite.
Sure itâs more gaslight-y, but at least its less immersion breaking.
Trekkies are the poster children for fanatically savaging each other over canon disputes, although frequently this can mask darker motives for disliking a new show. (Key clue is when one of them uses the term âWoke Trekâ, but thatâs a discussion for another occasion.)
If it was something that I really cared about, I might feel a momentary pang, but Iâd get over it and move on. Especially if the retcon made for a better story.
You might as well ask if Iâd get bothered if the sky turned polka dot. J. M. Stracyznski is a fantastic visualizer and writer. You might as well posit Carl Sagan becoming a Flat Earth advocate. JMS would not butcher his own work so badly.
Michael Moorcock is infamous for never being happy with his work, changing and modifying it every time it was reprinted but what I said about JMS can be cranked up to 11 with this man.
Yes, but I donât see much value in it. Many stories gain depth by leaving things for the reader to decide on their own.
And stories lose their value when thereâs no established, concrete lore. Part of me wants to explain to you how hypothesis works, but parts of me thinks you were just being deliberately obtuse.
Certain things do need to be concrete. Many other things can benefit from being interpretive. I think of a lot of TES lore as examples for that. Even divorced from that setting using the concept of the unreliable narrator on all levels, theres specific moments that work and can still be discussed decades later because they didnât write an objective answers and let the mind speculate based off the outcome and events leading to it, and all the interpretations of people there.
From a Certain Point of View sure. Like the Kaldorei can have their belief system about Elune, even if we the players know the truth.
Lore tends to work better when itâs subjective and kept strictly from a character point of view. Which TES does with all itâs contradictory lore, itâs all true depending on which character you ask
And others gain depth because the interpretation, the context, is left to the reader to fill out.
Thereâs not a single shred of evidence for Noahâs Ark, but the story still commands legions of followers (iâm not one of them by the way) Star Trek is even less consistent than Blizzard at itâs worst, but that hasnât dampened itâs cult status.
Iâll post my previous opinion, because I think itâs what would work best for WoW also
Lore tends to work better when itâs subjective and kept strictly to a characters point of view. Which TES does with all itâs contradictory lore, itâs all true or a bunch of nonsense depending on which character you ask
People tend to get mixed up between what we the players know and what realistically the citizens of Azeroth would know. Theyâre two different things.
Like you can have the Lich King, Yog-Saron and Zooval all think theyâre death gods without either being right or wrong
So the way I think things work best is if there is Truth with a capitol T, but it is woven through the truth of cultural lenses. Everyone is describing the same things but their worldview means they describe it differently. Blizzard should be the only ones with the actual Truth, which they keep as a writing tool to ensure the story remains structured well.
When you build lore that way, it means if you compare everyoneâs stories you can pick out common threads and build a meta narrative of Truth if you really want to. It also means you can lean into one cultural truth as being the closest to Truth, as can everyone else and no one is entirely sure which is actually closest.
The only such T that should exist in my opinion is the Creative Bible that is followed internally for consistency.
Because Iâm far more interested in the individual stories than playing the Trek style canon game. Or trying to map a personal religious agenda onto it.
The problem is that isnât what Blizzard is doing. They are retconning things so they do not have to come up with a way around lore issues and then acting as if they are clever by spouting âIts all about perspectives!â
You cannot look at chronicle and tell me that it was intended to be from the perspective of the Titans. There are things in those books that they would never know. No, the whole âTitans perspectiveâ is due to laziness and an unwillingness to stick to what was written on the part of the Warcraft writing team. It is as simple as that.
Then I recommend using different examples, ones that people arenât prone to ignorance or arrogance about.
I hope for your sake, the individual stories you like arenât retconned. And Iâm not coming in with a religious agenda any more than you are with a racial agenda.
Nonchalance is easy to fake with text. When I asked how youâd feel if specific stories were retconned, you tried to dodge the question by talking about the likeliness of it happening despite my examples being hypothetical. Thanks for actually addressing it this time.
As weâve seen, Blizzard doesnât even have that, to the detriment of the story.
Truthful af right here, slapping on the titans perspective was incredibly lazy especially since it was advertised as the âde facto WoW lore compendiumâ and there are indeed things in there that dead titans would have zero knowledge about.
The only time that such can happen is that you have a single person in charge, a JM Stracyzninki type of person. Blizzard has always been creation by committee and the head and makeup of that committee has changed over the years. Every time a new person comes in they make their own stamp on the mix.
