WoW's Timeline Problem

Lore Story Forum
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So for awhile now I’ve been toying with my own fantasy setting. It started out heavily influenced by WoW and I used it as a setting for D&D games and it grew over the years.

I mention this because as I’ve been toying with it recently I find myself adding more to its history and extending the timeline further and further.

For example my ancient Egypt analogue is run by enlightened necromancers and led by a Lich Pharaoh. This is tolerated by the wider world because even though they’re responsible for a near undead apocalypse that spawned a Forsaken alike kingdom in Not Europe they’ve been on the ball for about 130 years and now have a reputation as the people to call when less ethical necromancers are causing trouble.

And toying with this has shown me how bizarre WoW’s timeline is.

To give an example, a 45 year old man would’ve spent his childhood in a world without Orcs, the Undead, Draenei, Worgen, Void Elves, Mag’Har etc.

How absurd is that? Your entire understanding of the world has been upended so often it has to stop even being novel. Your son turns up at your farm door with a white demon made of yellow glowsticks and you can’t even be prejudice about it. Because ish like this is just Tuesday now and fine you’re getting maybe hooved grandkids. At least he’s not now an undead woman who does karate flips as learned from talking bear people like your eldest daughter who was just supposed to take a year off in Lordaeron.

There’s no time for anything to cook in this setting. It’s just Earth shattering apocalypse after Earth shattering apocalypse.

The most realistic part of this setting is how eager innumerable people are to join doomsday cults. “I’VE HAD ENOUGH! SHUT IT ALL DOWN” is an entirely reasonable perspective in this madhouse.

And the kicker is they shortened even the game time. Like all this happening over 16 years would be wild but screw that, it was 8 actually.

And on top of that, the deep lore is even more absurd. You’ve like the Amani launching completely failed invasions of Quel’Thalas after literal millenia of preparation. I can’t even parse the logic of it.

This is just a pointless rant honestly. But I really thought absence would make the heart grow fonder with Azeroth. But everytime I think about it the sheer thundering stupidity of this setting becomes clearer and clearer.

And as a fun setting where you can find undead guitarists jamming out on top of a t-rex, on top of a rocket powered shark, if you hang around Nazjatar it works so well.

But from BFA onward they’re trying to take themselves so damn seriously. And it’s making the world rip apart at the seems. This just isn’t the venue to weigh ideas like genocide and slavery. Because it’s made out of clown bones and pop culture references.

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Yeah, Azeroth has been an absurdly busy place for the last few decades, which is hilarious in a setting that also includes characters and societies that are several thousand years old. Imagine you’re a Kaldorei sentinel who fought in the War of the Ancients, spending literal millennia keeping a mostly uneventful vigil over your home. Then suddenly there’s actual space aliens in your backyard, the Legion returns, Illidan is released and turns into an actual demon before going to space, and there are a ton of people fleeing the literal zombie apocalypse happening a few continents over. Everything is very busy and hectic all of a sudden, and it really hasn’t slowed down since, but for a ten-thousand-year-old night elf the time that’s passed since Warcraft III isn’t very long at all.

Also, speaking of ages, why are there so few middle-aged major characters around? Were the First and Second Wars so bad that an entire generation got wiped out, leaving only either people who live for centuries if not millennia or people who were children during Warcraft III? Even Thrall is only in his mid-30s at most!

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WoW has the anime syndrome where everyone is either 18 or 8,000 years old.

And side bar but I really do hate the trope where people have to somehow do something defining when they’re 18. And I can’t help that culture engenders a willingness to join the military or take on student debt before you know who you even are.

But Azeroth is so divorced from reality. And I get it’s fantasy but no one behaves like a sapient animal.

Idk. I engage with the story as a RPer so I try to create characters within the setting. And how can you make anyone have a human reaction to anything?

Like the 20th century was an exceptionally eventful century for Earth. There were two, and nearly three world wars. Science exploded. You had intensely racist ideas based in pseudo science being challenged by the next generation. There were untold revolutions. So many wars.

Like the 2000s, wild though they are and there’s plenty of time for them to get even wilder, have on a timeline not held a candle to the 1900s.

And WoW is like if all the events from 1907 to 2021 happened in under a decade.

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Yes! Also, 8,000 years is a really long time! Like, absurdly long!

I just find the age gaps hilarious at this point. I do appreciate that the various leaders generally attempt to respect their peers’ perspective, but it is somewhat baffling that, for example, the Alliance leadership follows the direction of someone who is barely considered an adult within his own people, let alone compared to Velen or Tyrande or Malfurion. The Forsaken were led by Sylvanas, who is at least two thousand years old judging from a comment made by Lor’themar in BfA, and now have Lilian Voss speaking for them on the Horde Council for the moment. I love Lilian, I think she’s great, but she’s at most in her mid-20s, quite possibly younger.

Look at the playable death knights. Dread Commander Thalanor is a high elf, so who knows how old he is, but he’s old enough to have been a captain in the Thalassian military at the time of his death in the Scourge invasion. Is he the commander of Acherus? Nope! He’s a high-ranking death knight, possibly second-in-command prior to Legion, but he and all the other playable death knights take orders from the barely-adult human who killed himself two years ago at nineteen. (This is why I love the theory that the reason Darion Mograine always wears a helm that completely covers his face is to hide the fact that he still looks like a teenager.) Granted, Darion has done a lot to earn the respect and loyalty of those he leads, but it’s still hilarious that he was one of the youngest members of the Ebon Blade until they started raising people again, and he’s still the youngest Horseman. Imagine being a Light-forged Draenei, a few thousand years old, and you fall in battle in BfA. Next thing you know, you’re waking up to some undead human teenager telling you about how you’re going to be awesome at doing “what the living cannot,” whatever that means, and also he’s one of your commanders now, welcome to the death knight club!

Drinking. Only slightly kidding, I’m thinking of the follow-up to the MoP announcement cinematic, where the orc and human soldiers are sitting at a bar bonding over the fact that they just got their butts kicked by “a bear…in a hat!”

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This has been a very long .0 / 0.5 patch cycle no doubt about it, but realistically it’s only been 6 months or so since we were last staged in Azeroth. Not exactly a particularly long period of time by any non-WoW measure. I think the perception that we are stuck in the ethereal Shadowlands looking to get back to an idealistic Azeroth world revamp is mostly a construct of the community wearing rose-tinted glasses.

Other than that I agree that WoW has taken itself too seriously and that the current writing team does not have the gravitas to write a serious story, which as I recall is the source of a lot of our disagreement about the Forsaken. You cling to the idea that the Forsaken can be written as a tragic ideal. I recognize that the Forsaken are an over-the-top humorist trope that scratches an itch that no other race does, never meant to be taken seriously.

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Azeroth has had three Zombie Covids and I think it’s theoretically possible that one could survive them all and still not be old enough to drink alcohol.

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I think Blizzard is too stuck on world ending threats.
Meanwhile going from A Realm Reborn to Heavensward is about finding a place to flee as part of a political conspiracy and the whole dragon thing is just about saving a single city in it’s destructive potential.

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As a fun flight of fancy fantasy world, I love WoW. But it isn’t dark fantasy. It has some scenarios that would be pretty screwed up when you think about it. But all the horror and bloodshed has this cartoon art style, and is peppered with comedic bits.

At it’s best it’s in on the joke. It knows how melodramatic and ridiculous it’s being but it winks to camera. You know this is all for fun.

But the current writers seem to really want to male this dark fantasy. And it just doesn’t work well. Everything is so divorced from any semblance of realistic stakes or emotions that it comes of as unintentionally comedic.

Like I have a hard time finding Teldrassil tragic. When I’m still trying to parse out how a giant, magic tree in the ocean could be so flammable, and why the magic millenia old elves never once thought about a fire escape plan.

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As genre defining as Warcraft as been, I think the current employees are too influenced by popular media. You can draw almost infinite(Oh, we’ll get there) parallels, but you have their admitted guilt. “Our Red Wedding.” So we know they were trying to emulate Game of Thrones(lets not get into how they didn’t understand it) a massively popular show. (Hipster moment! I discovered the show while reading a… Rolling Stones? Magazine about season 1 while waiting for shots, recognizing Sean Bean.) Okay, enough of that.

There is no doubt they were… are… doing the same thing with Marvel. I feel dumb for having to reference it, but it’s blatant. The magic seals? Infinity stones. Zovaal even has his pseudo gauntlet. I said before, Sylvanas was Thanos, but really, she’s Loki. Just doing whatever because. Zovaal is Thanos… except they forgot to make us care. Instead, they just said, “Hey, you know this person you like… they work for Zovaal! Yeah, he’s awesome. We can’t give you too many details, because we want to surprise you later, but trust us, existence… well exist because of us… I mean, him!”

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They were going for Thanos and wound up with Steppenwolf. From the theatrical cut.

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Well Steppenwolf wasn’t behind everything. The best comparison would be that they were going for Thanos but end up with Agatha ( it was her all along).

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How much more fun would Zooval be if they got Kathryn Hahn to voice him? Change nothing else about the character. Just have her voice coming out of him.

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At least it would be funny. If nobody take you seriously, then make them laugh.

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It at least would be memorable. And that’s something Zooval definitely isn’t.

I’ve been playing that Mass Effect re-release recently, not like WoW has stuff for me to do, and I’d forgotten how well done the Reapers are.

They’re for the most part bereft of personality. But their bold faced certainty about the extinction of all advanced sapient life really is chilling. They’re older than most stars and have done this millions of trillions of times. There’s no debate here. You are a child irrationally claiming that maybe 2+2 can equal 7. And they are going to show you otherwise.

And I think something like that could work for Zooval. Like he was setting the earliest parts of this plan in motion before Trolls had tamed fire. Azeroth became useful in excellerating his plan, but ultimately it is an inevitability.

They could do something really chilling like showing Azeroth wasn’t the only planet of heroes. Several already tried to stop him and now all their souls suffer forever in the Maw. Something like that.

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This has to be seen in the U.S. context I guess, but indeed, you are right it’s quite insane.

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It’s funny to me the Supreme Commander of the Alliance wouldn’t be able to run for President for another 17 years.

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Does America have an age limit for the presidency? Not that I knew the terms of the presidency for any country, but I always assumed that after the age of 18/21 a person has all the rights or the possibility of obtaining them by passing exams.

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You’ve to be at least 35 years old and a natural born citizen.

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Natural born - that is, migrants closed the way? Interesting.

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Not sure I understand the question. But no immigrants can’t run for President. They can be anything else though.

Like I don’t think there’s been a foreign born Supreme Court Justice but there’s nothing saying they couldn’t be.

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