In fairness, he’s kind of the least obvious of the Incarnates. While we know he shares the baseline motive that drove the Incarnates and their Primalist followers, we still don’t know why Iridikron’s beef with the Titans seems to be so much more intense and hateful than the others’. Something has him hating the Titans so much that he’s willing to throw his fellows under the bus, get tons of other dragons killed along the way and expose Azeroth to potentially falling to the Void, seemingly in order to lure them back.
Unlike Vyranoth and the lesser Primalists (Fyrakk and Raszageth became too unstable and vengeful against specifically the Aspects over their imprisonment to seem particularly ideological any more), Iridikron honestly seems to care more about “making the Titans pay” than whether or not doing so will actually save or help Azeroth in some fashion. In fact he doesn’t seem all that invested in the rest of the planet’s welfare at all, or even the rest of the dragonkind. With him it all comes across as a singular, narrow vendetta against the Titans themselves, and we don’t really know why that is.
It’s a weirdly personal-feeling hate coming from what was a reclusive loner before he gained his powers. It almost makes me wonder if he’s really even “himself,” or if something has been acting through him ever since he became empowered. He acts as if Azeroth itself can be destroyed for all he cares, as long as the Titans also get caught up in that destruction as well. And there’s that whole thing in the novel where he realized awfully quickly what was really going on and whose power Neltharion was channeling when the Earthwarder attacked him with the Void.
It’s not totally out of left field. Undermine(d) went out of its way to draw narrative parallels between The Black Blood (with which Xal’atath is at least affiliated) and Azerite (The Blood of Azeroth). Both used for goblin weaponry. Both absorbed into a powerful “heart” artifact.
Then there’s Xal’atath’s tendency to manipulate through whispers as a parallel to Azeroth’s radiant song.
Might be forshadowing a connection or shared fate for these two characters. Or not.
Not saying everyone. I am talking large numbers. The average. Most people start looking for and consuming more deeper, more nuanced stories as they get older. It is less about crackpot theories and more just looking for more.
I think it is less a question of stupid and more a question of simple. As people get older, generally speaking, they are looking for more complexity. The simple answer in front of them seems like ‘it can’t be that simple.’ So they go looking for a more complex answer.
Kind of.
Pretty much.
Not really. More of an expectation issue. There are some things a lot of people forget, or just don’t think about, when talking about WoW’s story.
The nature of and MMO puts some basic constraints on story telling. If you set down and read an 800 page novel you can get some real depth, nuance, and significant character development. A game just can’t match that. It can’t match a 400 page novel. The amount of story telling room likely doesn’t even match what a novella can do. Or if you want to compare it to visual media, think about how much actually story telling time you have. Take out the game mechanics (questing, raiding, fighting in dungeons, etc.) just use the pure story (quest text, cinematics, nps talking). You end up with maybe a couple hours of real story over an expac. That has to tell multiple story threads and get through the over arcing story. That doesn’t even give them the same room to develop things that a movie would have. And certainly less then even the shortened TV series we get now days. It feels like more because we are playing and doing all the game things, so it is easy to forget that as a story delivery device it is very limited.
And think about how and MMO limits story telling vs just an RPG. We can’t really make choices because everyone has to end at the same point. We also can’t stop and spend a lot of time on story because a lot of players just want to get through it and focus on the gameplay side of things. That will fundamentally limit story telling options.
And, to get content out quickly a team has to write it. So, that all has to be coordinated. Blizzard can’t afford to have a single author dig down and go deep. That fast paced collaboration system also limits the story telling options.
When you keep in mind the limitations, WoW is actually does a pretty good job of telling the story. But, when you forget it and expect a deep, rich story you are going to be looking for more. And you will be disappointed. Case in point:
How much of that is actually because of writing mistakes/poor choices? How much of that is just all the medium and timeframe allow?
I find a lot of the issues boil down to looking for more than the media format actually allows. Set the expectations to match other media formats and you are bound to be disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong, they do make mistakes and poor choices. I would not argue they don’t. But I think that is the minority part of the issue. I think most of the ‘failures’ people see are expectations that never could have been matched.
I don’t think that is true. The only big difference I saw in how they handled things is that Iridikron is more thoughtful and cautious. Fyrakk and Raszagethe both felt like they had more hate. They were just more reckless.
There is an assumption there that he cares about them as more than just tools that I don’t think is supported by the story. The Titans/Titan forces hurt him, limited his domain. He is going to see them pay. The others never really mattered to him.
He might. But, remember, the Azeroth he remembers (untouched by the Titans) is gone. It might be as simple as he feels his world is already lost and can’t be brought back so he is going to punish those that took it no matter the cost. Azeroth herself is touched by the Titans, he might not even care about her.
Hrm, the parts that are directed at me mostly sound like restating things I already disagreed with without adding much. No, I don’t think your reconstruction of the expectation of the aging playerbase is right, I don’t think Blizzard is doing a good job within its confines, and I still think they are deliberately or negligently inviting speculation that leads to predictable and avoidable disappointment. The comparison to other MMO’s is new, but I’d frankly disagree that other MMOs I have tried share the same story problems that WoW has (which doesn’t imply that they don’t have their own, but does suggest some directional control in the choice of problems), so that’d be another segue that’s unlikely to lead anywhere.
Since I don’ think we have much in the way of evidence on either side, that sounds like the point where we’ll have to agree to disagree and leave it there.
It’s free marketing for them, so why would they try and publically correct lore/story theories? Every video game company does this
It’s common knowledge that people who read more fantasy books than someone else will very likely be able to guess how a book ends as well as the various story beats involved in the plot simply because they’re far more familiar with the fantasy genre than someone who isn’t as well read.
Another part of these accurate predicitions has more to do with a form of literary pattern recognition that allows the readers to be able to recognize that authors prefer certain storytelling methods and plotlines and are able to more accurately guess how a story will playout because of this.
I know that there are quite a few fantasy authors that have publically stated similar things about this this and have said that the only way to deal with it is for them to learn to live with that fact and write the stories that they want to write simply because readers love what they are putting out and aren’t all that concerned about the minute misgivings of having a particular storyline be “played out”
Literary rules get broken all of the time but what matters more is that when these “rule breaks” happen is that they need to be competantly written and have an interesting outcome more so than anything else.
As far as I’m aware, Blizzard has never attempted to break any sort of “literary rules” outside of the occassional poorly written, and poorly recieved, subversive story telling.
As far as tropes go, Blizzard has their own set of tropes that they like to use, while not really unique, and are far more simplistic than what many people would like for them to be.
It’s why people were able to tell from the very first interaction between Zul’jan and his sister that Zul’jan was going to be a raid boss. Or how players were able to accurately predict that the Sunwell was going to be a raid/some sort of plot device the moment more information about Midnight was publically released.
It’s more accurate than not. The original forums (because we’re on version 3 now, if my memory serves me correctly) didn’t have a Story Forum until about halfway into WotLK.
Us lore nerds used to post so many threads on the General Forum, and we often got the General-only posters frustrated at us for “spamming them with lore threads” (and about half of them wanted us to go to the roleplaying forum, lol).
(Yes, the Roleplaying Forum existed long before the Story Forum.)
Some of the hottest topics would cap 26 pages in like 30 minutes and we’d make “cont’d” threads… 5 times… within 3 hours.
It got especially bad during early WotLK — which is what finally led Blizzard to make the Story Forum. We were over the moon! (As were the General-only posters.)
It took us a few months for all the old lore nerds to remember that a Story Forum now exists and we didn’t need to post on General anymore. Then the original “Story Lounge” thread was created (this was with the old 26-page limit). We made… like, a dozen of continued Story Lounge threads before the blues finally lifted the page limit from the latest thread.
ANYWAYS…
During the old days in the General, before the creation of the Story Forum, the biggest topics were:
Lordaeron belongs to the Alliance.
Illidan was right.
Arthas had been reduced to a Saturday morning cartoon villain.
Lordaeron belongs to the Alliance.
Blizzard keeps “telling us and not showing us.” Bad writing!
Kael’thas was a better written villain than both Illidan and Arthas.
Lordaeron rightfully belongs to the Alliance.
You had no idea how much of a hot button Lordaeron was. It went on for years and years. It was finally the thing which drove me to leave the Story Forum in late MoP/early WoD: the fact that people were still arguing that Lordaeron was stolen from the Alliance.
But yes, there were plenty of heated in-depth discussions on the “big” villains back then: Kael’thas, Illidan, and Arthas.
EDIT: for clarification, I’ve always been a defender of the fact that the Forsaken are Lordaeron. They were born there, they lived there, they died there, and they were risen into undeath there. Their worldview has changed, yes, but it didn’t change that Lordaeron belongs to its people more than anybody else — and that it’s the Forsaken. The current Alliance of Stormwind has practically no rights to the land of Lordaeron beyond the few (few) survivors.
(Edited again because autocorrects. Why you like this, phone.)
I forgot to add — whenever a thread got capped, especially it was an active argument, then it’s a race to create the continuing thread.
It was a common sight to see 3 or 4 people each making their own continuing thread — which meant the original thread got splintered off into 4 threads! And some of us were passionate (or angry) enough to continually cross-quote each other from all the threads. Like, we’d start the argument in the original Friendofpie thread, then it got capped at page 26.
So Vyrin and Lazypeon and Dawnsong each creates a continuing thread. On Vyrin’s thread, we will see posters quoting other posters who had posted in the Lazypeon or Dawnsong threads.
And when these threads got capped at page 26… yup, you guessed it. They get splintered into even more threads.
This was why the old General posters hated the old lore threads being posted in there. It was absolutely chaotic, especially when the topic of the day was about Lordaeron.
(Wow, I hadn’t thought about these days in a LONG time. It’s why I developed the habit of having multiple tabs open to read all the lore threads going on. This habit still persists to this day!)
(I can barely recall the names of the old lore nerds from the Vanilla-Cata days. Please forgive me if I misspelled them. Vyrin was THE Lordaeron guy.)
I think the karmic justice I’d want to see for for xalatath is the fusion working but she has inexplicable life pantheon desires and has the impulse to help others while hating it.
there is a spanish youtuber who weeks ago speculate that xalatath was a piece of azeroth trying to return to azeroth core, it is translated to english too
