That’s when wrath dropped the ball and forgot about the wc3 character development. ICC gave us nothing on the character and she didn’t even get to interact with arthas or reflect on him on screen .
It changed so much she became an unfamiliar character and “evil lady bad” was the chanting of garrosh stans from the very beginning who just hated undead characters in general.
Exactly. They needed to set this up in the last wotlk patch but just didn’t. They waffled around with her because they thought a werewolves vs. zombies plot would be cool but failed to pay attention to any of the historical events that set up the undead of lordaeron’s actual legitimate and valid issues with Gilneas.
Cataclysm and wotlk have been dropping balls for so freaking long with horde and women characters in general so shadowlands is kind of revealing all those cracks and at least addressing them.
Wrath not doing a thing you wanted it to do isn’t dropping the ball, it just didn’t do a thing you wanted it to do. I would have liked to have seen Sylvanas interact with Arthas more than just in HOR or be present in ICC too, but her not being there isn’t some great disservice to her character. A lack of closure in itself can be a method of concluding an arc, see: BoJack Horseman.
I’m not entirely sure the thing about… Garrosh stans hating undead characters (?) was an entirely coherent thought because it had absolutely nothing to do with what I said.
So, you’re both disagreeing with me by originally saying that Shadowlands is the conclusion to some 13 year arc, but also simultaneously agreeing with me by saying that they didn’t actually set up her actions in any meaningful way. What even are you?
The story did indeed do the things I wanted it to do but it did it 13 years too late. Wow narratives in general take way too long to wrap up-- longer than any story I’ve seen in any media franchise ever.
The problem (MOSTLY) isn’t with what’s being told-- it’s how it’s being told, and how those narratives are getting executed.
No, there are definitely some fundamental problems with the story itself of Shadowlands that aren’t just bogged down by bad execution. Blizzard wants to tell a grand cosmic, metaphysical story and it’s way beyond their scope as storytellers, and also the current perceived need to retcon and recontextualize every major event of the last 20 years as being a part of Zovaal’s great scheme in spite of just how much that actively conflicts with those prior events and how they were described.
I don’t think anything important changed. A villain whose motives should have been introduced upfront at the beginning of the expansion got killed off.
The biggest retcon was dreadlords and where they come from, and I think that’s an interesting retcon. Another retcon was the primus inventing domination magic-- which, again, I don’t have a huge problem with.
Define how you feel something has “changed” or not, because it’s harder for me to take anything Arthas does in WC3, TFT, or Wrath seriously knowing it’s all tied back to Zovaal’s, who is an awful villain and character in general.
The retcons don’t “””””change”””””” much for the rest of the series, but now the context behind past figures and actions they took is wildly different and raised many questions, both deliberately (the Nathrezim not really being demons and in reality being from Revendreth) and because Danuser has brain rot and doesn’t think about what he writes (Zovaal wants to unite the cosmos so everything he is now retroactively responsible for has been actively working AGAINST that states goal by dividing the cosmos).
Zovaal being a boogeyman of the death pantheon and perverter of the primus’ domination magic does not invalidate arthas’ free will and his decisions to dominate others after breaking free from nerzul. It changes the past story 0. It just means there was a guy on the other side of the veil who had plans of his own who was taking advantage of other people’s plans.
There’s been way more annoying recontextualizations in cataclysm and BC that people just don’t care about and don’t talk about, like fel magic once being a product of arcane magic and etc.
Arthas’s story changed like zilch, just a couple other characters working in the background. His story stayed entirely the same, he stayed dead and was just a cameo in shadowlands.
I think we all know damn well we’d get a thousand “where is arthas where is arthas where is arthas no arthas? bad expansion can’t believe you did this to us blizzard” if they decided just to not add Arthas to the shadowlands story at all.
Yeah I honestly think they did as good of a job with arthas as they could and changed as little as possible.
The only other thing they could have done would have just been fan service, which some people would also found things to complain about.
I feel like there’s some intense desire for arthas fanservice and when it doesn’t get sated a lot of people just get mad about sylanas, even when she’s talking about, well, her closure of the guy who turned her into a murder puppet.
Yea I’m positive people would not have been happy with anything they would have done unless it was Arthas one shotting the Jailer and then one shotting sylvanas rofl.
Arthas died on Ice crown back when I killed him in Wrath. As far as I care, that’s the end of this story, and everything, in my headcannon, that happened in SL, is a dream induced by N’Zoth and nothing more.
SL is not the end of WCIII or Arthas, those things ended long ago. Danuser can say what he wants, I don’t care.
They wanted daddy arthas to decapitate sylvanas with a metal chair and look at the camera going “there will always be a lich king.”
Exactly lol. But people will always find an excuse for arthas and then say sylvanas was just as bad or worse, lol. Arthas chose to become undead. Sylvanas did not choose.
It changes the entire reasoning behind the Burning Legion existing and Sargeras going mad (which was already retconned once before), which feeds into my previous point about Zovaal being dumb with his stated motivation it matching his actions. He wants to unite the cosmos, so one of the biggest things he ends up doing is dividing the cosmos by trying to turn Sargeras (an order/arcane aligned Titan) against the void by corrupting him to fel. Whether this was all necessarily intentional is not the point, but it’s what happened.
For what its worth, I don’t like the Sylvanas redemption, but that’s mostly because I don’t like what went down with her in BfA.
I’m willing to put all that asside in the context of, what’s done is done, her soul is back etc. etc. and comparatively, I see this as a way for her and everything else to go back to the way it was pre-BfA.
When I look at it like that, it really doesn’t seem so bad to me. I’m just making a conscious decision to not put too much weight into the story between bfa and shadowlands.
(Didn’t mean to quote you, Rosen, but my phone was being weird)
His soulless mind that had lost the ability to feel compassion was what broke free. You seem to have serious issues with recognizing that Arthas’s soul was stolen by Frostmourne, and that everything since he picked up the sword was not meant to be seen as actions by his soul, but a soulless perversion of the man.