I’d count myself amongst that group. Heresy for a fantasy fan perhaps but I played Morrowind before I encountered any of his work. So the idea of things like Orcs and Dark Elves being universally bad guys just fell flat for me.
Also I had no earthly idea what the big deal with the ring was. Seemed to just turn you into an invisible addict. I was seriously baffled about it until I saw this video;
And if I’m being honest I think you’re giving too much credit to the player base. As some may’ve noticed I like to deliberately refer to things incorrectly for comedic effect, and a worrisome number of people thought that is what I was doing when I called him Baron Samedi.
Which he pretty much is. Be like having a healing deity with puncture wounds on their hands, feet and chest and calling him Gesus Vhrist. Didn’t even gender swap him which would’ve been my initial thought if I was trying to make a character inspired by real world theology and not just, ya know, including one.
A lot of the popularity of LOTR has to do with its beloved fellowship. Sauron primarily is just a looming threat with his armies doing a lot of the work. The struggle against these forces and getting the ring to the volcano is what made it compelling, not Sauron himself outside of the scene where he was taken down as he was not as invulnerable as he or many others thought (misinterpreted prophecy).
Zovaal is like the bad Bioware villains that have poor attempts to make them seem cool and do a few things to threaten the player but ultimately just fall flat in their presentation.
I don’t think similarities to other things would inherently make something more interesting. In fact it might make it worse because people could point to a better example. You can have fun active villains. Which is why people are getting more enjoyment out of Garrosh suicide killing a boss, completely unapologetic about his pretty simple, brutal goals than a villain with super vague ones.
The Jailer is boring because he has not felt like a proper threat, nor his armies, and has no charisma as its just boring predictable lines and the stupid mystery box set up.
I think suicide killing via a big axe strike that soul destroys you both or whatever is quite different than ending it as you cower in a bunker as armies close in from two sides. It is also just an extra thing, the actual end to his arc was a duel and execution that promoted the OG Orc religion and way of life over the brutal conquest culture represented by the likes of Blackhand.
Maybe. But I think the popularity of Bwomsamdi had less to do with him being culturally recognizable, and more to do with him being a legitimately compelling character.
Alex Desert is one of those criminally underrated workman actors you dimly recognize because he’s had a small part in like a hundred things. Reno 911, House, Better Call Saul, etc. The man knows how to preform.
Which is good because I 200% believe Bwom would’ve caught the villain bat bonk if he hadn’t been so relentlessly likeable. The character turned up to belittle you every single time you died in Zuldazar. I think it’s pretty clear we were supposed to hate him, but it just didn’t take.
And having accidentally made a likeable character they course corrected to keep him around. Hence him becoming a wholly benevolent deity by the time of Shadow’s Rising. At time of writing the guy’s the best deity to worship in WoW. He risks his own power waning to rescue the souls of his followers from the Jailor’s Maw. A thing both Elune and the Light don’t do for whatever reason.
His shiftiness in retrospect is just weird. And seems if anything is rooted in a desire to just screw with people for kicks than any nefarious end, which makes him even more likeable.
This was their admitted intent, which is bewildering too.
Yes, but also his characterization is based on popular media use of Baron Samedi, like Dr. Facilier and AHS Coven Baron Samedi, which Alex Desert used, as well as learning about Baron Samedi, to shape the character (and various famous Caribbean movies)
But I just don’t know how much I would chalk that up to Baron Samedi being the sort of concept everyone’s sort of aware of from cultural osmosis.
In fact I’d bet they were going to villain bat him because given the writer’s seeming obliviousness to any history not dimly remembered from high school, they probably saw a picture of the guy, noticed the skull and said “He must be a bad guy”.
Because I doubt with the totality of my being they’re aware that voodoo is connected to folk Catholicism and Catholicism likes bones.
And I’m really not inclined to believe the average WoW player is that much more worldly than the average WoW writer. Not if Trade Chat and the thoughtful correspondence post BG I’ve seen is any evidence.
Zooval falls flat because he lost his personality in a freak accident, yes, but also because of my earlier point about needing to explain the perimeters of the scary thing.
We know the Jailor has ill intent but what does his victory look like? Is unmaking reality a light switch kinda deal or more like remodeling a bathroom?
And the thing is as recently as 8.3 they did show not tell pretty well with N’Zoth. I actually found mind warp Orgrimmar and Stormwind to be kind of disturbing. Seeing Stormwind orphans dance over the murdered corpse of their matron was creepy, and the Goblin banker in Orgrimmar muttering a banal greeting over and over again because his brain snapped from shock was sad. Rexar letting parasites feast on Misha, Alleria murdering her son and husband- ish was pretty dark. We knew very well the price of succumbing to the voiceless whispers.
But Zooval trashes some territory we only just now saw with Broker Town, or just recently saw with Ardenweald.
The guy has nothing interesting to say and both threatens and can only be thwarted in some vague, unspecific way. Even if every past player was a walking Tolkien enclyopedia I don’t think that would’ve helped his case much.
What I fear from the possibility of the next expansions just going to be a big cosmology train is that its going to be a lot of the same- bad stuff happens to places we have little connection to and they feel oddly mundane as they tend to boil down to the same feeling towns and hubs we are extremely used to.
And the vast majority will never be seen or heard from again, nor are particularly relatable. Its easier to sell “mortal people just like you on another world” than “divine beings of X domain that for some reason need the strongest of mortals to bail themselves from their incompetence”.
WoW has been steadily chugging along ever since Amazon bought Activision and mandated a WoW subscription for Amazon Prime and the right to vote in the parts of the country the company bought in 2037.
Currently it’s on the Shadow Of The Shadowland’s Shadow expansion. They’ve still not updated on me on what’s going on in Tirisfal.
They could at least park the Sexy Greek Light Goddess in Silvermoon (would fit the vibe you get from all their golden statues glorifying feminine beauty and their Light worship and sun themes), and for everyone to keep enjoying a Gwynevere equivalent, but I doubt we would get to have that much fun with it.
I would not have known that Zovaal was trying to go for Sauron vibes if I wasn’t told about it. I’ve only seen the movies a couple of times at best, but I swear all I can remember about the dude was that he’s evil, showed up on-screen at the very beginning and that he has bad teeth. So admittedly Zovaal ticks the first two boxes if the bar you’re trying to clear is a new definition of the Banality of Evil.
If anything, I thought he was just a Sexy Satan trying to collect his chaos emeralds.
Nope, he is a horrible villain, well he is horribly written, he could be amazing, but the issue is you never see the jailer do anything in the game so.
We came into shadowlands with a heap of unresolved issues from bfa and they have occuppied centre stage.
If we had come into shadowlands as a stand alone, without Sylvanas/Tyrande arc, it could have been better recieved. Might not have been the best expansion ever, but you could look at some of its positives without being forced to dwell excessively on a plethora of unsatisfactory plot holes and retcons.
Zovaal’s presentation might have been better served if he was a mad scientist, academic or professorial type. He routinely gets other people and things to do all his his heavy lifting, so why all the muscle. His goals as far as we know them make him seem like some like an OCD bean counter who has seen an apparent minor flaw in the first ones design (freewill) feels the need to correct it. The other eternals recognizing this danger lock him away for their and his own good.
Zovaals physical presentation as a cosmic rock n roll wrestler is flawed.
