"So this is the end," Tanis said. "good has triumphed."
"Good? Triumph?" Fizban repeated, turning to stare at the half-elf shrewdly. "Not so, Half-Elven. The balance is restored. The evil dragons will not be banished. They remain here, as do the good dragons. Once again, the pendulum swings freely."
"All this suffering, just for that?" Laurana asked, coming to stand beside Tanis. "Why shouldn't good win, drive the darkness away forever?"
"Haven't you learned anything, young lady?" Fizban scolded, shaking a bony finger at her. "There was a time when good held sway. Do you know when that was? Right before the Cataclysm!"
"Yes"--he continued, seeing their astonishment-- "the Kingpriest of Ishtar was a good man. Does that surprise you? It shouldn't, because both of you have seen what goodness like that can do. You've seen it in the elves, the ancient embodiment of good! It breeds intolerance, rigidity, a belief that because I am right, those who don't believe as I do are wrong.
"We gods saw the danger this complacency was bringing upon the world. We saw that much good was being destroyed, simply because it wasn't understood. And we saw the Queen of Darkness, lying in wait, biding her time; for this could not last, of course. The overweighted scales must tip and fall, and then she would return. Darkness would descend upon the world very fast.
"And so --the Cataclysm. We grieved for the innocent. We grieved for the guilty. But the world had to be prepared, or the darkness that fell might never have been lifted."
-from Dragons of Spring Dawning, by Margaret Weis and Terry Hickman.
Perusing old entries at Rades' Orcish Army Knife blog was a trip down memory lane. The Fabulor posts alone were worth it, but in the middle of the myriad posts I found one of Rades' personal annoyances: his belief that the Naaru ought to be evil. His suppositions were in place back in 2012, long before the Warlords of Draenor or Legion expansions, so his beliefs predate any of the rigidity exhibited by Y'rel and the Prime Naaru.
But what got me to thinking was a post by Bellular Gaming last week about speculations for what might be the next WoW Retail expac.
Michael Bell speculates about how the rigidity and intolerance reflected in the alternate universe Draenei and Naaru, coupled with the same form of intolerance from Turalyon, could result in the Light being the Big Bad of the next expac, one that Michael calls Lightbearer.
Imagine, if you will, the sort of rigidity the breeds a purging of the ranks of the Alliance of all traditions not directly affiliated with the Light: Shamans, Druids, Mages, Warlocks. Or an Alliance that embraces such intolerance and implements it in an overthrow of House Wrynn in Stormwind and support of the Scarlets, which then turns its collective eye upon the Horde and those parts of the Alliance that support tolerance.
Rades would have been so proud about that sort of plotting.
If Blizzard goes that route they'll need to earn it, story-wise. The Maghar scenario was really jarring considering everything we did in WoD. It is something that they would need to lead into over an expansion unless they just want to 'Sylvanas' everything again. Yes, people can change for the worse, but if it isn't told coherently, logically, understandably they'll just make people even angrier. Wow's lore is already a bit of a joke, but if they try to 'rule of cool' this sort of change they'll get all the hate they deserve.
ReplyDeleteI wish they would leave all the morally-grey/bad stuff for Diablo and just let Wow have good guys and bad guys. Sometimes you just want to feel like a winner, a hero without a bunch of regrets and/or baggage.
They went in the morally gray direction almost from the get-go in Vanilla WoW with the Defias, since their origin story has a lot of pieces that a player can get behind. The big difference here is that the WoW devs lack imagination in that they constantly pick on the Horde to be the baddies that need "fixing", whereas the Alliance tends to get off scot free.
DeleteI never felt like the Defias were morally grey. More that their understandable desire for revenge was (created and) used by Onyxia as a tool to try to destroy Stormwind. Their goals and methods always seemed straight forward without the ambiguity I associate with morally grey. (This last part might be a 'me' thing.)
DeleteIMO, they stepped off the ladder of being in the right and into murky soup of who is in the right when they killed Queen Ayrenn. It doesn't matter if they actually did it or whether Onyxia actually ordered the hit, because they accepted responsibility for her death. That and turning the beef with the nobility into a thirst for the destruction of Stormwind itself was an escalation you can't really wave away, given the sheer number of innocents they were going to kill. I realize that some people would look at that as strictly black and white, but I view it as the natural progression down the slippery slope, aided and abetted by Onyxia.
DeleteQueen Tiffin, not Ayrenn. (Ayrenn is from ESO. Sigh. Was up too late tonight.)
DeleteWithout having watched/read the full thing, I really hope Blizzard doesn't go down the road of having an evil army of the light or whatever. I don't mind stories with shades of grey, or some light-wielding individuals going off the rails, but I'd prefer Light and Shadow/Void as cosmic forces to remain unambiguously good/evil.
ReplyDeleteI think it's mostly real life developments in recent years that have made me feel somewhat jaded towards this whole concept. We've had too many films and TV shows that glorified anti-heroes, and people will justify e.g. politicians doing terrible things because "they are all as bad as each other anyway". No, it's not all the same. There is value in trying to do the right thing. So I find myself longing for narratives again where some things/people are allowed to really just be good or bad.
It's not a matter of them being "evil", but they are firmly in the belief that they are right, and because of that it is just and good to "convert" everyone into their way of thinking by "filling" them with the Light. I see this sort of thing all the time with members of my family who are hard core Evangelical Christians. They do good works all the time, but because they believe that their viewpoint of Christianity is the only correct one, they conduct themselves against other branches of Christianity or other religions as if they were in dire need of conversion. (And yes, some of them believe that there's gonna be this big Christian Army that will sweep the world like a new Crusade, which comes uncomfortably close to what Isis and other extreme religious movements advocate for. Dominionists are what they call themselves.)
DeleteInterestingly, a month back or so, someone posted a "what if we had 3 factions" scenario on r/wow (which I don't read frequently and can't find it now), but the core points were something like:
ReplyDelete- third "nature" faction consisting of mostly Tauren, Night Elves, Druids, Shamans + matching allied races
- a stricter horde
- a stricter Alliance
which to me could be either related or pretty much the opposite if you think about "the light" vs the rest.