Ponderable That Makes You Go "Hmmm..."

If there's one truism in World of Warcraft, if it can be corrupted it eventually will be corrupted.

After all, the lore states that even Humans are descended from Vrykul, who are corrupted Iron Vrykul who received the Curse of Flesh, as did Dwarves and Gnomes.*

There's also another truism that WoW follows that is Lord Acton's quote that "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." If you give an NPC enough power, they'll likely become corrupted over time.

Unless, of course, plot armor dictates otherwise. (See: Jaina, Thrall, etc.)

From memegenerator.

There's also another exception to these general truisms. Us.

Given everything that our toons supposedly have done in Retail, we're pretty much at peak power right now. (No matter what happened in Dragonflight, you won the Afterlife an expansion ago, which kind of supersedes that.) So why haven't we become corrupted?

Yeah yeah yeah... Blah blah blah... We're the player characters. We're the protagonists in the game.

Then why are we playing second --or third or fourth-- fiddle to the faction leads? Or the guardians of Azeroth? Or of the Afterlife? If they couldn't do any of this without us, why do we need them?

***

History is full of examples where the Leader's Champion becomes more powerful or popular than the Leader, and that leads to... Issues.

Sometimes the Leader tries to have the Champion killed (See: King Saul and David).

Sometimes, the Champion revolts against the Leader (See: Sulla vs. the Roman Senate).

And sometimes the Champion gains political enemies that bring them to ruin (See: plenty of plots, but also popularly done in literature, such as in Othello.)

From memegenerator. They're doing well today.

So, while I often make fun of the Mary Sue/Marty Stu nature of Jaina and Thrall, we could also apply the same term to our toons. 

***

It's the nature of MMOs to eventually run into these problems, because the longer an MMO is alive and receiving updates/expansions, the greater the power creep and the challenges overcome. This is also a problem with ongoing book series, such as with Kim Harrison's Hollows series and Jim Butcher's Dresden Files.*** Still, you'd think that after a while the WoW team would realize that they've been boxed into a corner and need to figure a way out of it. 

If the story team put half as much effort into addressing the elephant in the room as the dev team did with raid design, they would likely have come up with a solution by now. Then again, maybe not; it certainly seems that the fallback solution is to just assume that we're good little henchmen champions who have no desires whatsoever for something grander. History has shown us that for every Cincinnatus or Washington who voluntarily gives up power, there's 99 other people who are more than happy to seize it.

I personally don't think it's weird, but
then again I live in Cincinnati.
From weird-facts.org.

And if you've ever been in a battleground, you know that there's a ton of MMO players who'd be more than happy to follow the latter path.

*Yes, I still remember my Wrath of the Lich King lore.

**whether or not you played those Expacs, the assumption is that your toon did All The Things.

***The inspiration for this post originally came from an acquaintance's comment about Rachel Morgan, the protagonist of The Hollows. She told me that she liked the series at first, but Rachel very quickly moved into Mary Sue territory, which gave her problems while reading the books.