#they get the lore wrong in the toon though and it makes me so mad

[tanadrin]

So all the terrible retcons and geographic inconsistency (Kul Tiras wtf) and the time travel and the bullshit with the night elves is bad (Illidan is the worst character ever, don't @ me), but the most frustrating part of WoW lore to me is its failure to explore certain complex emotional themes in a really satisfying way--like, the people who expound and expand on Warcraft lore are canny enough to notice that these emotional themes *exist*, but not clever enough to actually work with them or build them out, and so the whole thing collapses into rule-of-cool melodrama. There's nothing wrong with rule-of-cool melodrama; I love rule-of-cool melodrama. But Warcraft lore is *begging* to combine that rule of cool melodrama with some really rich and interesting emotions and character interpretations, it sets them up and is all ready to knock them down, and just... doesn't.

Take the conversation between Saurfang and Garrosh in the Borean Tundra, in WotLK, the one that ends with Saurfang saying "I don't eat pork." I think that's emblamatic of the big theme that unites the Horde, that makes it make sense as a faction. The Alliance, after all, started as a defensive association in the face of the Orc invasion; its renaissance after the creation of Durotar and the invasion of the Scourge is only natural. But what is the theme of the Horde? Is it honor? Strength? Sheer brutality? Well, none of those things. Orcs claim to value honor and strength; the Forsaken are certainly various shades of very dark gray at best, the Tauren and the Orcs *do* seem like natural allies of a sort, but all the races of the Horde have something even deeper in common: trauma. The Orcs are still (cf. Saurfang) dealing with the emotional turmoil of having been both forced and partially complicit in the atrocities of the First and Second War--after which their homeworld was destroyed, they were forced into concentration camps, and they had to rebuild their culture and their identity from the ground up. They have to find a new place in a new world, and there's this tension between the younger generation that doesn't have firsthand experience with any of this and just remembers that the Horde used to be a name that struck fear into the hearts of their enemies (Garrosh Hellscream, for instance) and the older generation that remembers how awful that time really was, and doesn't want to see the old ways revived because it might just destroy their people for good this time. Then there's the Darkspear Trolls and the Tauren, who were both driven out of their old homelands, and fell in with the Horde as natural allies with similar cultural points of reference; and the Blood Elves, whose suffering in the Third War was severe enough to radically alter their culture, coupled with being betrayed by their ruler who decided that joining the Burning Legion and abandoning them sounded like a better time than rebuilding Quel'Thalas.

And then there's the Forsaken. Oh, man, the Forsaken. The Forsaken and Sylvanas are some of my favorite characters in all of WoW, because sure, you could look at it and say, "okay, creepy undead who like green things that go plop and mad science = evil, bad guys." But you'd really be missing what makes the Forsaken interesting. They're not the Scourge--they explicitly broke away from the Scourge when Arthas left Lordaeron. They're not invaders, either. They're in fact mostly the human population of the destroyed kingdom of Lordaeron, the inheritors of that land, but who are treated by the Alliance as interlopers with no right to the very towns and villages they have *always* called home. They're treated as monsters by every living person who ever knew them, and they can't help but regard themselves that way, too. "What are we, if not slaves to this torment?" is one of the casual interaction lines you get when you click on Sylvanas: they do not *like* being dead. But Sylvanas is ruthless and cruel and after Arthas is killed, wins the Val'kyr over to her side so she can keep making more Forsaken. Why?

Simple. Let us imagine: you are an ordinary person, of no unusually great or poor moral virtue. You are hurt, badly. Grieviously. In a way you will never recover from. And everyone you love, all of your friends and your family, the whole society you come from, now sees you as an unredeemable monster that should, no, must be destroyed. How long must you be called a monster before you decide--fuck it, I *will* be the monster they call me. Because, at least that way, no one can ever hurt me again.

The overpowering motivation for the Forsaken is not power or bloodlust; it's not money, or forbidden knowledge. It's making sure no one in the whole world is ever able to make slaves of them again. To make sure they will not be hurt. And the biggest misstep the Alliance ever made was not reaching out to Sylvanas with overtures of friendship as soon as she established her kingdom--because like it or not, she has the support of the people of Lordaeron, and thus a damn good claim to her position. Maybe, if they had, they could have influenced the Forsaken, shown them that they had friends and didn't need to resort to amoral methods to defend themselves. But as it stands, they only have allies of convenience in the Horde (at least until Sylvanas becomes Warchief), and they know that no one in Azeroth is quite happy to see them continue to exist and be free. Everything else about the Forsaken--their use of dark magic, their development of a new, even more destructive plague, their recruiting former servants of the Lich King and raising new Forsaken from among the dead of the ongoing wars--makes perfect sense from the standpoint of a people that knows they are under threat from all sides, and will do anything to survive.

(The Draenei could have been something like this, too, FWIW. Like, a broken people, a people of exiles who are most comfortable in the shadows and with moral ambiguity. But then Metzen had to go make them Righteous Space Goats. I mean, come on. They're just boring now. They were never going to be Horde-aligned--there's too much history with the Orcs  there!--but having a group like that on the side of the Alliance, to help drive home the point that there is not a clear good guys/bad guys distinction here, would have been really nice.)

That actually makes them a pretty damn good fit for the Horde. Moreover, it creates an interesting point of tension with the Alliance, which is clearly *not* always the good guys. I mean, there's the matter of orc concentration camps, but also consider the refusal of leaders like Daelin Proudmoore to contemplate peace (and the subsequent, somewhat... forced turn of Jaina Proudmoore from dove to hawk) and the steadfast refusal of many on that side to deal fairly with the races of the Horde just because they appear monstrous. And arrogance, hoo boy. Dalaran, Gilneas, the Night Elves--huge swathes of the Alliance are characterized by being arrogant and not a little cruel.

And what of Sylvanas becoming Warchief? I don't know where the BFA lore is going (I'm not playing retail anyway), but right now it looks like they're setting up another Garrosh type situation, and preparing for Thrall to retake the Warchief-ship, but if they do that it would be a real pity. First of all, because, well, we saw that already in Mists of Pandaria! What, are we going to besiege Orgrimmar again? Second of all--Sylvanas and Garrosh are *very* different people. Garrosh was, well, Proud; hence the Sha of Pride. He wanted glory and power, he wanted war for war's sake, so he could live up to his father's reputation as a warrior. He was willing to sacrifice everything else that made the Horde the Horde for that. Sylvanas, though, has one overriding motivation: Keep Her People Safe. Punish the people who hurt her is a strong secondary motivation--but it's part of that first one, because if she can make her enemies' victories painful enough, she might discourage them from trying to press their advantage. And her people *trust* her on this: "Dark Lady watch over you," they say when you take your leave. She is not an autocrat--she is their beloved protector. So, she makes the ruins of Lordaeron uninhabitable. She annihilates Teldrassil. Does she spend very many Orc and Troll and Tauren lives doing so? Very well. They aren't *her* people.

I don't think this has to be a tragic flaw leading to her downfall. It sure doesn't make her a good leader for the rest of the Horde, though (even though, on an emotional and aesthetic level, I am 3000% here for Warchief Sylvanas, even more than Warchief Vol'jin, who also had a lot of the creepy threatening vibe that made him a much more interesting choice than either Thrall or Garrosh). But you could make it one, and you could do it very well--they've already mentioned in the tie-ins that Calia Menethil, Arthas's sister, teeeechnically has a claim to the throne of Lordaeron. And, even more interesting, is no longer quite among the living, even if the mechanism of that unlife is happy fun magic instead of evil death magic. Moreover, she has some sympathy for the Forsaken. You could have a squaring-off between them, and you could have a Queen Calia--maybe. If you could bridge that gap and make her understand that the Forsaken feel fundamentally apart from the other human kingdoms now, if she could come to understand just how much evil the Alliance has done to them, if she could really grok what it's like to be them. Then you could have a leader who understands their trauma--but also wants to heal it, rather than lash out at anyone and everyone that might conceivably be a threat. That, too, would be very interesting.

(There’s a reason that, while I loved the Alliance as a kid, I only play Horde toons as an adult. It’s not just that the Horde feel more interesting and vivid to me. It’s that the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the Alliance stands out in much greater relief now. The Horde aren’t good guys--nobody’s the good guys, here--but they don’t lie about their motivations, and they don’t act with cruelty and then play the victim in response. Jaina was an important exception, but they badly mishandled her character in the runup to MoP, which I find very hard to forgive.)

But knowing Blizz, even if they go vaguely that route, they won't stick the emotional landing. There is a very good, if very OTT and melodramatic (in the best possible way), series of fantasy novels or games lurking *behind*, or perhaps parallel, to Warcraft's lore. It is a shame that Blizzard has done so much to obscure it with obnoxious cruft, retcons and timeline compression, repetitive use of the same handful of characters, stupid-ass time-travel plots that create ten thousand plot holes and inconsistencies, shitty tie-in novels (cf. everything by Richard Knaak), and a total failure to make half the world's characters (i.e., everyone in the Alliance) at all interesting. I have a daydream of doing my own version of WoW lore and posting it somewhere like on AO3, but one of the things that makes WoW lore simultaneously so interesting and disappointing to me is that it's embedded in the explorable, realized space of video game worlds. Hard to reproduce that in print, I think. Might be worth it to try.

#world of warcraft #lore #warcraft lore #the forsaken #sylvanas windrunner #the work of chris metzen and its discontents #but hey #at least i got full chain of the scarlet crusade on my warrior in classic

[applekitty]

ive noticed that a LOT of fanfics that try to redeem dedede really dont try. like its not like the author is lazy but the way its executed is

i have never read a fic wherein dedede is given a satisfactory redemption arc, he’s usually just nice from the beginning and very flat with the same personality every other ‘game’ dedede has, basically just ‘i am loud, i’m not mean or cruel im just loud and also im very sassy and a dad dont mess with me im epic’ which seems at first like it might substitute for his evil nature but it doesn’t

or he’s just really outrageously stupid, which is more anime dedede. 

i do agree with you, though i think dedede in and of himself is a hard character to do perfectly ‘correctly’. because when it comes to game canon, there is no correct way to write him. because dedede has no personality. he has hints of personality. which is not replacement for a personality. you are left entirely to your own devices when it comes to dedede’s flaws and his entire mindset in general, because canon supports absolutely everything you could ever put onto his canvas. i could say dedede is a hostile matriarch with no care for anyone other than himself and his kingdom and it’d be supported, because the only times dedede has been forced to act out of good is to defend his planet from something (potentially, in magolor’s case) hostile. or i could say he’s just a cozy uwu dad who’s done some wrong but he’s fluffy and cute nao and canon would sort of shakingly support that.

i went out a LOT about this on the hnk discord server. i’ll leave the entire transcript below but it’s about how people write game canon / why i don’t read game canon fics / the intrinsic, EXTREME difficulty with writing game canon fics. had this convo with @sociallyunacceptableorb , @toon-kirby , and azuranaito

i’ll tl;dr it here but: the reason why game fics seem a little strange while going in is because the games themselves lack a solid personality for the characters. fanon personality exists for them, and usually when writers write for them, they step in such a way which may not align with you, the viewer’s expectations of the fanon personality. it may seem inherently unsatisfying, to you, but for others, it’s very satisfying. the status of game canon and fandom canon makes it harder for you to be satisfied by the fanfics you read unless they are very surface level, boring sorts of fanfics. 

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:40 PM

kitty’s opinion time

most writers cannot go without incorporating the anime in some regard to kirby content due to how much the anime had bled into the interpretations of the games. people will write spanish meta knight as a game thing, people will write kirby being babyish / saying poyo being a game thing, as well as dedede being southern a game thingthe writers who decry the anime as bad / only good ‘at the time’ yet use anime personalities / interpretations make me lul extremely.(edited)

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 12:44 PM

Galaxia was from the anime.

Girlaxia was from 4Kids.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:45 PM

kirby saying ‘poyo’ is an anime thing, galaxia is an anime thing, to pick and choose from the anime shows that the games and their lack of writing cannot stand on its own without having to take from the very franchise that’s being decryed to help a worse written franchise

(edited)

no writing / intrigue writing ≠ good writing

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 12:47 PM

To be fair, it’s probably for the best that anime bleeds into the games or else we’d be stuck with oceans of edgelordery KIRBY IS EVUL AND EATS INNOCENT LIVES… though that’s already on AO3.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:47 PM

looks at matpat

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 12:48 PM

He ignores all canon to make people mad on purpose.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:48 PM

honestly if removing anime canon / anime’s bleed into the video game’s interpretation = writers to go 'KIRBY EVUL’ then idk what to say other than lul

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 12:49 PM

I mean, I don’t think the games writing is shit, but I also don’t trust edgy people with Void Termina.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:50 PM

i think saying 'game writing > anime writing’ is just blatantly.. wrongbecause that’s just saying 'little to no writing so that way you can focus on gameplay > a literal 22 episode made for television with themes and lessons’

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 12:51 PM

Oh! Yeah, that I agree on.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:51 PM

i also dont trust edgelords with kirby or void honestly

or any kirby characters

i dont trust edelords period

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 12:51 PM

I thought you were saying that all game lore was trash.

It’s crumbs.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:51 PM

i used to be one and i made EVERYTHING baaad

it’s comparing crumbs to a loaf of bread

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 12:52 PM

“Well, I hate pumpernickel! So the entire loaf is bad!”

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:52 PM

uerGHERUG

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 12:53 PM

“But you haven’t even eaten it.”“IT’S BAD.”…this metaphor is getting lost.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:53 PM

honestly it’s why i just.. dont read game fics, because there’s little to no ground for writers to stand on and write stuff with

things get too wild and they feel just.. weird ig

i dont know how to put it into words, really

AzuraLast Wednesday at 12:54 PM

That kinda makes me mad with what happened with one of my friends. People got onto her for crossing the anime and games together, which, when she wrote it, it wasn’t bad at all, but because the anime was involved people wanted to bitch at her for it.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:54 PM

interps of game canon are based purely off the person who writes it and all the people reading said thing all have different interpretations which inherently makes reading a game fic unsatisfying and ooc for you personally because your hc filled in the void the game left differently than the authors did. but for the writer it is ic.(edited)

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 12:55 PM

Like gijinka fic?

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:56 PM

reading mirror fics also, inherently, can be unsatsifying i think

for the same reasons

people have so many different interps of how mirror world works that reading anything about it, just on its core basis that the author uses to define a 'mirror world’ can feel unsatisfactory

gijinka as well suffers from this

AzuraLast Wednesday at 12:57 PM

My friend didn’t write gijinka. But she self projected quite a bit onto Meta; her HC for him was that he was an engineer trained under Haltmann.Which also ended up writing out the actual irl problems her major has which is an aerospace engineering.Hoo boy, with the Mirror World, there’s no clear line with it but the majority is usually edgy.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 12:58 PM

people have different interps, and because of how the western world works, we all think our interpretation is the best we can possibly have. usually when we read things we suspend our disbelief, and when it comes to kirby fics, game fics, gijinka fics, i don’t think people can really.. deeply get involved in them.it’s a problem fics i suppose in general have. but it’s especially bad for game canon writers, or gijinka writers.people have hugely different adaptations of the same subject. with the anime there’s clearly written rules and characters defined over the course of 100 episodes. there’s a clear cut story with lots of dialogue and content there to be tackled. but even still, it can be interpreted differently by different people because thats how life works. only the existence of a canon episode cannot be refuted; a fic can be

game canon is harder to do because yes you have the games, and a lot of them, but there is no writing. it is all gameplay. which means that personalities and dialogue and whatever else is not the focus. people can have extremely varying interpretations of canon because of this, which is what intrinsically makes game canon harder to write for. with anime canon it’s easier to write closer to canon because there is a clear cut one. but with game canon, there is no clear cut canon.

AzuraLast Wednesday at 1:02 PM

That’s also why so many people also freak out about all the supposed lore the games have, right?

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:02 PM

the lore in games is very open ended is the thing, so it leads to people’s speculation and very different extrapolations of the lore and canon, yes

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:03 PM

Yup! It adds to their own things; it’s satisfying less for the confirmation and more for the new content to tinker with.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:03 PM

kirby is very, VERY dry in terms of story telling in the games, so any piece of lore given is EXTREMELY important for content creators / theorists(edited)

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:04 PM

I can’t really fault people who build off lore since it’s such a personal thing. Other people get huffy and whine about them “not really appreciating the game” but I find it is appreciation, just in a different fashion. It goes downhill once people get childish and argumentative, though.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:05 PM

the thing is people can also do that ^ for the anime too

remember that one server you were talking about in #newbie-chat

lol

in the end we are the people going 'you are not appreciating the anime right and the way you write for the games is going to intrinsically be unsatisfying unless you go onto the crutch of anime lore'i do anime/game fusion because i know the games can’t stand on their own

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:08 PM

Aheh. But of course.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:08 PM

[snobbish laughter]

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:08 PM

I actually don’t for the same reason. It feels cheap, like I’m forcing a square peg into a round hole.The barebones of the games doesn’t mesh with the backstory of the games that well for me.

StarRodPiplupLast Wednesday at 1:09 PM

So, like, if I wrote a fic with a sentient Galaxia, and then threw the rest of anime canon in the trash, it wouldn’t be cool?

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:09 PM

it’d be relying on the anime canon in some regard, showing that the game canon can’t hold its own

StarRodPiplupLast Wednesday at 1:09 PM

Too many plot holes

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:10 PM

it would be a tad bit jarring, at least in my opinion because im the local brutal 4kids anime stan

but for other people it wouldnt be, i’m just a person with too much time to complain about kirby

StarRodPiplupLast Wednesday at 1:11 PM

I’ve been really curious if “a nightmare of a galactic crisis” was just a coincidence or a deliberate lore inspired word choice, hence why I’ve steered away from capitalist idiot nightmare….it’s fun to write him like that though.

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:11 PM

Also, if it’s a prequel… where the hell does Tiff go? The Cappies? Cappy Town? Dedede just abandons everybody for no reason and there’s a fountain powered by something that Kirby had to create by eating?

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:11 PM

schrodingers cappytown

AzuraLast Wednesday at 1:12 PM

I would like to know my own headcanons give my own appreciation to both the anime and the games. Games can’t stand alone with their bare bones and the anime can always be expanded upon. Nothing wrong with having fun while writing, that’s all it is, isn’t it?

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:13 PM

honestly i think the best way to write kirby stuff is anime/game fusions

i wonder if it’s because thats what i write HMMMMMMEIUGUIERGHERG

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:13 PM

I fuse. I go by manga lore.

Novel, whatever.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:13 PM

novel lore or bust

AzuraLast Wednesday at 1:14 PM

I fuse because it feels the most natural for me.

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:14 PM

Because the novels actually build on it! They don’t pop backstory in everywhere! It’s just a Kirby game with more explanations for stuff in it!

StarRodPiplupLast Wednesday at 1:14 PM

I just wanna write about an evil vampiric wizard for some reason

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:14 PM

the games do need something to help them, i believe. when it comes to content creation of the purely fic type, anywayscourtesycalling does great one-shot comics and what not, they do game lore to the t because their comics are.. well.. oneshots. they’re satisfying by themselves

anyways i’ve got a lot of feelings on people decrying the anime as bad or cool to hate then taking things from the anime and putting it into game lore. that’s mostly what this is about

AzuraLast Wednesday at 1:17 PM

It seems kind of hypocritical in a sense too, doesn’t it?“Oh, I hate the anime but love the games but I’ll piss on the anime as I write my fic because even though I love the games I need to strong bones of the anime to hold me up as I write my fic.”

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:18 PM

yeah that’s sorta what im on about here thank you for summarizing it for me

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:18 PM

Yep! I joke about it a lot myself.Especially people using 4kids voices when they say 4Kids is trash.

AzuraLast Wednesday at 1:18 PM

Same, all it seems to be is a freaking joke.

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:18 PM

Sorry for turning this into a Steven Universe-esque debate thread.

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:19 PM

i instigated it

:v

Garlude Smoocher (Shirley)Last Wednesday at 1:19 PM

:v

chingkittycatLast Wednesday at 1:19 PM

it’s an interesting thread anyways so

#they speak #Anonymous #i have never read anyone ever try to give anime dedede an actual redemption so im assuming this is about game dedede #analysis