It is.
Doesn’t exactly make much sense when towns like Auberdine are described as ‘cities’ in lore. NElves have been living in cities for a good while, even before Teldrassil.
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human: ugh, city elves
night elf, who lived for 6000 years in zin-aszhari that makes stormwind look like a rock floating in a puddle: ???
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It mostly boils down to each individual’s willingness to buy into something.
We can see this with Blizzard. They’ve sacrificed a lot of consumer good will over the years and as a result of that, people tend to be more critical of Blizzard and less lenient when they make mistakes.
Then you take a look at one of World of Warcraft’s competitors, Final Fantasy XIV, which earned a whole lot of good will from its consumers, to the point where I think that they have been far too forgiving of Square Enix’s mistakes lately.
It applies to roleplaying too.
If I don’t know someone or have a negative view of them, of course I’m going to be more critical if they play an unusual character concept than I would be if I knew and trusted the player. I wouldn’t say this is a good thing either, since good will can be exploited and being closed-minded can lead to missed opportunities.
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Loki season 2 episode 4 spoilers
— It would just be easier to burn this place down and start from scratch.
— Sure. Burn it down. Easy. Annihilating is easy. Razing things to the ground is easy. Trying to fix what’s broken is hard. Hope is hard.
— Interfere for good. Heard that one before.
— You can’t give people free will and then just walk away, Sylvie. That’s not how it works.
Behold, dialogue from an alternate universe where Shadowlands was actually competently written.
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I wonder what Teldrassil was in the eyes of those people then. Overgrown (heh) village?
Elves from Suramar and Silvermoon: ???
Viewed as a single story split into two seasons, Loki is amazing. It’s details-first storytelling, a rarity for Marvel and for mainstream superhero adaptations in general. You can actually piece out the whole backstory (in, er… meta-time?) based on what we’ve seen. It’s Doctor Who for people who care about consistent worldbuilding.
It’s a marvelous (pun intended) example of how writers can have their cake and eat it too. Give analyzers the worldbuilding they crave, while also giving drama-enjoyers emotional pathos, high-stakes arguments between conflicting ideologies, passionate speeches and catharsis — things that we associate with the cheesiness of mainstream Marvel movies, but that actually work here because they’re earned.
Edit: Watching Loki season 2 made my brain sketch an outline of “how I’d have written Shadowlands”. Of course, given the choice, I would rather not have written Shadowlands, but if the rough worldbuilding and assets were already done and I had to insert this particular setting into Warcraft lore or else, I now have a basic idea of how I’d have done it.
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I still very much feel a lot of Danuser’s current “Order bad and evil” storytelling, comes from having watched Loki and fully misunderstanding the message of it but trying to cram it into WoW all the same.
An “Orderless” universe fundamentally cannot exist, it is inherently contradictory in nature, even if we were to end the Titans influences on Azeroth and rebuild Azeroth in a primordial form we would just be replacing the Titans Order with our own form of Order that was more primordial.
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2nd chicken stock cube used today, lets see if I can eat my Cajun chicken WITHOUT finding a chunk that is undisolved.
I’m not sure Loki affected Danuser’s writing in a significant way. It was released in 2021, after Shadowlands and after the “I’m totally fighting for free will trust me” plot was already revealed.
What we’re looking at is two writer teams getting similar overall worldbuilding beats (a rigid, stiffening structure imposed on an inherently chaotic universe to force it to conform to the creator’s vision), except one writer team successfully pulled it off, and then successfully expanded on already established lore in an organic way to give the story a satisfying conclusion — while the other one completely botched the execution to the point that we’re left here shrugging, looking at the wreckage of the abortive little Secondary World, and trying to guess what the authors meant to say.
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Danuser hasn’t had a single original lore thought since he took to deciding the story direction.
His cosmological nonsense is a crude imitation of The Elder Scrolls (without the creative influence of certain substances that helped make it) that just does not line up in any way with all previous lore we’ve had.
It was bad enough for us Afratboysiabi’s “THE LEGION IS UNLIMITED!” whack of madness being brought in to circumvent the fact the Burning Legion in WoD was tripping over itself in terms of continuity but at least it was expanded on in a (somewhat) meaningful way in Legion with the use of Argus etc. Not ideal but it didn’t bend a fundamental element of existence.
Danuser then decides to ‘explain’ the afterlife of all things, poorly at that, and completely demystifying something that should have remained something unexplained. We’re got it in Dragonflight with the ‘explanation’ that Order = Bad (despite the fact the alternative is the literal madness of the Void)
Even in the newest patch there are ‘lorebooks’ (ie the mad rants of someone who doesn’t understand the work he is standing upon) trying to ‘explain’ the ‘connection’ between the Emerald Dream and the ‘lifelands’ because we really need that too.
Chances are we’ll have the Light and Void ‘explained’ to us in the World Soul Saga (MCU Phase 4).
It’s all so tiresome.
My personal headcanon is that the various writers involved aren’t allowed to communicate with each other unless they enter a fighting pit.
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Durge run in BG3 is going swimmingly
Into Act 3 now and it turns out the best investigators are those that love a bit of necromancy in the form of speak with dead
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It turns out ‘asking the victim who killed them’ is an underrated detective move
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ah, I do miss my Shakesperian speaking character in my writing, its funny to make him use modern phrases. i just get fed up with typing it out after a little while.
It is also amusing to write the vampire that doesn’t know what an apostrophe is (unless it belongs to somebody) have a minor anneurysm when he heard; “I hast manners and crap”
New Wrath of the Righteous DLC has an android companion: I am enthralled
she immediately shoots down romance: cowards, weak of bloodline, you will not survive the winter
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I’ve steadily gone off FPS games as time goes on, a mixture of them adding way too much gumpf and not enough substance, which is why the only one I can stomach for lengths of time is Hell Let Loose (WW2, very squishy humans, heavy focus on support/map control/tactics and communication).
But damn if the times when you get bad games aren’t bad. Just had a super long, drawn out slugfest that we inevitably lost. When your team just clearly doesn’t have a clue, you have Obviously Kids talking smack in team text chat and complaining about your K/D (jokes on them, I managed to get the Support class levelled up finally) and the enemy team is so Everywhere they can spawn kill you 80% of the time…
It’s like being put to death with a steamroller.
Or a Zamboni…
So, the mythic Fyrakk kill has finally happened, and the long grind begins… then I got shafted since I have no enchanter, leatherworker or inscriptor to make the darn thing 
Between my characters I have all of those - assuming you don’t need max ranked professions you can hit me up if you get lucky
I’ll keep it in mind, thanks!
I point those people to Kalen Trueshot of Stonetalon questing.
“We use guns just fine, friend. CANNONS, on the other hand, I take issue with…”
He comes around to the sniper cannon.
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