“When we see we’ve written an inconsistency, we go think about it, afterwards, to see if we’re going to say it was a retcon or pretend it’s just uhh, unreliable narrator” is like, the core rule of how not to write unreliable narrator things wtf
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You didn’t miss anything. It was very predictable the new beast would replace the previous pet and a few quests later he’s all but forgotten about his grief.
I remember some npcs send you letters to check up on them, they could’ve done it with this story too. Check up on the tuskarr 3 times to see him overcome his grief and find companionship in his new pet. A missed opportunity.
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I kinda love this answer because it’s one of those “here’s a proof why modern WoW storytelling can be ignored” things. For all we know, the unreliable narrator thing they’ve been doing since Shadowlands has just been one big case of gaslighting where the authors pretend they knew about the inconsistencies the fans pointed out to them. And it also provides great argument against the people (and there are still some, yes, it’s baffling to me too) who keep eating the new cosmic lore.
No, as it turns out, there is no big deep Blizzard cosmic plot, they just pretend like their inconsistencies are unreliable narrators.
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I am once again floored by the WoW CDev team’s sheer incompetance.
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(gun cocking) Always has been.
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… Clever girl-
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My former guildmates, pandaren RPers, have got their hands on the just-released Exploring Pandaria book, and apparently it’s… surprisingly not bad. It has pretty much no new lore, but it basically portrays Pandaria mostly as we left it at the end of MoP questlines, and canonizes some headcanon that we assumed in RP anyway.
Here are some details, courtesy of Sujee of <Celestial Circle>:
Exploring Pandaria lore
Krasarang
No mogu presence ever mentioned
Saurok active in jungles
Mantid sometimes seen over the wall in the trees
Tuskarr seen around anglers wharf, travelling from dragon isles
Crane temple is all good, filled with hope and joy
Crane wing refuge is gone, it was a temporary camp
Unga Ingoo still home to hozen pirates
Domination pointis a horde fortress, and is still active, with gates and guards
Bilgewater beach is a goblin settlement near Domination point, has a restaurant called the Boiling Crustacean
Dawnchaser Retreat was abandoned then burned down by Saurok, there’s nothing left.
Sentinel Basecamp was also abandoned, taken over by nature.
Thunder Cleft is a permanent tauren ran horde town ran by the old Dawnchaser tribe
Incursion is an alliance base still
There’s an alliance seaport further east called Lions Landing, has a lighthouse and such
Timeless Isle
Randomly accessible, it’s simply not always there, not explained how, but time related- suggested that wanders in and out of time
Huojin and Tushui encampments still there
Adventures are still coming to the Island to fight Ordos
Pirates spotted not far off the coast, baiting saillors
It is common for people to go to the Celestial Court and challenge the celestials
Jade Forest
No mogu in the Jade Forest
Lorewalkers tell us it was the center of the Pandaren Empire while it existed
Garrosh’ar point is gone
Paw’don famous for apple cider
It’s cider not as goodas before mop, the newly planted trees (old ones destroyed by horde) only now yielding their first fruits
Twinspire Keep is empty, no horde
The Serpents Heart statue is being rebuilt and is ‘several years from completion’, covered in scaffolding it holds no magical wards or seals, and is intended to be used for Yu’lons life essence as originally planned still
The Jade Temple welcomes all races seeking to meditate and pursue knowledge
Inkmakers use the pink petals from the arboretum to make inks used for enchanting
Sauroks still stealing eggs from windward isle
Wanderbrew and Goldendraft families are in constant disputes over their breweries in Dawns
There’s still a few jade statues left near the jade witchs hut, but only the guardian animal ones, all people ones are gone
Terrace of Ten Thunders are peaceful ruins, no mogu
Thunder hold is empty, no alliance
Also not sure if it’s implied but the OG statue was never meant for yulons life essence, it’s suggested. Since the statue had a seal containing the Sha inside it, which broke during the jade forest battle.
Kun-Lai
Yaungol and fire camps gone
Farmers slowly reoccupying lands
The cave between binan/tavern in mists is called the ‘Kun-Lai Pass’
East/Westwind Rest never got rebuilt
A Grummle says they were “made Specifically to be very strong and at ease in the mountains so they could act as beasts of burden” by the mogu
Kota Basecamp has a Keenbean Kafa Coffee shop with tables and chairs, recently invented “Express-o”
Mogu spirits gone from passage to zouchin
Zouchin totally rebuilt many years ago, still has odd bits of old trol stuff being found in nearby woods, children scolded for finding arrowheads that might be poisonous
There is a new stormstout Brewery built in Zouchin
Mogu shan terrace/vaults clear of mogu, still secrets to uncover within
Peak of serenity is gone, nothing left but burnt stone
Shado-pan don’t just let anyone through the wall into townlong, have to be convinced, expect those that pass through to die
Mantid still attack people on the wall all the time still.
That’s what I’ve got up to atm, on dread wastes next
But yeah lots of nice art
There’s one bit that seems like a mistake or something, but it’s mentioned elves having a 2 way portal back and forth to darnassus lol
Comment by Lintian: So the flyover lore writer seems to have misinterpreted the culmination of the Jade Forest storyline. The statue wasn’t built to seal the sha. The sha had nothing to do with the statue, it emerged there and destroyed the statue because that was where the Alliance and Horde’s armies-by-proxy clashed. The Jade Forest is a brutal deconstruction of prior WoW’s “factions bringing their war to foreign shores” trope, and the book explanation, unfortunately, missed the point.
I’ll add Townlong Steppes, Dread Wastes, and the Vale when Sujee reads and summarizes them.
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Same as it ever was.
…same as it ever was.
Only really surprising thing to me there is that the A/H bases in Krasarang are still active.
also no, adventurers aren’t going to the island to fight Ordos, because they need the legendary cloak from Wrathion to reach it and that questline has been removed!!! Can’t get it anymore!!!
remember when they said they were going to remove that requirement in WoD and then never did
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That’s what we assumed in RP anyway. It makes sense, the factions presumably maintain trade and diplomatic relations with Pandaria. Besides (and I admit this is giving more thought to it than Blizzard probably did), they’ve invested a lot of resources into building seaports under their control, and presumably want to cling to them like Azeroth’s equivalents of Hong Kong.
Watch the monkey’s paw curl and change the boss to require the other legendary cloak from Wrathion.
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They kinda are, but as trade posts go they could’ve picked better spots.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraftlore/comments/179p5ht/smolderon_is_evil/
Commenters on Reddit assume way more depth than Blizzard writers put into their thought process.
There are talks in comments about cosmic forces and thematic significance and such, but I imagine the conversation actually went something like this:
— So Fyrakk’s thing is fire, right? And his allies are fire themed? Let’s make Ragnaros a boss in the raid.
— He’s dead, players killed him in the Firelands in Cataclysm.
— Oh. Whoever replaced him, then. Whatever.
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I wouldn’t go that far, but I do think that the intricacies of some of the less openly visible things in lore are a mystery to some of the newer writers. If they wanted Ragnaros back, they just would bring him back. It’s happened before, and there’s a precedent with the whole Dark Iron Ragnaros loyalists thing.
An example of more ‘obscure’ things I wholly assume they don’t understand is how most demons are aliens that were fel-corrupted, hence a man’ari paladin that’s still a man’ari isn’t the exact same thing as a dreadlord who has been completely lightforged away from shadow or fel.
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Dracthyr bobbing for apples get the things stuck halfway into their faces. It’s so obvious how they’ve been designed and how the dragon snout is built on top of a regular humanoid head.
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Its frustrating because really, all they had to say to make their train of thought make sense and (imo) be cooler as a story is:
“A Man’ari who undergoes a process of purification or lightforging to be rid of the Fel in their veins and soul could eventually, if faithful and desiring it, find their connection to the Holy Light and the Naaru returning to them with time which would eventually allow them to walk the path of a Lightforged or Vindicator/Paladin/Priest once more. Though this would obviously come at the downsides of no longer being bound to the Nether and forfeitting the power the Fel granted them in favor of the Light, so a rather selfless act.”
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Sure would be nice if the Earthen Ring (that put Smolderon into power) had any sort of involvement in kicking him in the face, maybe expressing some opinions on it.
oh well lol!
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Azeroth’s regime change track record is a bit of an interplanetary embarrassment.
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Yes, they could go for a penitent angle, but, an eredar that’s had the fel syphoned away from them is just a draenei. It could work if eredar had been mutated beyond looking like draenei but with green eyes and (sometimes) red skin, but an eredar that has all their fel taken away from them is just a draenei.
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I’d argue that honestly works pretty well with the angle tbh, the Light’s all about getting boyscout giddy over people being selfless and virtuous in their actions, so understanding that you’ll just become a normal draenei again eventually if purified/lightforged kinda works imo.
Edit: obviously for the sake of customisation you could have an inbetween phase, where they’re still red/fel-veined etc. but able to wield the Light sporadically.
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#notmyfirelord
Didn’t they have it in BfA too or was it just two view points written by people who didn’t communicate?
Always healthy when teams don’t see what the other is doing.
I mean, that could work, but my biggest problem with the answer they gave is that they didn’t even really answer the question. All they said was that since this one demon could be lightforged, it wouldn’t be far fetched to think that eredar could be paladins.
It’s like if they added undead paladins and instead of adding lore to them involving Alonsus Faol’s return to Lordaeron or something of the sort for it, they said ‘well, Sir Zeliek could wield the Light when he was a death knight, so undead paladins aren’t too far fetched’, instead of giving an actual in-universe explanation as to why they suddenly can be paladins.
Imagine you were to roleplay a man’ari paladin with that concept, and you wish to only use a canon explanation as to why you can be one to someone who just asked you how you became a paladin in-character. What are you supposed to say? That there was this one demon that was lightforged, so it isn’t far-fetched for you to be a paladin? What kind of meta, Deadpool fourth-wall-breaking kind of justification is that?
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