Can you please start fixing the terrible choices she and her team made? Start with removing Calia as a Forsaken leader. She’s got no business being there. The Desolate Council can work with just the ACTUAL Forsaken, Belmont, Faranell and Velonara. Lilly can be the official Forsaken Greeter. But if you are feeling generous, replace her with an actual Banshee.
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Her centering about Baine needs also go away for good. I have never seen any other character that is such a coward.
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I mean, I’m not opposed to offing Calia to create a story that brings some change to the Forsaken, but if it is any good kinda depends on that story. Just cutting out Calia changes nothing. The Forsaken culture we had under Sylvanas was rewritten as the result of oppression and misdirection. The Forsaken don’t really have much of an identity right now, and Calia was a (probably failed) attempt at giving them some new direction. I fully understand why people violently reject her - just as I understand why they do the same with Anduin and Baine - but in what is now essentially a post-faction world… what do you actually replace them with to make it better?
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Oppression and misdirection? That was Golden’s writing still. Cause I don’t know how anyone can say Sylvanas held the Forsaken like some sort of hostages when the fact of the matter is that she created them from the ground up, from a bunch of sad zombies to a superpower.
No what we need is for the Forsaken to drop these Golden-eque characters and go back to the way they were. To what made them special as a WoW playable race, not to what makes certain people here feel better about themselves, many of whom don’t even play a Forsaken.
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Golden’s writing created lore, though. Yes, it only was misdirection and oppression, because that’s what is written in Golden’s book. But it’s still in there right now. I thought your question was about the story going forward? Or are you asking for a retcon of everything she was involved in? Because that’s been quite some years now… In other words, impossible to do without just starting again from that point.
Apart from that I do think Golden’s influence is overestimated. Yes, she had the freedom to bring in and flesh out characters, but she wasn’t the one who decided to base the story about them. You can maybe criticize her for how she went about writing a story about Calia trying to bring about peace between Forsaken and humans that failed because of Sylvanas’ intervention and led to her being raised to a light-undead. But I’d think that the story that happened was way worse than the way it was written in this case, for example, and that wasn’t her area of responsibility.
A writer for hire writes what they are hired for.
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The Undead started as rejected, dark, brooding people trying to secure Lordaeron against alliance advancements. Calia and her light and hope BS was the direct opposite of this.
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Maybe once she did, but after they moved her on to the writing team, she ruined lore. Thing is you are right. Golden wasn’t bad as long as she was told what to write, but the moment they allowed her to get creative and add characters or modify exiting ones as she saw fit, things started going down hill, didn’t they?
And I’m pretty sure her influence is what caused her to get the boot. I think she didn’t want to play ball with Metzen who is gonna be in charge of the WoW writing from now on.
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That’s not even the issue. Many people on my side of the isle were not content with just being tossed a bad light abomination. And instead of listening to our complaints Golden and her boys on the writing team decided to throw us that whole load of crap about how undead is undead no matter how and what. Yeah, they threw that crap at the faction that has been sruggling with that condition for 2 decades and that was just insulting. But then again it’s no big secret Golden didn’t like Horde players cause they criticized her Alliance - orientated writing.
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Kill Calia? I’m all in.
While the concept of Light-undead is interesting, I think they can be their own independent faction instead of the Forsaken.
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If anything, I expect even more terrible world building and deliberate subversion especially as they seem to be laying the groundwork for Void Elf Paladins.
I don’t particularly like Void Elves to begin with but at least when they’re leaning into the Void there’s some cool stuff to be found. Yet if they can just tap into the Light then it simply comes across as silly.
I feel the same way about the Light wielding Forsaken.
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If we’re plainly looking at the concept of good storytelling, then the Forsaken should have gone to the grave once Arthas was dead. That would have been a good end to their story.
But that would never have worked, because nothing is more static in WoW’s world building than the playable factions, and because of it I don’t think the Forsaken has had a single positive story beat since Wrath. Nowadays they seem far too human. The state of undeath doesn’t seem as grim as it did back in 2004-2009. So how do they fix that? I honestly believe you can’t. They’ve had more years of bad development than good, and for the last ~2-3 years they’ve seen near zero development.
Even if they somehow do manage to make them interesting again, how do you account for all the years they weren’t? Permanent lore blinders…?
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That’s pretty much what I was getting at. Ok, you get rid of Calia, but how exactly does that make the already ruined Forsaken in any way interesting? What story are you trying to tell that can actually turn back the time on them to make them more interesting and less human again? Calia is barely a symptom, she isn’t the disease.
If Calia and her vague peaceful humanizing is gone, what would it be replaced with in a post-faction world? Not who would replace her, but what they would actually do. And the answer is either nothing at all, or more of the same, I think. But I’d be interested to see, if someone actually had a positive vision going forward.
Complete and total brainstorm, but maybe the Forsaken could reject her. The Desolate Council had potential but the story is progressing at a snail’s pace and it is prone to big twists for the sake of spectacle. I don’t know what motivates Calia. She has been, thus far, completely uninteresting. I don’t get the sense that she is driven by power in the “Lordearon belongs to the Menethil dynasty!”-kind of way. It seems she’s a typical Disney princess, well-meaning and good. And that’s super boring.
We need someone like Putress, except not as villain fodder. Someone to reject the monarchic tradition of Azeroth. An odd source of inspiration could perhaps be the Republic of Venice, who was part democratic and part oligarchic and, to some extent, part monarchic (the doge was a figurehead that served for life). You could break down the forsaken into various interest groups who all elect one official to represent them on the Desolate Council, and then you could create some interesting conflicts within the Forsaken as a faction with political backstabbings and all that fun stuff. Lillian Voss could perhaps sit on a WoW variant of Venice’s “Council of Ten” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Ten).
It is maybe not impossible but … I wonder if Blizzard would dedicate this much effort to the Forsaken as a faction. They have a dozen other factions now that they’re drip-feeding new content/lore to.
That’s… not a bad setup, actually. Though one that isn’t easily tied into gameplay, since we don’t want that situation solved, just communicated. I guess an actual RPG questline, where the Forsaken player gets involved and actually gets to choose a side might work? With the Forsaken keeping the details of the new arrangement to themselves? Not a usual kind of story for Warcraft, and a sizable investment in one of the less popular races, but I do very much like the idea of cloak and dagger politics within the Forsaken society, out of sight of the living. Though nothing of that really follows or neccessitates getting rid of Calia, but I guess we can take that as a bonus to set the stakes.
Yeah, that’s what kills it, sadly. Pretty much every race could profit from some internal conflicts to broaden the perspective, deepen the world building, and to attract different kinds of players. And Classic did have a lot of that, somtimes subtle and understated, somteimes with a whole Defias rebellion. And it’s not like they wholley forgot how to do that un new zones. Zandalar and Kul Tiras were good examples, where they set up quite a bit of politics, and they seem to be doing the same with War Within - with the regretful difference, that they are just setting up those problems to solve them, not to build on them. Better than nothing, though.
And in recent interviews they did mention that the racial questing experience was something important they lost along the wy, so they might just look at that when and if a world remake actually comes up… I just wouldn’t bet on it improving things right now.
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The real problem is humanizing all the races and trying to apply the "who is bad and who is good to them " .
In vanilla different races were pretty much different species . They thought and acted differently , because they are not human .
For an orc to smash another orcs skull , for eating the last piece of boar meat is normal . Orc were primate humanoids , with huge muscles and anger issues .
For Undead it was normal to spread Death and Decay . That’s how decay works , it infects anything living . This is normal .
It had nothing to do with who is bad and who is good . It was just natural .
Look at it from this perspective .
Is a tiger bad for killing a human ? It is a tiger . It does tiger things . It cares not if you are human or not , because a Tiger thinks like a Tiger . Sometimes this gets them to clash with humans , sometimes not , but both are different and require different things .
This was forcefully changed in the last 2-3 expansions and now all races are humanized .
What is an undead now ? Well its just a human affected by shadowlands magic …
What is an orc ? Just a green human.
What is an elf ? A human with pointy ears .
We can all understand each other . We can understand how everyone feels and if we do , than fighting each other is no longer based on natural order and instinct , but on political colors .
Removing Calia means nothing if the whole backstory is ruined .
The way you described above , with factions and what not , still keeps all races humanized and does not remove this from the lore .
I’d say we need story like the orcs had under Garrosh . A story that will show that domesticating Tigers (errrr Orc and Undead) is not a good idea .
WoD already proved that orcs do not really care what they kill and for what reason . That the demonic corruption is not the case for their aggression and sooner or later they will always do the same thing .
I’d say something like that could work for the undead too .
Here’s the story :
Undead start gathering in secret . Doing weird stuff . Doing Plague . Killing living creatures . Not for some political or some ideological thing , but because they like it . Because it is an itch that needs to be scratched .
Imagine some alliance emissary going to Undercity or wherever they live , to meet with Calia and woopsy daisy , the emissary disappears and are found in a big Jar . Investigation starts and it turns out that it is noting more than the human walking in the wrong part of the town .
Further investigation and turns out that everyone is doing stuff like that and when a living being passes by them , all undead drool and are ready to jump the gun .
Than we discover that even Callia has these urges , but desperately tries to maintain sanity .
The story than turns to a fight between the natural and the humanized order . In the end the natural mostly wins and we return to a normal undead . Some undead still try to maintain human sanity , but it is hard and uphill battle and they are exceptions than a norm .
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Ok, I’ll try to explain this to the best of my ability. All that follows is my perspective and my opinion, so keep that in mind.
That being said, I do want things to go back to the way they were, to the original Forsaken that got me picking to play one. One of the things I liked about the Forsaken was the ambiance, their insane, often amusing and always sadistic experiments were a breath of fresh air to me who originally played an orc mostly. I liked that they had this dark forest where they did that away from the eyes of the living. To me going through the Forsaken zone remains one of my fondest memories. It’s actually there I noticed, after about a month of playing that when you die the sky changes into a vortex.
So yeah, I would very much love to see them go back to the way they were, even if people tell me they shouldn’t cause it’s bad or whatever, I honestly don’t care, if you start changing them up, humanizing them, they stop being the Forsaken at least to me and turn into something else that does not interest me.
So to that end, I suggest the removal of Calia, a course correction of Lilly Voss and I also suggest that they replace Calia with Sharlindra, who is an old Forsaken character we actually know and has been with the Forsaken since the start.
I suggest that the writing concerning the Forsaken focus more on their secrecy and their unwillingness to mingle with the living. That would be a start.
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I think it’s important to point out that it wasn’t Christie Golden who decided what would happen next; she’s just one of the people who got to tell a part of the story of how it happened.
In the interviews about the World Soul Saga, Blizzard representatives talked a lot about how Chris Metzen and Ion Hazzikostas were having a lot of conversations behind closed doors about where the story would go in the next years.
So it seems that the people that you should actually criticise are Steve Danuser (as former Lead Narrative Designer) and Ion Hazzikostas. 
Just sayin’.
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The idea of them, they are Lordaeronians (is this a word?) first and undead second actually not that bad
A twisted dark kingdom built on necromancy trying to mimic their former living life is tragic and sounds interesting
Even with their own mini-alience, Alliance of Lordaeron was the alliance of the Humans and the Elves of Kingdom of Quel’Thalas, the Dwarves of the Kingdom of Ironforge and the Gnomes of Gnomeregan agains a common foe - their case the Orcs that invaded their land
The Forsaken in theory have undead among all of those races under their banner, so it could be a twisted dark undead reflection - just the common foe is whatever threatens Azeroth this time
Still would be dark and twisted, cursed undead “team”, but at least with a sense of self, that is more than a personality cult
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Sure, that’s a nice trope to focus on. Nightmare before christmas comes to mind. You could have a lot of fun with that… if you’re willing to put the time and effeort into it to make clear how much Forsaken are “defective” as humans.
Golden may be gone, but the racial homogenization program is certainly ongoing.
25 pages or so of Gazlowe explaining Noggenfogger that goblins should stop being the exploitative capitalism carricature that they always were and start adopting all the 21st century values. Apparently “the goblin way is invention, innovation, partnership”.
Yeah, that’s kind of the opposite direction for races that we were arguing for here…
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