I don’t think you can bring WoWs lore back on track. Just delete everything, start from the beginning.
Give us level 1 characters in the next expansion, that look like ours, but with no itemlevel and start a complete new story.
It is more of an expansion raid boss ending cinematic than BFA but that is nothing to be proud of.
Legion set a standard that sadly could not be followed
To think that again they play the “I must take over the world to save it even though everything I ever did is pure evil” trope…
The writers must have really loved the story of Kingdom Hearts 3, only it works even more badly for the Jailer
As someone who has read all the twilight books, I’ll go on record saying that the two first books are solid. The third book is iffy and the fourth book is a mess. And then there’s the recent fifth book which is also pretty solid and a side novella which is boring above all else.
So it’s a mixed bag.
But it’s honestly a better mixed bag than Shadowlands.
Stephenie Meyer has a better grasp on her vampire and werewolves lore than Blizzard has on their Shadowlands lore. It’s crap and full of holes, but it’s less crap and filled with less holes than Shadowlands.
twilight being a young adult story for girls who are hitting puberty and learning about love is pretty decent. It suits the market it’s written for, hence its popularity.
With Shadowlands you have to question who the story is written for. Who are WoW players these days? Young and middle-aged men who’ve been invested in the franchise for years already, yeah? So why does the story seemingly fail so hard to capture the interest and excitement of this crowd?
Surely one way of measuring the quality of a story is by counting how many people have appreciated it.
With twilight it’s a lot, with Shadowlands it’s not.
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The wow writers write the story for themselves pretty much.
And for anyone who cares more about peoples twitter bio notes than the quality of their work
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Absolutely agree with your post, “Twilight” is basic girly book with basic tropes, etc. but atleast it is well rounded and coherent story. SL is nonsense, fanfiction level territory.
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Yeah but even then they seem quite like your average WoW player, at least to me.
A young and middle-aged crowd of nerds who seem to be interested in fantasy and sci-fi, games and movies and the lot.
Like us.
So am I to believe that the story resonates well with the Blizzard employees, whilst for some inexplicable reason it doesn’t with the playerbase?
Nah, I don’t buy that.
I’m going to go with the notion that even within Blizzard they feel and know and are fully aware that this isn’t very good.
Maybe it’s a gambit and they know that the next expansion they’re cooking up is going to blow us all away, and Shadowlands was just a filler we had to get through.
They are privy to some story knowledge that we are not.
But that still doesn’t detract from the fact that Shadowlands is a story that doesn’t really seem to cater to any crowd.
At least Stephenie Meyer with twilight knew who her crowd was and who she was writing for.
@Jito I added a bit of extra spice in my previous post about something that seems to have something to do to an extend with the disappointments in the entertainment products the last few years
I read them as a teen, honestly thought they were all rubbish until the last one. May just be that I can’t stand Bella as a character, though. Yet somehow I still read them.
BfA and SL story has been the same for me - it’s alright but not something I want to redo compared to previous expansions.
Yeah maybe. It is tempting to worry that good fiction gets overshadowed by values and signals and such.
But at the end of the day, then Shadowlands boiled down to something like:
“…And then Sylvanas and the others made up and The Jailer died. The End.”
I mean, c’mon!
That’s not a story that fails because it’s turned into virtue signaling. It fails because it’s crap.
She’s definitely a deal-breaker. 
Story is cartoon level bad, nothing makes sense nothing explained, why destroy the old lore for this joke of a story.
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I believe “Fifty shades of grey” started as “Twilight” fan-fic, still better story than Shadowlands
That basically indicates Elune is an automa, too since she’s the Winterqueen’s sister… At this point, I highly doubt WoW writers had any clue what they actually gotten themselves into trying to “overwrite” old lore. They barely seem to know their “own” lore at all. What a wreck…
Yes, and I have read those books as well. 
And again I’ll go on record for saying that the first three books are better than Shadowlands as a story. Christian Grey is a better-written character than The Jailer, and Anastasia Steele is a better-written character than Sylvanas.
The plot makes more sense overall and the story actually satisfies the crowd it’s written for.
That’s all-together more than Shadowlands could ever dream of.
It’s harsh criticism, but I think it’s fair criticism.
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My sister forced me to watch the movie, it was torture. 
I have not watched the movies and I have no desire to try either. They come across as toe-curling levels of cringe to me. But then again, rom-coms and American romance movies has always rubbed me the wrong way.
But again, the movies did serve the crowd they were made for. Women flocked to the movies to watch them way more than any WoW nerds flocked to the movies to watch Warcraft.
Blizzard are crap at actually serving their crowd, which is why they keep getting all this criticism.
Oh they’re even worse. I mean they get the stuff in the book done very well, they act the part very well it’s just the characters themselves are -awful- and so cringe.
As for SL, I just have to stop trying to pick at it and accept the story as it goes but I think most of the fan base’s ideas of what COULD happen is better than what DOES happen.
I think it is just a problem of being around so long they didn’t really flesh this out from the start, they tried to squish the lore into the idea too much. I still am not screaming everything is rubbish though. I don’t think it is rubbish just… neh.
Yh i thinj it is going to be void vs light or Dragon Isles and somehow developing void cataclysm vs light for 11.0 you know to chill a bit from the cosmic stuff
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The intro cinematic was awesome tbh cause it confirms that every force wants Azeroth. No complains for that. The ending though is worse than BfA, teasing us for 10.0 or 11.0 but still not telling us what rewritting the rules of the cosmos means. The annoying is that if they tell us most things will make sense. The jailer his plan, his path everything about him. But they dont tell us and the ending of basically W3 is a 1 minute cinematic. You hve no idea how mad it made me watching it. When primus asked him just tell us what rewrtting means and then that he was actually a good guy and that probably the void is coming potentially in 11.0 or even 10.0. 10.0 is going to be dragons i think teasing to 11.0 for void vs light but wtf was this garbage of an ending??? wtf just wtf
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They retconned/recontextualized 20 years of lore for Thanos from Wish who didn’t even snap the world (which would be perfect for 10.0 makeover). My expectations were low, but not that low.
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Yeah this is probably what irks me the most.
Because we’re venturing into the realm where I start to feel confident in saying that I could write a better story.
I mean, early in this expansion I was the staunch fanboy as always. I defended the merit of the story, because there was potential for greatness. The proper ingredients for a good story were there. Blizzard just had to put them together.
I have written walls upon walls of text speculating – with a fair bit of confidence – what would happen next, and how the story would start to dip into elements of classical literature and religion and other heavy themes for a mature audience that could handle a grown-up storyline with depth and symbolism and a message of morality and ethics.
I could see that path for the story and I was certain that Blizzard were already in the process of paving the way for that to happen.
So to see that this is what the story ends up with, a whole lot of nothing, is… disappointing to say the least.
Blizzard don’t even try to do anything with any of the characters or anything really. It’s entirely without consequence.
I don’t even understand why we get a novel about Sylvanas now. What for?!
I was certain that the reason for her getting a novel was that she would be the main character of the story and all the events would serve as tools for her to transform and develop as a character. But she doesn’t. She just doesn’t. All she does is tag along.
I always felt that The Jailer was just a means to an end. He existed as the character who moved the story forward, but without being the character who the story was about. But when he doesn’t accomplish anything of consequence, then what’s the whole take-away of going to the Shadowlands?! Nothing happened. We may as well not have gone.
And the fact that we did go and Blizzard did remove the mystery of Death and reveal it for all it was…that’s not a good thing.
It’s like Warlords of Draenor with its time travel and multiple timelines. If it’s not pulled off in a satisfying way that makes the lore even better, then it just drags the lore down and makes it more stupid.
And that’s the same here. All we have gotten out of venturing to the Shadowlands is a bunch of stupid and silly lore about Death that we would have been better off without.
And I’ve seen Danuser already hinting at what is to come. You know, wait and see!
But the thing about WoW is that the game doesn’t get a clean slate after each expansion. Just like the lore forever more has to deal with the stupidity of multiple timelines because Warlords of Draenor was a mess, then now the lore always has to deal with what we now know that death constitutes, and what a mess that is!
I am greatly disappointed, not because Shadowlands is terrible, but because it makes it difficult for the story of the next expansion to be good.
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