Independent of the details… I agree with that. But I do think that’s always a risk you always take, when you tie old characters into new stories. The tie-in makes the story feel better, when it works, but the flip-side is that it can retroactively ruin stuff that worked before, if it fails.
Sure, I’m just arguing that what we have here isn’t that kind of hard retcon, because none of the events and characters involved were changed. The old continuity remains as intact as it was (little as that may be), we just smeared some poop all over it, so we can smell the Jailer. If it wasn’t poop, I don’t think we’d have a retcon problem in this specific case. There certainly have been retcon problems for a long time, though, yes.
To be honest, I have no idea why I was so sure that it was the Dreadlords before Chronicles 3. But you are right, the assumption that it was Kil seems reasonable enough with your sources. Though I wouldn’t really see a continuity problem here, considering that the Dreadlords were presumedly his minions anyways, so him using them and their ressources makes sense enough. I guess you could argue that this introduces an element of Kil being manipulated into that action by the Jailer-alligned Dreadlords, which undermines Kil as a genius master manipulator… But I kinda remember his “genius” in Legion, and find it hard to credit being vulnerable to Dreadlord-manipulation as out of character after seeing that…
Kil’jaden came to Illidan in Warcraft referencing the The Lich King as his ´creation’. It’s then severely implied that KJ supervised the crafting of the armory by Nathrezims.
A famous theory before SL released was even that KJ made a bargain with Zovaal.
That sounds like a leap for me, going by your words here and nothing else. If KJ was in command, when his servants made Ner’zhul the Lich King, it’s reasonable to call it his creation. That doesn’t imply that he created everything that was used in his creation or even performed the act himself. Thinking himself the architect here instead of the craftsman makes sense enough to me.
Now, I’ll agree that it’s enough to spawn fan theories, and it certainly sucks, when the fan theories are overwritten by stories that are actually much worse than the theory. It’s not a conflict within canon, though.
In my head cannon i kind of imagine it as a big ritual with the most powerful dreadlords and Kil’jaeden himself at the center performing the ritual to bind the Lich King .
After that they were left as his jailors (no pun intended) https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Nathrezim
"During the Third War, the dreadlords served Kil’jaeden and Archimonde as the jailors of the Lich King and commanders of the Undead Scourge on Azeroth. "
Probably why you felt they had crated him , given that in most interactions with the undead we have the Dreadlords somewhere .
Does Shadowlands Break continuity with the above ? In this regard , no. You can imagine that the Dread Lords tricked Kil’jaeden and they orchestrated the thing .
From my point though , it diminishes all villains before it .
First Once > Jailor > Denathrius > Dread lords > Sargeras > Eredar > Nerzhul > Arthas ?
So what Arthas is now the bottom of the bottom ? Your local farmer boy stealing candy and throwing toilet paper on roofs ?
Hell even the Legion is now a joke , because it was tricked by puppets made from stone , which in turn were puppets , of a puppet(Denathrius ) , which was a puppet of a Broken Robot (The jailor)? And this broken robot itself was a puppet , created by the first once ?
Not to mention that The Broken Robot was not even unique and there are probably at least two dozens more ? Hell he was even replaced twice , the second time , by some random nobody , with low self esteem (Pelagos)?
Please … How am I supposed to take any of these villains seriously . Turns out they are all jokes .
I fully agree, though the addons before pretty much did the same thing in a less blatant way, and when we faced the great super villains they usually turned out quite disappointing. I didn’t argue that Shadowlands was fine, or that it dealt tolerably well with the canon that came before. It pretty much ruined everything it touched, and looking away and ignoring it is often the best we can do to perserve what’s left.
But Darinja brought up that she wanted WoW’s stories to tie into each other more, while also criticising Shadowlands’ for ruining the past stuff. I felt that that’s a bit of a mixed message, since Shadowlands could only ever ruin so much, because the devs desperately tried to tie it to the stories and characters that came before. And that’s what this specific discussion was about.
" Retroactive continuity , or retcon for short, is a literary device in which facts in the world of a fictional work that have been established through the narrative itself are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work that recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former"
This is what I’m working out from when talking about retcon, sourced from the wikipage about the subject.
In this case the facts that have been established lies within the origins of the Nathrezim and the origin of the armour. Both of which are quite significant in the narrative story of the Burning Legion and the evens that unfolds in Warcraft 3, as well as the established narrative of the Lich King.
So in my opinion, it constitutes quite a significant retcon. It doesn’t change the isolated even of the creation of the Lich King as an entity, but it quite significantly changes the story before and after the creation of the Lich King
…that’s all well and good, but doesn’t really adress my point. I wasn’t arguing the definition of retcon. I didn’t even argue that it wasn’t one. I argued that that wasn’t the problem here, though it often was at other points.
I think the core aspect of any setting trying to take itself seriously is to maintain some sense of mystery without explaining absolutely everything.
Nobody knows what exactly happened to the Dwemer of Elder Scrolls and the older I get, the more convinced I am that leaving it a mystery is the best road to travel as any explanation is liable to just not be all that satisfying even if it is well written.
Having deliberate gaps in a story’s world building to encourage invested fans to share theories is also often more interesting than setting out to over-explain things.
The same can be said of going back and adding more and more complexities to story elements that worked well enough on their own. As it is all too easy for interesting characters to have their agency and depth eroded away altogether as an unfortunate consequence.
Issue that WoW has is the expansion cycle of 2y. It’s difficult to have old mysteries when you need to keep people playing and keep a level of interest in the MMO.
We already have people dissatisfied with faction conflict, which I think is also one of the reasons BfA changed to Sylvanas being the antagonist and introduction of Shadowlands after it.
Expanding lore and solving mysteries is a safer bet to keep player interest.
I’m not sure I agree with that. I mean, even with a 2y expansion circle, we didn’t exactly need to go into the nature of gods, heavenly realms,and the creation of the universe, just as there was no need to give us books that gave us some more or less objective explanation of the cosmic forces in play. Apart from that… it really doesn’t take much to set up something that’s a mystery to the playerbase. Let some merchant complain about the rise in banana prices because of “that pirate crisis in Tel’Abim”, and people will happily speculate for years about its relevance. Or, you know… just give us maps with blank areas that we personally haven’t explored yet. There is no reason to make the next expansion island pop out of nothing, when they could just give us the vague and unreliable in-character knowledge that people tend to have about far-off places before.
A lot of mysteries would arise naturally, if the writers weren’t so afraid of “limiting their creativity” by actually canonizing some worldbuilding fluff…
Creating mysteries sounds really easy to me, no matter the production constraints. Solving them satsifyingly is so much harder.