Warcraft Retrospective: A Blog Post Series (latest issue: #39, 2024-10-19)

[Aerilen-argent-dawn (Aerilen)]

@Desartin-argent-dawn

I am ashamed to admit that I have seen all those videos before. The last two I found rather meh, but the first two were hilarious imho. It gets even funnier though, there’s a whole meme campaign series where Garithos ends up ruling all of Azeroth and has to choose whether or not to take or destroy the Helm of Domination.

Uptimately Garithos was a tool to push Kael out of Dalaran and towards Illidan through Vashj. Who then went on to be depicted as a hypocrite and murdered.

He has – unless i’ve missed anything – being referenced to twice in WoW. Once in-game and once out. When Rommath lays into Aethas in the Shadows of the Sun story and in Grand Magus Telestra’s dungeon journal.

Both times the hurt comes from the betrayal of the Kirin Tor over Garithos being a bit of a chode. The former railing over the Kirin Tor’s betrayal at the order of Garithos (warning Aethas about future perfidy) and the latter defecting to the blue dragonflight after being reminded how the Kirin Tor imprisoned her people.

He is, in the grand scheme of things, not that much of an entity imo. A meme, really.

[Jaiare-argent-dawn]

I’m still browsing this thread and catching up when I can. I’m happy to see that you interpreted it this way as well! Especially touching on that jumping-to-conclusions regarding the Furbolg corruption and the decision to just… wipe them out… because it turns out Maiev is in a hurry.

Either because this quarry of hers has escaped, or she’s just on a timer somehow because if you take a look at all her Wc3 quotes they all denote a sense of urgency. And that’s odd in itself, because you’d think a huntress (something that Illidan himself even calls her) would know patience and when to apply it.

But she’s the opposite of that, at every turn, which is surprisingly consistent in the campaign. This governing feeling explains her words and choices from when they depart the still burning shores of Nendis (no burials, no mourning, no nothing); or when Naisha and the others get buried in the tomb, there’s absolutely no time to mourn and she makes sure there’s not even a soul who wants to, instead laying it all on Illidan and using this heavy moment to reiterate and double-down on how imperative it is that they finish the hunt; even when Tyrande gets swept by the river and she tells a half-truth or outright lie depending on how you want to interpret the way she says it as well as the words “torn apart” – for what likely is the end goal of urgency. She didn’t want Malfurion to waste time in mounting some misguided rescue efforts, but when the truth comes out it ends up costing her all the same. Did she have a crush on him, as I thought when I was a kid, or was it all just because of urgency?

Then, at the end… she again rushes – maintaining the same level of misguided hurry – through the portal to Outland and pursue Illidan through this final frontier.

As a message, perhaps intended for the younger audiences, I think the moral of the story (if the games could even be interpreted to have such a thing, or even be required to) is that being in a haste can often make things go wrong.

And years later, having gone over this campaign with a fine comb for RP reasons, Maiev’s behavior in Wc3 is the dictionary definition of hasty – fast and typically superficial.

Which is not at all what you’d expect of a huntress or a lawman.

This great and flawed character (at least the Wc3 incarnation) to this day remains intriguing and cool.

[Lintian-argent-dawn (Lintian)]

Warcraft Retrospective 33: Somehow, Draenor Returned

https://lintian.eu/2024/08/30/warcraft-retrospective-33/

Excerpt:

But wait, it gets even worse. It turns out that at the end of the night elf campaign, Illidan opened not just any portal, but a cross-world portal. Previously, this feat was only accomplished twice. Once it required a cooperation between Medivh and Gul’dan from different ends, and the other time it required a powerful lich (Kel’Thuzad), the Book of Medivh, and a nexus of magical energies (Dalaran), and both times it was a very taxing and arduous task. Is Illidan just that good that he can just open cross-world portals at leisure?

[Meronspell-argent-dawn]

@Aerilen-argent-dawn

He is, in the grand scheme of things, not that much of an entity imo. A meme, really.

I’ve always found him…really bizarre, both as a character and a part of the setting. This is probably going to be a bit of a nitpicky and rambling post so forgive me in advance Lintian, but:

He’s a supposed Grand Marshal, but nobody actually knows how or why and nowhere else in the setting is he ever even mentioned unlike other characters of similar ranks and status who at least usually get footnotes here or there. More than likely he proclaimed himself Grand Marshal of the remnant Alliance Forces through sheer nepotism just like his Father would’ve no doubt wanted, but even then, Kael technically outranks him in terms of Leadership, he was of the Six of Dalaran and Heir to the Kingdom of Silvermoon which was an Alliance ally long before the official formation of the Alliance of Lordaeron. If Kael wanted there was…really nothing that should’ve logically stopped him just telling Dalaran to deal with the uppity Grand Marshal whilst he makes his way to Ironforge to gather with the rest of the Alliance remnants fleeing the Scourge - nor can I honestly rationalise any reason why Dalaran turned against one of its founders and took the side of a measly man who’s only claim to fame was a single village in Eastwald who’s direct opposition was the High Elven Kingdom of Silvermoon that helped found Dalaran in the first place. There’s just a lot of…really odd inconsistencies that get created in the story by his existence in the plot, having Dalaran betray the Elves just as a sheer powergrab would’ve made a lot more sense at least.

Then there’s his very sudden, very drastic shifts in personality left, right and centre at any given point. Elves are no bueno but…Undead, Undead Elves and the Burning Legion are…A-Okay? That doesn’t make any sense, perhaps intentionally, but its utterly nonsensical when you take a step back and actually think about it, even if he’s just using them all as “tools” to retake Lordaeron, surely he sees the giant demon army and undead scourge now rampaging across his kingdom because of his choice of allies? So how does that benefit him? What was his endgoal there? Nothing that a Human mind can rationalise.

So what about in World of Warcraft, surely this Grand Marshal of the Alliance who managed to convince Dalaran to turn against its founder Kingdom and its own leadership has quite a big note in the MMORPG World of Warcraft, he’s pulled off a stunt absolutely nobody else has ever even gotten close too, he must have a giant statue-- Nope. No mentions. Not a single damn one. Nobody recalls this guy, the Alliance seems to have memoryholed him, the Blood Elves make no mention in their starting zones, the Forsaken don’t say anything…nobody even knows who the hell this guy was, is that deliberate? We’ll never know I suppose, but its certainly odd.

Overall, Garithos is a character who just seems to warp the setting around him, creating a variety of problems and requirements for mental gymnastics where they otherwise need not have existed.

[Jaiare-argent-dawn]

Great post! Blood Elves are my second (first?) favourite race here, and indeed campaign in TFT, so I’ve truly had a vested interest to follow along

Also, while I’m asking questions… what happened to Maiev?

Apparently the death she suffers in the tug-of-war mission is it for the Warden’s existence in TFT. It’s perhaps her canonical on-screen death, as the 2006 printed Alliance Player’s Guide makes mention of this:

This is of course retconned in the 2007 expansion, TBC, which … probably had been in the making, already, presumably at the same time this book was being written and printed?? Maybe they just didn’t want to spoil the surprise!

[Syelia-argent-dawn]

I have a feeling that lack of importance of Garithos might be the result of TFT being developed at the time when WoW was more than halfway through its own development. This could have resulted in situation where events from TFT aren´t properly represented on WoW´s map. In general, Lordaeron seems to have been subject of quite a large change because the continent we get in WoW is completely different from the land completely ravaged by Scourge and Burning Legion we see in RoC and TFT. There are however some things that change the context of the story if we look at it through the lens of TFT:

Blood elves of TBC are vastly different from blood elves of TFT. While there might be something in the manual, I don´t recall TFT ever mentioning that forces Kael had were only a minority of blood elves, specifically thousands of his best troops. For all we knew, blood elves Kael were all that remained of the race and included civillians and the number of combatants was in the hundreds. These forces also were portrayed as quite strong in TBC, because CHAMPYUN! needs to slaughter about 5000 while questing.

When it comes to mages, Kirin Tor as a whole (including Council of Six) helping is only mentioned in short story In the Shadow of the Sun. It´s effectively a complete recontextualization of the story, because suddenly Kassan wasn´t just some guy from Kirin Tor working for Garithos, he worked for the Council.

And, for Sylvanas and the Forsaken, their mission ends with Garithos being killed, not his army being destroyed. While his army likely wouldn´t just leave, I don´t think we have a single mention of their actual fate. For all we know, his forces got out with minimal casualties, especially to allied regiments from other Alliance nations (such as dwarves from the last mission), meaning that greatest sin of the Forsaken was killing of a guy nobody really liked nor mourned.

In this context, the idea of Garithos (a warlord with few thousand soldiers) imprisoning blood elves (an almost extinct race, with perhaps few hundred fighters) in ruins of Dalaran he controlled (with Kirin Tor not being a factor besides few people loyal to Garithos) makes much more sense, just like his death at the hands of Forsaken not mattering that much to the Alliance.

[Moridunum-argent-dawn (Moridunum)]

@Meronspell-argent-dawn

and Heir to the Kingdom of Silvermoon which was an Alliance ally long before the official formation of the Alliance of Lordaeron.

Lol. Lmao. Sure, sure. Had the Orcish Horde not touched the Thalassian borders and burned their forests, they had rather sit the whole war out and see Humanity burn rather then get involved, lmao.

In the same breath the Dwarves of Ironforge and Gnomes of Gnomeregan could be stated and they’d be more loyal allies then the Elves of Quel’thalas. Atleast before they burned Ghostlands and Eversong down… And even afterwards the Dwarves and Gnomes were more loyal members/allies of the Alliance in any incarnation!

[Dagnira-argent-dawn]

@Syelia-argent-dawn

I have a feeling that lack of importance of Garithos might be the result of TFT being developed at the time when WoW was more than halfway through its own development.

That’s probably it.

WC3 and WoW were developed in parallel, and TFT was developed towards the tail end of WoW’s development (and on a short schedule, so the campaign isn’t as polished as it could have been).

Out of all plot developments in TFT, the rise of the Forsaken is really the only one to be reflected in vanilla WoW. TFT explains why Arthas is gone from Lordaeron and Sylvanas is in charge. And then, as you mention, TBC came out and retconned half the lore developments in TFT anyway, concerning both blood elves and draenei.

[Lintian-argent-dawn (Lintian)]

Warcraft Retrospective 34: Something is Rotten in the Ruins of Lordaeron

https://lintian.eu/2024/09/07/warcraft-retrospective-34/

Excerpt:

Remember when Frodo was struck by a Morgul blade at Weathertop Hill and was fully healed five minutes later? I don’t either, because it would make for a bad story. His wound became a source of pain and anguish that didn’t go away even after Sauron was defeated, forcing him to leave Middle-earth before he could spend the rest of his days in peace.

The poisoned arrow that Sylvanas struck Arthas with is immediately dealt with and completely forgotten after this cutscene. It simply never comes up, either here or later in the campaign. I wonder what the point of it was, and whether it’s a remnant of an earlier draft of the story. This entire interlude is superfluous. It serves to establish Sylvanas’s defiance of Arthas, which we already know about. The final scene with the ships showcases Kel’Thuzad’s loyalty to Arthas, with the two bonding in a twisted sort of friendship, but it could have just as easily been moved to the end of the previous mission, and the interlude cut entirely.

[Jaiare-argent-dawn]

Nice post Lintian! This is it, the big one…

As I was reading through it, this line caught my eye,

Unlike regular liches, who are obviously reanimated orc skeletons[4], the Lich King is apparently a suit of armor encased in a block of ice, with no bones in sight.

I check the annotation,

4. Specifically, they were made from Ner’zhul’s orc followers.

And I go “hold on, that’s not right, weren’t those the Death Knights?” only to then realize the interesting connection you made!

Because before we had our silly lore, most of what this game presents was somewhat consistent so… Ner’zhul the orc shaman, who becomes a spirit inhabiting a suit of armor… called the Lich King… should logically be the king of Liches, presumably the spirits animating the bones of his caster archetype followers—the similarly inclined Shadowmoon wielders of dark magics.

And it always stood out to me that the Lich model, in its skeletal nature, isn’t really something that makes you think “Human” like the Undead Acolyte unit does, so when you said it’s “obviously a reanimated orc skeleton” all of this finally clicked into place for me because, yeah, why would it be anything else.

[Dagnira-argent-dawn]

This is not a conjecture — it’s spelled out in the manual!

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Lich_(Warcraft_III)

During his mortal life as the Warchief of the Orcish Horde of Draenor; Ner’zhul commanded a number of Orcish Warlocks and spell-wielding death knights. Yet, when these wicked sorcerers were captured by Kil’jaeden and the Legion after the destruction of Draenor, they were transformed into twisted aberrations of their former selves. These Liches possessed tremendous magical powers, yet their immortal, undead bodies were bound to the iron will of Ner’zhul. Since the Liches showed unswerving loyalty to their master, Ner’zhul granted them control over the furious elements of the cold north. Now, Liches wield frost magic along with their own considerable necromantic spells.

Scourge death knights are not orcs; they’re unrelated to the first generation death knights of Gul’dan. Rather, they’re former paladins who committed the same kind of atrocities that Arthas did at Stratholme.

[Vixí-argent-dawn (Vixí)]

Great post as usual!

I’ll be honest, I have always felt a bit conflicted over the Scourge Campaign in TfT. I often enjoyed Arthas part of the campaign but not so much Sylvanas and the Forsaken.

[Vragran-argent-dawn]

Hey!

This is an excellent series, and I want to give props for that. Well-informed, well-observed, and with some very valuable side notes!

I totally agree what you say about the night-elf campaign of The Frozen Throne – it’s a wild ride. I recently played through it for the first time, despite first having bought Warcraft 3 and TFT back in… 2004? I remember hitting the (timed, I believe?) purge Stratholme mission in the human campaign and repeatedly failing, so from then on I always attached a reputation for intense difficulty to the WC3 campaigns, ha! Incorrectly, as it turned out.

And Maiev, by the end of TFT, really had the capacity to be one of Warcraft’s most interesting characters. For what it’s worth, I think her appearance in TBC was good in that it kept her in the story and at last enabled her to slay her quarry, and it’s at least a 100x better than her “appearance” in the first Warcraft TTRPG, but yikes, Wolfheart. That’s the trouble with a revolving cast, I suppose, especially when there are multiple writers, working on multiple media involved. I feel like the next ideal environment for Maiev after TBC was surely Cataclysm, and the defence of the Kaldorei heartlands, or Mount Hyjal herself. But Cataclysm was the expansion in which they dropped the ball on a lot of character arcs (Garona’s…), in large part because there was too much writing going on, all across the setting.

Anyway, personal perspective over: I’m looking forward to reading more of this series! And hey, vanilla WOW will be no small task.

[Dagnira-argent-dawn]

Thank you Vragran!

Yes, vanilla WoW will be a mammoth to tackle.

I’ll probably switch to more of a summary approach for WoW, compared to how I’ve been analyzing WC3 mission by mission. I played vanilla, but never reached max level in it or TBC, only hitting it in Wrath, so I’m ill qualified to talk about vanilla endgame.

Also, I’ll probably actually have to play through the vanilla experience before writing about it, at least the leveling part. And there lies a problem: leveling in vanilla was slow and tedious. That experience has been preserved on Classic Era realms, which is what I’ll have to play through to take screenshots of the vanilla world, because Blizzard overwrote Wrath Classic with Cataclysm Classic thanks a lot.

I’ll likely focus on general vibes and post only short reviews of individual zones, at least if I hope to get this series finished before the heat death of the universe.

At any rate, I’ll take a break after finishing Volume 1. We have four more posts left to finish The Frozen Throne, then there will be another interlude post. This will wrap up Volume 1 and I’ll take an extended break before continuing with the Warcraft RPG, then the War of the Ancients novel trilogy, and then vanilla WoW.

[Jaiare-argent-dawn]

Thanks for this! I took a gander at the wc3 manual description and also in some other RPG books it seems the liches are mentioned. I was familiar with the DK lore but somehow never really got around to reading about the liches… I don’t completely hate the Shadowlands lore for them but I think these Ner’zhul origins were cool enough on their own. Looking forward to the next post!

[Vragran-argent-dawn]

@Dagnira-argent-dawn

Also, I’ll probably actually have to play through the vanilla experience before writing about it, at least the leveling part. And there lies a problem: leveling in vanilla was slow and tedious. That experience has been preserved on Classic Era realms, which is what I’ll have to play through to take screenshots of the vanilla world, because Blizzard overwrote Wrath Classic with Cataclysm Classic thanks a lot.

On that note, you could possibly try WOW Classic’s Season of Discovery. Levelling in SoD is purposely faster than in vanilla (or at least that’s my understanding), and while there are changes and additions, they are never so far reaching as what we saw in Cataclysm, mostly concerning additional or modified NPCs. Zones are largely untouched. The Warcraft wiki has a summary of those changes if you’d like to peruse them (I can’t link links!)

You might find that, collectively, they muddy the water too much for a proper retrospective of vanilla WOW, but if you want to avoid the lonnnng levelling process, it might be the best option!

EDIT: I think a “Cataclysm Classic” is an oxymoron, myself.

[Lintian-argent-dawn (Lintian)]

Warcraft Retrospective 35: Code Charm: Sylvanas of the Rebellion

https://lintian.eu/2024/09/14/warcraft-retrospective-35/

Excerpt:

This new Sylvanas is… scary. Her will is now indisputably her own, but it’s clear that something changed in her compared to the Sylvanas we saw in Quel’Thalas, even if we know basically nothing about her past life. Was she always an amoral manipulator? Is it the consequence of the mental trauma suffered when Arthas raised her as a banshee? Is undeath itself just inherently corruptive, twisting even noble souls into mockeries of themselves?

I really hope that when the time comes, the story will pick one answer and stick with it.

@Vragran-argent-dawn

EDIT: I think a “Cataclysm Classic” is an oxymoron, myself.

Fully agreed!

[Vixí-argent-dawn (Vixí)]

I absolutely love the jab at the still extremely weird and inconsistent necromancy used in the battle for Darkshore in comparison to every single other time in the setting, even all the way back in Warcraft 3.

Because oh boy, is it still a massive problem I have with BfA and Sylvanas’s writing during that time period.

Also funnily enough, we do know that Anub’arak would have very likely turned on the LK in an instant, as there have been many clues of how reluctant of a servant he actually was without direct mind control.

• Road to Damnation has him directly state that “‘Agreed’ implies choice.” when Kel’Thuzad told Arthas that he had agreed to join the scourge.

• His death quote in both the instance and raid says that he is happy to be free and his own mind again.

• His Hots character trailer has him openly declare his resentment of serving the Lich King.

There are several other examples, including Arthas in a short story sensing that his mind was full of resentment and defiance.

Also great post as usual!

[Vixí-argent-dawn (Vixí)]

Also I need to add, As you’ve already pointed out:

TfT has some real problems with what ‘possession’ actually is, because the Sylvanas story treats it as if its mind control. When the description, lore and even its textbook definition, is not that at all.

[Jaiare-argent-dawn]

It was a lovely post, I read half of it last night before succumbing to sleep and half in the morning. Now I’m oddly excited about when you’ll tackle the Forsaken story in Vanilla WoW! Understandably it’s a huge thing to tackle, but I really wish you will!

And because of how most of the factions lore is set up… most of it you’ll probably get in the early levels, the starting and 10-30 zones. So… it’s a bit of a logistical problem, but for the Forsaken (as a continued example) I’d like to see the contrast between them setting up the faction in Wc3 and then what they’ve done with it, once it’s consolidated, in Tirisfal / Silverpine / Hillsbrad.