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

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As someone who doesn’t delve into Warcraft novels because this franchise already sucks more than enough money from my wallet, I’m grateful for not only the synopsis but the review of the novel as well. It offers a lot of insight into a facet of the lore that I personally don’t engage with.

It’s also given me inspiration for another thread, since I’d rather not derail this one with the controversial topic of honour. Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder what media Metzen consumed between Warcraft II and Warcraft III that led to his sudden interest in stories about honour and integrity.

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Very interesting read!

The book seems to mark a interesting middle-ground between the very old early days of Warcraft and a shift into the newer narrative styles. It’s also fun to see how much the characters are actually fleshed out already compared to just characters in Warcraft 2.

As simply a short side-tangent, which Lintian will probably get around to later as it becomes a big issue in WoW in particular. While the sudden strange focus and near obsession with “honour” is a little odd, there atleast seemed to be some sort of understanding of what it meant here.

The issue with it as WoW progressed is that it ended up going all over the place and had no meaning or completely different meaning for whoever was saying it at the time.

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Thanks for the feedback!

Metzen wrote about his inspirations in interviews. Many of them were once-popular movies. In particular, he described Thrall’s quest in Warcraft Adventures as “Braveheart meets Spartacus meets Dances with Wolves”. The setup of Of Blood and Honor was inspired by the movie Enemy Mine.

(In case you’re wondering why I put some titles in italics but not others, my personal convention is that books and movies are italicized while games aren’t. This makes non-game media stand out in a blog that’s mostly about games.)

As for the specific obsession with honor? Who knows. Maybe he gorged himself on samurai movies? At some point I’ll probably need to do a separate post on the fuzzy concept of honor in Warcraft. Tirion, in his words and internal monologue, does reason about other virtues like compassion and justice (and the importance of separating justice from vengeance), but they get a lot less focus than honor.

Also, thanks for the thread, Shogganosh. I’ll reply there!

Yup. After two games very scarce on characterization, Warcraft is basically undergoing a process of reverse flanderization, with previously flat characters and cultures acquiring more nuance.

On an unrelated note, I’m wondering: how comfortable is the site to read, in terms of eye strain and legibility? I’m wondering if I should increase the contrast a bit and/or increase the font size so that individual lines of text are shorter.

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Zero complaints and suggestions. Good choice of colour for font and background, font choice is legible and the size of the font is appropriate. I’m personally happy with it as it is.

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Mimicking what Shogganosh has said, no issues with the site! The colours are pleasant to the eye and no strain or issue atleast for me.

It’s something that’s also continued to today. We’ve had many moments since then in which characters or cultures have received more details well after their introductions, even some characters from that book!

The issue however, is that later on, alot of these additional details often end up clashing with what’s been established already. But then again, as we’ve seen already from your deep-dive, this is nothing new to Warcraft and happened almost immediately from the second game onwards.

The problem is perhaps more that at this point, it’s an established setting spanning two decades, and alot of these clashes even go against what was established less than a year ago in some cases. There is very little rhyme or reason to how and when it happens.

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It’s a very easy read for me, so big :+1: there!

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The revolving CDev door is probably culpable to some extent and the rest is the incapability of the story team to actually communicate; e.g Garrosh in Stonetalon

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As usual, a nice piece to read. The bit where you describe the different approach to narrative, now and then, and how different moral situations are approached and solved, is an interesting highlight.

Very nice how you’re showing us that the concept of Warcraft moves away from a generic fantasy piece of pretty kingdom vs evil ugly dudes, like it was in Warcraft I and Warcraft II, and begins to develop a more complex fantasy world.

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Good read as usual.

One thing I would like to point out, and I do not know if you agree or disagree, is that I do not think Metzen intended for the story of oecs to come as much on the nose as it did according to your analysis. I would even argue that maybe it didn’t.

For one, Metzen quite clearly maps out his sources of inspiration, but even more importantly than that I think, he maps out what his intention was. No other setting had gone out of its way to humanize the orcs as an actual people with noble and good qualities. Even Tolkien as you mentioned struggled with this.

Second, but equally importantly, there isn’t necessarily anything with taking inspiration from material that is heavily romanticised or having only loose historical ties. Disney’s pocahontas comes to mind. Lots of things and popular, and I think that as fictional writers it is one of the most important things that you actually like what you are writing about.

Last but not least, drawing parallels of races being coded to IRL people or races or other similar negative connotations to me feels like painting devils on the wall. In short, it tends to tell more about the one who comes to those conclusions than the actual source material or it’s authors.

I am reminded of the metaphor of 3 blind men who come upon an elephant, and each feel it with their hands, describing one part of it at a time as the truth of what it appears as. All of their interpretations are correct, but just a fraction of the whole story.

Of course, that is where a good author comes to play and is able to write narratives that instil similar conclusions across different readers across time. In this instance, I believe Metzen wanted to write a cooö redemption story for a race that had previously always been treated as the default punching bag monster race, as something new and exciting. And in that, I think, he succeeded.

You can say whatever you want about warcraft orcs, but they were and still are to this date fairly distinctive from other orc variants across fantasy. Less so these days, but more back in the day.

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I remember first playing the Warcraft 3 demo and being surprised how “normal” the orcs were and that the standard typical human knights were depicted as the bad guys.

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This is a fair point.

I very much echo Vixi’s sentiment: the Warcraft III approach to orcs was very impressive to my young teenager self. But I don’t want to rush ahead, there is still a long way to go before we get to talk about that game (and I can’t wait)

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Warcraft Retrospective 14: Day of the Dragon

https://lintian.eu/2024/02/11/warcraft-retrospective-14/

Excerpt:

Day of the Dragon is not quite The Eye of Argon level bad, but it does commit some of the similar sins of purple prose, and not even consistent purple prose at that. Words from different moods of writing intrude and mix into a jarring hodgepodge. Some scenes take twenty words to say what can be said in five. There are awkward word choices all around that wouldn’t feel out of place in the aforementioned Eye of Argon. Women are “females”, eyes are “orbs”, and blood is “life fluids”. <…>

Beautiful prose, to me, is like icing on the cake. When I’m immersed in reading, I picture the story in my head, but beautiful choices of words and sentences make me appreciate the author’s efforts all the more, making the style of the prose a work of art by itself. Ugly prose, on the other hand, constantly distracts me. Either it slows my reading speed to a crawl as my brain tries to process the detail despite the strange wording, or I end up quickly skimming through the paragraphs to get the gist of what’s happening, then move on to the next slog of a chapter.

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“Nekros fingered the Demon Soul”
Sometimes one wonders if the price for using evil ancient magical artifacts isn’t too high.

There is one good thing about Knaak which makes me view him much more positively than I used to: He worldbuilds.
When you read his books, Azeroth actually feels like a planet instead of 1:1 copy of the game world. He has no issue creating new locations, new history and new characters even in his later books. This puts him in stark contrast with some other writers such a Golden, who will literally look at a zone from expansion that came out 6 years ago and portray it exactly the same as if nothing happened in the years since people were questing through the zones.

For all his faults, it is a testament to his worldbuilding abilities that even years after writing his last book in the setting of Warcraft, the locations he came up with were still used in new world zones. And I can imagine that if we ever get expanded revamped Lordaeron adjusted for dragonflying, Hasic will make its appearance too.

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This yeah. Knaak is an excellent worldbuilder.

I warmly recommend his Dragonlance works for anyone. Particularly the minotaur wars.

There is an Ogre character called Golgren in it that I hope to one day use as an inspiration for a character.

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I’m afraid I don’t know anything about Dragonlance, except that it’s apparently a pulp-fantasy D&D setting inspired by the authors’ D&D campaigns.

So I have two questions, and please don’t construe it as elitism (we’re discussing a pulp fantasy setting on this forum, after all!):

  1. Why should I care about Dragonlance? What does it offer that other pulp fantasy settings don’t? I know how to elevator-pitch Warcraft — what’s Dragonlance’s deal?
  2. Is there a lore compilation like Warcraft Chronicle that I can use to quickly get the gist? 190 novels is… a bit too much when my hobbies are already stretched thin.

One thing I didn’t mention in my post about Day of the Dragon — but might mention later — is that sometimes it feels like Knaak was writing a movie script that was turned into a novel halfway through. It’s very dialogue-heavy and has that kind of flow to it. The narration also tends to immediately remove mystery and tension from the villains’ allegiances and motivations by having them immediately reveal their identities and all their dastardly plans in cutaway scenes while smirking in anticipation. All that’s missing is dramatic dim lighting and moustache twirling.

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Entertaining read as always!

While it can be applauded(And I think it should in some aspects) how much Knaak’s writing helped change and put the Warcraft setting on a certain path, there are so many things you described that are awkward or fumbling.

He does/did do wonders in introducing a scale and grandeur to Azeroth both in location and time.

However I find it very funny that his writing style and choice of words reminds me of a stereotypical TRP profile.

And for the good he’s added to the setting, his naming convention is incredibly awkward and seems to be one of the origins for how Blizzard has come to make character names that “sounds fantasy” but has no rhyme or reason to them in any cultural ways.

Also as a final note, It’s always incredibly cringey to see “Women” as a word just being replaced by “females”, it feels very objectifying and like the writer is talking about a different, more animal-like species.

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I can’t speak for all Dragonlance books, as you said, there are nearly 200 books, many of which are related to one another or completely disconnected. But I can speak of Knaak’s works.

As already expressed, if you want a world that is built for you and your mind is left to imagine the built world with clear rules and a setting, it is a very comfortable thing to read.

Second, Knaak had the ability to make the seemingly obvious villain sympathetic in some way or shape, even almost a victim. Sometimes you even end up rooting out for them. In the Minotaur wars, there is a guy called Hotek who goes through that arc. In the WoW novels, when Thrall speaks to DW, DW momentarily exposes him to the burden he had to carry as the earthwarden- All the claustrophoby and immense weight of the world, carried on your back while everybody else got to spring new life into world, play with magic or time. There’s bitterness in that excert, one that makes you almost feel for the guy. Dw was in some ways the Atlas Titan of WoW.

And third and last, he manages to make terrifying villains without giving them an obviously overpowered power or edge in combat. They are terrifying because of their smarts, their way with words and deceitfullness. There are two in particular in the Minotaur Wars that stand out in this regard: Nephera, high priestess of the temple and Golgren, warlord of the Ogres.

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Back in the Day, I was among the many who lambasted Knaak’s bizarre dialogue, nonsensical plots and cringe villains (Dar’khan Drathir in the Sunwell manga is peak late 2000’s), especially when compared to Golden’s skill in expressing character. This isn’t to say, as we’ve observed, that any of Blizzard’s writing escapes these critiques.

The man did have a knack for expanding the universe of Warcraft in the Expanded Universe materials, as opposed to recent examples of Exploring Kalimdor treating the worldstate in-game as the full scope of the setting.

Discussions of the novels has me excited for – in the far future – Michael A. Stackpole’s writing in Shadows of the Horde (sounds the Telaryn signal).

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It is indeed strange that they decided to retcon Day of the Dragon to take place after Beyond the Dark Portal, as that’d mean the Alliance just stormed past Grim Batol and left the Dragonmaw and their dragons at their flanks for all this time ever since the Second War ended.

I also feel as though they decided to switch the locations of Dun Algaz and Dun Modr around. In the game, Dun Algaz lies about west of Grim Batol and is the passage-way that leads from Loch Modan into the Wetlands, and Dun Modr is the dwarven town at the south end of Thandol Span.

Yet in the novel Nekros talks about Zuluhed and most of the Dragonmawclan being entrenched at Dun Algaz, -north- of Grim Batol, and he mentioned being scared they’d get crushed between attackers from the west -and- those from Dun Modr, which is apparently on the north end of Thandol Span here. I believe this is how it was in the Warcraft 2 campaign aswell, so why they decided to switch that… shrug

As for the writing-style, I cannot entirely comment as I read Day of the Dragon in Dutch ( it, along with Lord of the Clans and the Last Guardian were the only three to be translated).

On the topic of world-building and the Dragon Aspects, this novel definetly did alot to flesh things out a little further and give the dragons their own personalities and abilities ( like changing into a human or other mortal). Part of why I found Warcraft as a setting interesting next to LotR is that it took some of the stereotypes of fantasy ( the orcs and dragons being evil) and somewhat threw those on their heads.

There might be more I could write but, this is all I can think of from the top of my head currently.

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That’s how it is in WoW, yes. Day of the Dragon follows Warcraft 2 geography, which WoW retconned. In Warcraft 2, Dun Modr is north of the Thandol Span, Dun Algaz just south, and Grim Batol farther south still.