sylvanas “im gonna take this brief emotional moment away from your former mentor and former lover who are both standing right here and make it all about me instead” windrunner
sylvanas “you’re a bad person arthas (nevermind that i’m arguably much worse) i hope you’re forgotten >:(” windrunner
sylvanas “i will accept my judgement and definitely not be framed as a tragic martyr for facing consequences wink” windrunner
It is ASTONISHING to me just how bad Shadowlands is.
Like… Warcraft has been going on a downwards hill for years now, but… Like holy shit, Shadowlands was a story ALL about visiting and exploring the idea of the dead, good and bad.
Ignoring how busted this made the lore, all the retcons, and just how much it shows how out of ideas Blizzard is at this point, imagine making an expansion all about the dead, and then NOT using it to explore in any way, the best written and most popular character Blizzard ever made.
Arthas beginnings, his good intentions, the horrible consequences that followed, and his fall to darkness as Frostmourne took his soul, leaving him a husk that would eventually transcend him, and become the the lich king, the best Villain Blizzard ever had.
Like holy shit, there was a golden opportunity here. What was Arthas thoughts on what his body/will did after her lost his soul? What did he think of his actions in hindsight? What regrets did he have? Could he possibly have risen above all his sins and been redeemed?
The answer to all those questions… Is no, because we have to give all the focus to the terribly written undead Elf who’s story should have ended along with Arthas, but who stuck around due to the popularity of her character, and has now become one of the most despised aspects of the franchise.
Blizzard had a shot to explore and continue the best story they EVER told… And they instead pissed it away to focus on a character they ran into the ground long before Shadowlands were even announced.
Ok, first of all, I know this is coming like 2 months later, but I guess is better late than never, right? 1.- Please, read till the end, as I'm not trying to make a mockery out of your liking blizzard, warcraft, thelore or whatever.
2.- Most of what I’ll explain here, is to help you notice that the problem is how the writers and “creators” in Blizzard drive their characters into a corner most of the time, but only because they work too little on them.
3.- Let me just point a couple of things and think about it for a while, also, considering that what I’m going to talk about (Warhammer) is “somewhat obscure”, not because people don’t know, but because it’s so massive in comparison that it would take a long, long time for others that are not too into it to know even half of the lore, and the fact that “ it became popular” because an Actor (Henry Cavill) talked about it, doesn’t really take effect on the fans of blizzard, because as far as I’m concerned (talked with many during many years) they usually live in a bubble that makes them believe that everything copies from warcraft/starcraft but not the other way around.
>it shows how out of ideas Blizzard is at this point
For that statement to work, Blizzard would need to have ideas of their own to begin with and those ideas shouldn’t be just blatant ripoffs. And that is probably the issue that 90% of the fans ignore; when talking about the lore, character’s designs and everything else, Blizzard mainly copied stuff from other places. It is a well known fact that people will take inspiration from different books, movies, etc. to work on “their own world” while “creating” stuff, and nowadays we can argue that “nothing is original”, but I’m not trying to point the lack of originality as a sin, but rather as the problem. Warcraft and Starcraft were both created in the 90s ripping off a tabletop game that at its own core had been inspired by some “Europe lore” from real life mixed with The Lord of the Rings, Warhammer was created in the 80s but Games Workshop as a whole is pal/bro with D&D creators, they reached some agreements during the last years of the 70s, and pretty much RTS would have been different if not for Warhammer revolutioning the concept of the game, and making it a lot more playable and comprehensible back then.
In the early 90s Blizzard was trying to make warhammer’s pc game (there was another company that was already on it) and nobody but them knows what exactly happened, some people (Wyatt) from blizzard said that they wanted to have their own ip for example, but then why did they just copied others ip so much to make “their own”? and even worse, they continued to constantly copy ideas from said IP. Games workshop is also blamed for not wanting them to mess up with their IP... but let’s get back to the point.
>the best written and most popular character Blizzard ever made.
Why did I mention the whole ripoff thing? Because it comes to play right here in this “best written character” part, Arthas is perhaps one of the least original characters they have in their whole “lore”, he is a complete mishmash of three characters from Warhammer: Aenarion, High Elf Prince who became Phoenix King, he was the model for Arthas’ background, sacrifice, and devotion to his people, while at the same time, being the “damnation” for his hate. Azhagh the Slaughterer, an orc warlord that was possessed by a crown that had inside the malign spirit of a human warlock and necromancer, just reading that should be painful for any fan of arthas, who happens to be the same thing but opposite races, as you surely know, Arthas is a human possessed by the spirit of an orc warlock, so obviously, Azhagh was the model for his “fall” rather than just being cursed to death he was cursed to become the body of a powerful necromancer that was trying to reach eternal life and one way was “turning lich”.
and
Archaon the Everchosen of Chaos, who would be the base they took to make the Lich King “more evil” as he was looking to destroy all life just because he wanted to and funny enough, was aiming to “serve” an out of the world lord/lords, FFS even the burning legion is just a ripoff of the Chaos Daemons.
You could argue that “this are just coincidences” or that “they don’t even look like it” but there are many things that just continuously jump to the face when you look into this characters, Frostmure was clearly traced on from Archaon’s, or take this other one Archaon’s helmet is named “The Crown of Domination” What did they called the lich king’s helm? oh yeah! “The Helm of Domination”. Even back in the story Aenarion took some drastic decisions when trying to defend his people from Chaos (again, burning legion) and his best friend tried to make him see that some extremes were not ok, what’s worse is that the moment Aenarion takes the sword he condems his own soul and his kingdom to the rage of Khaine.
>Blizzard had a shot to explore and continue the best story they EVER told… And they instead pissed it away to focus on a character they ran into the ground long before Shadowlands were even announced.
And yes, that’s true, but as you can see, the problem is not that they can’t think about it, when they decided to kill Arthas I’m sure they did because they didn’t know what to do with the character, Thrall was always a gary stu and that was because one of the creators turned him into his self-insert which at th same time is a reason why they didn’t just drop the character for so long. Even Sylvannas can be traced back to Warhammer, in the old, old lore there used to be a wood elf that had been fighting corruption and tried to defend her people, was killed by vampire count’s zombies and she turned into a banshee, do you know where she died? In the forest that connected with the town Sylvannar. I remember once some fans tried to say Arthas was inspired in Arthur from British stories, but I guess it’s over the nose to say they have no similarity at all, which is different to what I’ve explained here.
