Copying my post on Wowhead to here because this Mag’har thing is big. Spoilers, etc.
I’m usually pretty hands-off when it comes to the subject of Blizzard lore. The reason for this has always been because I know what they’ve written is bad, and that if I’m going to enjoy it, I’m going to have to derive that enjoyment from micro-level things like character interactions. However, even the character interaction in this one is awful, if the dialogue is any indication.
I usually love this awful, awful lore. I don’t look to Blizzard for talent or nuance in this department, I look to them to take characters I like, as if they were barbie dolls, and mash them together and go “now kiss.” You know, like they did with Velen and Illidan and Khadgar for the past couple years.
They had a chance, that started with Xe'ra and her attitude about conversion, to introduce nuance and distrust to the subject of the Light for maybe the first time in WoW’s story since the Clerics of Northshire decided to tell everyone about this nice yellow thing they found. What Blizzard has done with that chance is deliver a message that goes like this:
“The Draenei, who are as a species infused with the Light of the Naaru, have turned down peace with their neighbors in the name of waging holy war, fashioning themselves as benevolent angels uplifting Draenor’s natives out of ‘savagery’ and carrying out, presumably, the actual ongoing will of their Naaru masters, who have impressed a new zealotry upon them for reasons unknown. The moment the Draenei could stop being refugees, they chose to become conquerors, or were so weak-willed that when they had that choice imposed upon them, they reveled in it and took up arms against native people who were still rebuilding after the previous war.”
This spits in the face of the Draenei legacy. It undermines their bravery in choosing against the Legion, their thousands of years spent as nomads in search of a home, their roles as peacemakers who, upon finding their backs against the wall, always choose the path of cooperation and friendship rather than isolation and violence. They crash-landed a spaceship in ancient Elven territory. You know what happens when you do anything to ancient Elven territory? The elves kill you!
The elves didn’t kill the Draenei because the Draenei are always like this. They chose a path that would allow them to be allies with the very people whose lives and lands they disrupted. They made no effort to convert any elf- remember being a level 10 Draenei, and you go on a quest to learn the language of the Furbolgs? That’s what the Draenei we know are like. They’d rather learn to communicate with furbolgs than raise a weapon against them even for a moment, if they have the choice.
And Blizzard wants to tell me that these Draenei, or that some alternate universe reflection of them, would engage in a holy crusade to convert or condemn the ‘savage’ orcs who were living on Draenor first? It isn’t the mirror universe from Star Trek. That would have been a neat angle for Warlords of Draenor, everyone having a mustache and a more or less entirely flipped moral center, but it didn’t happen, that’s not the choice they made when they decided to play with an AU. Blizzard wants me to look at the Xe'ra incident, and then look at this, and say “oh, I guess the Naaru are just like that, and this is what happens when you listen to them.”
But O'ros and A'dal have been jingling at everyone they can since 2007, and at no point did the Aldor mobilize all at once to beat up all the Arrakoa in the Lower City because they wouldn’t convert. This isn’t how the Naaru have been shown to us. It’s been a Xe'ra thing. A Naaru Prime thing maybe, but even then, the first thing we were shown on no uncertain terms is that you can choose to resist that influence.
“I’m secretly a huge monster and I’d love to terrorize the orcs just to feel on top for once” should not be Yrel’s dark secret. This is revolting, and you can tell that the writing comes from people who haven’t been tracking the characterization of these cultures- not for a couple years, certainly not for ten or twenty. And I know, if you want writing to get done, you can’t always pull from a stable of writers who have been with you forever- they have other jobs to do and families to feed. But asking the new writers to brush up on the established lore before they write something as abominable as this seems like a necessary measure to ensure a consistent and interesting ongoing work, and I’m coming out of the other side of this post thinking that the writer(s) of this scenario really don’t know anything about the decade or more of context and labor that has gone into making these cultures something we recognize.
That’s a more tragic story than the one they’re trying to tell, but I hate it just as much.
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