i think that it would have been so fun if certain companions from previous worlds followed us into arc 3. like i think it would have been fun to see ivan the great just punt medulla into the sun. plus! ship crews IRL generally are bigger than 3-4 people! like i love, pork, beans, and sparck, and i know we don’t want to overcrowd things with Too Many Characters Going On At Once because then individuals wouldn’t really get to shine, but it could have been so fun you guys. plus maybe we would have gotten some more insight/development on our old friends from other worlds.
this post is gonna get long so buckle up
maybe they wouldn’t have such a major role because they already had one in their original worlds/storylines, and maybe i’m way too attached to our old companions, but we didn’t throw katara away when aang started learning earthbending in ATLA, you know? she stayed with the group and grew with everyone else. of course, wizard101 is a game, not a tv show, things are obviously different and of course there are shows where the protagonist Does move on with other people and new friends, but in pirate101 your companions stay with you as you go from world to world. though maybe it’s a different case there because the companions are also like, an incredibly important part of p101′s mechanics whereas the wizard101 ones just buff you in fights. in the pokemon anime, ash (the protagonist) Does move onto new regions like how the young wizard (protagonist) moves on to new worlds, but even then on occasion sometimes his old friends will roll back around.
some companions do have actual reason to stay back in their worlds of origin, dyvim has his deal with the king or whatever (iirc?) but this all rolls back to the point that plenty of other people in the fandom have made about all of the wizard’s friends either eventually leaving them or having to be left behind.
on top of this, you would think mellori and bat, who, yknow, channeled their ~*vibes*~ or whatever to help the wizard become the divine paradox at the end of arc 3, would have a part in arc 4 as well, at least a little, what with the whole Evil Paradox(tm) that we see. like. you don’t just bring characters with that important of a role into the game and never mention them again, right? i know arc 4 isn’t over yet but considering how KI is terrified of another malistaire situation im really not expecting to see too too much of them? though i’m hoping i’ll be proven wrong.
i’m not up to date on karamelle and lemuria bc my membership has died so i dont know what goes on with any companions from there. but like. pork is a skyship captain! he could help us Go To Other Worlds In The Spiral because of the whole world key situation (see dragonspyre and khrysalis, where theres like only one or two world keys to dragonspyre and a new one has to be forged for khrysalis). alternatively he could happen to Show Up in the places we visit on occasion and we could have a neat little reunion. like if zeke and eloise can be everywhere im sure we could have a reunion with the empyrea folks or other polaris or mirage characters at least once. like the visits with dyvim and zoot in the arc 4 prequest(?) were a step in the right direction but also were fairly brief.
also tell us what happened to rat and scorpion. are they just sitting there in the shadow realm waiting for spider to come back with the milk. like. they went there and then spider decided the universe wasn’t gonna game end after all and is hopefully going to couples therapy with raven in the primordial forest. like rat and scorpion arent even companions but you’d think spider’s other children would get some form of closure to their stories-
-actually no, you wouldn’t think because we don’t even really say goodbye to bat at the end of arc 3. (iirc) like where the fuck is that guy. i do hope we didn’t just leave him in the husk? like he wouldn’t just stay there after being told he’s spider’s most favoritest boy right. because he has a life and has built relationships with people Outside Of The Shadow Realm and doing things for spider! does he go back to building machines and start to help fix the messes made in empyrea, does he start traveling, or chilling at the arcanum, or what? to my knowledge, we have no clue! we take down the storm titan, spider tells bat he loves him, that’s it. mellori comes back with us to the arcanum, but we don’t even really know if she continues studying at ravenwood or not.
there’s honestly so many loose ends with certain characters in this game that aren’t really tied up. i guess it leaves room for fans to create their own interpretations to fill in the holes themselves and who knows, maybe they Are better about this in arc 4 (again i wouldn’t know because i haven’t played, never finished karamelle) but frankly kingsisle is such a mess in SO many aspects that it wouldn’t surprise me if they werent.
i still have no idea how old morganthe and by extension her teachers are supposed to be and how time works in the spiral. at this point you could say she did time travel to fuck things up in celestia and zafaria and it would probably still make more sense in the story than the messiness of arc 2. i look at arc 2 and then i am Looking Away.
of course there’s definitely a balance to be found between characters being brought up so much it might get boring instead of letting the character rest with a natural end to their story (malistaire) and delving deeper into the rippling effects their character’s story might’ve had on the protagonist and other characters and then on the flip side Never Having Characters Who Were Important To The Story Brought Up Again Ever (bat) but it’s absolutely possible. of course it’s not the case that there’s No Recurring Characters Ever in wizard101, we’d see ambrose all the time because he was a big deal and obviously we’d have to go back to our teachers for spells and quests every so often, but some of the professors are also a little flat (though that’s a discussion for a other post) and they also don’t Actively Travel With Us.
i wouldn’t want a favorite character of mine to be brought back and then absolutely be done dirty in terms of writing and story and having all of their development from their original world set back to square one. you wouldn’t take sokka from ATLA and suddenly make him sexist and annoying again at the end of the series like he was earlier on, because he’s grown and developed past that! that’s why he’s a fan favorite! (to my knowledge. i don’t partake in the ATLA fandom and it’s been several years since i watched the show in full so i'm running off of memory here) i also wouldn’t want them to be flat and boring if they don’t grow and develop past how they were before in the story. i know all of this would likely be difficult to show at times because we play as the wizard and only really see their perspective exclusively, but certainly not impossible.
though i suppose there’s a lot of angles to consider here, like how some of the people who spend the most money on the game likely don’t care for the story much at all and where the characters go and what they do, i’m sure we’re all familiar with the stereotypical mean storm wizard that bullies you in waterworks or darkmoor for not having Top Of The Line pack and bundle gear or gear from insanely hard dungeons or spells that can only be obtained through pack or mob drops (all of which require insane amounts of luck and either money or grinding). and then there’s the fact that some older voice actors might not even be Available anymore due to layoffs or whatever.
i’m only really writing this because i really miss the arc 3 characters a lot and even ones from late arc 2 and it makes me sad that KI is doing a full 180 and has decided No. They Shall Never Come Back Ever after the ordeal with malistaire. also for further context i’m not complaining about all this because i hate the game and think it’s the worst thing ive ever played, because i don’t, it’s been one of my biggest interests for a really long time. like it matters a Lot to me otherwise i wouldn’t have this blog, yknow? and for what it’s worth i did like pieces of arc 2 and the ending of darkmoor was pretty sweet. there’s definitely more eloquent ways i could have worded a lot of this. but my point is and has been that it’s possible to bring back an old friend every once in a while and have them play a part without it just being like Ah, This Fucker Again for money purposes. of course then we have to think of more natural ways to have a character return too, but that’s the case for even bringing a new character into the story.
of course all of these negatives can be turned into positives when it comes to fan content because we can take all of it and be like “mine now. here’s what happened to XYZ” because there Is room left open with the vague spots and loose ends to tie things up ourselves. but some things are So Big and messy that sometimes they have to be Entirely Rewritten. there’s a lot of reasons why things would or wouldn’t work in terms of his game but i suppose it’s all just food for our own thought because we know kingsisle themselves is just gonna do what they’re gonna do.
idk i have a lot of complicated feelings on this matter and i’m sick of writing this it’s been a few hours since i started, maybe all of this is just based off the fact that i Very Much So Have Favorite Characters And Miss Them A Lot. but yeah.
