Honestly... Jaina riding in on a flying ship is what fantasy is.

[Necroxis]

Banshees could always fly.

Spectral forms. Not physical ones. And not flying around like a rocket.

[Combatbutler]

Spectral forms. Not physical ones. And not flying around like a rocket.

She released all the hot air she usually spouts wasn't it obvious?

Though I actually laughed the first time I saw her launch, so blizz gets a kudos for that.

[Magnagarde]

Except before this we've never seen Sylvanas resurrect that many people before. She only tends to do a few at a time. But suddenly she can resurrect an entire contingent of soldiers at once. Banshees themselves never resurrected people, either.

Also Banshees dont fly around like rocket ships. Just Sylvanas.

What's funnier is how she flies away and keeps all the objects attached to her body. One would assume she can't make the armor on her body turn into banshee aerosol equipment that is unzipped and redeployed at an instant.

[Necroxis]

She released all the hot air she usually spouts wasn't it obvious?

Though I actually laughed the first time I saw her launch, so blizz gets a kudos for that.

I did too, I couldn't help it. I know it was a serious moment but it made me crack up.

[Mellrod]

Other threads are arguing about whether or not she's a Mary Sue, but I'm like: dude, the scene was just great. Stop analyzing it and enjoy.

Yeah, people really confuse Mary Sue with very open use of the Rule of Cool. Blizzard loves to be really flashy in cinematics and scenarios like these. ESPECIALLY when they herald in the next entire expansion. So why not let Jaina ride in flying on a ghost ship? We've seen in the Warbringers animation that she rose her father's flagship from the sea and went sailing on it. Blizzard deliberately took the time to set this up. Why not let her materialize arcane energy in the shape of cannons that fire magic missiles? Arcane has been used to conjure solid objects in the game plenty of times before, and Jaina is literally the most powerful human sorceress alive. She trained under Antonidas, the most powerful mage to exist in the lore. How difficult would it really be for her to do this?

Rule of Cool:

The limit of the willing suspension of disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its degree of coolness. Stated another way, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality so long as the result is wicked sweet and/or awesome. This applies to the audience in general, as there will naturally be a different threshold for each individual in the group.

We know that Khadgar has pulled just about the same amount of magical bullshit out of his ass so many times before. Anduin is a priest but can wield a sword, Sylvanas has shown off very vague dark banshee powers we haven't seen her use before the main BfA cinematic. Malfurion has turned people into fucking trees, and crushed entire buildings with roots, summoned armies of wisps and animals, and demonstrated such an open control over nature unavailable to the playable class. Pretty much all of the lore characters get a lot more freedom and more abstract expressions of their power than we players do, so this shouldn't be so surprising.

(Also its important not to underestimate the level of power it takes in lore to even come close to that of a player's in-game power. A common Druid, for example, hoping to command nature needs a LOT of concentration and a bit of sacrifice to do so, yet we do it with ease. It makes sense then that these major lore characters who're so much more powerful than us can demonstrate that with massive displays far beyond our own reach.)

[Pandragon]

I thought it was gonna be a Horde Airship coming from behind. Jaw dropped when i saw it was Jaina on a flying ship.

Other threads are arguing about whether or not she's a Mary Sue, but I'm like: dude, the scene was just great. Stop analyzing it and enjoy.

A whole bunch of people who have no clue what that phrase means and just keeps on parroting it about any character who does anything.

Sylvanas can only apparently fly now and has resurrection powers on the same level as the Lich King.

The exact same ability that unholy Dks have. Yeah, it's no where near the magnitude of the Lich Kings powers.

[plz delete account]

But reeeeeee your magic isn't realistic!!!!! Reeeeeeeeeeee /s

This is WoW. People bitch about everything in this game no matter what it is.

Nobody complains about Thrall or Illidan or Sylvanas being a Mary Sue/Gary Stu

[Ashnazg]

Sylvanas can only apparently fly now and has resurrection powers on the same level as the Lich King.

That's reaching. She rezzed what, a couple dozen of soldiers at best? That's barely more than a single DK can manage with apoc / aotd. Far cry from rezzing and controlling thousands of undead spanning continents.

[TickTickTick]

next time lets have genn appear on a giant flying wolf muh fantasy

[schwarzkopf]

The most powerful living mage, flying a magic ship with magic which we saw her raise from the depths of the ocean using magic, then using magic to help the alliance.

How could we have possibly guessed that a mage might use magic.

[plz delete account]

look too much deus ex machina and fanservice to me, and when the cannons start bombing i close the video because it was retarded

Only "retarded" because you knew you had lost the battle at that point.
Except we've known the outcome of BoL since Blizzcon

- - - Updated - - -

That's reaching. She rezzed what, a couple dozen of soldiers at best? That's barely more than a single DK can manage with apoc / aotd. Far cry from rezzing and controlling thousands of undead spanning continents.

As a single DK I've rezzed 22 minions at one time

[Thetruth1400]

Why does a human always have to be the most powerful though? It's getting tiring.

Most of Blizzard's writing is old and tired if you take a step back and analyze it, because this game was built off of Warcraft lore dating back to the original game Orc vs Humans.

They're pretty much out of lore characters from the days of old and are struggling to bring in new ones without rehashing the same story lines over and over. I mean, it's understandable considering this game is over a decade old, but still, take it with a grain of salt, don't have massive expectations.

The only way they're going to be able to tell creative, new stories is to bring in new characters, have them mean something to us, and not abandon or wipe them out in an expansion or two. That also means double the work though because those characters have to fit with us, but we still need something to do in the meantime of them establishing themselves. Yrel comes to mind as one of the biggest wasted potential characters recently. For the Alliance, they followed her progress from slave up to the point of Vindicator, only to have her story line abruptly end when Thrall showed up. Literally mid fight, Thrall showed up and forced his way into the fight, ending the story for the Alliance and Yrel right there.

In BfA, they basically gut her personality and made her the leader zealot of the Draenei forcing the Orcs to follow the light. Talk about weak writing.

[Tabrotar]

I don't give a fuck about Sylvanas.

Buhu i don´t give a fuck about Sylvanas but i will REEEE about everythng the Alliance do...

You sound like a fucking broken record.

[CreatureLives]

I don't find it weird at all. If the mages can make a city float I think one of the most powerful living mages in all of Azeroth can make a boat fly.

[Wyrt]

Buhu i don´t give a fuck about Sylvanas but i will REEEE about everythng the Alliance do...

You sound like a fucking broken record.

Because I fucking play Alliance.

[Necroxis]

That's reaching. She rezzed what, a couple dozen of soldiers at best? That's barely more than a single DK can manage with apoc / aotd. Far cry from rezzing and controlling thousands of undead spanning continents.

The Lich King didn't kill and resurrect thousands of undead at the same time. She resurrected about the same amount of troops as Arthas did in front of the Wrathgate.

[Torrasque]

Spectral forms. Not physical ones. And not flying around like a rocket.

In all honesty, that would be a cute retcon... Add in a few seconds to the end of the cinimatic were she hands off a spent goblin rocket to Gallywix and winks at him while Nathanos scowls.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Nobody complains about Thrall or Illidan or Sylvanas being a Mary Sue/Gary Stu

Idk in Cata and MoP Thrall got a lot of bitching. Because he did "everything" for example. Of course now that he is pretty much a no show outside of a pop in and say hello most the time he isn't talked and thus bitched about much. Color me surprised on that.

Plus I mean your post kind of proves my point. You even managed to complain about someone discussing something sarcastically which is instantly given away with the /s. I mean talk about finding something to bitch about anywhere.

[plz delete account]

Idk in Cata and MoP Thrall got a lot of bitching. Because he did "everything" for example. Of course now that he is pretty much a no show outside of a pop in and say hello most the time he isn't talked and thus bitched about much. Color me surprised on that.

Plus I mean your post kind of proves my point. You even managed to complain about someone discussing something sarcastically which is instantly given away with the /s. I mean talk about finding something to bitch about anywhere.

I wasn't bitching, just pointing things out that people aren't currently bitching about off the top of my head.

[Notshauna]

The Lich King didn't kill and resurrect thousands of undead at the same time. She resurrected about the same amount of troops as Arthas did in front of the Wrathgate.

Which isn't anything spectacular because Arthas before becoming the lich king killed and raised the vast majority of the first legion. Raising undead is relatively easy, the difficult part is creating intelligent undead, undead that are stable (as in they last indefinitely) and maintaining the control of them. Lore wise even relatively unskilled necromancers can raise simple skeletal undead and control them, they're just mindless and temporary.


As for the primary topic, I don't think that is what fantasy is about. Fantasy leads to fantastic worlds where insane and crazy things can happen but that doesn't mean stuff can happen without rhyme and reason. It's pretty much peak Blizzard writing, it's an interesting and entertaining idea that's not explained at all or thought about in terms of narrative and tonal consequences. In this small clip we see Jaina do three things, all of which while cool beg some serious questions.

First it has her flying her father's sunken ship, this begs the question of why we don't see other people doing similar things. For example in the real world we had fire ships that specifically designed damage other ships and cause chaos, if a powerful mage can lift a full sized ship they absolutely could fling a small fires ship at foes, as a far more accurate version of a catapult. In general siege weapons seem like they are much worse than mage spells which begs the question of why they are so common place in Warcraft's wars.

Secondly she uses ice magic to clear the Forsaken plague, and for what it's worth this is my pick for the most questionable usage of magic in the video. There is a huge issue here this particularly strand of plague is the Forsaken plague, which was specifically designed to be used against the Lich King, the very same Lich King that is a master of frost magic. This goes far beyond the realm of believability, as the plague's most likely designed to be specifically resistant to frost and necromantic magic, it'd be far more believable if she magically amplified Anduin's holy magic to cure it or if she used a fire spell to clear the area.

Third she uses what looks to be Arcane magic to unleash a volley of cannonballs against Undercity's walls. This is likely an extension to the magic that allows for automated brooms in Silvermoon and Dalaran, but there is a massive difference between sweeping in a cycle and loading, aiming and firing cannonballs magically enhanced cannonballs. Yet again this is another on of those problems that makes me question why we don't see this more often.

Fantasy is a framework to explore ideas that we all acknowledge are impossible, usually in a medieval-esque setting, but that doesn't mean you can just put something in without thought or care. Fantasy allows you to have things like Jaina's scene, but isn't an excuse to purely rule of cool it.