Well, realistically speaking he probably is unfit to command, at least by our standards - he's a kid with zero experience commanding an army guided by other figures with little to no experience (most of whom are rulers due to family lineage and not merit of any kind), except perhaps Tyrande who wasn't present. But then you're also arguing from realism in the context of a fantasy video game, so you're probably going to have to relax a few standards from the get-go.
Real world military experience is also replete with goofs, blunders, and ill-advised tactical decisions from the Charge of the Light Brigade to the Battle of Bannockburn to the Siege of Gibraltar. Some of them make for great dramatizations and set-pieces, as well. I'm also not really going to say Anduin isn't an idiot, because he is in quite a few ways, which is again to be expected of a young and naïve king who was promoted purely due to bloodline and not his military acumen or experience. The society of WoW is still a decidedly medieval one, despite their schizo-technology, and the people of the Alliance and Horde largely aren't conditioned to question their leaders even when they should.
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Not if you combine the sudden mobilization of the Scourge with the equally sudden loss of leadership for both the Alliance and the Horde, taking some of their most powerful players off the board and leaving both factions scrambling - and that so soon after the disastrous Fourth War. I mean sure, you still have a hook - no one's is really saying the abduction is *required*, but as you've said yourself several times now it raises both the stakes and the drama, not to mention also serving as a hook in and of itself (the Scourge attacks giving us no reason to journey to the Maw). Sylvanas alone wouldn't be reason for us to go to hostile territory, they'd probably opt to draw her out and attack her on Azeroth, if they were otherwise unaware of the plot going on in the Shadowlands.
Anduin and Tyrande, actually. But again, the presumption is that there's a story at play here - with presumably future dividends, at least one hopes. Not to mention the story of actually rescuing the four of the leaders themselves, serving as the intro to Torghast and its environs. It'd be a means-to-end fallacy to entirely discount the narrative surrounding those events just to say "well it doesn't matter because you rescue them anyways" when that's the story being told. That's the kind of argument you could telescope out and simply say "well none of it actually matters because you'll be victorious in the end anyways," which kind of misses the point of both games and stories. It's not about the end, it's about the journey to it, to put it succinctly.
[QUOTE=Super Dickmann;52729060]Go to any given forum or copy of the video and you'll see what I mean. As bagina points out it was largely found funny and you yourself acknowledged it wasn't very good. The overarching opinion is that it failed. Now, the majority can be wrong, but it can also be right especially in an instance where broad swathes of people from very different positions and interests in the lore agree on what the issues are. Everything said when it comes to the presence of the guards doesn't require a contingent of troops, that's a strawman, it requires an acknowledgment of these being defended places and of the abilities of both parties. I already told you how I'd do it, incidentally solving the issue of thinking those being assumed to be mooks - Anduin looks up, gryphon riders go up to engage, get fried in a few frames, then he gets chained and nabbed or maybe he tries to cast but we see the glow in his hand fade from the chain, implying its silenced. None of these are hard things to do - it's not difficult to get the scene's point across, it just doesn't do so.
I said it wasn't great, nor was it terrible. Most of the arguments I've seen against it are the same kinds of bad faith arguments you see constantly, and that's mostly what I'm arguing against. Looking at the Wowhead thread on the cinematic I see mostly mixed responses, some negative and some positive, but no real invective to speak of. For example:
"Love <3"
"Wow great reaction time there Graymane lol"
"I love the quality of their in game cinematics..."
"Honestly even with his defeat, Bolvar is amazing to me."
"I really like this one."
"The Bolvar part was interesting but... Really? YOINK?"
"If they wanted us to get hype for when we finally slit that woman's throat and put her carcass on farm, it's working."
"Epic"
"is it weird that I was laughing for 3 minutes straight after watching this?"
So no, I'm not really seeing this universal condemnation you're referring to? I see some unalloyed praise, some criticism, some jokes, and some people like myself who are more middle of the road. We've already covered the rest to the point of practical exhaustion.
She sounds pretty tired to me, and her reaction to seeing what she thinks is an illusion of the Champion borders on the hysterical, so suffice it to say that we read her dialogue pretty differently. She gives the impression she's been through this many, many times; always failing to escape, and despite being to run the gauntlet successfully it ultimately doesn't matter because she just has to do it over and over, meaning that her victories always amounted to nothing in the end. Baine, for instance, doesn't even really seem to recover from his wounds as you bring back the others over time - he remains kind of exhausted and weak the entire time. All of them refer to their experiences and decide they can't even talk about it for now, which really seemed to relate how traumatic it was, above and beyond the simple inability to escape the predicament (which is itself kind of harrowing if you think about it). For people who envision hell as a kind of profane repetition of your worst moments it would be terrible.
Suffice it to say that your read of the dialogue and events is quite different than mine, as to me it seems like all the faction leaders we rescue have gone through a harrowing ordeal that still haunts them, so much so that they refuse to even talk about it in the short term. It also seems to have brought them even more together, a shared experience and creating a forged by fire relationship across the faction boundaries (which I also think was kind of the intent). I think the leaders will come out of this with an even stronger sense that what unites them in adversity is more than what separates them culturally, which I think is a good thing for peace and stability on Azeroth in the longer term. It will also create a tension between those leaders who were involved in this and those that were not (Genn, Lor'themar, etc. etc.), which may have dramatic payout later on as well.