Maybe the problem are the writers

[mickybrighteyes]

Having a strong core doesn't mean you can't change, or admit to your own mistakes - it means that regardless of what happens to you that core remains intact and a strong influence over who you are as a person. Jaina prior to Cata was always depicted as a sensitive and insightful soul who favored creativity over brutality. She changed somewhat following the destruction of her home as well as the murder of her people and friends, but the same core traits she had always possessed eventually evened her out and made it so she could eventually overcome that trauma and resume being who she was, changed but still essentially the same person.

Contrast this with Garrosh, who's introduced as being a pathetic shell of an Orc who continually mopes and groans about the actions of his father until Thrall relates Grom's heroic death. He then does a complete 180 and becomes an entirely new person, overly headstrong and unreasonably boastful. He then proceeds to question his new father-figure Thrall at every turn, basically acting like a complete git throughout WotLK, and on becoming Warchief tolerates no criticism and surrounds himself with yes-men like Malkorok who kowtow to his whims like sycophants.

So yes, in that vein Garrosh is essentially weak and Jaina is essentially strong - he refuses any and all culpability for his many mistakes, and ends up lodged deep in WoW's version of hell as equally and stupidly unrepentant. Jaina, on the other hand, acknowledges her mistakes and the criticism levied at her and stops her descent into zealotry to eventually level out and return to herself.

The problem here is that if this is a take from MoP Era... Jaina did nothing in the way of admitting her own mistakes. She blew up on everyone, told them to deal with it and held onto that anger for the following expansions eventually resulting in her own dismissal from Dalaran. Yeah post BFA she did finally come around and admit her faults but that is still a weird thing where there was no real build up to explain her going from here post theramore MoP mode into sad depressed Returning to Kul Tiras to face judgement and exile into a death plane...

[Aucald]

The problem here is that if this is a take from MoP Era... Jaina did nothing in the way of admitting her own mistakes. She blew up on everyone, told them to deal with it and held onto that anger for the following expansions eventually resulting in her own dismissal from Dalaran. Yeah post BFA she did finally come around and admit her faults but that is still a weird thing where there was no real build up to explain her going from here post theramore MoP mode into sad depressed Returning to Kul Tiras to face judgement and exile into a death plane...

It is taking into account her character from before MoP, into MoP, and up until BfA and Shadowlands. MoP opened with the destruction of Theramore, therefore it makes sense it's during MoP she'd be at her most militant and traumatized - it was a fresh tragedy, after all. But she admits in War Crimes (chronologically at the close of MoP) that she doesn't want to feel the anger and rage she currently feels forever, and starts to take steps to address what she sees as a flaw in herself. BfA opens with her conflicted, but during her story-arc in that expansion she grapples with some formative issues and emerges from the events a stronger person, more akin to her pre-MoP self, but pointedly changed and wiser for her experiences.

Sure, she waffled for a bit following Theramore's destruction and her dealing with the traumas it caused, but that's realistic enough for a person grappling with their own demons as a result of tragedy in their life. But when all is said and done, she emerged stronger and more self-possessed than previously, a stronger character overall.

[Soon-TM]

The problem here is that if this is a take from MoP Era... Jaina did nothing in the way of admitting her own mistakes. She blew up on everyone, told them to deal with it and held onto that anger for the following expansions eventually resulting in her own dismissal from Dalaran. Yeah post BFA she did finally come around and admit her faults but that is still a weird thing where there was no real build up to explain her going from here post theramore MoP mode into sad depressed Returning to Kul Tiras to face judgement and exile into a death plane...

The best part about the oh so vaunted BfA Jaina is that she's being praised for having opposed Daelin (also the way she did lol), and gets to sit as Lord Admiral exactly when the Horde is doing exactly what Daelin always said it eventually would. Also, that big Mary Sue scene when she shakes the pendant and the fleet appears to save the day... /puke

[Izzyfurious]

Gee OP you don't say. This is what i have being saying for over a decade! you just discovered it yourself now, you are late af.

[Aucald]

This topic seens to have derailed really fast.

I thought the point of discussion was about how out of touch the writers are with the characters, and not how strong/awesome/flawed garrosh was/is.

To me OP has a point, Garrosh was all over the place during Cata, as was Jaina during MoP, yet, Christie sees problem in only one of those.

Maybe this applies to Danuses too, who seens to write a idealiazed version of his waifu, instead of writing sylvanas as she was before his time.

I don't see it as a derailment, merely acknowledgment that the central argument the OP made was fallacious and badly constructed. Plenty of various authors within the Warcraft franchise have mishandled or misunderstood the characters they worked with, after all; which is why some characterizations often come across as thin or entirely out of character depending. Every author also has their own skills and weaknesses when it comes to the narrative, as well. Golden specifically is good at interpersonal scenes, but she doesn't really write action set-pieces well, unlike Stackpole, who is excellent at describing combat in a narrative sense. Golden's issue with Garrosh also wasn't that he was "all over the place," because in reality there's really just one quest-chain where Garrosh isn't in the proper character (the Cata quest-chain in Stonetalon), which is actually the fault of Alex Afrasiabi and miscommunication:

Cataclysm seemed like he was going in a different direction for a while there ...

He was.

He was? Tell us about that -- why he had that shift.

Miscommunication.

So Stonetalon ...

Me.

You did Stonetalon?

I did Stonetalon.

I didn't stick to that path with Garrosh. I didn't -- not everyone was on board. Not everyone got the memo as it were, as we were designing -- and that was my fault. Because when you're doing, when you're trying -- because I was actually trying to bring Garrosh around, and Stonetalon was going to be the first of that. Cataclysm was pretty crazy time for us.

You had so much to do.

We did quite a lot of work. So I feel like there was a little bit of miscommunication on my part that kind of led to Garrosh going down another, darker path. So there's an interesting tidbit for you. (Source)

[Jastall]

Alleria ate a couple void beings. Not sure they were on the level of an entity like Cthun or yshraaj (or whatever) and she seems about as in control as a dude is of is sail boat in a windstorm since her big thing now seems to be internal struggles with the whispers that certain RP personalities around here like to claim she is totally in control of while arguing with herself

But you're right, Garrosh didn't control an old god. He just retained what passes as his mind as he let the power flow through him until we shut that shit down.

Garrosh was basically a less stable Azshara by Siege. He wasn't being brainwashed, but he directly served the designs of an Old God while imagining them to be his. Him ranting and raving about Yshaarj's visions showing him literal mountains of skulls and rivers of blood hardly help the case that he was fully in control as well. At least Alleria only hears whispers, which seems a lot less severe a side effect. In the end, he was still a pawn and would have made a pawn of what was left of the Horde had he won that day.

[sighy]

Yes, but that’s been the case with WoW’s lore and writing dept. since the game launched. Blizzard is notorious for saying one thing, but showing the complete opposite in practice.

True, it may be a bit nostalgic and if we're being honest the cracks were always there and it had it's charm, but over the last couple expansion packs the storytelling clearly took a nosedive for the worse. I'd say that they didn't really do an overarching narrative well since WotLK/Cataclysm. Legion got close, but Illidan kind of ruined it for me, with his arc being a bit forced and taking too much spotlight from other characters. BfA/SL so far suffer from this wierd state, where they seem fixated on Sylvanas, without Sylvanas leading to this wierd mess, where they constantly have to do massive retcons, in order to try and explain radical disjointed self-contradicting actions.(not gonna talk about the Nzoth laser anticlimax)

They are running out of big name franchize leading characters and can't seem to be able to create new ones, while the few old A listers left are either running out of good faith or still recovering from butchered storyarcs that did long lasting damage to their credibility and likability. (Hi Thrall) Aliance didn't have any real political intrigue since Onyxia bit the dust, which wasn't manufactured and instantly resolved in some sidecomic/shortstory, while the Horde's identity is basically destroyed and all their notable characters dead, discredited or both.


That doesn't mean there aren't good storyarcs in certain questlines or zones, on their own merit, but the entire package it makes not.

[Terrorthatflapsinthenight]

Besides even if Garrosh won it would have been a temporary victory until the Burning Legion invades again and destroy Azeroth as shown in the Blank Scroll story, as well as what happened after he changed AU Draenor fate.

[Triceron]

Sorry but this post is a cope. Garrosh was winning the war and if Vol'jin didn't backstab Garrosh the Alliance would've gotten annihilated.

That list of backstabbers is practically everyone in the Horde except Nazgrim. The rest were sorta treated as general mooks, baddies or people who just happened to fight on the wrong side of the war.

[Aleksej89]

garrosh is THE hypocrite of warcraft so he has no strength whatsoever but that was the intended purpose for his character.
writers wanted to show how blind stupidity looks like and garrosh portrays that perfectly.

sylvanas is just horribly written, the bfa-sl writers are absolute incompetent morons so its pointless to talk about characters when the writers are kindergarden dropouts.

[geco]

So yes, in that vein Garrosh is essentially weak and Jaina is essentially strong - he refuses any and all culpability for his many mistakes, and ends up lodged deep in WoW's version of hell as equally and stupidly unrepentant. Jaina, on the other hand, acknowledges her mistakes and the criticism levied at her and stops her descent into zealotry to eventually level out and return to herself.

BFA Not like Jaina Never learns from her mistakes? I see that she is making the same mistake for the third time.

[Orby]

As I have constantly repeated, Golden doesn't direct the lore going forward, especially back in 2012, Golden only wrote the books back then, and even they were books with scripts handed to her from Metzen.

While Golden has been writing books for WoW from as far back as 1998, Golden didn't join the Blizzard team as a creative writer until 2017 where she was offered a temp job there until later that year she was offered a permanent. And even now she isnt a head writer, she is a senior writer and she has leant her work to some notable moments int he game like some cinematics including a lot of the Legion Epilogue quests and also some Hearthstone expansion cinematics trailers. But she doesn't dictate the future of the story or develop where it heads to.

I still have no idea why some of you angry man children put blame just on Golden. Every time its Golden, and I have no idea why. There are like 10+ writers on staff at Blizzard, and sometimes you cannot tell what writer had a hand in what pie. So the fact Golden is defector punching bag is sad. I may not be a fan of they way the lore has headed in game right now. Especially shadowlands the theme is not connecting with me. But you know what... I just quit. Some of you are way too overly emotionally attached to this game I think its unhealthy and think you should get help.

[Ermelloth]

"Maybe"?

It's not even a rhetorical question.

Ever since Chris Metzen stopped working on universe he created, things went downhill.

[Nerovar]

BFA Not like Jaina Never learns from her mistakes? I see that she is making the same mistake for the third time.

At this point Jaina only exists to prove her father right every few years.

[DemonHunter18]

it wasnt "just" a night warrior. it was a night warrior+an entire army iirc

Don't forget that Old God had his own jabronis as well.

it was probably army vs army thing while that gay couple wrecked him.

But yeah, super underwhelming.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

If you can not see how out of touch the writers are after Jaina flip flopped mood over several expansion, while the person that writes her says she is headstrong and has a STRONG CORE, after all the damage she has done, then I'm sorry.

Richard A. Knaak got shit on for his powertrips with his own character. Danuser gets shit on for having a boner for Sylvanas. Christie Golden keeps latching onto Jaina Proudmoore being a strong, woman character slay queen while her portrayal ingame is equivelant to that on a teenage girl in a Twilight book.

This is an interview from mop which means golden wasn’t even working In house and was on a need to know basis she wouldn’t know how Jiana was going to be handled in game just the info they gave her to make the books.


As to current writing now though golden would still be a non issue as she’s said she doesn’t work on the wow team and only fills out orders for those who do rather that be books short story’s cinematic’s ect.

[Orby]

"Maybe"?

It's not even a rhetorical question.

Ever since Chris Metzen stopped working on universe he created, things went downhill.

You are joking right... People were just as hateful back then as they were now... I shall remind you of this thread.
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...etzen-be-fired

Look at this time capsule from 2011 and tell me if some of these don't look familiar

[Lorgar Aurelian]

What is "biased" in the OP? He is quoting one of the main writers in the staff, with source and everything. What should it include in order to not be considered "biased"?

The fact that golden didn’t work at blizzard in mop and was just a contractor who wouldn’t know what they were going to do with the character outside the books and wouldn’t know that the ingame writers would flip flop?

The fact that golden isn’t even a writer for the game outside of supplement material even after working at blizzard?

[Feanoro]

Well, I totally believe that this thread was made with zero biases and only good intentions.

I'd like to thank Blizz for the recent cinematic, stirring up all the "GaRroSh dId nOtHinG wRoNg!" posters. They endlessly go on about a flawed character being more interesting, then strenuously deny he had any flaws. They preach he's well written when his writing flailed around more than someone with five pounds of itching powder down his shorts. They praise him for never changing his mind, yet hail Grom as a hero when he's famous for changing his mind about the Legion. They proclaim he did everything for the Horde, when all he did was blow it apart.

[Soon-TM]

The fact that golden didn’t work at blizzard in mop and was just a contractor who wouldn’t know what they were going to do with the character outside the books and wouldn’t know that the ingame writers would flip flop?

The fact that golden isn’t even a writer for the game outside of supplement material even after working at blizzard?

She may have been "just a contractor", but that didn't prevent her from writing three major books for the franchise. At that point, she could no longer be considered a mere typewriter grunt, regardless of her contractual status with Blizz. Pretending that she just writes what others tell her and nothing but that, is hard to swallow.

Still, Golden isn't the worst offender here, Afrasiabi and Danuser are.