Nature abhors a vacuum. When official creativity was lacking, the community was compelled to step up. And y'all were amazing.
From the moment the expansion was announced and we saw images of Teldrassil burning, the community went into overdrive to crowdsource the most creative, imaginative, reasonable, logical, and just plain awesome ideas of how it could happen, what led to it, what the repurcussions would be, and what it would mean for the 4th War.
All throughout the expansion, from Uldir to Azshara to Sylvanas to N'zoth, all the way to the next expansion and how this one would seamlessly lead to it, the (proven fake) fan theories were amazing. I loved them all, and loved watching them grow and expand and was awed at how the community worked together to form extraordinary creative wonders.
Even when the biggest and most popular fan theory about the Shadowlands expansion broke (the one where we literally kill each other in the last "War for Azeroth" raid and Sylvanas leads us post-mortem into the Shadowlands to prepare us to fight the Old Gods, who fear undeath) was brilliant.
In those weeks that followed, people were disecting the legitimacy of the "leaked" screenshots of ghostly armies at the harbor, and every time I turned the game on and saw the BFA login screen that showed a desolate battlefield amidst ruins, with carrion hunters circling over corpseless armor and weapons, I thought to myself "It makes sense! The login screen was the biggest clue of The Grand Design! It shows a terrible aftermath of the war; a lifeless world because we killed each other and now we're off in the Shadowlands; the only place immune from Old God corruption, and when beat N'zoth and return years later, Azeroth is forever changed! World revamp, here we come!!!
Of course, it was all false. And the reality was so very, very, very underwhelming, unimaginative, nonsensical and borderline insulting.
But damn, I will always remember how BFA brought the entire WoW community together out of necessity because the story was so creatively bankrupt, and from start to finish everyone kept theorizing and scriptwriting and predicting all the ways the story could be salvaged and made awesome. So many ideas thrown around, so many turns taken, all those glorious theories and story developments that kept emerging every step of the way throughout BFA.
That's what I will always remember about this expansion; how at every chapter of the War campaign, the community crowdsourced such creative, imaginative, logical and brilliant alternatives to fill the plot holes we were perpetually fed. Every step of the way, the community came up with better ideas of what could have happened, and brilliant ideas of where things could go from here to salvage the story... and when Blizzard let us down again, the community did it all over again. And again and again and again.
Seriously, the story ideas you people came up with all throughout this expansion were nothing short of amazing. You came up with them because you were forced to, and they were great. I loved them all.