The Queue: The Narrative Importance of Failure

Today’s Queue may be a little different. It’s a bit of an experiment on my part in answering a question in depth. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m going to go further.

Many people remember The Empire Strikes Back as the best of the Star Wars movies. (I’m not among them, but it serves the argument I’m going to make.) Why?

Because it deals with the consequences of the previous film and sets up the victory condition for the series as a whole. The Rebels blew up the Death Star, yes, but that just means the Empire cares about them now. They spend the film on the run, scattered and demoralized. Leia and Han are forced to seek refuge with one of Han’s old associates (which doesn’t work out for them too well) and Luke at last must confront his past, accept the training he’s avoided since the previous movie, and ultimately go toe to toe with Darth Vader.

And how does it end? They’re still on the run, Luke has lost his hand and had his illusions shattered, Han’s gone and might already be dead. (Harrison Ford wanted out of the series.) They now know that in order to beat the Empire, it’s going to take taking down the Emperor himself, and that means getting through Vader. This is the movie that puts Vader on the map, the movie that raises the stakes.

I bring this up because World of Warcraft has been trying to raise the stakes for years now, but the closest it’s ever come is a five player dungeon, Halls of Reflection. We go in with Jaina or Sylvanas, ready to confront the Lich King. We take down two of his most powerful lieutenants. We charge into his private chambers.

And then we run away from him. He’s unstoppable. He nearly kills Sylvanas/Jaina, and if you try and step to him? He kills you. There is no option save flight. Said flight itself becomes the battle — the inexorable winter bearing down on you, revenants and ghouls summoned to hinder your escape, you battle your way out and witness as the mountain itself is collapsed on top of Arthas knowing even that won’t be enough to stop him. You’ve merely earned a reprieve. The raid that follows is a good raid, no denying that (although it got long in the tooth after a while) but in some ways, the story of Wrath of the Lich King hit its peak at that moment when we as a group realized the Lich King wasn’t going to go down easily.

Now, I’m not deluded enough to think that Blizzard doesn’t know how this expansion ends. They’ve most likely already got the final raids designed and are in the process of working on them right now. It’s likely we storm something, defeat a big bad (hopefully not Kil’jaeden) and close the portal that the Legion is using. And there’s a reason why that works, narratively — it’s a satisfying climax to an expansion built around the threat of these demons invading. If the expansion follows a three act structure, you’d expect to see the first patch set up the threat, subsequent patches expand the scope of the threat, and the final patch serve as the climactic battle. The reason we have this as an encoded dramatic maxim is because it works.

But I’m going to argue that after eleven years, it’s time for a departure. We’ve gone from strength to strength — foiling Ragnaros and C’thun and Naxx, going to Outland to stop Illidan, then returning to foil Kil’jaeden, Arthas, even Deathwing himself, we’ve shown our power. We toppled a tyrant in Garrosh Hellscream and journeyed to another world to prevent the Legion from assaulting a helpless people.

Legion should show us the consequences of all that. We’ve drawn the Legion’s full attention, and now they’re coming for us, and we can’t beat them. Not fighting on their terms. The invasion of Azeroth should end with the world in more danger than ever. Perhaps we go through the portal, preparing to close it, and see the vast hosts of the Legion preparing to march through, and realize that everything we’ve seen and fought so far was only a scouting mission. Perhaps we do close the portal, but that’s almost immaterial — the Legion knows where Azeroth is, and they have the means to travel the void and resume the invasion if they’re not immediately stopped. Perhaps they straight up stop us from doing more than damaging the portal and we have to retreat elsewhere.

Perhaps Stormwind and Orgrimmar are destroyed, and we find ourselves forced to consider the ultimate, not to be considered option to save our planet — perhaps the Horde and Alliance must become a united front, led by a single leader, in order to for life on Azeroth to survive.

I don’t know. But I do know this — it’s time for the down note. It’s time to look at the threat and realize we can’t just kill it with enough raiders.

Well, it does serve a purpose — it costs you money so you’ll think twice about whether or not you want to do it. But I agree, it’s not great, especially when the Artifact exists and is in my mind a very effective barrier to switching specs. As a Fury Warrior on the Alpha, I often find myself not able to tank (luckily I have six Warriors on the Alpha, so I just get on a Prot Warrior) and it’s annoying.

I want to level as Fury. I love leveling as Fury. I love the Fury Artifacts. That shouldn’t lock me out of tanking for friends. Neither should not wanting to be down 200g at the end of the night. I think it’s likely a placeholder, though. To my mind we need a good system for Artifacts so you can switch specs more easily.

I’ve answered this before but my answer changes because I really think WoW has some of the best music and I like a lot of it. I’m going to say this one from Warlords of Draenor for today, but I could find a song from every single expansion that I’ve loved.

Honestly I’d be willing to say (without sitting down and actually counting weapons from previous expansions, because man, I have things to do, I have bills if I want mindless repetition) that the 180 or so different Artifact looks compare favorably with the number of weapons you’d usually get in an expansion.

Okay, that’s The Queue for today. See y’all next week — Anne’s doing the weekend, so be nice and ask her much of the questioning.