The Queue: Dinosaurs dual wielding Ashkandi

Picture a desert. Cacti. Tumbleweeds in the sand, drifting across the desert.

This is the Queue. The day I just throw up my hands and make the whole Queue about dinosaurs dual wielding Ashkandi is getting closer.

Well, define ‘too many’ in this context. Some people would say one person who can kill all of mankind might be too many people with that capacity. Others might argue that we can’t just say that a specific person is to be judged by actions they haven’t actually committed — I mean, you don’t actually know that any of these characters is going to kill everyone, and it’s difficult to say who actually could do it if they never do.

And of course, if they do kill all of mankind, then nobody else would get to. You can only wipe out all of mankind once, after all.

For starters, they shouldn’t irradiate an entire city and drive their own people into exile.

That’s like job #1, and it is absolutely why Geblin is beloved by all Gnomes, and everyone hates you. Just in case it was unclear, that time you irradiated your home city and drove everyone into exile in a bid to become leader of said city was not what a good faction leader does.

As to why we have faction leaders, we have them because factions are led by people. It’s like asking why do we have a government, why don’t we just all lived in an anarcho-syndicalist utopia and while there are extremely good answers for that question, none of them would fit into the space of a Queue question and answer. I mean, one could argue that there’s a whole discussion of group dynamics and the nature of individual action vs group weal, but again — we don’t really have the space for it. There are entire textbooks on this.

In terms of World of Warcraft, I don’t think you can argue that the Faction Leaders have ever been exactly representative of their factions. Thrall was never a very generic or typical Orc, Sylvanas is almost utterly divorced from what being a Forsaken is like for the average player, Tyrande isn’t what your Night Elf is going to be like. And that’s okay. They’re not exemplars for us to try and be like, they’re characters who are in leadership positions for their people and who represent their people in the larger organizations they belong to.

Also, there are plenty of important figures in WoW who aren’t strictly speaking faction leaders, like Rexxar or Thisalee Crow. We have these characters because they have a role to play in the story.

So it did! Whoever did the capture on that episode (they also played some Diablo 3) was not exactly getting the best FPS on that dungeon run. I mean, my computer is old, and I get better frame rates than that in dungeons.

But it was pretty cool to see it, and they were right — WoW players do have a horrible tendency to skip all the lore explanations and just leap into a dungeon, and then I end up writing a KYL explaining what just happened… so I guess I should be okay with that.

Young me devoured the Amber books and loved them. Adult me recognizes some of the flaws of them — the characters can come off a bit too omnicapable, the dialogue can be so concerned with showing off how awesome and clever they are — but overall the series is wonderful and it’s a shame we lost Zelazny when we did. He could have been producing for another twenty or thirty years and it’s honestly sad that we lost that.

I generally prefer the Corwin series starting with Nine Princes In Amber to the later Merlin series, but I like them both. The idea of Amber and Chaos in opposition, creating shadows that are worlds like our own is one that really stuck with me and affected how I view fiction to this day.

I expect a lot of you to get to work making pictures of dinosaurs dual wielding Ashkandi for me, because frankly I deserve it. Have a nice weekend, see you next week, be sure to ask Anne a lot of questions so her Queue is easy to write. And then, next Thursday? Do that for me.