The Queue: hwat

As I gear up for a Tuesday where there’s a lot of small things happening to attend to but nothing major, so I’m a little overwhelmed but I can muscle through, I am reminded, once again, that I am a jinx and of course more things will explode today.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we answer just as soon as we figure out what in the (pirate ghost) is going on.

Losing out on Spicy Pretzel Mustard when you’re down to the final couple matches, especially if it’s due to a draw vs a deck which favors a high degree of randomness & RNG in the middle of the match.

On the one hand, yes. I have a feeling Anduin’s storyline from now on is likely to involve quite a lot of personal introspection, moreso than ever before. On the other, if they no longer trusted anyone who was ever under some form of possession or forced subjugation, then there would be precious few people left on Azeroth to lead anything.

All the leaders who’d been to The Maw might be some kind of Manchurian Candidate deal going on, since Anduin seemed relatively normal until The Jailer pulled his string. Magni’s been hearing whispers from whatever possibly-possessed planet he’s on since he turned to diamond by touching something he shouldn’t have. Tyrande is The Night Warrior, and though we’re assuming that power is on the up-and-up, it may not be. Who knows what kind of mind altering cooties Malfurion may have from his time in the Emerald Dream Slash Nightmare. Mekkatorque has been alternately incapacitated and hanging out with leper gnomes and whatnot.

Lilian Voss is a maybe, but we assumed she’d die in Scholomance, a place where necromancers are trained, so it’s definitely possible she died and was re-reanimated by someone with bad intentions.

The only person who seems to be clear at this point is Zappyboi, and we only met him like, a minute ago, so who knows. Maybe Aysa? Mayla Highmountain? Point being, this is pretty par for the course and I don’t really hold it against him.

As a writer, my first and foremost goal is to write a story I personally would like to read, and no matter what story I want to tell, the ending will be incredibly dissatisfying for someone. It won’t be realistic enough, or it won’t follow the established conventions of a satisfying narrative, or it won’t involve enough dinosaurs, or there will be too many women (or not enough women) or maybe they won’t be into the genre.

A great example of this is a favorite short story of mine, A Cartomante by Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (The Fortune Teller in English), which I’d urge you to go read before finishing this paragraph, because it’s a gut punch the first time around. Machado de Assis is known for (generally — this guy’s writing is so complex and thoroughly studied I’d need a full column just to make this distinction) being so realistic in his writing that it’s seen by some as a parody of realism. In A Cartomante, he sets the scene with a married woman assuring her illicit lover that her husband, also his best friend, has no idea and they’re fine to keep fooling around because a fortune teller told her so, and she goes home to her husband. The lover has been getting letters that somebody knows what’s up, and then all of a sudden he gets a phone call from the husband telling him to go over to their house. So the lover is quaking in his boots on the way over, positive the husband knows, when he passes the very fortune teller’s shop that reassured the woman. He decides to go see this fortune teller, who reassures him all is well, and the lover pays her handsomely, obviously relieved to know for certain that everything is okay, so he continues over to their house. And in the last line, the lover knocks on their door and is immediately murdered by the husband, because of course he is.

The way he builds the story makes that payoff incredibly, but intentionally disappointing, and I’m positive he had angry letters about it. But from my perspective it’s absolutely freaking perfect. It subverts the expectations you build up through the story, and it might be initially a little disappointing but it’s also completely logical when you think about it.

So yeah, no, I don’t really care if people hate my writing. There’s always another book out there, so you always have another opportunity to find a story you’ll truly enjoy.

I’m kind of the worst person to ask this, because I routinely do this and don’t give a single (pirate ghost). It helps that most of the characters I play are either Hunters or Tanks, which can usually muscle their way through if they’re undergeared.

That said, usually each patch has its own catch up mechanism for item level and whatnot with the patch, even if it’s just suffering real bad through the first handful of story quests until you get a better weapon. I don’t think it makes sense to resub early if you just want to jump into 9.2 ASAP, but if you want to experience a taste of 9.1.5, knock yourself out.

While I’m a vegetarian, if they made SI Sefin into sashimi I’d probably indulge just this once.

So if there were a reliable source for extensive leaks, which would have enough information to lay out the entirety of an expansion bullet point by bullet point, I’d think there would be information a little bit more seismic they’d also have access to.

In other words, funnily enough, I feel like this latest announcement kinda cut off the usual flow of semi-credible fanfiction painting itself as leaks at this point in the development cycle. I do think Dragon Isles are the bang-on Vegas odds favorite, and I’d be completely down with that as an expansion. Dragons are the kind of high fantasy I just think are sorta neat.