The Queue: Well, at least it’s Friday edition

Somehow Friday always sneaks up on me, is always a surprise. What happened to the rest of the week, I don’t know… but once again it’s Friday. Time to celebrate another week survived and answer some of your questions about World of Warcraft (and anything else).

Let’s Queue.

Transmog is the true endgame.

It really doesn’t take much to encourage me to go farm transmog gear, and sometimes you just want to go back to basics with those classic looks. I’d honestly been thinking about starting a bunch of alts purely to run through starting zones and collecting starter gear, but now that I know I can just buy starter gear I’m going to be all over that. I bet I can come up with an awesome transmog look based around the green and gold Blood Elf starting zone armor.

And actually I’m already hanging on to some white items I’ve picked up in Dragonflight just so I can add them to my transmog collection. I love having options, and this gives us all sorts of new options.

Sometimes things just happen because the story. Since the story was so completely focused on Illidan, it probably just would have been weird to drop in some random names for his parents and then moved on without meeting them again. None of the generic elf characters in that cinematic had names — they were purely there as set dressing, to support the story of Illidan.

Of course, the typical video game hero story sets this up neatly by having everyone’s parents’ be dead. Less character background to come up with, fewer character complications to deal with. How many people in Warcraft have parents? There are a few but not many. Jaina was estranged from her mother for most of WoW’s history and her father is dead; Anduin’s mother died before WoW and his father died recently; Thrall’s parents are dead (though he has a ghost mom); Tess has a father but it’s Genn Greymane and just don’t get me started on that; Arator has parents but they abandoned him to go fight an epic war against the Burning Legion. And don’t forget that Wrathion’s entire character is centered around his entire family being dead.

I’m sure there are many more that just aren’t coming to mind, but having dead or absent parents is kind of a thing. It wouldn’t be weird for Illidan’s parents to be dead, even by the time we meet baby Illidan in this cinematic. In fact, that would be kind of on par.

But everyone had a family at some point, and there will always be character stories that arise from those relationships. We are all of us products of our experiences, shaped by every relationship. It’s odd that Illidan’s parents never got so much as a nod of acknowledgement when the story actually took the time to go all the way back to his birth.

But here is my tinfoil hat theory. The story we see in Legion isn’t necessarily what actually happened. It’s what happened as presented by Xe’ra, who is Illidan’s biggest fan ever.  All she ever wants to do is talk about Illidan. It’s Illidan this, Illidan that, won’t you travel across continents so we can talk about Illidan? She only cares about Illidan, so the vision we see is also only concerned with Illidan, and leaves almost everyone else to fade into the background. This is Xe’ra’s fanfic of a world that revolves around Illidan, and in this world nothing else matters.

I also just reached True Friend status with Wrathion, and next week I’ll start putting effort directly into earning reputation with Sabellian. I also don’t trust either of these characters farther than I can throw them (and I don’t think I could throw a full-sized or even Wrathion-sized dragon very far). Wrathion has betrayed us repeatedly for what he perceives as the good of Azeroth and I perceive as Wrathion being an idiot. And we just don’t know Sabellian very well yet. We met him in Outland where he was kind of a pushy jerk, and after all these years he’s returned to Azeroth claiming he’s cleansed the corruption without any further explanation.

Okay, sure, just a couple of expansions ago we were all wearing as much Old God corrupted gear as we could find — until we literally glowed red with corruption — but when it comes to the Black Dragonflight, corruption is concerning.

I don’t trust Wrathion because I know him too well, and I don’t trust Sabellian because I don’t know him well enough. But, as the saying goes, keep your friends close but your enemies closer. I’m going to become BFFs with both of these guys in order to keep a close watch on them, so hopefully I’ll be ready when it comes time for their sudden yet inevitable betrayal.

Well, I was having a good day and getting through my to-do list, but now I’m worried about the possibility of tiny spiders raining down on me for no apparent reason, which I didn’t even realize was an option before now.

So the day is going downhill.

And that’s all for now my friends. I hope you have a very good Friday the the 13th on today, and take the opportunity to pet a black cat. (Or any cat. Or dog. Or really any pet at all. If you see one, you should pet it.) I’ll see you back here next week!