The Queue: We can’t escape this paradigm

Just a little Celldweller this morning.

It was actually in 1856, when Charles Sumner, an anti-slavery advocate and Senator from Massachusetts, was beaten unconscious with a walking stick by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. who was angry with Sumner for a speech he’d given a few days earlier attacking slavery in Kansas that mentioned Brooks’ cousin, a US Senator.

Brooks was not really censured — he survived an attempt to oust him from the House but resigned ‘to let my constituents judge my behavior’ and was easily re-elected to his House seat. He died in 1857, and so, missed the Civil War that his actions helped cause, but he was briefly humiliated by Anson Burlingame, who deliberately talked smack about Brooks until Brooks basically blew his top and called him out. Brooks made the mistake of saying he’d fight the Representative from Massachusetts, who’d been born in New York, anywhere he chose.

Burlingame gleefully accepted and choose rifles as their weapons, and picked a locale in Canada to get around US laws against dueling. Brooks soon realized that Burlingame, a skilled marksman, was really going to blow his brains out and he canceled the duel because it would be ‘unsafe’ to travel across the Northern states to reach Canada. Burlingame therefore got to watch Brooks weasel out of a fair fight after he’d ambushed Sumner with a stick.

In case it’s not apparent, I’m on the side of Sumner here — not only was Brooks a coward who beat a man almost to death on the Senate floor after jumping him while he was seated at his desk, but he did it because he and his whole family and most of his constituents (the ones who re-elected him after the attack, remember) were terrified of losing slavery. The fact that Brooks died horribly of the Croup and Sumner lived on for decades afterwards is a small blessing, but let’s not kid ourselves. Brooks and people like him ultimately started a war that killed almost 620,000 people, and I’m angry that he managed to avoid seeing the consequences of his stupid venial brutality.

Man I don’t really get to dust off that history degree very often. Thanks!

Xal’atath is an entity that may or may not be a severed piece of an Old God — some argue that N’Zoth is a likely candidate, based on their interaction in Battle for Azeroth and her clear disdain for him in Legion. Others prefer the notion that Xal’atath is a remnant of the fallen Y’Shaarj, noting the similarity in her name to that of Xal’atoh, the Desecrated Image of Gorehowl that Garrosh Hellscream wielded while trying to channel and control the power of the Heart of Y’Shaarj.

Whatever Xal’atath’s origin truly is, the entity first appeared in historical chronicles as a wicked dagger. It was often called the Blade of the Black Empire, and it brought chaos and ruin to everyone who every wielded it — notably including Zan’do — a Gurubashi Troll who betrayed his people and awakened Kith’ix, triggering the Troll/Aqir War — and Modgud, wife of Thaurissan who used it to attack and profane Grim Batol before the Wildhammer Thane Khardos managed to fight through an entire Dark Iron Dwarf army to reach Modgud. She attempted to use Xal’atath to defend herself, only to realize the knife had decided to leave without telling her, and her protests were ineffective against Khardos’ warhammer.

During the Orc invasion of Azeroth, Xal’atath was used by a Human named Natalie Seline, who was driven mad by the blade. It twisted her desire to protect her home into a fanatic’s desire to wipe out the Orcs — all of them, children and noncombatants the same as the Horde itself — and she ended up murdered by her own followers who sought the power over shadow magic she learned from the dagger. In Legion, the PC Shadow Priest finds the blade and uses it, but manages to evade the usual fate of all who dare use Xal’atath by giving up the Artifact’s power to draw the dangerous magics out of the sword that Sargeras stabbed the planet Azeroth with in Silithus.

Xal’atath reappeared in Battle for Azeroth, somewhat miffed about that, and she managed to manipulate any players who really like eyeball hats into a dark bargain with N’Zoth, while herself getting the Old God to permanently free her from her prison in the blade. Now possessing the body of a young High Elf who’d tried to channel her power, Xal’atath departed N’Zoth’s presence and was next seen dealing with Iridikron.

The TLDR is — Xal’atath is a powerful Void entity, perhaps an Old God or a remnant of one, that is likely going to make our lives very difficult for at least one expansion to come.

So Red and Drakkenfyre had a long conversation about Anduin’s storyline in Shadowlands and it’s too long to reproduce here, but the gist of it is that Red doesn’t think Anduin was shown doing enough stuff when he was being puppeted by the Jailer and that it kept him from really buying in to the narrative. (Red, if I’m getting that wrong, please chime in below.)

For myself it comes down to three points.

1. You never know what will break a person. When someone breaks, it’s not necessarily a big blow or calamity that causes it, but often the cumulative result of blow after blow happening. After my mom died, I didn’t have a breakdown on the spot, or even for weeks afterwards — when I finally did snap, it was over a teabag I found on the floor of the kitchen.
2. Anduin was kidnapped by flying women with magical chains, dragged to the world of the dead, tortured, and then when the rest of Azeroth’s champions escaped Anduin ended up unable to do so because he drew the Jailer’s attention, which led to his recapture. Then Sylvanas and the Jailer turned him into a literal meat puppet who could only watch his own actions.
3. It feels to me like if that happened to me, even if I never was forced to do anything particularly awful, I’d probably break by the second day of being utterly unable to control my own body. Just that, not even doing anything.

This doesn’t mean that Red is wrong in feeling as he does — the narrative didn’t manage to convince him of its authenticity, the verisimilitude didn’t engage him. It’s a very subjective thing — how many horrors do you need to see someone endure or even be forced to inflict before you personally believe that they would behave in a traumatized way? Everyone has different experiences of trauma and how the breaking point can be something no one else would understand.

I mean, objectively, finding an old tea bag on the floor shouldn’t have reduced me to sobs. But it did. Sometimes we break at the smallest things.

Sadly, no, I do not know where to find appliances.

I’m not.

If the past few years have successfully hammered anything into me, it’s that simple axiom that corporations are not your friends. They are, in fact, more like tumors on our collective social body — they seek only to grow, they suck in resources and c0nvert once useful processes into toxic, ultimately deleterious expansion, and the remedy is often almost as hard to survive as the original ailment.

I think a great many of the people who work at Blizzard are really smart, creative, talented and want to make games that we enjoy. But just as we’ve seen with the Writers and Actors strikes, the people running the corporate entities that hold dominion over them do not care about making games that are good or enjoyable — they care about money, and only money. Well, okay, they also care about themselves and their own aggrandizement.

Looking back at the culture of abuse that we found out existed at Blizzard, and then seeing so many stories from other game companies like Riot, Ubisoft, any time EA gets mentioned — it’s clear that the rot is deep, and that a lot of decisions that are made about the games we play aren’t made for our benefit. Early access has been around for a while now — when Starfield dropped it had it, so don’t expect the Xbox purchase of ABK to change or cause Blizzard to stop doing that kind of thing.

It’s even more complicated because the term ‘early access’ is used differently by different companies. Like, Baldur’s Gate 3 was in Early Access for years, and actually treated it more like an extended Beta Test. 

Perhaps I have become cynical here, but I honestly believe that the majority of the people working on these games are amazing and I am in awe of them, but the people who make the decisions at the top can be more of a hindrance than a help.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Sorry, things got weird, there was a history thing up front and an anti-capitalist screed at the end, maybe I should be watchful for people with canes.