The Queue: Work, work.

It’s January 2, so my nose is firmly back against its grindstone. Now, I don’t want to complain since my job is, you know, this. But still.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask the questions and we provide the answers as long as there isn’t more work needs doing.

I love public domain day. Creatives get a long life with their hopefully profitable creation, and the general public then gets to write a single paragraph of The Great Gatsby where Gatsby and Tom kiss and upload the entirety of the text to Archive of Our Own.

Also hitting the public domain this year is Call of Cthulhu by Lovecraft, The Threepenny Opera by Brecht (but I’m pretty sure all the English translations are still under copyright to their respective translators), Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and the character of Tigger, who didn’t appear until the second Pooh collection. As such, this is a good time for a reminder that Steamboat Willie didn’t wear gloves. Stay safe out there.

Aside from the novels, I don’t think we can attribute any one line in any game or cinematic to any one writer. Even if a particular writer wrote the prose or turn of phrase, especially in something as prominent as a cinematic like this, there are tons of layers of collaborative efforts, not to mention corporate signing off on the sentiment and any phrasing. The theme of redemption for bad acts — and even the repeated retcon of, “I’ve just been preparing you for the true evil I’ve foreseen” — has always been one Blizzard loves to explore. And Blizzard has categorically denied most efforts to point to any of their work as being allegorical.

Also, the general plotline of WoW has been plotted well in advance since it was clear they’d have to do repeated expansions with longer arc storylines. I wouldn’t be surprised if they knew we’d be going to the Shadowlands at the time we went to Draenor, for instance. The parallel between seeing your ancestors in the past and seeing your ancestors in the afterlife is a fairly strong one, although now that I’m thinking of it I don’t think we actually did see a lot of parallels there, and there was a lot of stickiness in terms of the mechanics of where alternate timeline dead souls go.

I do think there’s something darkly poetic about having a huge, damaging sword thrust through the core of the planet, and then having almost all the main characters shrug and either heck off for their own petty insquabbling, or worse, try to plunder that injury for profit. Meanwhile, the one dude trying to do something to stanch any of the bleeding is seen almost as comical. Maybe it’s an allegory for climate change after all?

I’m going to say two weeks, to give a nice buffer from the beginning of the year, but likewise wouldn’t be too shocked by just one.

I will say that the pace of WoW content release continues to be surprisingly breakneck compared to what I’m used to. It feels overwhelming just from a coverage perspective.

Oh, right. It’s Tuesday. Guess I’d better write the Queue.