The third WoW Midnight animated short introduces us to the “Son of Two Worlds,” Arator the Redeemer

In the weeks leading up to the launch of World of Warcraft‘s newest expansion, Midnight, we’ve gotten a peek into the trials and tribulations of some of the important characters we know play a role in the expansion — first Xal’atath, the instigator of the whole expansion, then Lady Liadrin, the very first character we see in Midnight‘s cinematic. This week, we get to learn a little more about one we haven’t seen as often — Arator, usually named with his full epithet “the Redeemer,” son of Alleria Windrunner and Turalyon and star of his very own zone-sized leveling path in Midnight itself. There’s been a pretty big push of Arator as a character leading up to the expansion, such as taking the leading role in the tie-in novel Blood Ties, and we’ve even got an explainer on all you need to know about the Redeemer going into Midnight. You may still want to read it after watching this video, in fact.

For some reason, unlike some of the others, this video falls a little flat. Maybe because of the immediate insistence of shoehorning the Light vs. Dark struggle into his backstory — Arator has not always “felt divided between worlds, with a father who served the Light and a mother who chose to embrace the Void,” and it doesn’t make any sense to say so; it’s been barely eleven years in-game since Alleria and Turalyon returned to Azeroth, and it’s not like Alleria was slinging around darkness-fueled powers when he was a baby. The other parts of his upbringing are much more compelling — the terrible fates of the Windrunners, living with his aunt while his parents were off fighting a thousand-year existential war in space, swordplay training with Lor’themar himself, being turned away from the practice of the Light by Liadrin, feeling torn between his Elven sides and Human sides.

However, some parts of this video that remind us of more recent events do point towards interesting upcoming story developments. “Son of Two Worlds” shows us an Arator that both desperately wants to live up to parents so famous they had statues in the entryway of Stormwind — he even states in his own words that he became a Paladin simply because Turalyon was a Paladin, to walk in his footsteps, but it wasn’t enough. Despite a pair of frankly lousy absentee parents, Arator’s turned out to not be half-anything — but what exactly is the whole man? This is the kind of story beat you can look forward to in Midnight while you’re questing with Arator, and these kind of smaller personal stories are the ones I’ve always thought WoW is pretty good at telling. While this cinematic wasn’t my favorite of the three, I look forward to what it means for Arator in the future.