#a lot of dragonflight was actually

[sniperct]

getting new FF14 story content so soon after I caught up to dragonflight is a kick in the gut at how much better at storytelling CBU3 is compared to blizzard lol

Gonna get a better comparison when I do the DF epilogue and the gilneas reclamation later or tomorrow lol

[nzoth-the-corruptor]

Do you think Blizzard will ever explain what Fyrakk was trying to create with the Suffusion Camps? Because the Dream Render only went into production after Vyranoth put a stop to his plan to force the Green Dragonflight to grant him entry into the Dream & he allied with the Druids of the Flame to get his ticket in.

like that entire ordeal was definitely not exclusively just to make one dinky axe he didn't even have a reason to make prior to 10.1.7.

[mbat]

saw another one of these memes the other day and had to do it with my WoW OCs, this one has the most of mine yet :p fun fact, out of the 16 shown here, only 5 of them actually use weapons that you would use to stab things with

blank version of the meme below if anyone wants to use it

[coffee-keith]

Really struggling with trying to figure out what's me. Like what I enjoy and what ideas/traits/desires are actually my own. I think it's beautiful that people influence each other and grow together, but I'm left feeling lost right now and wondering what's actually me.

[purityvalentine]

Dragons!

[goblin-enjoyer]

oh by the corpses I just seen someone on twitter point to when they added first added hats as when tf2s artstyle died. Calling tf2s artstyle beforehand "restrained 50s cold war art direction" as if it wasn't silly day one. "people rightfully shit on cod for breaking its art style but tf2 has been a mess for longer that nobody questions it" as if the game didn't have cartoony gore effects, funny voice lines and general golden comic era stupidity from as soon as it released. Im sorry but that idea of tf2 died 2 years in, even sooner if you actually look at any of the meet the team videos. and at the end of their little "thing was actually much better back in the day" speal they had the gall to go tell people to play tf2 classic. I'm sorry to people who play "classic" versions of games but why is it that whenever a bad take with someone saying that "oh the tone has been RUINED from its original light" or whatever, it's always a git who hasn't played the main game in over 10 years and stopped 2 years in. Like mate, you barely played the game! This period of time you talk about is less than a third of the games lifespan, less than even "the golden years" that the game was like in its prime. Why is the complaint with the yeti taunt glitch that a yeti is in the game as a taunt and not that the glitch exists? ugh, i need a drink. sorry for bringing twitter discourse filth here, just needed to quickly vent a little steam out me.

[dmmdipodcast]

Is there any obvious reason *why* McCaffrey included a second variety of female dragons (green) instead of just going with the idea that the gold dragons are female and all the rest are male? The greens are deliberately not allowed to reproduce, so unless it becomes a plot point somewhere, the only function of green dragons being female seems to be introducing the "(male) dragonriders frequently get really horny for each other (as a direct result of their psychically bonded soulmates wanting to have straight sex)" aspect that McCaffrey didn't actually seem to want and has all kinds of follow-on implications. (I suppose maybe she just wanted an excuse for *all* dragonriders to periodically get the super-horny-due-to-dragon-sex effect to drive the weyrs' unusual norms and didn't think through the genders, but that seems like a *really* big and hard-to-overlook detail when she made it literally all male riders other than for gold dragons.)

What an excellent question! The short answer is that no, there really isn’t an obvious reason to do that, and this is the kind of ANNE, WHY?? that made us want to start this podcast in the first place.

As for the long answer... I (Tequila) think most likely she had two competing narrative priorities and this ended up a sort of awkward compromise position

McCaffrey clearly wants Lessa to be the Only Gold Dragonrider circa the start of Dragonflight, both for Special Unique Protagonist reasons and because she wants Lessa to be very alone at the weyr at first so that she can triumph later. Having (almost) all male riders is a feature and not a bug.

Your point about Everyone at the weyr getting an opportunity to be horny. McCaffrey doesn’t want the mating flights to be unusual or up for discussion; she’s building them in as an unquestioned norm of Weyrs and part of what makes them notably distinct from Holds. This means she’s gotta have other female dragons.

There’s also the possibility that she felt it would be unbelievable to have such a drastic skew in gender ratio; diegetically, dragons were bioengineered, and green fire-lizards do lay eggs. It’s implied that green dragons could lay eggs, but chewing firestone makes that impossible, so Weyrs have deliberately chosen to keep greens in combat rather than have them reproduce—Dragonsdawn leaves it ambiguous but suggests that gold dragons were deliberately designed not to be able to chew firestone successfully, unlike greens. Sky Dragons, by Todd McCaffrey, does have green dragons laying eggs, and he "cowrote" it/consulted with Anne McCaffrey, so even though We Don’t Read Those it can give a rough sense of what she considered canonical.

Or perhaps McCaffrey wanted to emphasize how special and fancy gold dragons are by giving them a hierarchical advantage over other female dragons; she certainly seemed to replicate that in her writing about humans, where she frequently surrounds her compelling, complex female protagonists with cardboard cutout female supporting characters who range from “evil slut” to “mom” to “whiny gossip.”

Lleu points out that McCaffrey puts a lot of narrative focus on her central cast, especially in Dragonflight and Dragonquest, and doesn’t actually engage much with the background characters. She stated at one point (extradiegetically) that green dragons are 50% of the population, but if you count up the dragons we meet on the page they’d be more like 20% and most of that comes later in the series. So it’s not totally implausible that she really didn’t think about it until after Dragonflight and then she’d backed herself into a worldbuilding corner and couldn’t dig herself out!

More specifically, the moment that introduces green mating flights to the series is the beginning of Dragonquest. In the context of the book’s overarching plot, T’reb is being used to set up Kylara’s later transgression of not paying attention to Prideth and taking her out of the Weyr when she was close to mating. There’s also some Gender Politics at work here, insofar as the homophobia of the way this scene is handled (and for that matter some of the portrayal of green riders throughout the series) involves portraying gay men as effeminate—hysterical, in this case—and so distancing them from the “fully male” bronze riders Dragonflight focused on. T’reb works as foreshadowing for Kylara because he’s gay and so, in this homophobic schema, not-quite-a-man.

If we want to be generous to Anne, having the Weyrs be full of men having sex with men (especially introduced in this extremely dramatic way) also serves to really drive home how different Weyr sexual mores are from Hold and Craft ones, which we as readers expect will align with generic popular culture pseudomedieval feudalism (and which largely do so). The scene with T’reb and B’naj then also brings Weyr sexuality into the (commoner) public sphere (and this is I think a nontrivial part of what the Weyrleaders are concerned about), in keeping with the way the series as a whole is obsessed with the management of sexuality.

[deathknightrea]

I've seen a few people complaining about Anduin's new look and how he looks too "old" now, also they dont understand why he's acting so distant from his friends, so I figured I'd break it down from my perspective and a tiny bit of my own character analysis as a long time player since Lich King and have read a lot of the books. Also I'm a huge fan of Anduin as a character, so I'm sorry if it might be a bit biased.

He was 18 years old in the book Before The Strom which takes place right before Battle for Azeroth, (he probably turned 19 around the beginning of BFA) so by the end of BFA he would've been between 20 and 21 since the war was fought over 2 years. He was fighting that war while still struggling with the death of his father as well as running the Alliance and his own Kingdom. He even said he had never given himself a proper time to grieve his father's passing. If you read Before The Storm, you know all the heartbreak and disappointment he suffered in that book. Including everything that happened with Calia Menethil. (I know not a lot of people view the books as canon, but I do believe the legit Warcraft published books to be part of the Lore.)

In Shadowlands, which was stated to be over the course of 2 years as well. Anduin would've been 22 or 23 when it ended. Let's not forget that while imprisoned by the Jailer, everyone was tortured mentally and physically. Anduin obviously had the worst of it, constantly being controlled by the Jailer and the Mourn Blade and forced to do horrible things that made him feel extremely guilty and question his own heart. Let's be honest, if Arthas had been able to break free from the Jailers' influence and not fallen so far, he would be struggling just as bad as/or worse than Anduin.

We were told 5 years had passed between Shadowlands and Dragonflight so that puts Anduin around 27 or 28 years old in War Within. The biggest clue to how much Anduin has been struggling, is his sword. The first thing I noticed is that the yellow glow that for us symbolized his role as a Priest was gone. He even told Thrall there was no Light left in him. It seems he's to a point where he is giving up and still can't accept what he was forced to do in Shadowlands.

I think they did a good job on aging him in the new cinematic. He isn't the hope filled, peace seeking, bright-eyed, boy King we all knew. Now he's the war-torn, mentality struggling, man who needs help coming to peace with himself. The trauma of constant war and loss have finally caught up with him. We also don't know where he's been or what he's been up to since he left. However, just looking at the scars and cuts on his face, he's clearly been through something rough while he was away. You can feel the pain in his voice and see it in his eyes. They really did a fantastic job putting that cinematic together.

I feel like, as an Alliance players and due to the connection our characters have had from quest lines and side Quests over the years with Anduin, through Pandaria to Shadowlands, we will be doing a lot of Quests with Anduin to help him regain his connection to the Light and bring back our Priest--but that's just a my Alliance fan heart wishing.

If you actually read all this....WOW! 😂 Thanks for reading my rambling.

[busyfish]

i posted this in friend server but i think i'll info dump here too

TRANS DRAGON

This is Soojinx/Vilogosa (like Violet)

They're a former Kirin Tor mage; last stationed at the violet hold as a warden as a semi retirement from battle.

They have spent the last thousand years mostly masquerading as a mortal, typically choosing a female quel'dorei visage to learn and practice arcana in times of war. their home was recently destroyed and they've become a bit of a nomad and has chosen to take a more draconic visage, especially after being re-united with their dragonflight (some being former clutch mates)

i've had to do some re-writes on this character because of only being recently able to actually play an actual dragon race on a mage, so a lot of this stuff is kind of old writing or still wip

anyway yeah

[wavebiders]

been playing the newest expansion and add attempting to give nuance to the "YOU NO TAKE CANDLE" critters to the list

Modern WoW is so funny. The franchise has been around for decades and is built on so many classic fantasy tropes half of which are problematic af, and they don't just wanna throw out the whole setting but the devs still try to be woke so now you get these really typical fantasy storylines but they now include the kind of subplots where you have to like. Negotiate with the queen of dragons over the rights of her servant race

[shazleen]

Help !! I need book reccs!

I’ve recently got access to Libby and other library services, and I really want to start listening to more audiobooks!

Here’s some books I have read that I do enjoy, and maybe that will help?

The Secret History ; It’s the OG and undefeated dark academia book lol

Based on a True Story ; I love adult women crimes

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep ; idk it was a good time, I like sci fi

Dragonflight / Dragonriders of Pern ; I heard there’s a benevolent AI in the later books and also like long forgotten human tech and that’s my fave thing

Yellowface ; I work in publishing i just enjoyed it, it was like reading industry drama

Circe ; it described a femininity I have never experienced but was so good

Dracula ; look we all love it actually

The Moth Diaries ; it’s good I love an obsessed and unreliable narrator

The Ace of Spades: I do read a lot of YA for work but this one with a focus away from romance and two incredibly compelling leads is just really good 😭

( I don’t read much!! )

Specific genres/ things!!:

Adult / mostly adult characters

Contemporary

Dark academia

Mystery / thriller

Sci Fi / cyberpunk, or near future

Fantasy (any, I’m open!!)

Worlds that involve long forgotten and recently rediscovered technologically advanced civilisations

Secret societies, cults and sacrificial lambs

I of course generally prefer books that center women, poc & lgbtq characters!!

Thank you u_u feel free to send me asks or replies!!

[silriven]

Thoughts on the Badlands Campaign

So I finally got around to playing the Badlands storyline for myself. I went into this thinking "oh, maybe I'm reading way too much into the quest text, maybe when I play it myself, I'll see why everyone tends to find Rhea the sympathetic one in the story here."

I'm here to report that, uh, no, when I was the one actually taking eggs from the imprisoned mother and then murdering both her and her children in game, I found it just as impactful. Maybe a little more. We do some really despicable things for "the greater good" here.

The black dragon body count racked up by you, the player character, in this questline is thirty-six: 12 darklight soldiers, 22 whelps, Velarok, and Nyxondra. Alliance characters get a trio of enthusiastic dwarf sidekicks to help us with some of this.

The saddest part about playing this, for me, was realizing that when Rhea sends you after the escaped Nyxondra, you find her circling above her brood. So her first act of freedom was to go to the surviving experiments to try and protect them. You then kill 12 for the quest.

Another sad thing is her one line of dialogue, which is also the last thing she ever says: "My kin won't forget what you've done! We will rage, mortals!" Have her kin actually forgotten? We don't know, because so far, none of the black dragonflight have brought this up.

(There are these lines from the recent "Misfit Dragon" quest line with Wrathion and Vyranoth in patch 10.2, though, which I still love. It's a stretch, but it could be a nod to a lot of Badlands story things, including this, so there's that at least.)

All of this is on top of the suffering endured by Nyxondra "off-screen" as Rhea forced her to lay eggs while she was an invisible prisoner trapped within eyeshot of her unaware kin ("right in the middle of their breeding grounds"). It's unknown for how long.

One last interesting thing that stood out to me was that Rhea refers to herself "an envoy of Alexstrasza herself", so I think it's not a question of "if" Alex knew about this but "how much" did she know.

There's also a very dark joke about draconic diplomacy somewhere in here

The part of the quest that I think is really most affecting is when Rhea seems to have an epiphany and realize the extent of the pain that she's caused, but then she immediately doubles down on the excuse that Nyxondra's sacrifice "was necessary." Nyxondra, of course, seems to disagree strongly. Her free will has been taken from her by Rhea, she has no agency in this situation.

After this, Rhea sends a Champion out to "put her out of her misery," like she's a wounded animal. It's barbaric.

Then there's this line: "The Red Dragonflight is as benevolent as it is powerful." This is the final bit of salt in the wound. The Red Dragonflight was anything but benevolent in this quest. I think the only way you could come to that conclusion is if you see the corrupted black dragons as not only past the point of saying, but as lesser beings who are disposable, whose pain is some kind of comeuppance for having succumbed to the Old Gods.

It's another case in World of Warcraft of corruption being associated with moral "badness" by the narrative. The narrative in this game constantly implies that the dragons who succumb to corruption do so because they have some kind of moral failing or moral weakness. The narrative tells us that black dragons "deserve" not just to be killed but be made to suffer for their madness and for the actions they took while under the Old Gods' influence.

Rhea even says this somewhat explicitly: Nyxondra supposedly deserves what Rhea is doing to her because of what her flight did to Alexstrasza. Her suffering isn't just the consequence of cold science being done to save the future of the black dragonflight, it's deliberately retributive.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, just kind of wanted to talk again about how (intentionally or not) Wrathion's origin story is dark as hell.

[breadknight-likes-things]

My Unease Over The War Within Was Wrong

I'm always excited for new World of Warcraft expansions. It doesn't really matter what the pitch of them are, I'll always be excited to play more of my favorite game. That said, I was wary about The War Within. My worries were fairly simple, caves and underground areas in video games tend to be some of my least favorite parts, so an expansion pack based entirely on that, to varying depths, literally, seemed like it could go wrong in a few ways. Thankfully, it was me who was wrong in this assumption. In my head, I viewed a worst case scenario of basically every zone in The War Within being something akin to Dragonflight's Zaralek Cavern. I liked Zaralek, but I was worried that I would be asked to explore Zaralek four more times in one expansion. Caves can look varied, but I assumed that I'd grow tired of being underground all the time. This was unfounded, because The War Within takes the concept of a cave in three wildly different directions that deftly averts the issues I thought I would have with this concept. The only zone in War Within that seems to give off "traditional cave" vibes is The Ringing Deeps, but that zone averts most issues I could find with that by emphasizing the greenery in this underground setting. Its low ceiling does make me feel claustrophobic, but I feel that's the point of that area, it is supposed to be a large mine, after all. Hallowfall and Azj-Kahet fare even better with their approaches to underground zones, both in different directions. Azj-Kahet feels just about as underground as you can imagine. It's a wide, multi layered zone, with a lot to explore and a lot to see, but it feels like this is a place that hasn't seen the light of the sun since it's beginning. It's grimy, dark, and it feels haunted. It's a horror centric design, which WoW isn't a stranger to, but it's one of the best realizations of a zone that's meant to feel scary in the long history of this game. Meanwhile, Hallowfall is the exact opposite. I could go on at length about Hallowfall. Even though the story of the zone makes the dangers clear, and the heavy foreshadowing of what exactly that Crystal is doesn't paint a great picture of the future, Hallowfall feels safe. The glow from the giant Crystal is as bright as the sun, and it doesn't go out. It can be the actual middle of the night, and the zone feels like it's a comforting afternoon. The use of clouds along the roof of the cave helps to the sell the idea of an underground sky, and at all times you really do feel like you're outside, not miles under the ground. The areas in War Within are far more varied than my apprehensions going into this expansion led me to feel, and I'm excited for these new areas to grow on me. I won't lie, I greatly miss the Dragon Isles already, that place felt like a new world, but I long accepted that I wouldn't be seeing a repeat of that level of wonder right away with this expansion. As of right now, I'm just happy to see where the new vibes take me. I'm always excited for new World of Warcraft.

[voidsentprinces]

Look...I want to like Warcraft. Like I grew up playing Warcraft 2 all the time then Warcraft III and then WoW for a time but like between WoD and bits of Legion and a lot of BFA and all of Shadowlands. Blizzard kind of has a long standing track record of things that are cool as concepts and on paper but they just suck at executing well. And like...maybe except Legion. The ends of WoD, BFA, and Shadowlands and I guess Dragonflight's actual story? Were clusterfucking trainwrecks that either seemed too little or too much being pushed through a narrow hole.

So excuse me if I am not really brimming with enthusiasm over this new trilogy they are putting together. Which is now being labelled another final battle after they just got done trying to convince us all that Shadowlands and Mr. Clean was the true final battle of Warcraft 1 - BFA. And it all feels like the Star Wars fandom after Rise of Skywalker. You've just had this colossal failure and no matter how much Mandalorian or Acolyte or Ahsoka or Andor you put out. Its now over shadowed by the mountain of wreckage that now has a single rug thrown over it.

Blizzard is good at concept. Starcraft II's stuff with the Xel'naga was cool as a concept, Diablo III's whole daughter of Diablo was cool as a concept followed by Lilith was neat as a concept, Overwatch II where you may of gotten a PvE storyline that they had been building for the last 8 years was cool as a concept (even if they never fucking delivered that), Heroes of the Storm was a pretty cool concept (until they tried to build an Esport around it and crashed and burned), Hearthstone IS cool as a concept (though maybe they should cutdown on the card bloat), and now WoW's new expansion trilogy is cool...as a concept. But I don't trust it any further than I can break into Microsoft and throw its CEO.

Feel like WoW is now a good playground to get a group of friends together and go off the vibes of the beginning of an expansion and ignore everything else that follows.

[eluviannaa]

Sketches from this week's Umbral pages - Elu's parents, Dacian and Tavora 💜💜

Dacian inspired Elu's love of archaeology and I went around looking for Reliquary camps in-game as inspiration for a lovely flashback moment/landscape.

There are so few camps but maybe I'll end up drawing the one in the Badlands one after all. I do want to check out what's in Tanaris still but a lot of their presence is implied? That makes for good choices in what to draw, but I was actually surprised there wasn't more pre-Legion.

Though I really love their collab with the Explorer's League in Dragonflight. And then there's the Azerothian Archives gahh amazing.

I hope we get more things like that in The War Within!

[skymagpie]

The War Within SPOILERS and the discussion around [redacted]'s death

This will be spoiler heavy and below the cut I will not be censoring [redacted]'s name so proceed with caution. I am mostly going to discuss theories, reactions, wishful thinking and the such. Feel free to add or discuss!

As a lot of us who saw the leaks know, it is implied that Khadgar dies in the opening of The War Within, in the pre-patch story. The implication comes from the fact that we see Dalaran destroyed and the placeholder for the cutscene says that the rest of the cast takes a moment for Khadgar.

Now I expected Khadgar to die in the World Soul Saga. They kept hinting how they will make us sad, Chris Metzen has been taking classes from the Game of Thrones writing school in the late years and the community was out for blood because Dragonflight was Oh So Disney!!! To add to that, Khadgar kept acting like he is on death's door in both Shadowlands and Dragonflight, which is the weakest form of foreshadowing a character death possible. Also he is 54, he isn't even old.

However what I didn't expect is to be right at the opening quest of The World Within. I expected either here or maybe in the following expacs, maybe at the last fight, but not at the opening. And the death being here is actually my problem with it.

Theory on how it might go down ->

If you watch PlatinumWoW's video on the alpha, it seems that Magni Bronzebeard goes into another coma and we bring him to Dalaran to nurse him back to health. There are some other characters present.

Afterwards we end up on the shore with The Chamber of the Guardian (where we nursed Magni back to health) in pieces. And we fight Xal'atath's nerubians. Afterwards comes the screenshot from above where the main cast seems to mourn Khadgar.

The most obvious and cliche way this will go down is that:

We tend to Magni

We learn something about Xal'atath from Alleria and/or Khadgar

She suddenly attacks

We defend the city and fail

Khadgar does a heroic sacrifice, ensuring our escape and losing his life in the process. This plays in a pre-rendered cutscene much like Varian's on Broken Shore.

Once we arrive at the beach there is a Animated Real-Time Cutscene as described above where everyone mourns him.

Alleria makes it her mission to hunt down Xal'atath because Khadgar is one of her closest friends. Their beef is personal (and I get it, I am with Alleria).

Theories and wishful thinking

-> Now for the theories, please do know that Khadgar is my favourite WoW character and there is a lot of bias in what I hope might happen, so I will list them just in case.

The death might be a fake-out. We might not see him die on screen (though this depends on the pre-rendered cinematic I believe is missing) and we assume he has died in the explosion or whatever broke The Chamber of the Guardian. We mourn him and near the end of the Expansion he will appear just in the nick of time. Here he might actually die, but that is another discussion.

Khadgar openly decides to port Dalaran elsewhere or we see him be swallowed by the void and ported elsewhere himself. He is not dead, but we do not know of his fate and neither do the main characters, so they take a moment to mourn. This also adds to Alleria's personal beef with Xal'atath even if Khadgar doesn't die. Saving him from whatever fate befell him can also add to this.

They actually take a moment for him because he is somewhere and not dead (not likely, but I have to throw it in here).

Discussion

I won't lie, I think if it goes down how I suspect it will, it will be horrible. I don't know if Chris Metzen and the writers are under the impression that Tirion's and Vol'jin's deaths were good because they weren't. They were pointless Game of Thrones-esque shock value so people will not whine that this game doesn't kill enough characters.

This game has had it's fair share of good character deaths and it's fair share of horrible character deaths. Varian, for example, had a good death. His death was given the weight it deserved, he went out as a badass and he got a whole rendered cutscene. Not to mention he had narrative build up, he learned the lesson his son was trying to teach him right at the end and he knew that his time as leader is over and this world needs a king like Anduin now. Tirion was disrespected. Metzen and the writers must be out of their mind if they think the community found Tirion's death as anything other than stupid and funny, because that's all it was.

So if Khadgar earns this death, it will truly be stupid. I have no problem with characters dying, I have a problem with pointless deaths just so annoying youtubers will think that we are finally having AN EPIC STORY because you know, the years are 2011-2019 and we still think Game of Thrones is peak writing.

Khadgar's death here will not have any narrative build up - let's be real, Khadgar wasn't a character in the previous 3 expansions so killing a character that is narratively "cold" is not going to have an emotional impact on people. Varian was very present in the story when he died.

I think a far better way to handle this is if we have this scenario, have Khadgar's death be a fake out and then have him die in the 3rd act of the expansion. This way there will be narrative build up and it will lull us in the false sense of security that Khadgar cannot die, only to then shock us when he does. This will really break the feeling of "hope" we might build up and truly achieve a feeling of dread and defeat.

They already tried writing death at the beginning of a story and just rehashing Broken Shore won't make Tirion and Vol'jin's deaths any less stupid. Khadgar is a beloved character, he isn't someone you should kill at the start of a story. No matter how symbolic you think it is that he dies along with The Chamber of the Guardian, none of it ties back to any of his previous and good stories, from The Last Guardian and all the way to Legion.

So while as a writer I want to remain realistic and know that probably my favourite character will get bagged, a part of me hopes that the writers are a bit better than this and that they won't give us another Broken Shore, but give us a meaningful character death and a worthy farewell.

It's too early to speak, so this is all speculations and I am probably not right about many things.