#it just managed to have one of the absolute worst lore fuckups in the entire game?? that they COMMITTED to???? bafflement

[worldguardian]

@landscapingfan said: was there a mistake in CoM? i wasn't aware of that (but im also not hugely informed about it, i only played it once)

so CoM had a lot of goofiness in it, largely people acting very out of character and also the fact that the player character didn’t really need to be involved at all but much of the OOC-ness can be put down to a combination of the writers having to try and distribute dialogue evenly amongst every character, thus no single character really got to have a properly big, fleshed out speaking role (aside from azzy, zaros, and arguably kharshai),

and also the fact that two of those aforementioned major characters were probably not in the best place mentally for the duration. zaros having to recall the betrayal and azzy having to not only relive that through their bond, but also literally relive it through divination memory shit wouldn’t have been the greatest time for them, ya dig!

but anyway i’m blathering. i could talk a lot about CoM.

the big “mistake” in CoM was, like i sort of mentioned, something that you could actually work with. you could either ignore it outright or find other things in-canon to explain it with to make it Less Stupid.

the mistake was two-fold: the reveal that zamorak had been there personally when seren came to the mahjarrat posing as mah and taught them the rituals. right from the off, this reveal COMPLETELY fucks the timeline of mahjarrat history. it makes zamorak - and by extension, almost every other mahjarrat, because zamorak is one of the oldest - either WAY older or WAY younger (we’ll get to that) than you would otherwise suspect. this also naturally necessitates that azzy was there for this moment as well, since he’s The oldest.

first of all, the idea that any currently living mahjarrat was alive for this thing that supposedly happened so far in their culture’s past that none of them even believe mah is real anymore is just capital-f Fucking Stupid. this cultural turning point that shaped their entire history and put them down the path of becoming the bloodthirsty, violent, warlike species that they are today? the thing that happened so far into their species history that it’s literally part of their own creation myth by the present day?

nah lmao not only did that happen within living memory, it didn’t even happen within living memory of the oldest member of their species, because:

BILRACH WAS THERE TOO.

this is the second part of this mistake, and instead of being the result of just not thinking the implications of things through like the first bit, this part is directly because of NOT KNOWING THEIR OWN FUCKING LORE.

everything wrong with “zamorak was there when seren taught them the rituals” so far can either be ignored or teeth-grittingly headcanoned into making sense. but the mere addition of bilrach popping in to say “hey i remember that shit too! i was there!” fucks it ALL THE WAY INTO THE STRATOSPHERE

why?

because bilrach is one of the youngest mahjarrat! in mahjarrat memories, bilrach is described as being young by the time of the move to gielinor. combine this with khazard probably being the only mahjarrat born on gielinor, and that makes bilrach like, the second or third-youngest mahjarrat!

so if he was there too then this shit happened like barely ten thousand years ago! so not only is zamorak way younger than you’d think, but so is azzy, the guy who’s so brain-breakingly old that even the other mahjarrat find his age incredible!

WHAT THE FUCK!

there is seriously so much that this one singular decision fucks up that i could keep at this for several paragraphs more but i’ll spare you because god damn. unfortunately they hardcore doubled down on this in future updates in way that made it CATASTROPHICALLY MORE STUPID because this one flub makes anything else based on it go to shit

end rant

[shallow-wordsalad]

reading recent stories of Magic: The Gathering's lore has reminded me of the importance of avoiding the Idiot Ball when writing. the latest two chapters of Phyrexia: All Will Be One's story have been a sequential and rapid passing of the Idiot Ball from Kaya to Kaito to Elspeth and it lead very quickly to the villain getting what they wanted through no action of their own. we did a whole thing about going to the past, getting in contact with the person who originally beat Phyrexia, getting an extra copy of the ultra-bomb he used to destroy them, and bringing it all the way to New Phyrexia's portal-opening magic god-tree before Kaya went "hey what if this explosion hurts someone innocent". somehow that one freaking sentence was enough for Kaito to go "hey yeah wait this is a bad idea we shouldn't do this", and Jace - poor friggin' Jace - was just flabberghasted and left holding the bag going "buh - w, wait, hold on, we're already here, we HAVE the bomb, we're good to go!" but, nah, Kaya and Kaito made their moral decision in a split second and by god they're going to defend it come hell or glistening oil. and then, as if that's not bad enough, Elspeth catches up with them after Jace manages to finally activate the Sylex - doing the thing they were trying to do at the start of this entire extremely-lethal excursion - and SOMEHOW knew there was some kind of moral debate happening and that she disagreed with Jace. so he gets freaking stabbed, and she disappears with the bomb to blow it up somewhere else - somewhere where a lot more innocents are likely to get caught in the crossfire. or, since she took it to the Blind Eternities, possibly WAY WORSE - the entire argument was about not knowing if the Sylex's blast-radius could cross the Blind Eternities, so I guess we're gonna fuck around and find out? nice work fellas, we blew up innocent people and didn't even graze the robo-zombies we wanted to blow up in the first place. the same robo-zombies who are about to spread all over the Multiverse and kill everyone anyway.

I don't mind the villain winning, but the state of things in MtG's lore is such that Elesh Norn conquering the Multiverse is really more a testament to the absolute idiocy of the heroes than the ruthless efficacy of Phyrexia. it reads less like a masterstroke of villainous planning, or even just one crucial mistake at the worst moment, more like a D&D party who just couldn't get their shit together for so long that the DM just called it off with Rocks Fall Everyone Dies. this was a series of colossal fuckups and leaps of unfollowable logic, and somehow in pre-written story, someone managed to metagame information they shouldn't have had.

seriously, this? "Somehow, in that moment, she understood everything—what Jace had resolved to do, what was about to happen not just to Mirrodin but to the Multiverse itself. Elspeth saw, with perfect clarity, what needed to be done." this is garbage. yeah, SOMEHOW, Elspeth knew all this very specific stuff that everyone else only had just guessed at two seconds ago, and only decided upon one second ago. what do we need Jace for anyway, Elspeth is clearly some kind of mind-reading precognitive psychic on the level of someone reading a script a page ahead.

jesus christ. if you're going to have doubt and infighting among your protagonists, at least have it make sense. these idiots had an entire plot arc to think about the consequences of the Sylex's use, and only decided to question it at the very-literal last second with the worst conclusions possible. it not only cost the heroes a victory, but it cost the integrity of the story as a whole. this sucks.