#mop remix

[rebcebab]

So this is why they took out all his quests

[mikaila-orchard]

Sylvaina pet peeve: The Alliance Favoritism.

So I figured now would be a good time to air this particular grievance now that MoP Remix is reminding people of the Purge of Dalaran and leave them thinking, "Jaina, what the fuck!?"

So a lot of Sylvaina content kind of mirrors official WoW content in that there is an obvious Alliance favoritism there (if not a concrete Jaina favoritism). Jaina's feelings and internal struggles take up the vast majority of the stories. Sylvanas is the one who has to work on herself and feel worthy of Jaina's love, and so much of the supporting cast of these stories includes the Alliance Leadership and/or the Blood Elves. Other characters from the Horde races barely show up at all. FR, think of how many Sylvaina stories you've read where Anduin was in the supporting cast as opposed to, say, Thrall?

Hell, the Forsaken, Sylvanas' people, barely show up in these stories other than the non rotting, still sexy, Darkfallen characters. I can think of exactly one Sylvaina story that even insinuated that Jaina had anything of a rapport with Apothecary Faranell. And holy fuck, the number of fics that try and scapegoat Nathanos as Sylvanas' enabler and have him killed off because of it. They are so quick to separate Sylvanas from one of her only canonical sources of emotional support.

Speaking of the Purge, think of how many times in a Sylvaina Sylvanas is raked over the coals for Teldrassil by all parties, but then proceed to never bring up the Purge. Ever. They don't even account for the idea that Sylvanas might take issue with even dating someone with so much Sin'dorei blood on their hands. The blood of the people she fought and died to defend. Killed by the Lich King's former boo. That doesn't account into their writing at all because they either didn't know the Purge even happened before writing, or just decided it wasn't important because Jaina didn't suffer consequences for it.

These trends are unfortunately prevalent in this ship, but that just makes the stories that don't do this stand out a lot more. There are Sylvaina stories with a healthy balance of Horde and Alliance characters, don't forget that Sylvanas rules over the Forsaken, and treat her and Jaina's actions equally. And they're some of the best stories this ship has ever seen.

I just wish we got more of them.

[thaidakar-is-hot]

:|

[lgorstheme]

Went to Neverest and smoked some Kun-Lai kush with the grummles. Had to burn my fingerprints off in the campfire. The Shado-Pan will not find me.

[archdruidlumi]

[nraqi]

no. mr lorewalker i am DONE with being sad over anduin stop hurting me

[dretanya]

Playing MoP Remix and I finally realized... after the first time a Horde player sees the Sha manifest in a living being (the alliance captain), Nazgrim tells Taran Zhu "Help us rout [the Alliance] from your land, and your kind can stand tall and proud with the Horde!" with a big emphasis on proud. Taran Zhu replies "My people have stood tall without you for thousands of years." - no mention of pride, obviously knowing about all the different Sha. Then months later, Garrosh is infested by the Sha of Pride. Actually very good and subtle foreshadowing, in my opinion.

[ansu-gurleht]

i want to add a little bit of the backstory i've come up with for my mop remix hunter, ylmuzdri!

(apologies for shitty cropped screenshot)

she is a man'ari eredar who only recently (begrudgingly) joined the alliance via the draenei. she used to be a tracker for the burning legion, and oftentimes was tasked directly with hunting down draenei exiles. but her group of lost man'ari joined the draenei so she didn't have much choice but to follow along. velen himself upon meeting her knew she still had hatred in her heart, so when it came time for her to adventure in azeroth via the timeways, he recommended she try the pandaria campaign, hoping that she would mellow out somehow through contact with the pandaren. and as it so happened, she was contacted by eternus not long after to invite her to an...accelerated course through the campaign, seeing as she was already a rather skilled huntress. she took the offer, partially because she didn't think velen's plan to mellow her out would work, and wanted to get it over with.

several, SEVERAL pandaren beers later, she mellowed out.

[noonmutter]

bit of a rant about Mists of Pandaria Remix below, skip this if you don't want to read what's mostly just me venting about some stupid shit the team did years ago. this involves minor spoilers about plot points that are largely irrelevant to the overall story but if you wanna be surprised you'd prolly be mad at me for mentioning

so I'm running through MOP Remix just like a huge chunk of WoW players right now, right

and this was the expac that'd come out before the expac I joined the game in, which was WoD. The Tanaan patch of WoD. I joined during an objectively awful part of WoW. People had a habit of singing MoP's praises (at least for the story) a lot in comparison to WoD, although the bar wasn't very hard to clear.

So I played MoP's story as a character that vastly outleveled it and didn't have to gear up and grind my way through it, and I had the same general experience as most new players did, which was constantly wondering what I was missing because a few fairly significant story beats were relegated to happening in novels or just had cinematics that weren't accessible in the game anymore, shit like that

and I remember actively avoiding the main alliance v. horde plot because I really didn't care, I wanted to see what the Shaohao stuff was about, because man those cinematics were gorgeous (and at the time, unique to MoP; they hadn't gotten lazy and reused the art style for Diablo 3 where it didn't belong yet). I wanted to know what those were about and how they expanded! And gosh, that was great and rewarding! Wow!

so in Remix, I'm running ALL the storylines, because every quest rewards a buttload of bronze and stuff, and gimme gimme gimme, I wanna collect all the cool shit.

but oh. my GOD.

I can't even evaluate the story from a watsonian perspective, where I look at the actions the characters take and their political ramifications and whether X person made the right call or if Y could've stopped this other thing if they'd just found the magic doodad or whatever. I simply can't. It's all written in such a hamfisted, "we don't understand politics or what actually causes systemic hatred or bigotry or the general concept of moral nuance" way that I cannot evaluate the characters because the writing is just not good enough to stay immersed in it when big plot points hit.

I can't sit here and compare Jaina's stupid murderous kirin tor rampage with Garrosh's Anything At All because I'm too busy thinking about all the ways both of them were poorly written into their respective story beats.

The Alliance and Horde stories do not depict the same events. An Alliance player sees the Horde do things that Horde players never even hear about, and vice versa. And it's not minor stuff. Alliance players do not experience an Alliance airstrip being built in one part of the Jade Forest, where they take Pandaren slaves--including children--to do it. We don't see it, we don't hear about it, it's never referenced even as a throwaway line later on. It's just a thing that happens completely in a vacuum. When I encountered this event in the Horde storyline, it was so unknown to me as an Alliance player that I went looking for the air strip and was surprised to actually find it accessible on the map. I fully expected it to actually not exist, phased or some shit, if you weren't Horde. That's how divergent it was. And that's bad. That's not like 'ooh wow what a twist,' that's 'who the fuck directed this?'

Remix really shines a spotlight on how immature the writing in MoP got, because it shows a fundamental lack of comprehension of the basic concept of equivalence. We didn't need to see both sides take slaves in order to accept that they were both equally morally wrong for perpetuating a racially-motivated war; they've already been doing awful shit to one another for years prior to the expansion that was good enough to showcase it. We especially did not need to not see our own side take slaves in order to stir up more hate against the other faction.

If that event needed to be included in the game so bad, it absolutely should've been something Alliance players found too. We should've been faced with the idea that xenophobia, zealotry, and hatred were not relegated to The Other Guy and that the guys who looked like us and wore our colors could be monstrous bastards, too. It would've played beautifully into the general theme of Pandaria.

But that writing team failed to do that at every opportunity, and given how beautiful and poignant other chunks of the story (the parts largely divorced from AvH) were, I can't think it's because the team itself was incompetent. It stinks of executive meddling and the kind of mentality that led to shit like the "build an entire expansion just to justify this cool image I have of Sylvanas burning down Teldrassil" incident.

It's just so disappointing to go through it and see it and be able to point a big neon arrow at it and go "this right here was a dev team actively encouraging its player base to actually hate each other" which is very different from encouraging competition. Even though the overarching theme of Pandaria was learning to let things go and swallow your pride before it destroys everything you care about, the actual plot frequently made the players experiencing it hate each other as people.

and I think that might very well have been an underlying point of Remix. because man does it make me appreciate the current story team even more than I already did.

[displacer-beasts]

is.... is that a painting of Anduin in Scholomance?

[rebcebab]

It wasn’t fully his fault tho’ I just really wanted to draw this meme

Absolutely brilliant original meme is by the wonderful @myszkaa please please please show some love in the links below!!!! https://x.com/sweepswoop_/status/1813707550493483334 https://www.tumblr.com/myszkaa/757534969372557312/thought-tumblr-would-like-to-see-it-here

[its-fjori]

It's finally over, got everything I wanted out of Remix

[thaidakar-is-hot]

Wrathion is a bit confused by the father/son bonding moment and infuriated by this persons onsie.

[ariviadraws]

In memory of MoP: Remix

A quick and messy comic about when some random Zandalari player jumpscared me after I finished the Throne of Thunder run and my first instinct was to fight lol

Also meet my newest baby - Dark Ranger Melieth (the troll is random)

[nraqi]

marksmanship hunter skippy is at level 53 now whoo hoo‼️ my wholehearted thanks to all the overpowered toons who are leveling their alts and carrying us low levels in the process hhh

[flershnork]

So long Remix, you will be missed. Kind of.

I loved Remix but eventually I got to a point where I just wanted to move my main over to Retail again and just continue remixing it up on a different character.