#his second in command guy. how he was immortalized by stories and whatnot

[arundolyn]

relevant to nothing, but i wanna hear your thoughts on the natlan archon quest. am i the only person who's kinda salty with how it ended? i know they can't kill off mavuika cause they wanna make the archon playable, but it felt a little too convenient to me that capitano was just there to solve the problem. maybe i'm just coping since i wanted playable capitano. just wish the whole archon quest was written differently cause i'm so indifferent to mavuika. i still think she's cool, but there could have been more. hoping they make the second act of her character quest a banger. eh maybe it's just a me issue and i'm just burnt out from all the dense lore bombs in natlan -🍵

see. listen. its really funny. cause im a fatuihater on principle. i just Havent liked them. this made me like capitano. i was SEVERELY not vibing with him when he showed up and literally went "fuck it we're doing my plan". that was just Typical Fatui Shit to me and i was already rolling my eyes and sick of it. capitano actually gained my respect by having a genuinely interesting plot purpose and actually having principles he stuck by. i fully did not buy into him being all chivalrous and just like his lackeys talked about him being because the thing with just about every harbinger and in general fatuus so far is we're told one thing and shown a whole nother. this is probably the first time we had a genuinely altruistic harbinger, and also the first time we're shown The Bad and then Actual Good. every other time its been either Good no wait theyre Bad or Bad and then Worse. cant stand childe. dottore is just flat and lame because theres no substance to it other than He Feels Like It. arlecchino could be compelling but its severely hampered for me by her lack of self awareness. her and wrio are interesting character foils but the fact that she Genuinely believes shes better than crucabena and doing something good for Her Children is just such a HARD turn off because functionally she's in the same boat but with worse and deeper emotional abuse rather than flat out violence. i wouldnt mind as much if she like. admitted this. but she truly does seem to believe grooming kids into being soldiers is good when she does it so its like... nooooo.. nope. its So clear to me narratively she doesnt actually care for anyone in the house of the hearth on an individual level so much as theyre Her Property. her pawns. if someone gets hurt theyre messing With Her. this is just neatly dressed as the whole idea of Being Family. anyway thats not the point

^ i said that like a week before actually playing the last bit of the archon quest and like. i live in a hole so i dont really know how everyone Felt about the ending by and large but like. they won me over big time with that! not only was the scene really cool and the entire concept of no matter what happened there it was going to be cheating death was REALLY sick. that was a satisfying narrative arc 100000% and it was pretty well foreshadowed. im a sucker and told myself when i started the game like a month after it came out i was GOING to like the pyro archon and natlan no matter what bc something something native american vibes and i do genuinely love mavuika and enjoy natlan so like. im for sure biased. and it made narrative sense for her not to die yet even if she had already accepted she would. its also a satisfying end for capitano cause he actually achieved his technically impossible goal. he won against death! by dying anyway! and giving all the souls he had inside him somewhere to rest!

im also super biased bc the way capitano tried to kick the door down and say HEY we're doing things my way and didnt look like he wanted to defer to the people that Lived There that he PROFESSED TO CARE ABOUT simply did not sit right with me. heavy colonizer vibes. ESPECIALLY after the reveal that everyone would functionally lose their cultural identity if he did what he intended. and saying he cared about the people and land in question. like that simply Did Not Track. first harbinger ever to sit his white ass down and listen when mavuika told him to knock it the fuck off and honestly that was so real. they didnt fully win me over pretty much until he showed up in front of ronova and i knew Exactly what i was about to happen. they started to get me around the time he showed up at the flower feather clan but i was still suspicious. unironically him dying made me like him so much more cause it was actually. like. cohesive and sensical. some parts of natlan felt like a slog up to that point for sure but that was an Extremely good payoff for some things set up since the beginning. kinda makes up for the gosoythoth fight being pretty lackluster. i had also figured ahead of time they were gonna subvert the mavuika death bit and this kinda feels like the only way it couldve been done without being a total cop out. but tbh i get it and i doubt youre the only one since natlan has been pretty unpopular for various reasons

maybe capitano being there was some degree of contrived and convenient but idk. to me it felt pretty well thought out and when you think back on certain things even before he flat out tells you what his deal is they did foreshadow the whole being a vessel for other souls thing. interesting foil with both ororon and mavuika that way. he actually felt like a driven and consistent character when i was instantly under the impression when he showed up and started throwing punches at a god that he was just gonna be another guy here serving his own mystery agenda consequences be damned but he did kinda actually back up the fact that he cared about natlan and its people as well as his homeland and its remaining inhabitants so i do have to give props for that. like extremely. maybe its cause hes one of the only harbingers who doesnt give a fuck less abt the tsaritsa idk lmao. it was kinda sweet that mavuika conceded to him after he died as a sign of respect. cause like clearly after they werent opposed they had a lot of mutual respect for each other as leaders! refreshing to have a harbinger capable of listening to other people idk the M.O. of the fatui is really just wreck shit in a foreign land until they comply rinse and repeat kinda nice that was Fully not what he was going for. felt organic

[youngster-monster]

concept: a story that’s 100% Illidan coming back (from the dead AND ten thousand years of imprisonment) and just.... having no idea what the fuck is happening

Like, magic, which he knows a lot about, suddenly isn’t the same? The blood elves happened (a nation of mages that existed for centuries, no way they haven’t made some kind of advancement in magic), and the Kirin Tor is completely new, the druid have had a few centuries to perfect their stuff as well so that’s new, plus there’s the priests, shamanism... Magic always evolve but at this point it feels like he forgot to do his homeworks and he has so much to learn yet, he keeps a runes dictionary and scribbles rituals in the margins of textbooks, mind going a hundred miles an hour as he reads new theories and wonders how they could have missed it before.

And the orcs, that’s new. Illidan doesn’t know about orcs, and he had an army of those in Outlands but he doesn’t really know about them, their story and what makes them tick. He probably got a crashcourse in the important stuff (the blood elves, the orcs and the draenei most, because he works with them, but the others to a point as well, Kael’thas probably trashtalks the seven human kingdoms when it’s late and they’re working on plans) but Illidan is a smart guy, alright? He’s a mage, he’s a scholar, he’s desperate for knowledge and power and he wants more. He looks at the humans, the fel-touched orcs and the others, the jungle trolls and their frost brethrens, the pandaren and the cursed worgens, and realizes the world got a lot larger while he was gone.

Here’s another thing that changes, one that changes quick and all the time, in eternal societies and ephemeral culture alike: language. When he gets out of his prison, he basically has the time to piece up new Darnassian slang (ten thousand years isn’t that much to the night elves but still, language change in ten human years, so ten centuries gotta be enough for immortals) from Tyrande’s fast-paced debriefing and then he’s thrown into a world he doesn’t speak the language of.

He learns Thalassian on the go, because of and thanks to the blood elves at his command. Kael’thas read enough ancient grimoires on magic to be fluent in old Darnassian, and he’s a Prince �� he’s close to fluent in every language spoken in the Alliance. So he helps, of course he does, sitting on the floor with Illidan every evening, writing unknown words with familiar letters and repeating them until Illidan can twist his tongue around the new vowels.

(A mage like him had to be a professor at the Kirin Tor, at least for a time: teaching came to be second nature to him. He knows Illidan’s kind, the brightest students of all, he was one of them, so he doesn’t give him the answer when he frowns and opens his mouth without talking, lost in too many new words. He gives him subtle nudges, some tips, never enough to feel easy; he’d lose interest if it were easy. Challenges are good, so he covers infinite patience under sarcasm and rolls his eyes at Illidan’s frustration.)

Illidan is a good student. He likes learning, he has an ear for languages and after so many years in silence he’s starving for words, more of them than he can say at once. It takes him merely weeks to get the hang of the way Tharnassian twists his mother tongue into something different, musical and bright and weird in a good way, a novelty wrapped in familarity. A few months and he’s fluent, and then he moves on to the odd hissing that makes the nagas’ language, starting with the swears Lady Vashj spits above warmaps of ever-expending Legion troops.

(She’s not much of a teacher, too busy and too detached for it, but she tolerates his few questions and eavesdropping well enough, giving him a few pointers when it looks like he’s having a hard time with the alien language.)

But those are easy, a fraction of the new way people speak to each other in this strange new world. Illidan is brought back from the dead and thrown amongst soldiers, commanders and champions, elves and pandaren and humans and whatnot. So many languages he doesn’t know yet, spending hours pretending to pour over the maps as he listen to the way common takes roots in both human and orchish and how easily trolls took to the later, compares Draenei with the way Kil’jaeden whispered in his ears and marvels at the changes and the similarities.

There’s so much that’s different it’s making him dizzy. The first time he sees a map he must be like ‘what the fuck, all of it is new??’. There are human kingdoms and yeah, the Sundering happened, he gotta get used to that. He goes over recent history and then further, and it hits him that he missed all of that. Time flows weirdly in darkness, faster and slower at once, and he had no idea of the territorial dispute between the human clans that would then unite into the kingdom of Gilneas. So much happened in so little time (the First War ushered in a new era of change, history fast and brutal in the making) but before that there was chaos as well, and there’s nothing Illidan hates more than missing on change.

So let’s talk about Illidan coming from ten thousand years of nothingness and falling into a world that’s nothing like the one he knew except for a brother who despises him and magic biting into his flesh like fish hooks. Dying and coming back a decade later, still reeling from a final hit and realizing so much changed again, seeing a map and not recognizing the world it portrays, a second Sundering he missed.

Let’s talk about Illidan, lost and found and lost again, Illidan who belongs to no era, Illidan who’s timeless and hungry for more, filling the emptiness left by years not lived with second-hand knowledge of what he missed.

Let’s talk about Illidan with only himself for company for ten centuries, Illidan who doesn’t know anything anymore except that the Legion must be stopped and then does just that, because he’s lonely and lost but he’s Illidan first and foremost, because after ten thousand years he’s the only thing that feels the same anymore and if isn’t dead yet, not for lack of trying, then that must be his destiny, and Illidan — golden-eyed and brilliant and so deadfully alone — is desperate for it.

But more than anything else, let’s talk about Illidan discovering the world changed and finding it all the better for it.

Let’s talk about Illidan discovering they finally found a cure to that one illness no magic could keep at bay, the one that spread through the night elves’ great kingdom and became a nightmare, a plague like a punishment for their many sins. Medicine became more than luck and prayers and loose leaves in a leather purse: at this point he knows those new races better from anatomy books, because those — unlike history — never twist the truth.

Let’s talk about Illidan dealing with demons in Pandaria and marveling at the native fauna, the plants he would never have dreamt of, curious as a child, half his mind calculating how easily anything could kill him and smiling all the wider for it.

Let’s talk about Illidan stumbling upon technology, steam engines and flying ships and exploding everything, Illidan learning that magic and machines are closer each day and trying to tinker with both at the same time.

Let’s talk about Illidan who’s never learned to be afraid of change, Illidan who likes knowledge more than he hates distractions, Illidan who pesters his allies about enchantments and the new techniques of weapon smiting and the inner mechanism of the draenei ships, Illidan who never take a break but scribbles questions in the corners of the reports he’s reading, wondering what kind of book he’d need to answer them and who he could send to fetch them.

Let’s talk about Illidan finding his way back to the world, one change at a time. Let’s talk about Illidan learning to love a new world rather than mourning what he’s lost, because he’ll never not die for Azeroth but now he knows what he sworn to protect.

Let’s talk about Illidan, just for a moment.