#say what you will about blizzard and warcraft and their various shitty franchises

[legend-tripper]

ugh ok i know blizzard is a shit company but they just posted an opening for a warcraft lore writer and historian temp position and im a little 👀

[redisaid]

in your honest opinion, does writing wow fic with imperfect knowledge change whether or not the fic is good. im thinking about writing some sylvaina or other wlw wow fic and uh. huh wow lore is complex. and/or difficult to parse.

I'm going to give you a bit of a controversial answer here, and perhaps not the one you're looking for, but: Yes, depending.

I'm not saying that getting into Warcraft without wading deep into twenty plus years of scattered, shitty, and retconned to fuck lore is necessarily bad, but context is needed to give you a full answer.

Are you just writing an AU fic? If so, meh. Getting a general idea of the characters, what their deal is, and how you fit that into your AU is good enough.

Now if you're writing in-universe fic, this is a bit of a different story. You have to know when and where to set your fic, and understand the differences between fanon and canon and decide what you're using from each. This is...tough, without at least a baseline of knowledge about all the various media that make up Warcraft.

But, I'm not saying you have to play WoW for X many years or read all the shitty novels and comics. Fuck, even I don't read all that.

What I will give you is some basic resources that I think everyone should at least ATTEMPT to consult.

Wowpedia is your friend. Not Wowwiki. Fuck Wowwiki. Wowpeida is a great quick reference for lore resources. I highly recommend looking up character pages, and looking up the timeline there. They can be a bit of a lengthy read, but they're worth it. I honestly still use Wowpedia to this day, because I cannot possibly remember all the shit that goes on in this property.

If you do not know the story of Warcraft 3, this is the foundation on which WoW was built and, if you're planning on writing Sylvaina, where both Sylvanas and Jaina are introduced to the franchise as characters. Please learn about Warcraft 3. I would highly encourage you to watch this compilation of all the cutscenes and cinematics...but it's 4 and a half fucking hours long. Still, if you wanna throw it on in the background while you're doing something else, it's a good watch.

Just putting in the effort to read some Wowpedia pages and check that out will give you a really good foundation for what you need to start writing Warcraft in a lore-conscious way, without consuming years of your life or giving Blizzard any money.