Year Of Epic Fantasy Reading: Day -3

Starting in January I'll be commemorating my Year of Epic Fantasy Reading 2017 by posting about some of the books I've read in the genre this past year. I thought I'd kick it off by posting about some of my favorite fantasy stories that aren't books.


I'm gonna start with one of my favorite video games, The World of Warcraft.

Even though I don't play this game anymore, it holds a lot of fond memories for me. I won't be discussing the lore of the story too much, because the way you experience it though the game is a lot more fun and immersive than lore in the books. You just need to know it's kind of a mashup real-world mythology and fantasy along with some sci-fi elements (some nods to pop culture too) It's fun, it's cartoony at times, but when it wants to it can get pretty intense!

If you're playing the game, you're playing as a character of your chosen race.

(My chosen race (most of the time) was Gnomes (They're awesome!). And I favored the spell-slinging Mage class: Frost specialty. I liked keeping my enemies as far away from me as possible, especially because Mage armor is crap. And I favored Player vs Environment over Player vs Player. Frost specialty meant it would take a little longer to take down an enemy, but I also could trap mobs or make them move slower: engaging several hostiles at once and picking them off one by one...before they can even touch me!)

Your race determines which of the two main factions you'll be fighting for. The Gnomes are allied with The Alliance (the pretty people) and all the cool races belong to The Horde. These two groups don't like each other, and at this point for your character it doesn't matter why. Each of the governments best fighters have been sent off to war, and there isn't a lot of social infrastructure, so your character (who's basically a nobody at this point) starts out doing stuff like delivering letters and transporting goods from one place to another. Eventually as the NPC's (Non-Player Characters, the kind of stock figures in the game who guide you along the story) see that you're reliable they give you more difficult assignments and reward you with better pay, more experience, and (this is very important) armor.

Eventually your character becomes this kind of mercenary-for-hire, and you kind of work freelance for the government, or whatever individual or organization you decide.  Eventually, as you fight more and more difficult opponents, you'll need to team up with other Player Characters (the one's with real people controlling them) more and more.


So what kind of ends up happening in the game is that we see the rise of this mercenary class. There's obviously a lot of freelance work available and the benefits and opportunities for advancement are immense.  While you're in service, you literally cannot die (err...at least you can't stay dead) because Valkyrie spirits will keep bringing you back to life. Unlike the regular military, you get to wear whatever you want (although you'll definitely want to consider stats when choosing clothing and armor). Your character can become insanely wealthy, you get to travel A LOT and you get to interact with all these different world mechanics (Like Dalaran WTH?). You get to meet and/or fight a bunch of really cool characters: Heroes, and Anti-heroes, and delicious villains.And because the game progresses as you do, you get to see that your actions actually do have an impact on the world (for better or for worse).

You even eventually "Level Up" to become an in-game legendary figure yourself: You and your co. are basically the most OP gang in the entire world of Azeroth, and everyone would basically die if you weren't there to save them.

You start out as this little nobody doing all these little quests for the quest-giving NPC's and you end up with your own military garrison full of NPC's who basically do quests FOR YOU...

So, yah...basically life is good. And guess what? None of those opportunities would have been possible without The War. The War literally took you from a nobody and made you a somebody.

It's a very fantasy perspective of war. I mean, we do know that war can promote technological advances IRL, and that is certainly represented here. But we also see a weird type of profiteering off the war: not just in the game's quests but, like, built into EVERY character's arc.

I used to joke that the most unrealistic aspect of the game is that the core conflict between The Alliance and The Horde is still ongoing. These guys have faced apocalypse after apocalypse: Dragons, Demons, Zombies, Aliens, Cataclysmic earthquakes and continental shifts, these weird chaos thingies popping up everywhere, AND TIME TRAVEL....

And they've joined forces so many times, it kinda makes it laughably ridiculous that they haven't overcome their differences at this point. Sometimes I even amuse myself by imagining that whatever gimmick the game masters have come up with in the latest game expansion is really just your character playing a game of Hearthstone just to keep their strategy skills sharp:

("Hmm...Now I wonder what would happen if....we had ANOTHER dragon attack, ANOTHER demon invasion, ANOTHER plague of undeath...etc etc." "OH! I know!! What if we found another continent and it had PANDAS ON IT!!" "OH THAT'S AN AWESOME IDEA!")

  

But really, I think the real answer should be that this mercenary class (ie. You the player) has become self-aware. The war made the quality of your life better. You literally have no incentive to end the war, because all of your wealth, power, and influence comes from being a part of the war machine.

Your character is probably intentionally going about finding ways to promote this conflict in order to maintain or promote his or her standard of living.

And that would actually make you the vile In-Game Villain of them all.