Tour #20 and 21: Shadow Wing

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Note: Shadow Wing is a duology consisting of the two Manga titled The Dragons of Outland and Nexus Point.

Sonaira says:

In the kindest possible terms, this wasn’t for me.

It was confusing, repetitive, failed to hold my interest, and wasn’t improved at all by the art. The main plot is the mystery that the eggs Deathwing had sent to Draenor in Beyond the Dark Portal turned into nether dragons. Treating it as a mystery is one of the biggest disservice the plot does, however, as it seems this would already be known to the readers (maybe), so it’s not a mystery so much as a slog.

It’s position in the timeline is a bit murky, though. The books take place following patch 2.4 Fury of the Sunwell, easily evident by its prominent mentions of Kalec and Anveena. Which means we mis-placed this in our reread and should have read it much later. If that’s the case, then the readers would likely already know the big “mystery.” But.

The story also contains Draenei and Broken who apparently don’t know who the races of Azeroth are and are astounded to see a group of Paladins. It also heavily referenced the quest chain in Shadowmoon where you end up killing Zuluhed and rescuing Karynaku. That apparently hasn’t happened in the manga’s timeline and I genuinely wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a callback or foreshadowing to that questline, which is one example of poor craft in a story full of them.

You may notice I’m talking more about continuity than contents and that’s because figuring out the puzzling timeline is the most interesting part of this duology. It’s full of characters the author cares about but that readers aren’t given any reason to. There’s a cute little stinger with Malygos at the Nexus, but that again just brings me back around to where you can place these books.

And…all the…characters talk like…this.

I’m no stranger to either comics or manga, and I was really looking forward to this. Unfortunately, it leaves me with a sense of ennui and dread for when we do get to The Sunwell Trilogy.

(NB: I have an acknowledged dislike of Knaak as an author, and I attempted to account for that and read with an open mind. I’m not perfect, though, so if you do like Knaak’s work, you may well enjoy this.)

Shoryl says:

I’d like to start by getting some issues I had with the design choices out of the way:

• I understand the desire to have narration in a different font than dialogue, but the narration needs to be in a readable font. The small type combined with the faux Olde English font made it very difficult to read.
• Art is a huge part of manga, as it should be telling at least half the story. While I might enjoy a piece or two in the art style presented here, I found it distracting. It may have worked as a style for color work, but this was black and white, and there just wasn’t enough variation or texture in the images to work for me in that format.

Now, on to the story itself. I thought I might appreciate this a bit more than I did because I like dragons, I was curious about what Deathwing was really up to in Beyond the Dark Portal, and I suspected it had something to do with the nether dragons. But the writing was lackluster, the story didn’t have any particularly interesting beats, and the characters were just none I’d ever heard of. By this point, I should have heard of somebody!

While I was quite pleased that this story had very little to do with orcs, I was disappointed that there wasn’t really much to it. It was mostly a dragon acting like a petulant child and a paladin who was infatuated with her to the point of distracting him from his duties.

Tour #19: Unbroken

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Sonaira says:

I really, really want to like this story. I feel like I should like it, but when I’m finished reading it – which I’ve done several times now – it simply doesn’t have the effect it should have. In part, I think it’s that I simply can’t let go of the meta. I know this was written to explain the Draenei/Broken retcon. And I know that it was to introduce the shaman class to the Alliance. And so I can’t help but see it through that lens. And the thing is…the Broken make no sense. Here, it’s an evil red mist that something-something no longer can feel the Light. On Argus, it’s…what? Is it the same red mist? Was that tested on the Draenei who remained before being used on the Draenei on Draenor? Maybe! But it doesn’t really hold together on its own, and it’s more of a headcanon than anything. I’m usually fine with retcons, but this one doesn’t sit right at all. Why and how would the Legion even figure out how to separate the Draenei from the Light? So. Many. Questions.

The other problem I have with this is that Nobundo is tormented by the thought of female Draenei – and only female Draenei. The framing here is just so unconsidered that it just throws me completely off. Why are the orcs only tormenting women? Why are the women not fighting? Why is Nobundo only tortured by the thought of women dying? It’s a sad, tired trope, and I’m not pleased to see it here.

Shoryl says:

There was a lot that was good that came from this story, but in and of itself, there were some problems. First was the use of “red mist” to cause illness in the Draenei. With the way the orcs worked at the time of taking Shattrath, this would have been used everywhere.

I found it a bit hard to think of the very proud and enlightened Draenei being so prone to such a level of bigotry. Especially treating those who had stayed behind to fight so poorly. I can’t imagine that they didn’t figure out that everyone who became broken had been at Shattrath during that battle.

Random Thoughts

• Here we see Akama before he was retconned for Warlords of Draenor. There’s no way someone like Nobundo wouldn’t have known the Exarchs’ names, if not who they were.
• The ideas of how the elements helped Nobundo are fascinating, particularly in contrast to Harbinger: Gul’dan. I do think the parallels here are intentional.
• I am also annoyed at the whole thing about there only being female Draenei being tortured, and thus torturing Nobundo, but I don’t have anything more to say than Sona already did.

Tour #18: Beyond the Dark Portal

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Sonaira says:

I ended up liking this quite a lot, though mostly the Alliance side. That’s probably not surprising, since I’ve not been shy about my very clear biases, but it’s more than that – until we get to it in the Tour, I will have never done TBC Horde-side. There’s no resonance for me there, particularly since this is the umpteenth retread of “Orcs Behaving Badly.”

Metzen briefly mentions trying to tie Beyond the Dark Portal the Warcraft II expansion with what they were developing as the actual world beyond the dark portal for TBC, and I think that’s really where it shines. You meet Danath Trollbane and Khadgar extremely early on, and I had literally no idea who they were. This is a fantastic book for those who came into the Warcraft universe with Classic or Burning Crusade. It would have saved a lot of me wondering why I was following around some old wizard’s pink elemental. As I’ve mentioned earlier in the Tour, the only thing I knew about Turalyon and Alleria is that people were upset that they were “missing.”

And if you’re curious, this book does absolutely nothing to change my opinion that Ner’zhul is a thrice-damned fool who never learns. Here he’s played by both Gul’dan (again!) and Teron Gorefiend. I mean, I’m pretty much okay with Ner’zhul being tortured, though I shouldn’t be. And I still don’t get quite how it went from this to Kiljaeden dreaming up the scourge and the making him the Lich King.

Random Thoughts

• The rifts bug me for some reason. It’s like they needed a reason for the portal to open again, and couldn’t come up with anything better than “um, guess we didn’t really close it last time?”
• Oh, hi Genn
• I had never really wondered where the Skull of Gul’dan had gone after he died in the Tomb of Sargeras but before Illidan…ate him, I think.
• They seem to be setting up a lot further down the road than I realized. Here we see Genn for the first time, and set up Garrosh appearing in TBC proper (which I’ve only heard about).
• Even further down the line, I could easily trace the evolution of the bloodthirsty, death-seeking Alleria with the Alleria we meet again in Legion.
• So. Teron Gorefiend. This is the first quest I can recall that made the character into a fool. And in this first installment, I wasn’t yet tired with the conceit. (I had no idea who he was when I was doing his quests, and my character wouldn’t have had either.) That would change as more and more quests reduced the character into a gullible caricature, but here it served to make you really, really want to head into Black Temple and kill him.
• The titular Warlords of Warlords of Draenor make a strong showing here, and I’ll be interested to revisit this once we get to that expansion. As I recall, they are much more interesting in this original timeline than they end up being in the expansion.

Shoryl says:

This one took quite a while for me to warm up to it. I believe I’ve already mentioned Orc Fatigue? Well, here’s another book full of orcs vs humans. I’m beginning to realize that my problem here isn’t specifically the orcs, though that is a piece of it. It’s that just about every piece of writing has to have more than one paragraph explaining everything I’ve read or witnessed what seems like 100 times now.

Once we actually went through the dark portal it got a lot more interesting. I really enjoyed meeting the Draenei for the first time, as well as seeing orcs being afraid of something. It was nice to see “monster races” as friends of the Alliance.

It was also interesting to read Turalyon and Alleria being quarrelsome, since I knew how that would end. Though it was painful to watch Khadgar fumble with not being able to fix it, even though he wanted to.

Random Thoughts

• Teron Gorefiend is both an interesting and annoying character. Interesting because this isn’t the last we’ll see of him; annoying because he will make a fool of the player character in TBC. At least, as Sona mentioned, it was one of the first times it happens (The first time I recall is in the night elf starting area, where you help a satyr.)
• While Turalyon and Alleria were at least somewhat known to me, I didn’t ever understand why there were dwarves in Shadowmoon Valley until this reading. Nor why they got tattoos and we couldn’t have them.
• There’s also the entire side point of Deathwing going through the portal as well… and what the heck he was up to.