Absolution in Draenor

Grom, the father

Heavy stuff, absolution. The undoing, or at least the forgiveness of sins. It’s a hard thing to come by. Redemption is a story driver that gets kicked around and lip service is played to it, but oftentimes, just that. I mean, video game characters get redemption through laying waste to countless multitudes of enemies and then often winning at best a pyrrhic victory as they bleed out in the last few seconds or stare meaningfully into the middle distance.

Absolution, however, is something even rarer. The undoing of sin, the race to correct it, by means of sacrifice? Forget about it. Villains are without redemptive qualities and heroes are often enshrined from their first words as purveyors of good.

Which is one of the things that makes the backstory for the new WORLD OF WARCRAFT expansion so compelling, because it focuses on one of the most fundamentally broken characters in the sprawling mythology of that game/world. I’m trying to think of how much information I can give you without frying your brain to make you understand this. Let’s give it a shot.

In WORLD OF WARCRAFT, there’s two major factions vying for control of the world of Azeroth: The Horde and the Alliance. The Horde is made up of the Orcs and assorted other like-minded races; the Alliance is similarly clustered around Humans. I’m simplifying things for sake of clarity. And we’ll be focusing on the Horde side of things here.

On the Orcish side, there’s a handful of figures we’ll need to know. Grom Hellscream (dig the kenning family name; there’s plenty of that in WORLD OF WARCRAFT). Grom is the father of the recently-deposed Warchief of the Horde, Garrosh Hellscream. Grom is a tragic figure, having once effectively sold his kin into demonic slavery for power. So if there’s original sin in Orcish history, Grom Hellscream is at the heart of it, taking the quick path to power, but leaving his people scarred for it.

Garrosh, the son

Garrosh Hellscream is a charater who has been kicking around the WARCRAFT universe for several years now, first introduced as a callow and thoughtless youth, and then warrior. He rises in power, enough to challenge the current Warchief, Thrall. The challenge is rebuffed, but Garrosh is allowed to assume the mantle of Warchief when Thrall finds it necessary to abdicate. Garrosh proves himself a bloodthirsty and relentless leader, finally slipping into a self-manufactured insanity. He is removed from power, but escapes execution.

And slips back in time.

Now I know, I just lost you there, right? Because I felt the same way when I heard about the storyline for the soon-to-be-launched expansion to WORLD OF WARCRAFT. Seriously. I heard “going back in time” and “alternate timeline” and my eyes glazed over. I’d lost interest.

And then I watched the cinematic for the expansion and something hit me.

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLzhlsEFcVQ

For those of you who don’t watch it: at the moment that Grom Hellscream is about to trade freedom for power, he refuses. Then he attacks his would-be enslaver and kills him (the would-be enslaver being a demon named Mannoroth who is totally hella metal and why didn’t you just watch the video?). Then the son (from the future), Garrosh Hellscream saves his father’s life, both literally and metaphysically.

Mannoroth, the enslaver

Absolution. Because the sin didn’t happen. And what’s more, the presence of Garrosh gave Grom the strength to refuse the promise of easy power. Now, maybe I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. One of my favorite books is LORD KELVIN’S MACHINE by James Blaylock, wherein the titular hero uses a time machine, not to go back and kill the villain (who has killed his wife in the present), but to go back and change the villain’s life in such a way that he never even becomes the villain.

This is ultimate fantasy fiction, right? Something that can’t happen. It would be like LORD OF THE RINGS being about Frodo’s quest to not only destroy the ring and Sauron, but to make it so that Sauron never becomes a threat, and maybe, just maybe, becomes a hero in the work. Granted, that’s not going to happen because Sauron by design is evil and bad and has no reason for doing it, not even envy. He’s just bad.

All the way bad

Garrosh Hellscream is bad because he’s human. Because he wants more than he can hold and is desperate to prove himself by strength and savagery. He’s human because he wants to undo that which has already happened and force history along another path. And he’s human because he wants to see his father succeed, to have the event that broke him never happen.

This also makes him a more interesting character than just about any that has been featured as a central player in the larger WORLD OF WARCRAFT plots. Garrosh has been allowed to make horrible, titanic mistakes (too many to name here), but he’s also striven to change them in a way that could only happen in fiction. About the only way that the developers (which is how I’ll refer to the creators of these authorless narratives) could have improved on this in my mind is to have Garrosh escape into the present and live with the mistakes that he’s made and try to build a better world from them (likely impossible, but this is fantasy fiction we’re talking about, so anything could be possible.)

It’s a real pity that these guys are all going to end up being the villains of the next couple years of WORLD OF WARCRAFT, because they’ve just been made more compelling for all of their mistakes.

On the technical side, the cinematics are beautiful as I’ve come to expect from the Blizzard Cinematics team and are every bit as good as what comes at us from Hollywood, backed up by their own aesthetic (which is extra metal this time around, and that’s fine by me.)

Hella metal.

Full disclosure: I’ve worked as a contractor for Blizzard Entertainment in 2010-2014. They’ve published one of my short stories, “The Teacher.” And I interviewed for a position on their cinematics team in 1999 or so. So I’m just a big suck-up, right?