Never Gonna Come Back Down

So I was taking Aerionn the b'elfy holy/protadin punklet through the beginning Pandaria quests last night, and the following occurred to me:

As much as I love the Hozen and I seriously want to hug all of them, I kind of wish they were more developed. I also kind of wish they were more like the original Monkey King. Like Sun Wukong. Not with the UBERHAXX necessarily, but the general attitude and cleverness and most of all identity. The Hozen have some solid foundations, but their cultural identity and their culture fullstop isn't fleshed out as much as it could be.

The little bits and pieces that we get about their culture are neat--how and when and why you get a double name, their hilarious poetry, their linguistic quirks...yeah there's some deeply, DEEPLY facepalm-worthy gaffes and stereotypes to be found, but homework WAS done. It doesn't quite make up for the *GROAN* moments completely, but it's there?

And that just makes me want MORE dammit. XD I'm not sure how much development the Jinyu got, as I am FAR AND AWAY NOWHERE NEAR PANDARIA with my Allyside characters (the highest-level one is Eveynna, Stormwinder-Theramoran pally extraordinaire and queen of the epic !Newfie accent, at 30), but yeah. I do wish we'd gotten more. Compared to the amount of work done with the Pandaren, it's like an Ensure pudding cup next to creme brulee.

I know that not everything can be put into a game, and that Pandaria is light-years better than Cata with regard to the completeness of questlines (even if a lot of the storytelling is still execrable...the stuff dealing with the Pandaren and Jinyu and Hozen and Mogu and Co. alone is fantastic but the second practically any named mainstream NPC besides Anduin gets into things, everything spirals rapidly down the flush-hole), but...yeah. When you put one up against the other you get wistful. (Well...you do if you're me. :B)

I'm probably going to end up fiddling around and expanding upon a lot when I get to writing about Pandaria. Because well that is what I do. If something feels too spare and I'm still hungry I make more snack food.

And also it will feature AU!Garrosh not being made of fail, and a distinct lack of stupidness with legacy characters. :D

So I *cough*procured*cough* some digital copies of various tie-in novels and comics and et cetera and so forth on night during a fit of insomnia and boredom. Haven't managed to read much of Knaak's malarkey beyond a few sentences (the cadence of his writing is just irritating as almighty fuck to me, like every sentence is like "s/he was an adjective, adjective noun" and it reminds me of this goofy song my sister and I sang as kids: "oh in the dark, dark woods you find a dark, dark house and in the dark, dark house you find a dark, dark room" etc. and it ends with finding a ghost in a dark, dark box, but my sister tended to put the box with the ghost inside of fifteen or so MORE prior dark, dark boxes--or as many dark, dark boxes as she could get away with before my dad flipped out and demanded we knock it off) but I did manage to read some of it!

HERE I SHALL YAMMER ABOUT THE THINGS I READ! This isn't really a review asmuch as a bunch of impressions and random piles of bollocks. I'll cover the manga/manhwa and comics in this entry; books come next.

Needless to say ZOMG SPOILERS


( words, pictures, and funky text formatting! )

I'll be gettin' into the actual novels in my next post.

You are probably pretty damn Canadian if:

-You are writing AU!not-so-damn-stupid!Garrosh Hellscream explaining just WTF he was doing with the Evel Knievel dirigible shit...

...And you write him as saying he was "trying to deke that damn dragon out, keep it away from the rest of the zeppelins" and then realize that you've written an Orc explaining that he was trying to deke something out and that you didn't even think twice about using "deke" even though Orcs probably don't say "deke" and chances are a bunch of your readers won't know WTF that word even means anyway. lawl.

In conclusion, nonstupid punkass Garrosh is fun to write because he does things like almost Leeroy a zeppelin into a mountain in effort to deke a dragon out so it doesn't eat the rest of his troops. And hey if the Alliance sees him being a a raging badass deke-master or their airship pwns the dragon too, so much the better.

Also I've had too much caffeine.

ETA: Uh wow lol maybe I should explain the Canuck-ese--'deke' is abbreviated from 'decoy', and it's hockeyslang. XD Deke (out) = feinting, faking someone out.

flinkie dared me so I did it. *chuuuu* to thee for helping me out so much and checking for IC and typos!

TITLE: [clever thing wanted!]
FANDOM: Benighted/SPF/Fate
CAST: Vicky, Jer, Gil, Forest, and a posse of squeaking avian familiars.
DISCLAIMERS: Fate belongs to TypeMoon; SPF belongs to umbra_elf. Benighted belongs to ME, h0rz. XD

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