And while I finish up the next arc on The Summoner, I’m going to be posting They Were Roommates, a short series of comics based on a joke I made on Twitter.
You know, fandom seems to talk about Wrathion’s past mistakes a lot, but I don’t often see anyone discuss his visits to the August Celestials during his legendary questline. Like, sure, people occasionally bring up his attitude towards Tong, but how many current players were there to experience (and still remember) the rest of that quest?
When I think of Wrathion, I think first of the whelp who literally dropped to his knees before the Red Crane of Hope, who poured out his heart about the visions he’d had – how terrified he was that the Legion was coming, about the “rivers of blood and cities in ruin” that would result if he wasn’t able to somehow, some way, stop this from happening, and about how the only thing sustaining him was the tiny sliver of hope that he might actually succeed.
This is a young dragon who foresaw something that absolutely shook him to his core, something he would do anything to try to prevent… and who felt he had almost no support, because it seemed he was the only one taking the threat seriously while everyone around him was busy fighting one another. His fear, his burden, was so great that the Red Crane himself even admitted that Wrathion needed his blessing of Hope “more than any I have ever met”.
We can, of course, debate Wrathion’s methods. It’s fairly obvious that he didn’t fully understand the lessons the Celestials were trying to teach him – at least not at the time. It’s also undeniable that he made some pretty terrible mistakes along the way. And I can certainly understand the argument that his attitude in Dragonflight is just too annoying for some people to stomach.
But the thing that always brings me back to Wrathion as Aspect is the knowledge that he actually cares about Azeroth. From the moment he was hatched – even before – he carried the burden of Earth-Warder, and he took it absolutely seriously. Neltharion took an oath, and he broke it – broke beneath it, I would argue – and Wrathion clearly believes that it’s his own responsibility to bear the immense, crushing weight that his Aspect father/grandfather, and his entire flight, proved unable to bear. All those black dragons betrayed Azeroth, tried to destroy what they were sworn to protect, and here’s Wrathion – first a whelp and now a drake, all alone, without Neltharion’s colossal size, strength, and power, without the support of a dragonflight behind him, without the support and trust of the other flights, without any true home or safe harbor, without the regard of the mortal races that he’s trying to protect – doing his best to fulfill an oath that he personally never actually took, only inherited.
Given that knowledge, I actually think Wrathion has behaved with remarkable restraint in regard to Sabellian’s sudden appearance as a rival. Has Sabellian even given us the slightest indication that he actually cares about the sacred charge of the black dragonflight? He’s certainly older, wiser, and steadier, and maybe he’s done a good job of raising his kin and keeping them safe in Outland… but does he care about Azeroth? Because he certainly hasn’t been there when it needed him… and yet he was perfectly willing to risk reappearing just in time to claim the Obsidian Throne.
changing elves from being assholes with a superiority complex and recharacterising them as just sort of weird guys that have an entirely different set of social behaviours to harken back to the days when people thought autistic people were a kind of fae for having odd behaviours. the entire reason why they dont particularly enjoy gatherings of men or dwarves or whatever is because they tend to be loud and the average elven social gathering is just a bunch of them sitting in a room in silence ignoring each other
like theyre still kind of mean but its more of them being blunt and lacking empathy rather than being condescending or purposefully malicious
my elven ass after spending 45 minutes in the pub with my dwarf friends:
I GROW WEARY OF MIMICKING YOUR OBNOXIOUS MANNERISMS TO ACCOMMODATE FOR THIS ENVIRONMENT. I WISH TO RETURN TO MY CHAMBERS TO REST AND SO I MAY PLAY SPLATOON 3 ON THE NINTENDO SWITCH. WE SHALL GATHER AGAIN NEXT HALF MOON AND I SHALL TELL YOU OF MY VICTORIES.
them:
okay man take care
ALT
you understand my vision
God imagine the hyperfixation of a being that doesn’t need to sleep and can live for centuries.
“I’ve been working on this 32-volume book on the mating rituals of the common woodlouse since… Which king do we have now? Hargiff? Edward?”
“uhh, Leafy… We’ve been a democracy for over 400 years.”
“oh really? Well now I’m going to have to completely rewrite volume 17! Probably for the best, it needed some more work, I wrote that during the decade when I had a hangover.”
This experiment was on my backlog for more than a year and was at the bottom of the list because yeah when I finally had time to draw something, this was not it.
It’s funny how hair can completely change the vibe of a character. I will keep drawing Darion according to Ashbringer design with fluffy hair, but I always thought that if he would have long hair, he would braid them into some viking – alright, let’s say vrykul – style.
ALT
