Truth: I will go on for a thousand years about Frozen As Queer Narrative. But not now because I have no keyboard.
I agree with everything here except your tl;dr. I think it’s inadequate (oxymoronic way to describe a tl;dr, I know) and misleading.
“tl;dr DKs are creepy, gross, murder machines, not misunderstood woobies that just need to learn a little control and happiness.”
Call me naive and perhaps delusional, but I actually don’t believe this is universally a case of mutual exclusion. I also saw (pretty vague, but they were enough to make me go ‘huh, interesting’ in the theater) parallels between DKs and Elsa, even beyond the frost powers. I agree that the insatiable death-hunger is a bit…uh…compounding but I think there is more nuance to it than you’re implying. There’s plenty of space between “willingly (? dubioouuus, see: coercion, loss of all hope in the face of the inexorable) destroyed an entire society and slaughtered their own family” and “melts the ice of their heart with the power of lurve.”
tl;dr DKs aren’t nothing but creepy gross murder machines. And some of them are a lil woobesque let’s be real here (
lookin straight at you, Thass)I see your point when it comes to comparing Elsa and DKs, but I have to agree that DKs are pretty much mass murder machines of the scourge.
Being a rper of a Self – aligned DK I know that, even if they have control, they still have to resist the urge to chop everything they see into a million pieces. (It’s not that simple)
As far as I am concerned, having never watched Frozen, Elsa absolutely hates being feared, ruling via fear and etc, but DKs are sadistic war machines who feed off the fear of civillians, and also classed as masochists. (Makes them feel alive wot wot)
I’ve gone off topic but, DKs will pretty much chop anything as soon as that little pain starts, which would eventually send the poor DK to be as mindless as a ghoul and as deadly as a stampeding mammoth.
Elsa and DKs are only similar in the fashion that civillians fear them both and that they can use frost (which DKs such as 1st and 2nd can’t)
Yeah. I mentioned the blood hunger complicating things. There’s a bit of ‘her magic can become evil and uncontrollable if she doesn’t learn to rein it in’ in Frozen and that’s where I saw the closest parallel.
I’m not arguing that DKs can become lovable teddy bears with a bit of cuddling and the occasional gnoll slaughter, but I am saying that I don’t think it’s…like…”universally all dks are the worst ever and they’re all the same without any variation among them whatsoever” outside of their blood hunger.
It’s virtually near impossible for a DK to overcome their blood hunger, due to that pain they have.
Yuuup I know. I think I’m having trouble articulating my point. I’ll shut up now, haha.
As someone who plays two DKs, one of whom is a gross, sadistic, cruel reanimated corpse and the other of whom is….not so much with the adjectives….I come down on the side of there being plenty of wiggle room in terms of how DKs are interpreted. I think there is plenty of space for conflict and adaptation, both.
Also, “gross” and “horrific” can be (disturbingly) subtle. It all depends on how you want to play it, what themes you want to emphasize.
There is wiggle room yes, but they have shown in lore that if DK’s do not kill regularly they will suffer wracking pains until they do so because killing things is now their addiction.
They need to kill. They can fight it, resist it, some better than others, but if the DK isn’t off killing stuff every so often they will be in debilitating pain until they cave.
I have a DK I play as a ditzy goblin who is like a failed DK. She is funny, derps about and in general fails or lucks her way through missions she is given from her Commander.
When in reality she has to every week or so go find some cultists, scourge, or something to slaughter to feel better. There are days she worries that she might run out of stuff to kill with the war winding down and if she should just end her existence to avoid hurting people who have befriended her.
So while yeah, RP your DK how you want – I 100% agree not all of them need to be grim dark murderous machines – they do have to by lore have an desire to kill that has to be sated.
I would like to gently point out that the addiction is not to killing. It is to inflicting pain. From Ask CDev #2:
Are blood elf death knights still afflicted by their racial addiction to magic?
No, though their new addiction, the one all Ebon Blade death knights possess, is arguably worse: the need to inflict pain. If death knights do not regularly inflict agony upon another creature, they begin to suffer wracking pains that could drive them into a mindless, blood-seeking hysteria—a far worse fate than that of those who suffer from arcane withdrawalIf you have a different source in lore that indicates that the addiction is to killing specifically, please share?
It’s kind of wobbly tbh
from the starting quest:
The endless hunger will soon take hold of you, death knight. When it does, you will feel pain immeasurable. There is only one remedy for the suffering: the hunger must be sated.
I give you the key to your salvation.
Chained to the Heart of Acherus are those deemed unworthy of the dark brotherhood. Use the key to free an unworthy initiate. Allow them to equip their gear and battle you for their freedom. Kill and the pain will cease. Fail and suffer for eternity.
Live or die – the choice is yours to make.
But this is in the scourge, where the general interest is in actually killing your enemies and not just making them suffer. There seems to be a general consensus that pain is the minimal requirement to sate them. There’s also the question of vampiric runeblades, which do require death.
Still not the kind of person most folks would be interested in hanging around with for a long time, whatever the case.
Outside of the game, Creative Development has said that the addiction is to causing pain:
I- I can see where you’re coming from? She definitely holds a good narrative for people fearing what they don’t understand (and my bb Lightandwinged will go on forever about how her story is a wonderful queer narrative, à la the X-men), but- uh. There are a few noteworthy… differences.
Their violent streak is an insatiable urge. It’s less “I’m going to stay away from people because they don’t like me” and more, “I’m going to stay away from people because my blade and body are screaming at me to mutilate them into unrecognizable chunks of meat” (thanks Arthbama). They’re also walking corpses, possibly plaguebearers, more than likely suffer from severe (and with their urges, violent) PTSD, likely smell terrible, and overall not somebody that would be healthy to have your children or elderly around even if they did have control over their urges.
There’s also the fact that they’re the face of an organization that committed a wide-scale genocide and destroyed an entire kingdom. Regardless of the fact that they’re now free, it’s perfectly reasonable for people to fear them or be wary. The average citizen probably doesn’t give a damn about the nuances of mind control and unholy magic; they just see the thing that murdered their mother in front of their eyes. And on top of that, some of the Ebon Blade did ask for that power, which I can imagine most would find unforgivable, and since there’s no way to make the distinction I would again say it’s reasonable for the average person, especially someone impacted personally by the Scourge, to just avoid the hell out of them.
tl;dr DKs are creepy, gross, murder machines, not misunderstood woobies that just need to learn a little control and happiness.
Q: Are blood elf death knights still afflicted by their racial addiction to magic?
A: No, though their new addiction, the one all Ebon Blade death knights possess, is arguably worse: the need to inflict pain. If death knights do not regularly inflict agony upon another creature, they begin to suffer wracking pains that could drive them into a mindless, blood-seeking hysteria—a far worse fate than that of those who suffer from arcane withdrawal.
But in the quest, a Death Knight killing them has the added benefit that the necromancers can now come up behind you and reanimate anything you’ve just killed, a very easy way to for the scourge to get an ancreased headcount without that giant job fair that was Wrath of the Lich King.
And here’s my whore! … No really he’s a whore.
