So.. Stormrage.

So I finally finished reading Stormrage after much reluctance and venting; only took me a little over a month to read something I normally would’ve finished in half a week had it hooked me, go figure. I’m not entirely sure how to best approach it, but seeing how I think I might’ve spent far more time during the past month trying to decide what I think about it than I’ve spent actually reading the thing, I’ll see if I can put it into something coherent.

Obviously, this post will be drowned in Stormrage spoilers and probably some anti-Knaak sentiment, so if you’re bothered by either, you should probably skip this post.

All set? Grand, let’s get at it.

The first thing I want to do is start with making an acknowledgement – I know this is largely a teen book. In fact, a friend of mine tends to describe what Knaak writes as “male teen power fantasies” – a description I find rather apt. As a result however, I am not part of the intended target audience for this novel, and I’m very much aware that some of the things I consider significant faults with either it or Knaak’s writing in general might not be errors so much as him writing specifically for a certain audience. Furthermore, I have no way of really knowing how much of the story or characterization are squarely on Knaak’s shoulders and how much is by some form of editorial mandate.

As you might guess from the above paragraph.. I don’t really think too highly of the book, nor the author.

While most negative criticism of Knaak – from the Warcraft fanbase, at any rate – seems to focus on his characters, that’s never really been my problem; the greatest issue I have tend to be in a closely related concept – characterization. This again is something where I feel that I have to give a little ground – Knaak is quite obviously a story writer: that is to say, he writes a story and everything else – even characters and the setting – are malleable if it serves that one story. I, on the other hand, tend more towards the other extreme – I’m far more of a character reader/writer, to the point where I tend to put characterization (and often character journey) first with all else being secondary. As a result, I’m pretty much doomed to find Knaak’s characterization flat, empty and shallow, except for the times when I find it inconsistent and broken.

There was actually something I noticed while reading Stormrage – Knaak seems unwilling to let characters speak for themselves; if there’s a dialogue exchange longer than two sentences or any kind of expospeak involved, Knaak almost immediately breaks into describing what was said rather than letting the characters speak. There are a few exceptions, but more often than not.. any sort of explaination or expospeak will be done as a short and quick description rather than through actual dialogue – it becomes especially jarring when a dialogue is cut short by something along the lines of “So characterX explained to characterY” about topics that haven’t been mentioned to the reader yet.

I can’t shake the feeling that a large portion of the book is spent trying really hard to avoid letting the characters speak and act on their own – characters are generally simplified down to just a few traits with whatever depth there might be either immediately explained, mentioned but never shown in any form, or suddenly pulled up out of nowhere for a few moments and then forgotten, and sometimes emphasis is just odd. For example, according to Stormrage (the book), the most prominent feature of the dragon Lethon is that he’s not as large as Eranikus, but still fearsome. Why do we know this is the most prominent feature? Because it’s repeated about four times throughout the same chapter and battle. It struck me as really weird, as if Knaak was trying to force a meme on the Warcraft community. And then there’s..

Okay, you knew it was happening. Tyrande. Yes.. let’s tackle that part, as her characterization is probably the one aspect of the book I find the most aggravating.

In the War of the Ancients trilogy, Knaak wrote Tyrande largely as a somewhat insecure early 20-something who suddenly got shoved into a larger responsibility and whose contributions were mostly convenient magic, love interest for Malfurion and spending most of the third book in one distress or the other. Occasionally we’re told she’s dressed for war and it’s suggested she’s capable, but we’re never really shown that much of it, and it doesn’t take much for her to fall into distress mode. It was.. quite.. the stretch; I could grudgingly accept it then because young acolyte Tyrande is separated from present day Tyrande by ten thousand years, and people do change over time. It seemed like there might be a decent set of character growth between that young Tyrande and the present day one, so I could in the least buy it.

But then came Stormrage and Knaak’s characterization of Tyrande took a stark turn for the worse – not because he changed it, but rather because he didn’t. Ten thousand years later and she’s still an excitable, insecure early 20-something who is plagued by what I can only consider massive self-doubt, whose brief moments of competence are generally overshadowed by her ability to get into trouble and needing rescue. Where, exactly, is the woman who quite distinctly told Malfurion Stormrage that “Only the Goddess may forbid me anything, Furion!”, because she certainly isn’t in this book.

Continuing on a tangent from that, Knaak does permit Tyrande to occasionally express her frustration about Malfurions’ constant absence and how he’s put himself in danger, and on its own I’d applaud that – she showed similar frustrations in Warcraft III which later mellowed out in the Frozen Throne expansion when she had had some time to center herself and be glad to have Malfurion around, so it would make for good and consistent characterization. It would, but then every time she does it in Stormrage, she immediately admonishes herself for doing so, pointing out how it’s wrong to do so and she shouldn’t be upset with him or blame him, utterly breaking what could’ve been one of the few in-character and sensible characterizations in the novel in half.

And then.. there’s one particular moment fairly early on when Broll is casting some spell or other to communicate with a dragon in the Emerald Dream, and High Priestess Tyrande Whisperwind, undisputed leader of the night elven people and lover of the first night elven druid ever, discovers “for the first time” that druid spells are powered not by the druid him or herself, but also by the nature around them.. yes.. and before there’s even been time for it to sink in just how utterly absurd a sudden realization that would be, Tyrande goes on to point out to herself that she “should’ve known” (yes, she should) because she too was there when he learned from Cenarius..

Do I even have to point out how utterly insane this would-be revelation of hers is – especially when the book already does so for me?

Of course, true to above examples, Tyrande immediately turns the whole insight on its head by spinning it off on a tangent of how Malfurion is tied as much to his calling as she is to hers and how she couldn’t expect him to put it aside for her sake.

And people wonder why I’ve been concerned regarding where Tyrande might end up in Cataclysm; if this particular aspect of Knaak’s writing end up becoming canon like so many other things, the chances of us getting to see the strong, independent and comptentent Tyrande we used to know are all but nonexistant. I simply can not reconcile the Tyrande from Warcraft III – or even the one from World of Warcraft itself – with the one Knaak is trying to portray; am I really supposed to believe that after ten thousand years she still has next to no pride in what she’s acomplished? That she’s not in the least come to terms with her uncertainity? That she’s not at all grown to her station?

It just boggles the mind..

Moving on, I admit I find the scope of the novel somewhat weird. While I realize Knaak is trying to go for something really epic, there’s several times where it seems to go so far past the top that it just strikes me as absurd. Especially when taking into account that both travel and communication has a tendency of becoming increasingly swift and far-reaching the further the book goes, with characters effortlessly mind-speaking back and forth halfway across the world and/or between realms and effectively teleporting back and forth between locations at a maddening pace. It’s especially distracting when the extensive mind speak kicks in and it feels like the book just gives up and hands all the major characters magical mobile phones attached directly to their brain simply for the sake of convenience.

It also feels like there’s some major strange inconsistencies going on; Malfurion and Tyrande not only keenly remember both Brox, Krasus and Rhonin to the point where Tyrande apparently is moved to the point of tears when reminded of the noble sacrifice of Brox (despite it being, you know, ten thousand years ago), but apparently the night elves also built a statue of him.

..I seem to recall the night elves not easily trusting these new, strange peoples they’d never seen or heard of before back during the events of Warcraft III?

I’m also a little askew about the conclusion; so Teldrassil is now not only fixed but also blessed by the life-binder, the Emerald Nightmare is all but completely resolved and we’re left with a whole lot of chaos and death caused, a few ominous hints about how the Old Gods were behind it all and Tyrande and Malfurion married by Ysera and Alexstrasza. Oh and Staghelm’s mind apparently broke when the Nightmare creature that was misguiding him was blasted. To a point, it seems almost like we were just cheated out of a whole lot of content by having both the night elven political depth, their concern about the world trees and the Emerald Nightmare all resolved off-screen in a novel, in spite of all the build-up that the game has held.

I’m actually not sure what I’m supposed to say about it; on one hand, the prose is a bit awkward in places, the characterization is somewhere between shallow and nonexistant, it has very little depth and will generally proclaim immediately whenever someone is wrong or biased in their opinion, leaving very little room for any real thinking on behalf of the reader. On the other hand, it has an epic scope, a going story and stuff happens. I’ve been spending quite some time trying to come up with a decent enough analogy for it, and the closest one I’ve been able to think of is that it’s a little like watching a Steven Seagal movie – if you don’t mind leaving your brain at the door and stop caring about such as characterization, subtlety or depth for awhile and just want to be pulled along for a ride, then Stormrage might very well provide, and I’ll admit I found parts of it entertaining. Just don’t stop and think about what’s happening, because that will somewhat shatter the illusion.

Oh and if you’re a Tyrande fan.. it might be a good idea to skip it – you might find it rather offensive.

By the by, is it just me, or did Knaak develop an obcession with the word indeed somewhere along the book? There keeps being pieces I can paraphrase as “The creature was very large. Indeed, it was huge.” snuck in just about everywhere. It really struck me as feeling out of place. And as for the canonical use of a hearthstone.. no comment.