Is anyone else disappointed that Aurene was brought back to life?

[Trejgon.9367]

On 9/1/2024 at 3:01 PM, Imba.9451 said:

Talking about the time gap imho misses the point that her ressurection was absolutely onbvious imho. Or did anyone NOT see it coming?

It was either that or even worse deus ex machina.

For me her coming back is not the part to be disappointed at. It's the part where AN thought, that killing her off the way they did (after doing all they could to sell us the idea of us winning in ep5), would make for a good story, and that the couple months of farming "GoT-like" drama because "oh gosh we killed off our beloved character we spent years building up as the only hope for world surviving and we are now going to release series of lore blogposts on how sad that is for everyone", is going to be worth the cost of the impact of the story for anyone late to the party, or just replaying later spanning impact of that death to be approx 5 mintues.

Edited September 2 by Trejgon.9367
typos

[Konig Des Todes.2086]

22 hours ago, Imba.9451 said:

Talking about the time gap imho misses the point that her ressurection was absolutely onbvious imho. Or did anyone NOT see it coming?

Honestly it wasn't a question of if, but how, given that the story made it painfully clear that Tyria would be destroyed without Aurene to replace Kralkatorrik, and you can't destroy the world the game is based on in an MMORPG.

The terrible part of Aurene's resurrection isn't that Aurene revived, it was that she revived - with speech - within the first 3 minutes of the next episode. So later players come in, she dies, and 3 minutes later she's alive again. Big whoop. Resurrecting her should have been a big deal.

Ironically enough, the rewrites to LWS4 which pushed Joko's death from the end of Episode 2 to the end of Episode 3 likely caused this, as it meant that we only had 3 episodes to focus on Kralkatorrik instead of 4.

22 hours ago, Imba.9451 said:

And to make matters worse, Joko got killed for that cheap plot device. Just when he started to become an interesting character, we got robbed a potential great villain/anti-villain.

Counter to your complaint, ArenaNet writers confirmed after War Eternal came out that they though they knew from the get go they'd kill Aurene off and bring her back, they didn't think about how to bring her back until they sat down to write Episode 6 in earnest - meaning that they had written out Episode 3 and it was in post-production before they came to the conclusion of "Aurene eating Joko gave her immortality magic" (which still, IMO, doesn't make sense when you consider how much magic all Elder Dragons consume and are not capable of using). Joko didn't get killed for a cheap plot device. Joko got killed because they couldn't get the hang of writing him until the last minute, and they didn't want to stretch Joko's plot too long - the longest they would let him live is to the beginning of Episode 4, and TBH as much as I'd prefer 4 full episodes with Joko, since they forced themselves into a 6 episode season, it was necessary to kill him off by the end of Episode 3 to make the best impact; just as The Hobbit suffers because Smaug dies in the first 10 minutes of the third movie, when there wasn't much need to it after the lengthy dragging out of confronting Smaug in the dwarven city with zero effect leading to a blue balled cliffhanger.

Honestly if anything should be blamed for Joko's unsatisfying length of time, it would be the 6 episode structure of Seasons they forced themselves into for only two seasons. And the same can be said for the four equalized plotlines of LWS3 that only got 1-2 episodes each because of sharing screentime in only 6 meager episodes. And this also ties into the aforementioned rewrites of LWS4 that got mentioned - if Kralkatorrik's arc got the original 4 episodes length, there could have been an entire episode dedicating to resurrecting Aurene, making her death and resurrection feel more impactful (especially long-term). Imagine a world where Seasons 3 and 4 were 8 episodes long just like Season 2, where we got 4 episodes focused on Joko and 4 episodes focused on Kralkatorrik, without any rushing through; where in Season 3 we had 3 episodes focused on the White Mantle instead of 2, and Lazarus wasn't some filler arc to fill out the 6 episode setup.

Edited September 2 by Konig Des Todes.2086