Killstealing bastards

Am I the only one who is getting sick of big-name NPCs stealing my kills?

Spoilers below the cut.





It's been going on for years now.  We didn't kill Illidan, Maiev did.  We didn't really kill the Lich King, Tirion did.  We didn't really kill Deathwing, Thrall did.  More or less.  We didn't kill Garrosh at the end of Siege, Thrall (again) came in to finish him off.

Well, it's a tradition that's alive and well.  After doing essentially all the legwork in Draenor, after being named General of the Alliance forces, after pinning Garrosh down in his base, we roll in there to deal the deathblow and what happens?

It's bad enough that we apparently still need an army to finish the guy off.  But at the very end, when we finally get our "duel to the death" with Garrosh, he pulls off a bullshit Superman comeback and then -- then -- Thrall (again!) comes in and steals the kill.

I will grant that the Garrosh v Thrall fight was suitably epic.  Garrosh bein all "you're a lil bitch and I'm tougher" and Thrall being all "no, no, you're just an overgrown muscle with a sharp piece of metal and I've got the motherfucking planet backing me up."  Well played, good stuff, that's why mages win every time.  I digress.

Let me take a side trip and talk about Jack MacLeod.  He was a citizen of Theramore, a sailor and engineer on a fishing boat.  He had a wife and three children, two sons and a daughter.

He was at sea when the mana bomb came.

Jack was broken by the loss of his family.  He started drinking, heavily.  He became a well-known public nuisance in the Dwarven District of Stormwind, drinking himself nearly senseless every day and then going out to the docks, fishing and loudly singing off-key sea shanties until the guard came to take him to sleep it off.

It was ultimately Chen Stormstout himself who saved Jack, mostly by beating the mickey out of him during a barfight gone wrong.  Chen saw Jack's shattered soul and offered him a way out, a way to pick himself back up and put himself back together.  Chen took Jack to the monastery in Kun-Lai and there, Jack found new purpose in his life.

Jack was a natural -- he wasn't the most lithe or graceful, but he was strong, had excellent balance, and could drink like a demon.  Jack purged himself of the anger, sadness, and doubt, replacing them with a singular purpose: to bring Garrosh Hellscream to justice.  His unbreakable resolve and mastery of the killing arts earned him the name "Akuma" from his mentors.

Akuma wandered the world, honing his skills and helping those in need, until finally the opportunity arose to take the fight to Garrosh himself.  Akuma was at the vanguard of the Siege of Orgrimmar, and was present, nodding with silent approval, when King Wrynn stayed Thrall's hand and took Garrosh prisoner.  This wasn't rage or vengeance, this was justice.

And then Garrosh escaped.

Akuma was among the first to volunteer to go to Draenor.  The hunt, for him, was personal.  Garrosh had escaped justice once, and Akuma was going to make certain that he would not do so again.

Why do I go through all this?  Because Garrosh was Akuma's to take down.  Akuma's entire purpose for being, his raison d'etre, was co-opted by Thrall, who, up until that point, wasn't even on the battlefield that day.

From a storytelling perspective, it's a huge let-down.  Yes, it's nice and consistent to have the "real heroes" of the world be the ones to actually deal the death-blow, but it reduces our characters to the role of sidekick.  And while I can't speak for anyone else, I'm not satisfied with that.

It's not like Blizzard can't write stories where the characters are the first-stringers.  Algalon jumps to mind, probably because I just did the quest the other day.  The old Onyxia attunement is another example -- we're so important to that effort that Bolvar remembers us two expansions later.  These were moments when we, our characters, were the Big Damn Heroes, and nobody rolled in at the last minute to steal our thunder.

The weird thing is, the killsteals are the exception rather than the rule.  They just come at the climax of a particular story, which makes it all the more jarring.  Here we are, doing all this work, gearing up, getting prepared, fighting our way to the throne room, as it were, and at the moment we're about to deliver the deathblow, at the moment all our hard work is to come to fruition, that sanctimonious green asshole has to come in and steal the show.  (Three times, now.)

Well guess what.  I have my own score to settle, Thrall.  I have my own narrative to spin.  I'm the one playing the game, and it leaves a sour taste that the reward for all my hard work is I get to watch someone else take down the bad guy.  (Epically, yes.  Nevertheless.)

The players -- the people playing the game -- haven't dealt the death blow to an enemy since vanilla.  Hey Blizzard: maybe this expansion, when we're fighting the Big Bad and Thrall comes in to Save The Day [tm], you can have the enemy plant him right on his ass, and we, for a change, can be the ones to finish it.

Kormak Blastbrew, Jack "Akuma" MacLeod, Taeligan Moriarti, Naormain Paendrag, Daongan ap Calyffar ... these are the names of heroes.  I am nobody's sidekick.