by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

This week, let’s take a look at Blizzard’s previous animated lore series, the Burdens of Shaohao.

Critical Details

• Animatic-style short animation, released shortly before Patch 5.4, and fed into the narrative of the Timeless Isle.
• Provides a folklore rendition of Emperor Shaohao’s struggles with the sha, and his decision to sequester Pandaria from the world.

Brief Synposis

The first chapter seats the action of Shaohao’s journey against the backdrop of the War of the Ancients and the Sundering, which is what motivates the emperor to seek a way to save his people. The next four chapters detail how he faces the burdens of his own dark emotions, how those emotions manifest into the sha, and how each of the four August Celestials offer him guidance on how to control himself and thus defeat the sha. The final chapter paints a different narrative than has been presented in-game; namely, Shaohao sacrifices himself to shield Pandaria from the Sundering in order to buy the pandaren time to follow in his footsteps and achieve enlightenment.

Why It Matters

I wanted to cover this series early because it really demonstrates how a story can change based on the method of the story’s delivery.

The animated Burdens series is a self-contained story: it’s got a beginning, middle, and end, and the thrust of the story is that ultimately, Shaohao’s sacrifice enabled the pandaren to achieve enlightenment and control over their burdens. This bears over into the game, because when Horde/Alliance players show up in the Jade Forest, it’s our undisciplined minds that give rise to the sha, which triggers their release all over the land. It’s a big part of the player’s job throughout the launch content of the game to defeat the six sha.

However, the story clashes with what we’d already seen in the game in the form of lore objects that present the story of the “Seven Burdens of Shaohao.” Found in places near to where players throw down with the sha bosses, and ending with an object in the middle of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, the placement of the objects demonstrates the path of Shaohao’s footsteps, conquering the sha in sequence (via days-long battles that also had him getting direct assistance from the August Celestials), and then bearing witness to the emperor’s final act: he couldn’t save the pandaren without also saving the mantid and the yaungol and the places where he had sealed away the sha, so instead he saved the whole continent.

This in-game version of the story also uses the device of the Monkey King creating masks so that the emperor could draw out the burdens from within himself. You can see this concept echoed in the animated series; most of the time, when Shaohao faces off with the sha, there’s some element of physical reflection involved:

• The sha of Doubt is a shadow that mirrors his shape and movement.
• The sha of Despair starts as a reflection in the water while Shaohao is trapped in the swamp.
• When gripped by the sha of Fear, his face is reflected in the beads of sap before twisting in the visage of the sha.

With the release of Patch 5.3, a quest event had players encounter the spirit of the emperor himself, who offered an entirely different interpretation of the end of his story; it wasn’t his desire to give the pandaren enlightenment and/or safety that drove his decision, but instead a overwhelming sense of pride. “I thought we were better than the rest of the world,” he says, before going on to state that his pride was a mistake, and that as a sha, Pride was more dangerous than all of the other sha combined.

So we’re presented with three different interpretations of the  same story: in every case, the emperor combats his burdens made manifest, and then sacrifices his spirit in order to cloak Pandaria in mists, which protected it from the Sundering and sequestered the continent from the rest of the world for ten thousand years. But how that combat took place, and ultimately why he summoned the mists, are different depending on what source you look at.

Which version is canon? Which version are we supposed to say is the truth? The best answer is this: consider the source.

Consider this guy an unreliable narrator.

The animated series is being recounted to us by Lorewalker Cho. As a Lorewalker, Cho’s job is to uncover the history of the pandaren people, so that the pandaren can understand their origins and reach enlightenment. Cho telling a story that paints the emperor’s struggle as an example of that pursuit of enlightment, and his sacrifice as a celebration of brotherhood and filial piety, is in line with Cho’s objectives as a Lorewalker. It’s a feel-good story that engenders pride in one’s heritage and way of life.

The “Seven Burdens” recorded on the in-game lore objects are the same as plaques you find on memorials and statues in the Real; they’re there to try and communicate the importance of the place you’re standing in. In many cases, they’re not always accurate to factual history; they exist to justify the existence of the memorial itself, so telling a narrative that paints an picture of epic battles is also par for the course. Like Cho’s version, it’s about pride; and not only pride in the emperor, but in his allies, from the Celestials to the Monkey King to the Shado-Pan.

The version we get from Shaohao’s spirit puts a shade on all of that; pride becomes the problem. Whether this is the spirit’s guilt because of the failure of the pandaren to achieve enlightenment, or just a hamfisted tactic to Blizzard to seed the Sha of Pride fight in Siege of Orgrimmar, the bottom line is that it doesn’t result in the same kind of feel-good narrative of the other two versions; it’s a cautionary tale about getting too caught up in your own legacy to take the world into consideration.

The reason why all of these different versions are important is because it demonstrates that not everything in the franchise has to boil down to a strict timeline of events; these stories exist because they serve different purposes, and while that might mean in some cases that there may be conflicts and the timeline gets confusing, it doesn’t really matter. If the stories do their job of entertaining and/or informing the players of details of the game world, it’s not 100% necessary that everything is rigorously consistent. For some people, I can appreciate that such consistency is a mark of quality, but there’s a lot of entertainment out there that entertains perfectly well without being rigorously consistent. So Blizzard’s insistence on telling the story of the emperor no less than three times indicates that it’s a story they felt we not only needed to hear, but needed to see from multiple angles.

For the most part, very few stories in the franchise get this kind of attention, and I think it’s because there are times when CDev only seems interested in providing stories that act as set dressing for the expansion. The effort put into making Burdens stand out in every way possible, though, makes me think that they had an objective in wanting to get players to reflect on what’s happening in the expansion, not just in the standard kill-bosses-get-loot cycle, but in the motivation behind that cycle.

To a great extent, the questions asked during the opening cinematic for Mists, which are echoed during Burdens (“why do we fight?” and “what is worth fighting for?”) really are questions that we, as players, should ask ourselves, even outside the context of the game.

Got a request for what we should cover next? Leave a suggestion in the comments, or hit me up @unlimitedblack.