by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

Set to be unleashed next week, William King (best known for his extensive work in Games Workshop‘s Warhammer 40k universe) kicks off a great story with Illidan, which really digs into the demon hunter’s mind all the way from his imprisonment to his career in Outland. But before we get in too deep:

Critical Data

WHAT’S IN THE BOOK

• The advance copy I received was 318 pages of fairly non-stop self-destructive glory for all of the viewpoint characters.
• Begins with the moments just before we met Illidan for the first time in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.
• This is a decidedly darker and more graphic story than I expect out of Warcraft, though it’s not TOO graphic and it does suit the material.

WHAT’S NOT IN THE BOOK

• Deviations from canon dialogue. King goes through a lot of the scenes where we’ve seen Illidan in-game (from WC3 all the way to the end of the Black Temple raid in Burning Crusade), and he generally recreates the dialogue word for word. In most cases, the internal narration you get for the active perspective at the time lends much more nuance to that dialogue than the game version could ever communicate.
• Cheerfulness. This is a story about antiheroes. Illidan fits that definition to a T, but the additional perspectives we get (most notably Maiev Shadowsong) lend a different shade to the antihero archetype. You’re going to love or hate these characters by the end of the book, but the bottom line is that you’ll have more context for where they came from and why they do what they do.

THE PROJECT

The chief operation of William King’s novel (his first and hopefully not his last for the Warcraft franchise) is to string a coherent narrative through most of Illidan’s in-game appearances since WC3. In a lot of ways, this book is the perfect example of why some stories simply can’t be told in-game; there are many scenes that are completely bereft of dialogue, but which are described in such detail and filtered through the perspectives of the POV character in such a way that it would be impossible to achieve the same emotions if you had to try and tell it to an everyperson player avatar in-game. That internal monologue, that questionable viewpoint on what’s going on in front of them: if you tried to portray it as a cutscene then you’d have a very concrete idea of what happened, but not how anyone felt about it. And that feeling, that very close perspective of what’s going on inside Illidan’s head, is really the point of the book.

If you ever wanted to understand why the Betrayer did everything he did from WC3 on, this book will articulate it for you handily.

Now, is it any good? For the purposes of full disclosure, I will admit that I’ve never liked Illidan as a character. He always felt like he was the personification of this emo rebel who exists to get friend-zoned by Tyrande (which feeds into the awful concept that is “friend-zoning” but that’s really a whole different article entirely) and then just channels impotent rage into nothingness while wielding awesome glaives and eschewing a t-shirt. I went into this book expecting that King’s project was to redeem Illidan and justify him as a character in advance of his inevitable return in Legion this summer, and was pleasantly surprised. Not because that redemption happened (without spoiling anything, it doesn’t really happen) but because I came out of the story appreciating more about Illidan’s antihero nature.

There is more to the guy than being bent out of shape about Tyrande, or his brother Malfurion. He is a creature of ambition, but also a creature of vision, both of which are delightfully ironic given his millennia of imprisonment and his actual lack of eyeballs. He’s an excellent anti-hero because his methods are brutal and terrifying but they ARE also effective, and the question about whether or not they serve the greater good for Azeroth and/or all the worlds in the Great Dark is really something that’s largely left to us as the readers to judge.

So yes, I’d say the book is pretty good, and worth a try. I also feel like the fact it’s coming out only a few weeks after Chronicle Vol. 1 and a few months before Legion‘s projected release is entirely intentional. In many ways, a lot of the details about the Burning Legion and Sargeras that were firmed up in Chronicle are acted upon in this book (and no, you don’t need to read Chronicle to understand any of that, as the critical details are well-articulated here too), and stuff that happens in this book certainly sets the stage for the Demon Hunter class narrative we’re going to see in Legion.

Moreover, it’s an excellent example of a piece of media being released at just the right time: do you want a solid review of Illidan’s modern career without having to play through WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos, WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne, and Burning Crusade‘s questing zones and first two tiers of raiding? Illidan delivers that, just in time for it all to be relevant again.

You can preorder Illidan (in either dead tree or digital format) at Amazon, and it is due out on April 12th. Bonus? The preview on Amazon’s page will give you a very good idea of what to expect, so if you’re on the fence, give that a try.