Xal'atath Does YouTube

Three days ago, Blizzard dropped another War Within cinematic on their official YouTube channel, called Threads of Destiny. While featuring less visual detail than their last cinematic, it actually gives some background for one of the villains of the upcoming expansion and I recommend watching it. It's in line with the kind of character vignettes that they've been doing pre-launch for several expansions now and which I've always quite enjoyed (though anything's yet to beat BfA's Daughter of the Sea, a seriously incredible musical number whose success is also reflected in it being one of the most watched videos on WoW's YouTube channel, even above some of the official expansion cinematics).

Threads of Destiny is a solid addition, but I've got to admit it does nothing to assuage my worries about the story returning to old tropes, seeing how it shows how one of the first villains we'll encounter in the new expansion is evil because she was ambitious and got corrupted through a bargain with (an agent of the) Old Gods, a WoW villain arc we've dealt with about about a hundred times before. Though I liked that several of the most upvoted YouTube comments drew a parallel to Arthas with phrases like "succeeding you, mother"; I had not thought of that one myself.

Anyway, the agent of the Old Gods in question (even if she might not be working for them anymore) is of course Xal'atath, and she's been very active on YouTube in the past few weeks. I first noticed it in this Taliesin and Evitel video, where around the 12 minute mark Taliesin is about to launch into a long soliloquy about the latest cinematic when he suddenly gets drowned out and disappeared by Xal'atath, who comments: "Welcome to the real weekly reset. Taliesin and Evitel are sadly indisposed as they are busy being consumed by the Void, like you all soon will be!" However, the video then just resumes as normal by cutting to Evitel's next bit. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that to be honest, as their videos are always full of jokes and little skits, plus Tali has been a proud self-professed Xal'atath simp since Legion, so my first thought was that maybe it was just another one of their bits - though I did notice that Xal'atath's real voice actress was being used, not some goofy voice-changer.

It was more obvious that something was going on when I encountered the same thing around the 2:15 mark in a Preach video a couple of days later - and one that had nothing to do with The War Within at all, as it was about the history of the guild Paragon. Xal'atath seems to briefly almost possess Preach while also taunting him about how "you and your world will be mine" - but again, the video just resumes as normal immediately afterwards. I went to the comments to see whether people were talking about this strange interruption, but at the time couldn't find anything. People only seemed to care about the actual content of the video, not this weird interlude. A bit of googling surfaced a forum thread where someone noted that they'd noticed Xal'atath cameos in multiple people's content recently, and others were chiming in with additional examples that they'd seen. Eventually Wowhead did a full news post summarising all her known appearances. Apparently she also speaks Spanish and Portuguese!

Since I work in marketing in real life, I thought that was a really interesting thing for Blizzard to do - clearly it required some effort and a solid degree of collaboration with all these content creators. I'm just not sure I get the "why" exactly. People watching these guys will already be aware of the expansion and of Xal'atath as a character (even if they don't know much about her) and is having her wax poetic about her evil plans really going to make much of a difference to anyone's perception here?

My best guess is that someone in the WoW marketing team was like: "Remember Wrath of the Lich King? People loved how Arthas was everywhere, constantly taunting the players. Nobody had anything bad to say about that. We should do something like that again, and make it even bigger. Maybe we can even take it outside the game itself!" And yeah, you can find my own thoughts on that in the linked sentence, which goes to a post on this blog from 2009, in which I talk about how Arthas became a bit of a joke over the course of Wrath of the Lich King, constantly showing up to make speeches while coming up with excuses for not fighting you at that particular moment.

However, I think that was not the majority opinion at the time, and many players still consider Wrath their favourite expansion in all aspects, so maybe the WoW marketing team isn't entirely off with their thinking there. The only difference being that Arthas was a character with a lot of history behind him, while Xal'atath is not - I guess it remains to be seen whether the power of "sexy elf lady" on its own is enough to make the masses love her. I'm already kind of tired of her myself to be honest and the expansion hasn't even launched yet. I want to see villains with interesting plans and personal interactions, not endless cartoonish speeches about what a badass you are and all the evil things you're totally going to do later (not now though, bye!).