The War Within, the latest World of Warcraft expansion, is off to a strong start. The early narrative is interesting, the environments are gorgeous and densely detailed, and the characterization is a big improvement over the zenith of Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. There’s one element that’s a little harder to quantify; it’s a special sauce that adds a nice flavor to everything else. It’s the dynamic between Alleria Windrunner, arguably the expansion’s main character, and the villainous Xal’atath. So far, it’s tense, dramatic, and gay as hell.
Alleria Windrunner is a long-running character from the original Warcraft real-time strategy games. She’s an elven ranger, dedicated to her family and to protecting the innocent. Her lengthy backstory is marked by repeated sacrifice — she left her home and infant son to pursue the Orcs into the Dark Portal. She was thought lost, but she ended up embroiled in a thousand-year war in an extraplanar realm alongside her Light-loving husband Turalyon. The demands of that war eventually lead her to embrace the shadowy powers of the Void.
In World of Warcraft, the Void is presented as a corruptive force, constantly whispering and coercing. This cosmology is a big part of the current lore; there are six cosmic forces, of which the Void is one, and it is opposed to the Light. This contrast is so strong that Alleria can’t even touch her husband without both of them being in great pain. So what’s a girl to do when she’s having marital problems and struggling to master her new Shadowy powers?
Enter Xal’atath, the current big bad of World of Warcraft. She’s the Harbinger of the Black Empire, some kind of ancient and powerful force of the Void. She’s an eldritch entity haunting the corpse of a Void Elf. We don’t know a lot about where she came from or what her ultimate goal is, and part of that is because she’s so focused on seducing Alleria to her side. Metaphorically, of course.
There are multiple cutscenes throughout The War Within where Xal’atath menacingly hovers around Alleria, cooing in her ear, getting right up in her face. At first, I wasn’t really sold on this conflict. Xal’atath talks a good game about having Alleria “embrace her true self” and “be who she was meant to be,” but she doesn’t have many bargaining chips. The player isn’t given much reason to think Alleria would deliberately fall to evil, so the whole thing rings a little hollow.
That is, unless you extrapolate on the relationship between Alleria and Xal’atath — which fans are happily doing. The ship is still in its nascent stages, but there’s a lot of potential there. Besides, there are two more expansions in the Worldsoul Saga after The War Within, so we know this dynamic has a lot of time to slow boil.
Will this ship ever become canon? Probably not, since Xal’atath just destroyed the beloved city of Dalaran. While Blizzard is taking big narrative swings lately, I can’t see them deciding to resolve this particular conflict with smooches. But the fan interest, and the fact that fans are enjoying the dynamic between our hero and villain, is a good sign for The War Within. I want to be able to speculate on these characters’ inner lives, their motivations, and their wants and needs. That just happens to result in good old fashioned shipping, and who am I to argue with that particular kind of enthusiasm?
