By Luke Adelhoch | Staff Writer
Fanfiction: you know it, maybe you love it, maybe you wrote (Or write) it. It’s been a source of comfort for me during the pandemic, and none more so than Travels Through Azeroth and Outland (Also simply known as “The Travelogue”), a World of Warcraft fanfiction of well over one hundred chapters running from 2007 to 2013 in which a lone undead mage… well, he travels through Azeroth and Outland, visiting every questing zone in the game up to that point. It’s easily the best Warcraft fanfic I’ve ever read and dare I say one of the finest written fanfics I’ve read in general, however dubious an honor that might seem.
Here’s the catch: I quit playing World of Warcraft two years ago.
That being said, it might sound a bit confusing that I’ve been spending so much time reading a fanwork of it. It’s practically the reading equivalent of looking at your ex’s Instagram, right? There’s a pirate meme from two years back that said it a lot more elegantly than I could: “Well, yes, but actually no.”
With video games in particular, there can be a rather large distinction between enjoying a game and being invested in its story. In World of Warcraft’s case… well, quite frankly I hadn’t been invested in either for a while, hence why I quit. But with a setting so expansive and a fandom so passionate, it was only a matter of time before someone struck gold and wrote a story that tapped the boundless potential of Azeroth and Outland’s worldbuilding.
Reading the Travelogue feels nothing like playing the game I’d grown so distant from, but instead like reading a travelogue through a living, breathing fantasy world that captures the same wonder I felt opening the game for the first time at the age of eleven.
The first and foremost reason this fanwork has captured my heart is of course the worldbuilding itself. The story zooms in on the everyday people of Azeroth instead of big names, something the game itself never does unless they have quests to give. The towns aren’t collections of houses with a assortment of work to be done by enterprising heroes, but entire communities full of people who go about their daily lives in a dangerous, wartorn world-- it isn’t just the warriors on the front lines that have their voices heard by the narrator, but also humble innkeepers, beleaguered farmers, and refugees displaced by the countless wars and magical catastrophes that shape the world’s larger story.
Every fantasy race and faction feels fresh here. Human kingdoms are mostly palette swaps of each other from a player’s eye, but in the Travelogue, each one has a separate culture and worldview defined by centuries of history, some pulled directly from pre-existing lore and some written from scratch with quality rivalling the best official sources. The changes in orcish society during peacetime are carefully detailed. Even the undead, often touted as the token playable villains, are granted an especially appreciated level of pathos and complexity as the world-weary, morose remnants of a once proud and progressive nation.
This is in no small part due to the protagonist, Destron Allicant, being undead himself. Once a promising student of magic with a tight-knit circle of friends in the wizard city of Dalaran, he was tragically killed and transformed into a mindless undead before being granted free will again, now living as a pariah and unable to reunite with even those friends he had that still live. His undead fortitude certainly helps him travel the rougher parts of the world with far less needs than any mortal, but emotions and sensations are often dulled to him and he forever grapples with the knowledge that to even his people’s allies, he is still a monster. He travels the world not on an adventurous whim, but in a desire to find greater meaning in and understanding of his newly extended life. The world’s quality wouldn’t matter if the lens was bad, but Destron is a pleasure to read.
At the end of the day, it’s wonderful to see the World of Warcraft uncompromised by game design, budgetary concerns, or the burden of scale. It’s the world I always wanted to explore growing up, and thanks to one guy who had a lot of passion, ideas, and writing time, it can finally live up to that potential. Not to mention there’s no monthly subscription for reading.
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