#we ride forth

On my way to kill the Lich King.

Yes, always drawing Ashbringer version of Darion Mograine. Forever.

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/story/short-story/we-ride-forth

This was such a cool read. Great short story and a great lead up explaining stuff regarding the opening pre-patch cinematic.

Blizzard doesn't like elaborating on death knights ever and often times forgets nearly every aspect of death knights, so there isn't exactly this clear and concretely stated event for this, it's more of just "this is how it has to be because that's the rules of the world they made."

Because there's Domination between The Lich King -> Subordinates and there Domination between Death Knights -> "lesser"-intelligent undead (specifically thinking of Lurid, Thassarian's skeleton here), it's basically necessity to extrapolate that Domination is enforced by hierarchy, and how it makes no sense that it would be only The Lich King that would Dominating everyone, especially because some death knights were under Kel'thuzad's command (some specifically ONLY under Kel'thuzad's command, such as the Four Horsemen), and Kel'thuzad has a wide berth of Domination skills and he consistently does it to the living in all three of his raid fights.

Per the Chronicles, Darion was the right hand of the Lich King, which makes him out to be in a position equal to Kel'thuzad. That is a position that I doubt he could have and maintain without a power level equal to Kel'thuzad, and as such, Darion had double the health as every racial leader in Wrath of the Lich King. And, as such, with Domination working on a hierarchy, and Darion having control of an entire citadel and those who work out of it, it is far more likely that Darion was personally enforcing the Domination of the death knights.

That's not to reduce the role The Lich King plays, as he is constantly whispering in your ear in the Death Knight starting zone, but there's no way that he has the time to micromanage every ghoul when he has an army with tens if not hundreds of thousands of undead that needs to be reined in.

In the Death Knight manga, we see Thassarian's point of view of the second Battle of Light's Hope, where he is very much still in the position of "The Lich King is good" while Darion and The Lich King fight. Considering how Darion unwaveringly pledges all his knights and everything turns out fine from this without any discussion between the knights, the most simple answer is that Darion manually freed them all and was vehemently keeping them free. From We Ride Forth:

Thassarian's questline in WOTLK also sheds some light on this, as The Lich King says this upon seeing him:

this sentence makes no sense if The Lich King still had some control over the knights, and the death knights largely aren't capable of resisting him, considering that even Darion, the strongest death knight period, without his righteous anger, can't stop a Bolvar who has never exercised this power from Dominating his body, again from We Ride Forth.

But am still tired only by looking at the pages and how much time it takes.

When the lawsuit came, that was the first punch in my guts. Then finding out about the bro culture, and how women in Blizzard were doing (considering I always wanted to work there, it feels like I missed a bullet). Then seeing how Shadowlands turned out and how it spits on 20 years of history of lore because a person in charge of the story is so obsessed with 1 character he forgets to make the story about the world and he even destroyed the character in the process, not just the characters, history of lore and the world around, because he realizes there is no way to redeem the character, so he had to recreate the lore so he would make it possible. And it was not even needed in the first place.

Since then, I know I could finish We Ride Forth comic. I am just asking myself why. Why would I do that when I know where the story leads. I just don't see the point, I can't gather my mental energy to continue.

I didn't know it will be such clusterfuck. WRF is still a great short story and it's one of the best things that came out of Shadowlands. But right now the only thing that makes sense to me is going back to fanfics and maybe the best thing would go back to my comic about death knights, starting before the events of WotLK and then continuing to WotLK.

Still, even though I have reasons for not finishing this, I feel like garbage.