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The Loose Ends of Mists of Pandaria
Since the expansion is now locked in its final patch, with no future storylines to come to change the status quo until Warlords of Draenor, we're free to look over the past year and a half and say Did that actually happen to some of the stranger moments in the story. Don't get me wrong - I'm a huge fan of the story in this expansion, I think it had some really good twists and some nice back and forth between various NPC's (for instance, I love the Jaina/Vereesa team, I think Jaina's interaction with Lor'themar is fantastically catty, and the Baine/Vol'jin bromance is a lot more relatable than previous Horde leaders) but that doesn't mean it doesn't have some head-scratchingly weird moments in it. These moments often take the form of unexplored consequences or loose ends to the plot. Let's look at a few of them now. The Mogu Woman conspiracy This one got really strange because the in-game lore for the presence of mogu women got really convoluted. The way I have it worked out, there used to be mogu women, but at some point after Lei Shen became emperor, something happened. We know there was at least one mogu queen, who died by Lei Shen's hand. It seems that after Lei Shen used the power and knowledge he stole from Ra-Den to 'reverse engineer' the Curse of Flesh, he seemingly eliminated women from his society since his people wouldn't need to reproduce any longer in the conventional sense. The only two women left were in fact the Twin Consorts, and they were literally just constructs carved into the shape of women, possibly as a last dig at Monara. This leaves a whole host of questions about Monara and her relationship to Lei Shen - were they related in some way? Was she his last queen, or perhaps even his mother, or just a rival he killed to cement his power over the mogu? I found this aspect of mogu culture - their rejection of an entire gender as part and parcel of their rejection of being flesh, being alive at all, to be one of the strangest aspects of their culture. It's got some real world resonance, as well. The mogu end up not being just cruel and callous, they're also really creepy in ways we don't see often.
The Daily Grind: Loose ends?
MMOs are about story as much as they are about killing things and leveling up. We all immerse ourselves in the various worlds' backstories to different degrees, and most times when we enter a major quest, we're taking part in something to do with unfolding storyline. Expansions and patches extend stories, bringing new factions and zones into the game that were previously only heard of in lore. But with such a broad realm of ongoing stories in so many different MMOs, the chances are that full closure isn't likely to happen for all of them, and loose ends will be left hanging. City of Heroes players may never get to find out the final fate of the Reichsman, for example, or what the Blood of the Black Stream are, or just who Rularuu really is.What NPCs and storylines from your MMOs would you like to see the developers return to? Are there any characters whose stories just beg to be fleshed out more? What zones could do with more stories? What quests deserve an extra chapter? And the final question: given the tools, would you write them yourself?
