Alrighty, my first webcomic. How primitive. They get better.

In case you didn't know, Blizzard has teamed up with Mt Dew to sell a World of Warcraft themed soda. As a part of that promotion, you can get your own battle bot vanity pet from the game fuel site here. Just click on the icon in the lower right hand corner and it'll redirect you to a battle.net site. If you already have a battle.net accout (and you should), just log in and you should get your battle bot pet in the in-game mail. If not, you'll need to sign up and convert your World of Warcraft account to a battle.net account.

Yesterday I was doing a heroic AN with my DK (the undead one). There was another DK there taking for us. I asked him if he needed the plate belt that dropped from the last boss, and he said all he was after was a tanking trinket. I asked him which trinkets he was using now when this shaman says "What difference does it make? It's personal choice really anyway."

I just finished Reading World of Warcraft: Arthas: Rise of the Lich Kingby Christie Golden. It's a relatively short book that tells of Prince Arthas' corruption and rise to the Lich King.
*some spoilers after the break*

First off, I want to say that Christie Golden writes the most readable Warcraft novels. Her style is swift and to the point. She doesn't waste words with saccharin or purple prose. And while her plots, I would assume, are laid out for her. She makes an admirable attempt at seeing that they're credible. With Arthasshe continues in the same dependable way.

There are a few things that bugged me. Probably the biggest is thesize of print and spacing on the page. I put off buying this book for a while because it just didn't seem worth it. I expect a hardback, especially a $25 hardback to have a lot more meat that this one did. And I find it strange that a character as infamous as Arthas would have such little to be said of him. I could imagine that time was an issue of getting the book out for the WotLK expansion. And that's understandble, but if there was more material, maybe a trilogy should've been in the works. Either way, twenty-five dollars for this kind of story is a bit steep.

Another thing that makes the price tag seem too much is that aside from a few chapters about his childhood (which do little to tell us of the man he becomes) and a chapter at the end, most of this material is already known. We already know that he was the type of guy to slaughter a town full of people. We already know how be became the Lich King. What we want is the why. And frankly, a general feeling of inadequacy doesn't seem to be a very satisfying answer.

I could give you a short retelling of the story, but I'll boil it down to this. Much like Anakin Skywalker, Arthas will do whatever he has to save those he cares about. He is seduced by the dark side and becomes Darth Vader, I mean the Lich King.

Like Anakin, there are two major mistakes being made here with Arthas. The first is that no one really cares what this character is like as a boy. We like this kind of character when he's force choking someone to death, or stealing their soul with a big ass sword. If you can make a child version of that character just as cool, you've accomplished something neither George Lucas nor Christie Golden could.

The second mistake, also seen Anakin, is this idea that the vilest villain has some good little boy inside him. Why can't he be a creep? You know the kind that you heard about as a kid, that buries kittens up to their necks then runs them over with a lawnmower. From what we know of Arthas in Warcraft III, I don't see why he couldn't have had that kind of background.

But how do you make that kind of character the hero of a novel? Simple: you don't. Make his parents or a sibling the hero for having to put up with the sick little shit. Show from their perspective how this adored little boy is really the anti-christ and all he needs a suit of armor and a bad ass sword.

Just imagine the real turning point for Arthas when he lies in the snow with his crippled horse. Instead of weeping and vowing he'd never let anything like that happen again, he wonders how long it will take that horse to bleed out. Or how many other bones he could break before it would finally lose consciousness.

Sigh, so my biggest problem with the book isn't actually the book. The problem is that the book isn't the book I wanted it to be, and Arthas isn't the Arthas I wanted him to be. Not to mention, once he's the Lich King he then killed the only interesting part of him (not the little boy).

I have to wonder what this book might have been had Christie Golden more time to craft new material, enough to fill an actual book. But I imagine it still wouldn't have been the book I wanted to read. And Arthas would still have been a little boy who just wanted some affirmation from his father.

I made a DK last night on Arthas, because my rogue was feeling a little lonely. I leveled a DK when the expansion lost, mostly to see their starting area. But I was hooked and leveled that sucker all the way to 80. It was my first 80, did quite a bit of naxx (as in went on a lot of naxx runs, our guild wasn't great at finishing them).

So why make a new one? Well, the DK has changed quite a bit, and I've leveled a few characters since I started playing mine. I abandoned my DK because at the time we needed healers so I switched to my druid. That's probably the worst thing I've done in the game, to be honest. Because I switched from a class and a role I really enjoyed to one I didn't enjoy so much. And instead of getting more healers, I saw DK after DK get invited to the guild. At one point we had 16 level 80 DKs.

Anyway, I could go back to my original DK, but I feel like I don't know the class as well as I did since the changes. And their are some aesthetic reasons. As much as I love undead, they're one of the worst looking classes in plate. I hate that it always looks like I'm wearing shorts. Which is too bad, because undead have the best laugh and the best dance (though the best cheer goes to belfs).

So I'm going Draenei for now. I've joined a raiding guild with my hunter, so that's my main. But I think if I get used to playing DK again, I might dust off the undead one.