The Light and Dark do not work (rant)

Okay, so I just did a mild rant in a theorypost of mine, where I attacked Wynncraft as failing at correctly portraying the Light and Dark as the following:

• Not good or bad.
• No clear correct side.

Here's why I do not think this is done well.


Firstly, the Realm of Light questline directly aligns the player with the Light side. While the player is not broadly moral, committing a significant quantity of mild to major crimes (including two different thefts of magically-important sceptres), they are overall a force for good, targeting innumerable significant evils globally and rooting out and destroying them (with the only time when this is not the case being An Iron Heart, where the player may choose to allow Urelix to continue kidnapping and effectively torturing villagers), to the benefit of basically everyone.

With the player established as light grey on the moral scale, with few truly unjustified actions, aligning them with a specific side, even just for the simple narrative reason of 'we aren't going to implement a Realm of Dark questline, you idiot, that's not remotely feasible, what do you want, helping Bak'al wreck a city', is automatically a point in the favor of that side.


Secondly, the Realm of Light is broadly benevolent, even in an aloof manner. Orphion's lack of communication with his followers does sort of controvert the whole 'Light' thing, and directly causes the entire Thousand-Year War, which is actually a significant plothole that should be patched. But other than this total lack of foresight, Orphion isn't that bad. The Light Forest is a broadly positive place to be, shown to be simply better for everyone than the Dark Forest.

This is apparently because the Light Forest is adapted to contain Light (presumably because it has been Light for so long). But the SE, adapted for Dark, is a horrendous place for any living humans (I'll lump Gavellians with humans for ease of speech), and one in which Orphion acted directly to give mercy to the people there. He doesn't really benefit from having the Lutho citizens exist in a happy Light version of their area, he doesn't need that to have his Obelisk be a foothold in the area (unless he's planning to turn them into a Lightbringing army).

Light regions are generally positive. Sensei Miyagi's abode is a serene valley of blooming cherry trees, even in the middle of the shifting canyon. The Light Forest is hostile, but literally every region in the game is hostile, except for the Ocean, which is broadly empty and without content or update save for a few islands with specific challenge. It supports the Orcs, who are established to be maligned and misunderstood, but essentially good at heart, just with some aggressive honor things. The Light Forest supports several other, minor sapient races such as Phrumkins, which seems to be relatively good. (The CotL has 12, and if it's Light-aligned - similarly to Sensei Miyagi's grove, which I give a solid 80% chance of Light element - then that's more support on the diversity of life front.)

Meanwhile, there's not much of 'bad' to counteract the 'good'. The Light takes some callous routes to its ends, sure, and frowns upon excessive pacifism, but everyone hates Lari. Urelix may be highly unethical, but he is ultimately correct - the sacrifice of villagers saves many lives, in Wynn at least (although the sale of golems in Gavel is just regular evil, there's no need to waste a sin on, like, oppressing orcs). It's not shown to have any real bad traits (although it's certainly said to not be truly moral) other than a good-is-not-nice mentality.

Also, the whole point of NoL is that helping the Light is good? Defeating the Parasite is the good ending that improves Gavel. This could be argued to be supportive of a return to the status quo, but arguably lopsiding it in the other direction would be pretty helpful. An SE sapped of its dark would be better for humans. Worse for the natives, but they're horrible.


You see, the Realm of Dark is... extremely ungood. Every monster you fight in the SE - its home territory - is a complete Lovecraftian nightmare, and in four flavors to boot. The Realm of Darkness is so dangerous and bad for humans that all the miners of the Abandoned Mines selflessly sacrificed their lives to keep it locked away for a little while longer, and Bob is implied to have gone to the Realm to defeat some great evil within (I'd like to think he's ???, the gatekeeper of the Dark Portal). The environment is completely hostile to all human life, requiring the Lutho citizens to be sustained on Light alone and for their souls to be hidden in an alternate world for their own good.

To add on to Dern's solid role as the evil antagonist, it seems to be directly responsible for just about everything in the war. The first thing Dern did (possibly even before the unsealing of the portals) was to launch a massive assault on the Olm and drive them from their Holm out into Wynn, more specifically Time Valley and the Dernel Jungle, where they proceeded to languish and broadly die out, leaving behind more of the great monument productions of the ancient monument civilisation while occasionally tactically sending out Olm to achieve Plot Relevance (more specifically as Witherhead and Martyn - the latter implicit). This is not very good. Dern proceeded to follow up on this by brutally attacked northwest Gavel and causing immense suffering in the area, directly assaulting and corrupting the Realm of Light, and by deploying another eldritch abomination to rip reality itself apart in order to achieve yet more dominance. This is patently evil.

Also, Dern seems to be allied with the Corruption. Corruption spikes and Dark spikes visually look extraordinarily similar (although that's just an error in style). Bak'al, the most prominent corrupted, is also Dern's equivalent of Lari and directly aids Dern while also being the partial creator of the Eye. Without more info on why Bak'al works for Dern, the obvious conclusion is that the Corruption leans towards Dark and may in fact be directly allied to Dern. And considering the Corruption is unambiguously evil, this is a point against Dern.

Finally, Dern does nothing good. Its actions benefit nobody. It might be good from the perspective of the SE inhabitants, but you know what we aren't? That's right, SE inhabitants. None of us are sapient slavering pits, we are not eyes wandering on feet made out of ocular nerves, we are not giant gestalt acid consciousnesses, and we are not mindless skeletons without identities rending reality apart in our hunger to consume the real and spread the dark. Without a single good action to its name, Dern is just evil.


The result is that the devious ploy to subvert expectations of a Light and Dark conflict fails extremely hard. It has not merely fallen on its face, it has broken its nose, busted its lip, shattered its glasses, and caused several skull fractures with the extreme force it impacted the ground.

Spoiler: Terraria Does It Better

To add onto this, let's look at how Terraria does the World Evils.

The Corruption/Crimson are obviously bad. Not only are they filled with hostile abominations, but townsfolk will refuse to live in them. They spread and destroy biomes, replacing the contents of most biomes purely with their own garbage, while outright destroying the Jungle, a crucial area for the midgame of Pre-Hardmode and Hardmode. They contain some treasures - Demonite/Crimtane, Shadow Scales/Tissue Samples, Souls of Night and Cursed Flame/Ichor - but, for the most part, they're just bad in almost every respect and require constant work to keep contained so that they don't ruin the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the Hallow isn't much better. It does the exact same things to biomes - it overwrites the Desert, Snow, and Purity while destroying the Jungle - and causes the exact same problems, requiring the same work to keep it contained while being exponentially more dangerous in the underground than the normal caverns, just like the Corruption/Crimson. The only differences between the Hallow and the C's are A. townsfolk will live in the Hallow (and have opinions on it) and B. it has a late Hardmode boss, while the C's don't have any Hardmode bosses (only contributing to the Mechs, and identically to the Hallow).

The result is that both the Light and the Dark are basically pretty dangerous, great annoyances that you use mods to turn off to save yourself the immense annoyance of endless hellevators and Clentaminator solutions, and they're obviously nearly equal, and hostile to life as they spread and overrun the world. Left unchecked, they'll completely destroy it, and they get exponentially more difficult to contain the longer they're allowed to grow. The ideal world has them in balance, contained without significant spread, or simply outright gone, leaving only purity.


This is not what happens in Wynncraft.


As stated above, the Light Forest is broadly good in its portrayal. It's very possible that it indeed overtook and destroyed whatever predated it in the area, but nothing in the game hints towards this. And that basically ruins it. Even if the Dark were like Terraria!Corruption, that doesn't improve it, at all. It's making Light evil that makes Terraria's system work.

One could argue that the end result can be explained by humans and Gavellians being fundamentally aligned with the Light. This would check out and make all the lore sound, but it's still just... not a good portrayal. It boils down to Light=Good Dark=Bad anyway.

Say Light and Dark each have fundamentally neutral moral codes. From a Light perspective, Light's code is good. From a Dark perspective, Dark's code is good. We are the Light. We see Light as good and it may as well be, because perhaps it is, in fact, best for us. This is moral unambiguity with extra steps and a side of moral relativism. If each side is fundamentally so different their moralities can't coexist and are mutually evil to the other, then it doesn't really matter that there's not actually a more morally good side, because from the human perspective, we have our side, and should fight for it. And therefore the sought moral ambiguity is more of a philosophical detail.

TL;DR: If the Light and Dark are meant to not have any human-comprehensible morals, that's been very poorly executed. On a black-to-white scale, the Light is close to white while the Dark slams into black, as does the Corruption. This should be fixed to improve the lore.

 

It seems to me that humans are normally light-aligned. Dark spreading is good for dark. Light spreading is good for light. If light spreading is good for humans/villagers, it doesn't mean that "humans/villagers are automatically the only moral possibility and therefore light is good." It means that light spreading is also good for humans/villagers. We're rooting for them, because we are them, but also because there are more and they make sense to us.
Basically, if we define "good" as "what benefits our side's qol" we will naturally gravitate to our side being the good side.

 

Still means it's slanted in favor of the Light. Also I think I forgot to put that in. I will add.

 

You don't have the full story. Obviously without any history of Orphion's or the Light's actions and with a sliver of the greater picture, it's currently going to look like Light is objectively good and Dark is objectively evil, when they're both more akin to wild animals (Realm BEASTS, if you will) who act out of their own desires with little regard for any but themselves.
Taking some stuff in 2.1, the emissaries of Light of the Light Forest actively seek to kill all life that doesn't fit the ecosystem (which yes, includes the people living there) to prevent the introduction of Parasites, basically acting as macrophages destroying everything foreign. That's certainly not beneficial for humans or villagers-- that's literally the Light going "I don't really care about your lives, I just care about keeping myself safe by any means necessary".

 

2.1 improving the lore is good, it just has the side effect of not being in 2.0. I'm not ranked high enough to access the beta, so I can't account for any 2.1 stuff.

 

I want to point out that the SE is neither Light nor Dark. It is Void that rules the SE. Void is not Dark and Dark is not Void.

 

No???? What???? What are you talking about???? The game MULTIPLE TIMES says that SE is Dark. A whole lot of ingredients and enemies from that area have Dark, a synonym of it, or Dernic in their name. Why in The Realm Beast of Darkness' black Earth would The Silent Expanse be 'ruled by Void'???? Is this satire or something????

 

I think it might be confusion with TNA's lore.

The Blueshift Archipelago (TNA) is a land within the Void that is controlled or influenced by Dern (iirc) and Dern uses the Void Holes to take over the SE. The Void is not an active participant in the War of the Realms unlike the Realms of Light, War, and Dern. It is merely the gap that bridges realms. Void Valley has ties to the Void but it is still first and foremost a Dern-controlled area.

 

Also wrong

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Read the in game lore. The idea that darkness spreads through void holes was temp beta dialogue

 

Oh, that's why they're attacking you?

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Yeah, it's not necessarily that Orphion has our interests in mind, it's just that we happen to align with their needs.

 

I'm a bit confused as to how void holes and darkness work (lore wise). So there were no void holes around Lutho before the darkness took over the area? But also aren't the void holes used for the darkness to reach the physical plane? So how did darkness make its way to the physical plane before there were any void holes? And I know The Nameless Anomaly can create void holes, but how did The Nameless Anomaly get there in the first place?

Also is there any mention so far as to what the area around Lutho was called before it became the Silent Expanse? Cause Lutho is just the name of the town right? And the Silent Expanse wasn't always called that... also do any NPCs actually call it the Silent Expanse? Because as far as I know, no one knows about the Silent Expanse except Elphaba, Aledar, and Lucio, and the "people" of Lutho (and the dead miners, but in a way, everyone I listed is dead)

I'm on a question streak. Someone correct me if I'm wrong with anything I said

 

So, before the silent expanse was taken over, the Olmic lived there (the same people in the Dernal Jungle and Time Valley). The Silent Expanse was invaded and most people fled to those areas. I'm pretty sure Lutho was an Olmic town, and of course the ruins were theirs. I don't know for sure, but I assume the Nameless Anomaly either could create void holes without directly being there, or got through the Dernic Portal and just allowed the force to spread. I can't really find anything on the timeline of the Nameless Anomaly vs. the Portal, so I have no clue.

 

No. This was never said in game, either.

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To clear things up, The Nameless doesn't 'open void holes', and Darkness does not spread through it. The Nameless rips off chunks off reality, and the gaps left behind where there's now a hole in existence are known as 'void holes'.

 

So the portal opened, and the Nameless Anamoly came through it?

 

Gosh reading this makes me really wish there was a Wynncraft movie of the whole timeline of events. I watched one that was very cool about the whole timeline, but I don’t think it was as cinematic. If i was good at editing and knew how, i’d totally do it.

Still seems to me there isn’t any official name for the land before it became the silent expanse

 

No. The Nameless Anomaly isn't even in The Silent Expanse.

 

That makes more sense. Now that you mention it, I do remember reading something that talked about the void and the plane of existence, but don’t know where it was from

 

Planes of Existence. The Physical Plane, or The Plane of Physicality, and The Plane of Influence.

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Basically the realities in which the material world is, and where the realms of influence are

 

It’s a very interesting concept, our land is like a chessboard and the realms of light and dark are the players

 

They don't care about our lives, only moving their pieces