The UED retcon makes no sense

 The UED were introduced via retcon in BW, and were not originally planned as part of the franchise. The BW website at the time of release made no mention of the UED, but only stated that "Terran Emperor Mengsk I...must now turn his attention to...a conspiracy deep within his own ranks." 

In order to explain why the UED wasn't mentioned in the SC1 manual or OG campaigns, the BW manual states that the UPL secretly spied on Koprulu for centuries and then reformed as the UED when they saw the protoss and zerg ravage Koprulu. There are several problems with this retcon.

How did the UPL secretly spy on Koprulu for centuries and without being discovered? In order for this to work, they would need human agents to infiltrate the colonies and remain both loyal and undetected over multiple generations. This is simply unbelievable, but it gets even more unbelievable from there. The UPL decided not only to secretly spy on Koprulu, but to keep Earth's and Koprulu's existences mutually secret from one another for centuries. Again, this would require a level of conspiracy that is unbelievable for humans to achieve. Unsurprisingly, Heroes of the Storm seems to retcon this again by stating that Earth and Koprulu were always aware of each other. 

Furthermore, the UED is culturally completely different from the UPL. The UPL were basically anglophone space nazis and their policies were directly responsible for the exodus of the people who would colonize Koprulu. The UED is multicultural and employs psychics, which is the exact opposite of the UPL policies.

Another problem, altho it goes beyond the intended scope of this blog, is that the UED never shows up again in the series. Blizz just wasn't interested in including them in SC2. Their reasoning for why the UED didn't return in-universe? Since none of the invasion fleet survived, there was nobody to tell Earth what happened and their spy network magically stopped working.

Yet another problem is that the attitude of Koprulu terrans towards Earth is wildly inconsistent. Raynor teams up with Kerry after she tells him the UPL did bad stuff to them in past, without elaborating, and he just takes her words at face value despite the UED obviously being culturally opposite to the UPL. Meanwhile, UED sympathizer movements exist in secret across Koprulu and secretly yearn for the UED to return and wipe out the evil alien scum.

Maybe they'll finally return in SC3 with a fresh round of retcons. I'm not looking forward to it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Raynor was always directionless

One of the common criticisms of SC2 is that it alternately removes Raynor’s agency by making reliant on Tychus to tell him what to do and makes his few independent decisions driven by idiotic sociopathic horniness for Kerry. Thing is, this is also true of his character in SC1 OG and BW. It’s not a new thing. Raynor is passive, reactive, callous, sociopathic, and lacking in coherent motives or values. He’s pulled along by the plot, rarely makes independent decisions when given a choice, and his few independent decisions are usually nonsensical to drive the plot forward. Despite this, the writers expect us to think he’s the hero of the story (nevermind that he appears inconsistently across campaigns). Examples: In Raynor’s first appearance, he makes the decision to help Magistrate clear out the zerg. He doesn’t really have a choice, given that it’s a genocidal alien invasion. But it establishes he’s willing to put his life on the line for the greater good.  Later, Raynor is forced to...
Read more

Arthas, Sylvanas and the nature of self

Credit to ARM3481 on the Scrolls of Lore discord for the following analysis: Admittedly in-universe it makes sense for the world to continue blaming Arthas, so from that context it's not hard to understand why some people just latch onto that incomplete view of things.  Especially depending upon their experience playing and familiarity with his pre-WoW development. But really from an informed "reader" PoV, you're correct that while it's Arthas' fault for things getting to the point that he picked up Frostmourne, after that choice he's basically no longer that Arthas any more.  The creature he became at that point was the worst of himself magnified by the influence of Frostmourne, which then became even further removed from his old self once he deliberately extracted whatever lingering vestiges of his humanity remained after his battle with Illidan. Arguably the Arthas that went to the Maw would be whatever was left by his death at the end of WotLK, which m...
Read more

Aldaris did nothing wrong... except everything

The character Aldaris is more or less an idiot villain in the protoss campaigns whose sole purpose is to cause conflict to drive the missions. The frustrating part is that he is written horribly. He always has a good point, but the narrative either unfairly punishes him or gives him the idiot ball for it. During the protoss civil war, he was suspicious of the nerazim and his reasons for being suspicious are completely reasonable considering that the nerazim caused the apocalypse the last time they were on the planet. You would only know this from reading the manual, as it is never brought up in the game script so Aldaris gets framed as an ignorant bigot standing in the way of victory. Then he just forgives the nerazim and says he was wrong, without providing any explanation for why he thinks so beyond "the narrative says I should admit I was wrong." In the next campaign, he starts a terrorist uprising. His reasoning for this is that the nerazim matriarch has been compromised...
Read more