So I had recently got the Starcraft battle chest and while being enticed in these games - something sparked in my brain.

We all know the Kerrigan and Zerg from the olden games. In Brood Wars we have a cold, ruthless Kerrigan who is only willing to ally with Mengsk and Raynor to fully take control of the Zerg as the UED created their own little Overmind. Deciding to consolidate her new Zerg. But she was also created as a desperate goal for the Overmind to free itself from the grasp of the UED and to have the Zerg be independent in some way.

Since, now being apart of the UED, the Zerg will be pawns of the UED. But the story changes in Starcraft 2. Dramatically. No longer is Kerrigan this last-ditch effort at survival and independent from the UED, but rather an orchestrated effort to prevent "Amon" from destroying everything. Kerrigan in the 'solution', and the Overmind knew it's death was inevitable as the Overmind was connected with "Amon" and would not be able to resist Amon, nor override it's constant-need to destroy the Protos.

Kerrigan is now this. Symbol of a prophecy to save da Galaxy.

And I'm a bit confused by it. Why was this narrative needed. The Zerg serve perfectly well as this Horde of Monsters needing to consume and feed to evolve and grow and expand. Similar to the Xenomorphs and the Tyranids, this right-to-be-feared Horde that serves a purpose albeit a very dark one.

And while Starcraft 2 and Heart of the Swarm still keep a 'dark and edgy and totally not different Kerrigan" - this seems like a different Kerrigan.

But what are your guys thoughts on the narrative change and this "prophecy."

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"Yeah, a sheltered and overly idealistic son of an absolutist monarch, set to inherit the whole nation and continue to rule it as an autocrat.

A beloved archetype of modern era!" - Kir the Gul'dan

Because fuck logic, Kerrigan is teh sexxorz and the fanboi love her, so she can't be all that bad.

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I think this has been discussed over and over since SC2 was first released. Not really feeling like going over it again.

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I'm playing through HotS myself at the moment.

Blizzard probably wanted to up the ante with a bigger, badder threat to the galaxy in the form of the Xel'naga (and they did foreshadow this with the secret mission in Brood War). Basically the Zerg are undergoing an evolution parallel to the Horde's in WC3.

Which doesn't make for the most groundbreaking storytelling, but I didn't go into Starcraft expecting anything like that. My only real problem is just that they seem unsure how dark they want to make Kerrigan, and as such she kind of waffles between being a Thrall clone and a Sylvanas clone. Maybe they just wanted to show she was uncertain.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

But. Half-dragon, if your opinion isn't given then anasi dies a little inside.

just always thought that the 'greater power' was whatever suited him and even this was a ploy.

Coming from a guy who played the UED and Kerrigan's Swarm, acting as loyal allies only to oh so conveniently leave and oh so conveniently tell the entire 'goal' to this Protoss, who can destroy the specimen as he doesn't care.

There seemed to be something even more than that.

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"Yeah, a sheltered and overly idealistic son of an absolutist monarch, set to inherit the whole nation and continue to rule it as an autocrat.

A beloved archetype of modern era!" - Kir the Gul'dan

The UED didn't create their Overmind; it was created by several of the original Cerebrates deliberately merging together, before the UED managed to capture, pacify, and control it.

Kerrigan's original purpose was implied to be to provide a means for the Swarm to assimilate humanity's burgeoning psionic potential in order to better counter the psionically gifted Protoss. In short, she was a means to the end of assimilating the Protoss race, essentially being the very tool the Overmind had sought as a potential advantage by invading the Koprulu Sector and targeting humanity prior to attempting to challenge the Protoss directly.

Hence why it kept sending the Swarm after Mengsk's Psi Emitter; what seemed to the humans like the bestial zerg instinctively seeking out powerful psionic emanations due to some genetic or psychic drive to do so was actually the sapient and calculating Overmind deliberately sending its broods in pursuit of what it thought were the emanations of a powerful human psionic, ripe for capture and infestation/assimilation; it just happened to find an actual psionic who fit the bill on Tarsonis when Kerrigan was left behind while defending the Emitter. (So yeah, just about much everything bad after that point - including the fall of Aiur - is Mengsk's fault for unwittingly giving the Overmind the very thing it had been seeking all along to initiate its confrontation with and assimilation of the Protoss.)

The UED wasn't even a factor in the Koprulu Sector yet when the original Overmind "created" Kerrigan, much less a threat to the independence of the zerg; the Overmind that the UED managed to capture and control in BW was a separate entity from the first one. The Overmind that infested Kerrigan wouldn't have had any way of even knowing the UED existed (until SC2 retroactively added literal precognition to its kit of psionic abilities.)

At the time of SC1 there was never any real indication that the Overmind - or anyone else for that matter - could actually see the future, much less that the Overmind's motivations were affected by foreknowledge of any future threats to the Swarm.

That "feature" of psionic powers was added later and more heavily emphasized in WoL, and brought with it the whole mystical angle that frankly makes SC feel less and less (to me anyway) like a science-fiction universe and more like a fantasy one.

James Phinney is no longer co-writer. Enough said.

Sometimes I wonder what James Phinney thinks of SC2's story

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I feel like Metzen is really a fantasy writer at heart.

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And a star wars fan, so he wanted mystical powers with his sci-fi.

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So, it's a story of

Local Man ruins everything

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"Yeah, a sheltered and overly idealistic son of an absolutist monarch, set to inherit the whole nation and continue to rule it as an autocrat.

A beloved archetype of modern era!" - Kir the Gul'dan

No Metzen himself said that it's a story about a boy and a girl.

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Can't it be both?

I always thought the presence of the Protoss implied a lot of mysticism in the universe right off the bat, even if we weren't seeing the full extent of it yet.

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The jury is out on that one.

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I agree. StarCraft's already foreshadowed this kind of thing (really, once you start throwing in psionic powers, you're going pretty far from hard science fiction). Add to that the general mysticism of Protoss culture, and SC2 isn't really much of a departure.

It might just be because HotS comes right after WoL, which was a bit more grounded.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

No, because Blizzard already stated it was a sci-fi (Tychus even said it in a promotional video I think) so it's either a sci-fi or Blizzard doesn't know the difference between sci-fi and sci-fantasy.

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The thing is, telepathy and telekinesis at least remain grounded in a common "source". Sure, it stretches credibility, but it at least sticks with the basic hypothetical of electrical synaptic activity, only interacting on an elevated level. Reading someone's mind? Well, their mind at least operates on the same fundamental biological principles as yours, so there's a detectible commonality there. Telepathy? Well, the brain already translates electrical impulse to chemical reaction and kinetic response through the mechanisms and materials of the body, so that's a potentially measurable connection right there, if expanded and amplified.

Something like prophecy goes and turns it into literally changing the laws of time and space with your mind. There's no logical link there; if anything, a living mind evolved to exist in one time and space - like in a physical body born in a physical world within normal time and space - shouldn't really be capable of exerting influence and extracting information from outside the frame of time and space in which it exists. The protoss were shown to warp time and space with their technology in SC1, but it wasn't until SC2 that quantum temporal manipulation got lumped in with the rest as if it's just one more ability arising from the same genetic mutations that enable psionic levitation and telepathy.

If you're going to treat something like a viable and consistent science-fictional future, then you can't just borrow the philosophies of modern-day fortune tellers, spirit mediums and spoon-benders and declare it all as part of one thing not out of rational classification, but just because it's all similarly unexplained. You've turned it into magic at that point, and with magic being made real within the story it stops being science-fiction and becomes fantasy. You might as well chuck in angels and demons at that point, because you've decided that science doesn't count in your fictional universe any more.

Even if literal foresight can exist, it functionally shouldn't have anything to do with the other powers applied to psionics in SC (and many other SF universes; I'm not just picking on the one, really), and it certainly shouldn't just be one more thing a mind can do with the same mutation. Doing so is just bad science being used to disguise fictional magic as something measurable without justifying itself.

Not sure if you recall those Q and As held by the lead writer of WoL?

In them he elaborated on the "prophecy" hullabaloo, namely it is simply a prediction of the future with a high chance of coming true. Overmind had great mental powers, not even talking psionics here strictly, just that he had a lot of brain. It is not inconceivable that knowing or glimpsing at Amon's motives, as well as knowing a thing or two of the Xel'naga (giving that he killed them) he could figure out what his long time plan would be and how it would play out. Due to Amon's great influence and/or planning the event was nigh inevitable, hence the "prophesy" and creation of Queen of B.

Long story short, I felt the same and I had no problem with his explanation.

And how did said prediction manage to include a play-by-play of the last battle between the protoss and the Hybrid when the Overmind had no preexisting way of knowing who any of the specific protoss involved would be?

The prophecy wasn't made out to believably be a highly educated guess on the part of the Overmind; it involved a literal portrayal of the last heroes of Aiur mounting their final defense against the Hybrid and the Swarm and references the destruction of humanity, despite the Overmind having supposedly planned it all out before it knew terrans even existed, or knew anything about the specific state of the protoss in the time since the Xel'naga had departed from Aiur.

In the end, it just came across as one more "everything that's happened is according to some impossibly informed and obnoxiously circuitous plan". It feels like every time I turn around we're fed one more excuse for why every time a villain was defeated, it was because he had convoluted reasons for not actually wanting to win.

It's not clever any more. It arguably never was, and it's got every other serious Blizzard villain retroactively gaining talents for foresight so specific and so convenient that they can only be rationally justified by literal clairvoyance.

Even as much as I'm looking forward to the potential for RoS, I'm already bracing myself for the moment that Diablo or the Prime Evil busts out of the Black Soulstone again and we learn that he knew he'd lose in heaven and had already arranged for everything Maltheal ends up doing in the expansion to facilitate his latest revival.

I understood that those visualizations we saw were Zeratul's interpretation of the events, that is how his mind processed the immense information from the Overmind, also filled in the blanks. In fact unless I am mistaken the Overmind itself says very little, effectively all it says is that the protoss would make a last stand, and the zerg would be discarded in the end. Those are both things I can believe he predicted.

Simply put Amon's will is cosmic, what he wanted would come to pass, making predictions based on that is not magic it is utilizing knowledge.

Though I will admit I would have preferred if none of that ever happened and the Overmind was just an amoral, self centered giant brain.

That's kind of how I saw it.

And yes, I would have liked it more if the Overmind remained a monstrous being. They wouldn't even have had to make it a good guy to fit in with the new narrative; the Overmind could have secretly worked against the xel'naga out of simple self-preservation.

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

I suppose it could be justified as the Overmind having mastered psychohistory or something, but the game's narrative doesn't present it as such, but as literal prophecy. Hence the feeling of fantasy versus sci-fi.

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Hari Seldon: Overmind

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

It could be deterministic prophecy.

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Only the dark energies of the dark templar can prevent Cerebrate reincarnation.

Reincarnation is science now.

Protoss, purest of form
Zerg, purest of essence.

Never was hard science

As for boy and a girl

Starcraft is a 3 part story. Terran, Zerg and protoss.

If its a story about a boy and a girl what does that make the protoss.

Is there some kind of love triangle going on.
A threesome I don't know about

Or
Is Jim Raynor really Corey Matthews, Kerrigan is Tapanga and Zeratul is Sean in the backseat of the car acting like a bro shouting "whoo, whoo, whoo!!!"

This BS about Kerrigan being the hope of the universe, Overmind being compelled against his will to do evil while secretly setting up the hope, etc. made it impossible for me to take Starcraft 2 seriously at all. I'd actually say that the current state of WoW lore is way better than that of Starcraft lore, and that's saying A LOT. The Warcraft equivalent of this lore-raping, which in the context actually would make a lot more sense, would be something like Ner'zhul acting against his will due to Kil'jaden, but sacrificing himself to set up Arthas the One Hope of the Galaxy as the Lich King so that Arthas can defeat the Burning Legion and save the world. Wait, did that sound too reasonable? The best part is, Arthas becomes Human again, re-enters a romantic relationship with Jaina, and then becomes Undead again! WoW lore has long gone down the shithole but it hasn't quite reached this level of stupidity.