Spoilerific Musings

I feel like the few things I can vent out of my mind recently are all spoilerish. How much should one protect people from spoilers, though, when they probably won't even see the source material? Hmm... Well, here there be potential spoilers, anyway.

With some newish access to Netflix, I was easily able to get caught up on the latest (6th?)season of Voltron: Legendary Defender. I like the show and the development of the setting and characters for the most part. This season has some major ups and downs.
On the one hand, it's getting to explaining and elaborating on a good number of things that were hinted at before. Lotor and Haggar's histories and perspectives lose some mystery. Keith and Krolia get to explore details of their past via (very convenient) time disruptions. We get a little bit of a love triangle going on. We find out what's up with Shiro. We get some Altean reveals. And even if it took up basically a whole episode, I enjoyed seeing the group playing Monsters and Mana. Apparently "paladin" is the new "bard" when it comes to expendable character classes.
On the down side, a lot of this stuff is crammed into the seven-episode season and it's done in a manner of "telling" rather than "showing" with flashbacks and explanations. That is poor storytelling, and I can't help but feel the experience of the season would have been so much better if it there had been more room to explore more of that in "real time" with the characters.
Specific thoughts in the wake of the season?
Well, a season or two I remember someone commenting on the series by saying they wanted to see the vehicle Voltron make an appearance. I found myself thinking "that'd be cool, but Earth's 'Galaxy Garrison' in this iteration seems barely capable of exploring its own system." Now, with mention of information sent back with Pidge's father, this is something that could theoretically happen. I'd absolutely love to see a new version of the Explorer, even if a second Voltron might be farther off (potentially requiring Altean alchemy).
The alien wolf was criminally underused, but looks cool. Lotor's followers - I get why they flip-flop, but damn they switch sides so much no one could trust them at this point. I'm a bit confused by the messaging at the end, where Allura seems to be saying the very power of quintessence (at least in the between-world void) is corruptive, while what we previously saw of Zarkon implied there were some sort of entities within that space that were responsible for the corruption.
We'll see what comes...

I was asked a couple times what I thought of the recent Sacrifice story mission(s) in Warframe. I'm not sure I have much to add that I didn't offe rup at the time. I find the story appealing and interesting. We finally get some real solid explanation of what warframes are, though it's mostly more confirmation at this point than reveal. It seems a little odd to me that Ballas is both primarily responsible for development of the warframes as well as the one to toss them under the bus and defend to the Sentients, but hey. And the Lotus is still not back, so that kind of sucks.
Excalibur Umbra is pretty cool all around, and I quite like the fights-while-you're-in-operator-form passive, even if I haven't been able to maximize use of it in any sense.
What I didn't like is largely the same thing I haven't liked in other storied parts of the game. Might biggest complaint is the difficulty. There's no real scaling that I'm aware of. If you've played deep enough into the game to get to these missions, you have gear that's good for them. But don't bring new stuff you're leveling up, or you'll be hitting the enemy like wet noodles. And given my operator/amp stuff is still very basic, being forced to fight that way in a couple sections sucked. Granted, the worst part would only reload the area and keep the enemy wounded, so I was able to zerg through that fight, but I "died" five or six times, I think - enough that the moment lost all tension.
Still, I want to see more. And considering how long this has been teased... guh... the next step could be a while.

I recently read Humans Wanted, a collection of short stories all crafted around the premise of humans being among aliens in a way that highlights their good traits rather than viewing them as baseline average. There are some interesting little tales there, mostly optimistic and fairly light. It seems a little awkward, then, that most of them establish humans as having destroyed Earth in some way historically. Yay? There certainly is some darkness to the stories too. Actually, the most striking one to me ended on a terribly tragic note, even.

WoW:BfA looms. Blizzard offered a free weekend to returning players, allowing me the chance to poke my head in and play through the end of Antorius, the Legion-end raid that I missed out on. I now feel caught up, but it was... eh...
From a mechanical perspective, it was about what I expected. The LFR "wing" was two bosses, though the end boss was complex and multi-phased. We wiped several times. I was neither surprised nor really disheartened. Seriously, I didn't expect an LFR group to tackle an expansion-end boss fight any easier - they're always rough due to complexities as much as raw numbers. No biggie.
Story-wise... I feel like I missed how the Titans needed to be restored to their thrones in the first place. And Sargeras himself gets hit by them, not us - something that's probably fine given we've fought aspects of him before. And he's... uhh... what? Imprisoned there? I guess? And Illidan stays there because "what is the hunter without the hunt?" I feel like there's explanation missing. These scenes have a finality to them, but as far as I can tell, the Titans and Illidan are withdrawing from the world(s) to imprison Sargeras. And if that's what is happening, there seems zero guarantee that he won't break free at some point.
The sword left in Silithus and the immediate mining of the world's blood sets up some points of conflict for BfA, I guess. Though, as I understand, the pre-expansion patch will have characters disempowering/using up their artifact weapons to somehow mitigate the sword's damage to Azeroth.
What does that mean for BfA?
Well, for starters, I feel guilty for being a miner. Beyond that, I feel around as little excitement as I did for Warlords of Draenor. In that case, I was sort of put off by the Horde/orc presence in the story. In this case, it just feels like Legion was the capstone, and going back to territorial faction conflicts is a wasteful step backwards. I could totally see Sashayla just retiring at this point.
That might save me falling down the rabbit hole of "the Light may be eeevil," given how Blizzard seems to have set up Light and Void as both less-than-altruistic. The Old Gods still exist in various fashions. The Lich King is a potential villain if they keep pulling the thread laid down in the DK campaign story in Legion. But so far, the focus is on Alliance vs. Horde, and while I acknowledge that was a central conceit to the game world, it is among the least interesting/appealing to me currently.
I still fully expect to play, but I can't say there's anything specific I'm looking forward to like there was in Legion.