The Aftermath

This was going to be the Lorwyn review, but I ended up saying very little about that book and a whole lot about the aftermath of the Mending for both the storyline community in general and for me personally, so it works better as a separate article.

Too dramatic?

When it comes to people's least favorite stories there are a bunch of usual suspects. Prophecy. Scourge. Quest for Karn. War of the Spark: the Forsaken. If you've been reading this blog for a long time you may suspect that my list includes a few more obscure stories, like The Cursed Land. But I think most people will be surprised to hear that my least favorite of them all are the Lorwyn-to-Eventide quadrilogy. I don't think these are very high on most people's hate list, and to be honest a lot of my animosity comes from the context in which I first read them.

Now don't get me wrong, I think these books are very bad. Slow, padded, boring, lacking in interesting characters, just a real slog to get through. At least Prophecy had some insights in Keldon culture to entertain me. At least Scourge was terrible in bizarre and interesting ways. At least The Cursed Land had the decency of ending after one novel! But to really get my dislike, we need to go back a bit.

The years leading up to Time Spiral block had been pretty good for the storyline community. Kamigawa and Ravnica were very well received, the number of stories we were getting was slowly increasing again, and with Coldsnap and Time Spiral WotC seemed to be getting back to more continuity driven stories. Personally I was having a lot of fun as the moderator of the MTG Salvation storyline forum, where we were setting up the MTGSally wiki (which would eventually evolve into the current MTG Wiki) and which was visited frequently by the likes of Scott McGough, Cory Herndon, Will McDermott, and occasionally Brady Dommermuth, though he hung out more often on the official Magicthegathering.com forums.

Times were good...

...and then the Mending happened. 

People hated the Mending, and they were very vocal about it. Being a moderator I was diligently reading all the threads, and it seemed at times that half of them were made purely to rage about the Mending, and the other half degenerated into complaining about it anyway.

Like I mentioned in my analysis of the Mending, there was always going to be initial dislike of it. Fans are as a rule possessive of their fandom, and resistant to change. But I do think that if handled correctly the community could've been persuaded to like the new planeswalkers.

To do that, a novel was needed that really sell it. A novel that was not just good, but that featured the new planeswalkers in a story that couldn't have been told with the old 'walkers, to convince people of the value of the new status quo. To really get the old guard on board though that story should also have some link to pre-Mending stories, to ease the fears that everything old was being jettisoned just so WotC wouldn't have to worry about continuity anymore. Maybe an older character in a major supporting role? And to really hammer home that the old stories still mattered and were being build upon you could've had that character refer to what has changed. Maybe have them ask a new planeswalker if they know their kind used to be godlike?

In other words, what was needed was Agents of Artifice.

AoA is in my eyes almost the perfect introduction to the post-Mending status quo. It showcases the new storytelling possibilities and sold many people on Jace and Liliana as characters. It's still hailed by many people as one of their favorite Magic novels.

But we didn't get Agents of Artifice. We got Lorwyn.

The Lorwyn books follow the planeshopping era formula to a T. A fully planebound story, focusing on a bunch of mortal characters from the setting, no planeswalker in sight, and no link to the larger continuity until a minor reference to the larger multiverse in the final novel. It's the exact same story structure from before the Mending only done worse, and nothing about it tells you that WotC had any idea what to do with their new status quo. On top of that, it lasted for ages. An entire year worth of stories featuring a bunch of characters wandering from one vague mystery to another, padded out with a bunch of random battles.

Thus during Lorwyn block nothing was done with the first batch of planeswalkers, ironically still called the Lorwyn Five, leaving them as blank slates, symbols used only for marketing by WotC, and by irate storyline fans as focal points for their anger. Resentment continued to be the main atmosphere on the forum. Slowly the authors visited less and less often. And at some point I realized I was just not having any fun anymore being the moderator.

The final straw was the announcement that Eventide would be the last Magic novel to be included in the fat packs. To get anything from the relaunched novel line you'd have to buy them from your local Barnes and Noble. But the Netherlands doesn't have any Barnes and Nobles, nor did it have any other bookstores that sold Magic novels, at least not in my area. Due to some weirdness with contracts my local game store couldn't order the books for me either. Looking back there was probably some way I could've still gotten them, via some online seller, or the American Book Center, but that would've required a modicum of effort, and I was just too bummed out by the one-two punch of two years of bad stories and a depressing mood in the community to be motivated to figure out how to keep reading the novel line. I told the other moderators I was giving up the role, and pretty much retired from the storyline community.

Okay, this one is definitely too dramatic.

I never drifted away completely, getting my hands on a few novels at some point, including the aforementioned Agents of Artifice, and occasionally looking into the Uncharted Realms stories when the novels were cancelled and the storyline moved onto the website, but without an ongoing story any good individual stories weren't enough to really suck me back in. They didn't capture my continuity-loving heart either, as we went years without even knowing where the post-Mending stories fit on the timeline, and any returning planes came with big ret-cons to revert them to how they had appeared in their last set no matter what had happened in the storyline. And whenever I tried to reconnect to the community it seemed negativity still reigned. Years after the fact I would enter a forum thread on some random story and there would still be people raging about the Mending. 

Only in 2014, seven years into my sabbatical, did stories like Nissa, Worldwaker and Dreams of the Damned, with their hints that we were returning to a more ongoing story, really pique my interest again. I was working night shifts a hotel at the time and thus had plenty of time on my hands, which combined with that renewed interest to get me to finally pick up the last Harper Prism novels and WotC anthologies I was missing from my novel collection. I also started trying to update the timeline I had once made for the MTGSally wiki to remove some mistakes and fill some gaps, which in turn was the genesis for this blog.

So, that's why I dislike the Lorwyn stories. Is it fair to hold all that against those books? Not really. But can I ever read them without the bad associations they hold for me? Also not really.

It's probably for the best that I spun this article off from the Lorwyn review, as it doesn't say a whole lot about that novel. But hopefully this look into the history of the storyline community was interesting to some of you. And I think it's good to know the backstory of my years off from the storyline, as that is going to impact the format of this blog going forward. 

GOING FORWARD?

When I first started this blog, a friend of mine asked me if I was really going to cover everything. I had no idea at the time. This was just a project to get through some boring night shifts and to keep practicing writing now I was no longer at university. I was just going to see how far I would go. But the question did make me think, and thus I told my friend that I at least wanted to get to the Mending. Due to me drifting away from the storyline after that I hadn't read everything released since then, and I certainly didn't know where to find obscure behind the scenes information writers had mentioned on old forums, like I did for the pre-Mending era. Besides, one of my main motivators for starting the blog was to finally figure out the complete Magic timeline, and beyond the Mending we had pretty much no idea whenever anything happened, so figuring out a timeline was impossible anyway. So yeah. The Mending. That seemed like a good place to stop.

Well, I've finally covered the Mending. So... now what?

This blog has run a lot longer than I thought it would. Since starting it I've changed jobs three to five times (depending on how you count secondments and new functions at the same employer) and moved house twice, and you can tell pretty clearly when those changes happened by when this blog suddenly went on hiatus. If there's one thing I've learned from all that it's that it takes quite a while before I've found a new routine, and that I need routine to keep a regular writing schedule. While all that was going on with me the Magic storyline has also gone through some major changes. Of special interest to me: slowly a timeline started emerging again!

As the Gatewatch took center stage we suddenly started getting temporal references again. A Kaladesh era storyline podcast revealed it had been "about 60 years" since the Mending, finally allowing a rough placement for the previous nine years of stories! We also started getting references to how much time had passed between various Gatewatch stories, giving us a relative timeline for the more recent stories. Finally the Dominaria Art Book outright stated "it is now 4560 AR" and the Ravnica D&D book told us it was 10.076 Z.C., enabling us to graft that relative timeline onto the main one. (Kinda. Sorta. If you make some assumptions to reason your way around a bunch of inconsistencies. But that's how it's always been.)

Well, I'm nothing if not a completist, so I can't leave the timeline unfinished from the Mending onward. So I am going to continue blogging. But there's going to be a bit of a change of format. Because I've not got all the behind the scenes info, and because I've simply haven't read and reread the post-Mending stories as much as the older ones, I can't give as detailed trivia and continuity sections as before. I'll have to experiment to find a right format, but expect shorter articles. And if there are any cool references or interesting continuity issues I've missed, you should all definitely mention those in the comments!

I'll probably also be grouping stuff together in one way or another. Again, I don't know just how yet, but I'm not going to cover every Uncharted Realms story separately. I'll still be aiming to cover all the stories, so if I ever miss something obscure, like a viral marketing story or a YouTube short or whatever, please let me know in the comments as well!

Next week I'll try to figure out the timeline placement for the sets up to War of the Spark, so we'll at least have some kind of framework to hang individual stories on. The week after that I'll do an inventory of what stories we'll actually have to cover. For the post-War of the Spark stuff I don't think we've got enough temporal references yet to make a comprehensive timeline, so we'll leave that for some time in the future. Maybe.

I'll be honest, when the community turned sour in the wake of War of the Spark it reminded me an awful lot of the wake of the Mending. There's a reason why I didn't continue the coverage of topical stories I had started with Dominaria beyond that point. For a while even I thought that in this article I would be announcing that I was picking War as the end point of the blog. Closing the gap between the Mending and the Dominaria stuff I had already covered seemed like a good way to come full circle. But then the latest Innistrad stories suddenly stated that it was two years since the last Innistrad visit, and I thought, aw heck, who knows? If the history of this blog so far is anything to go by we may be two creative teams hence by the time I actually get there, and I have no idea what WotC's attitude to the story will be at that point. With them releasing heavy on continuity sets like Dominaria and Kamigawa on the one hand, but MaRo referencing Spider-Man when people ask about planeswalkers aging on the other, it feels about equally likely that they'll release a complete and detailed official timeline as that they'll go full comic book and embrace a sliding time scale to keep Jace young forever... I guess we'll find out eventually.

Let's first just see if we can make something of a comprehensible timeline for the last 15 years of stories!