The Unlikely Planetary Romance: World of Warcraft

If there are any properties that don't strictly adhere to the Silver Age segregation of fantasy and science fiction, and they get any significant popular acceptance, it's likely that this lack of separation will fuel that growth. Star Wars welcomes wonder, mysticism, and other fantastic elements that--in its most popular expressions--allows it to be Superversive as well as firmly in the Pulp tradition.

It's not the only property. Several in Japan likewise go this route, mixing to varying degrees, with similar results- and not all of them involve giant robots. While significant, I'm not talking about those properties here. I'm talking about one about to celebrate another convention and announce a new expansion: World of Warcraft.

The property started as your usual Vanilla Fantasy setting, but started blending when the RTS games introduced Outland, introducing Planetary Romance elements.

The blend became more obvious with the first MMORPG expansion: The Burning Crusade, which retro-actively added spaceships and crystal mystic technology to a property that already had cannon, firearms, powered flight, and industrial production economies on top of the knights-and-dragons core of the property.

This blending trend continued, at varying speeds, ever since. Wrath of the Lich King returned the flying castles of the dead, the Necropoli, and even introduced a new class of them (Acherus, the home of the Death Knights). The narrative revealed the Titans as Ancient Aliens, capable of colossal constructs and the power to make them work; god-like in power, but not true gods, and a lot of the fantasy elements are derivations of either their works or those of their enemies: the Void Lords, via the Old Gods that serve them. The Burning Crusade arose when one of the Titans went Full-Tilt Bozo and decided to burn Creation to save it from said Void Lords.

Now, with Legion, we have a full-on science-fantasy setting and there is no significant complaint about any of it. Not the spaceships. Not the mecha. Not the fighters. Not the souls-as-fuel concept the aforementioned Crusade uses to run its technology. Nothing at all. Instead, people still whine about Pandaren, and hate the RNG-on-RNG hobbling of the game. While it will never go full Space Opera, it's not that out of line with (e.g.) Palladium's RIFTS, skewing closer to its Fantasy line. BlizzCon hits on the first weekend in November, so Soon(TM), and I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.

(And if you object, saying that Starcraft is the Space Opera setting, review the definition of Space Opera that Brian Niemeier gave a few days ago here:)

I see the term space opera thrown around a lot lately, and in contexts that make it clear there's more than a little confusion about what the genre entails. To sum it up, space opera descends from the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Doc Smith. Modern Mil-SF follows the tradition of authors like Robert A. Heinlein and Joe Haldeman.

(If you can't see the John Carter of Mars roots in World of Warcraft, you're in dire need of remedial education. Go read those books; Amazon has them for Kindle for free.)