What’s up? Spazzle here, everyone. A few days back, Garrosh offered me the chance to guest-write something this week. I thought today might be a good day to do it, since the Warchief and I had crossed paths at the Darkmoon Faire over the weekend, and I thought you all might enjoy a different perspective on what happened.

I went to the Faire with my cousin Khizzara. She really liked the tonk demolition game, probably because it merged two of her great loves: engineering gadgets and blowing things up. She managed to pester Finlay Coolshot into letting her tinker with the tonks. She kept attaching all kinds of gadgets to the tonks, tweaking the motors, all kinds of things like that…most of which worked out pretty well right up until the point where her tonk would go flying into something and blow up. Oh well. That’s Khizzara.

We were checking out one of the souvenir kiosks (I swear Khizzara was going to spend all her tokens on fireworks) when I noticed Gurtash at the ring-toss tent. It looked like he was with a draenei girl, trying to win a prize for her. Khizzara and I went over and watched him from a distance. His aim wasn’t too bad, but there was one toss that went far wide of the turtle. Khizzara managed to pull off a save for him, though. When his toss started going wide, she spotted a mouse poking around inside the ring, and cast Polymorph: Turtle on it, just in time. The ring clanged off of the mouse-turned-turtle, and when Jessica the carnie started calling it a miss, I jogged up and pointed out that it looked like Gurtash was trying to hit the other turtle, and it’s not his fault that they have multiple turtles in there without any clear indication of which one he’s supposed to try to hit.

When we were leaving the ring-toss tent, we spotted Garrosh over by Sayge the fortune teller. Khizzara had never actually met Garrosh properly, so I thought I’d bring her over to say hello. When we got there, Garrosh had just finished answering Sayge’s riddles, and he was getting Sayge’s buff spell based on his answers. I introduced Khizzara, and Garrosh was friendly about meeting her (well, friendly for Garrosh…he didn’t swear or anything), apart from seeming a little disoriented for a few seconds. After that, the conversation started to get a little more interesting.

Khizzara and I were about to leave, when Garrosh started to follow along. He said he had an idea about the Death Knight Rises graphic novel I’d loaned him last week, and wanted to know what I thought about it. So that was fine. I was happy enough to talk comics with him, especially since most of the time when I try to raise the subject he calls me a nerd and a pansy and asks why I’m not out practicing melee combat like a grown-up. I was surprised enough that I’d gotten him to take the graphic novel in the first place, so the fact that he wanted to talk about it was a pretty nice bonus.

He walked along with us while he expounded on his idea about the comic. It was actually pretty elaborate and involved, even though he insisted that the idea had just occurred to him a few minutes ago. He said that it seemed to him that The Death Knight Rises presented in understated form a conservative worldview that posited (yes, Garrosh said “posited”) that a flawed order was still worth defending insofar as it still offered a preferable alternative to the chaos that would result from a successful societal upheaval by the disenfranchised, and that the story reflected an underlying anxiety toward the undermining of established power structures.

By the way, even though I’m probably paraphrasing here (I’m nowhere near as good as Mokvar is at getting these kinds of things down word for word), let me emphasize that I’m also not dressing that up at all. This is basically what he said.

I was a little taken aback by this. I basically shrugged off it off and said I thought he might be reading a little too much into the comic, and that it was probably only meant to be taken as a good adventure story. At that point he rolled his eyes and muttered, “Ah, the intentional fallacy. How pedestrian.”

At that point Khizzara leaned over and whispered to me, “Int buff.” Now it made a little more sense.

Garrosh went around with us a little longer, and we were talking about all kinds of things, generally at a much higher level of discourse than I’m accustomed to, when all of a sudden he got a look on his face like something had come to him in a flash. And then he was off and running.

“Hold on, how did I not realize this before?” he said. “He’s Vol’jin!”

“Who’s Vol’jin?” I asked him. “I mean, other than Vol’jin being Vol’jin.”

“BOB, that’s who! That guy who keeps writing in to my mailbag week after week! How did I not think of this?  It’s been Vol’jin all this time! And he’s been messing with me! He knows perfectly well the difference between ‘Invincible’ and ‘Invisible’! And that you can’t just sell the Warglaives of Azzinoth! He was just saying those things to bait me into correcting him! And I fell for it! Not to mention that when he said 6 – 6 x 6 = 0, I’m fairly sure he knew that was wrong, too! I’m actually embarrassed I missed that myself – how could I have forgotten my PEMDAS? It should come out to –30, obviously! I can’t believe Vol’jin’s been putting these past me all this time, and I never once put it together until now! What’s WRONG with me?”

He dwelled on Vol’jin trolling him for a while, but then he started running through other odds and ends that he hadn’t noticed before, little mistakes that he felt like he should have known better than to make. Not seeing through Magatha from the outset was the big one, really. But then, after a while, the int buff finally ran out of him, in mid-sentence, no less: “…and for that matter, it occurs to me, something that doesn’t even add up about that time I was attacked at Alcaz Island…um…hang on… What was I saying? Ugh…don’t you hate when you’re about to say something and then it falls right out of your head? Probably nothing important. Whatever.”

By this point the buff was long gone, and Garrosh decided he’d had enough of our company, so he went off on his way to try to find Gurtash. Khizzara and I kept playing some of the carnival games for a while, and I even won enough tokens to finally get my Darkmoon dancing bear! I think I’ll keep fairly quiet about that, and then swing by Grommash Hold sometime after the Warchief’s been dipping into the felweed again. Can’t wait to see the look on his face!

See you all later!

If you ever need anything,

Spazzle