This is about the Warhammer End Times expansions. In short, over the last about a year and a half Games Workshop released a series of expansion rulebooks to its Warhammer Fantasy Battles tabletop game. They represented cataclysmic events called the End Times happening in the world of the game, with one book of the sets being rules for the game and another, much thicker book being a massive compendium of lore describing the events. In the fifth and final expansion, Archaon, the world is effectively destroyed along with all the races, factions and named characters (who number in the dozens) dying horribly in a storm of world shattering energies. And this is where I felt something weird.
I felt a strange feeling of loss. I've played WHFB for almost 9 years now, though only very rarely in the last 5 years, and was never that into the lore. But reading how Grimgor Ironhide gets his head lopped off, or how Malekith the Witch King lies dying under a pile of rubble with his dragon Seraphon dead at his side, or how Archaon, effectively the main villain of the WHFB world, falls into a bottomless pit of fire, I felt like departing from characters I'd known for years and years. Considering I knew them all effectively as fantasy tropes with stat lines, this was particularly weird. Perhaps there was some sort of attachment to the characters because I knew what each of their miniatures looked like, and their place in the world. The thought of them all (or even one to be honest) being eliminated altogether was something I'd never thought would get a reaction from me. Especially the beautiful artwork depicting Lovecraftian forces tearing the world apart at the end was particularly striking, and even sad. Perhaps because so few works of fiction ever end in the actual destruction of the world this stood out to me so much.
I guess the TL;DR would be that I found I had way more attachment than I thought to a part of my hobby I never considered important. Have you had similar experiences? Wherein something you've thought you had no emotional stake in suddenly gets that reaction out of you? I'm very curious, since this was a new feeling for me.
Edit: renamed the thread
I felt a strange feeling of loss. I've played WHFB for almost 9 years now, though only very rarely in the last 5 years, and was never that into the lore. But reading how Grimgor Ironhide gets his head lopped off, or how Malekith the Witch King lies dying under a pile of rubble with his dragon Seraphon dead at his side, or how Archaon, effectively the main villain of the WHFB world, falls into a bottomless pit of fire, I felt like departing from characters I'd known for years and years. Considering I knew them all effectively as fantasy tropes with stat lines, this was particularly weird. Perhaps there was some sort of attachment to the characters because I knew what each of their miniatures looked like, and their place in the world. The thought of them all (or even one to be honest) being eliminated altogether was something I'd never thought would get a reaction from me. Especially the beautiful artwork depicting Lovecraftian forces tearing the world apart at the end was particularly striking, and even sad. Perhaps because so few works of fiction ever end in the actual destruction of the world this stood out to me so much.
I guess the TL;DR would be that I found I had way more attachment than I thought to a part of my hobby I never considered important. Have you had similar experiences? Wherein something you've thought you had no emotional stake in suddenly gets that reaction out of you? I'm very curious, since this was a new feeling for me.
Edit: renamed the thread
