One key point about "mists" in terms of how it's often used. "Mist" is often a concrete noun stand-in for "mystery." Mists hide things and they signal the start of an adventure. Mist appears in a movie to suggest danger lurking out of sight: it's always going to be something like Skull Island, or a velociraptor, or intelligent apes.

But, seeing something draped in mist for us savvy fantasists is basically like sticking a flag on it that says, "Here's the exciting stuff! Explore here!"

"The Mists of Avalon," Stephen King's novel "The Mist," "Gorillas in the Mist," "Red Mist," "Shrine of the Morning Mist," "In the Electric Mist," "Sinbad Beyond the Vale of Mists." Even in Shakespeare's plays, characters are running out into mysterious mists for an adventure like in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" or wondering where Hamlet's father's ghost came from besides "out of the mist."

Never mind that Kvaldir are only associated with the mist because Blizzard was trying to imbue that same sense of mystery and danger that usually comes with mist. Pandarea is a mystery to the rest of Azeroth, thus it comes swathed in mist.

And let me just add that if "Mists of Pandarea" is the next expansion, Pandarea had better be a whole damn continent and not just a handful of new zones like Cataclysm. Blizzard is really falling off in production of new content. A new island here, a new underwater zone there... A few Lost Isles on the side would not feel like an acceptable expansion. No matter how much mist there is.

Reply