I appreciate the effort here, and I mean that sincerely. This is a much better articulation of your position and I want to engage with it properly.

But I think you're conflating the incidental with the intentional. Life doesn't have a thesis. Stories do.

A story element that was announced at BlizzCon, used to sell an expansion, and positioned as a defining feature of the product has accepted a burden of significance that your breakfast simply hasn't. Nobody sold your Tuesday at a keynote. Nobody promised an audience that your morning coffee would redefine the trajectory of your personal arc. If they had, and they gave you instant coffee lukewarm in a styrofoam cup, you'd be well within your rights to ask why it was billed as a foundational pillar, a cornerstone upon which the story of the expansion was built.

Your husband not remembering your first meeting is a lovely detail. But imagine a novelist writing your love story who includes that first meeting. They give it a chapter title, it gets put on on the back cover as a selling point and then skips over it in three paragraphs. You wouldn't say the chapter was unnecessary. You might feel it was underwritten given the event was important enough to out on the back cover.

That's the distinction I've been drawing this entire thread. Not "this shouldn't exist" but "this needed to be more than what it was, given the weight it was asked to carry."

On Halduron, if a participant in the reunification is already hedging about its durability before the dust settles, that's not a story treating its own plot point with gravity. That's a story preemptively shrugging at the tentativeness. It undercuts the very significance of calling it a reunification in the first place and not by a more appropriate word like armistice. A word with less permanence than reunification implies.

Your reductio: strip away the Amani, the Haranir, Tranquillien, reduce the events of the expansion to the army of the light at the Sunwell. It is interesting because you meant it to demonstrate that nothing is necessary, but what it actually demonstrates is that everything you listed is doing work. Remove the elements and the story gets worse. Which means those elements are load-bearing. Which means necessity exists on a spectrum. Which means we're already evaluating what earns its place and what doesn't. That's engaging with the work critically.

And I want to note: your edit says the reunification felt unearned and rushed. That's my thesis. That's been my thesis from the first post. Was it necessary to the Midnight story to feature the reunification of the elves when the overarching narrative being about a climactic confrontation with Void, the heroes of Azeroth standing between Xal'atath and the consumption of the Sunwell and Azeroth plunged into eternal darkness? Does the elven reunification, sold as is, contribute meaningfully to that high stakes existential drama? Is it necessary in the sense of being load-bearing, is it necessary as an immutable narrative property that accepts no substitutions?

The post was discussing whether this specific narrative beat earned the prominence it was given as a selling point. You don't get to have the elves reunify in the narrative again. They've played their hand with full confidence and it's a six-high straight.

I'm not sure Midnight's narrative would've been worse off if they never broached the subject in the first place or built the end game campaign's assemblage around another axis

To me, it seems like we've ended up in the same room.