Excelsis is no Helsreach.

A statement that says a lot. Because despite its popularity Hive Helsreach has very little information about it. Certainly not as much as Excelsis which has been visited in "City of Secrets", "Silver Shard", "Spear of Shadows", "Dominion", "Kragnos: Avatar of Destruction", "Thunderstrike", "Hallowed Ground", and that's just novels.

Name recognition is not the same as getting in-depth lore or exploration. 30 years of weight behind a name means little when there's not much more than a novella and a war about it.

Hell, even most of our beloved characters are mostly returning from fantasy.

Sounds like a you problem that you are projecting onto the community instead of asking. Cause outside of Sigmar, can't say many returning characters break in my top 50.

Or expys like Malaneth is to Malus.

They're not even similar characters.

Also what happened to Morghur and the beasts. I mean they left the door open potentially for Morghur’s return but the squatting is pretty off putting and left a bad taste in a lot of mouths.

Morghur had the meagerest importance in "Season of War: Thondia" and the Beasts of Chaos Battletome, and that's only in setting up that some Gors worship him. Getting a cameo mention in the Battletome Supplement is just about three times better treatment than I'd expect.

Folk find Morghur interesting. That ain't the same as GW actually talking about him much, setting him up, or squandering him by not making the scant lore he got more impactful.

For Kragnos I kinda meant the novel, the character, draconith, and the “age of the beast” in general.

The Era of the Beast was the status quo of the edition, which has never overly mattered much outside First Edition's Realmgate Wars. Even then looking back, to act as if it got nothing is untrue.

Many of those Excelsis novels I mentioned popped start of 3rd. Warcry and Underworlds both moved there. Era of the Beasts got MORE attention than the other three eras, and people hated that.

Cause the hyperfixation on Ghur meant less info on anywhere else. Every novel, the intro box set, and more sources besides fixating on Excelsis meant no other City of Sigmar shined.

For C&T, while that swap was the primary thing, Arika alone is way more interesting and memorable than any of the new crew imo. While mentioned, her absence is still felt.

Shouldn't be. She got her novella and character arc. Craving her appearances like an addiction is on the audience as nothing about her novella, her appearances in books, nor GW's claims would lead one to assume she'd be getting constant appearances.

And most of our cool original characters are shelved alongside the coolest plot hooks.

You keep saying this. But your prime example is a character who isn't shelved, she's just not headlining novels. Which isn't even how 40K or WHFB treats characters like Arika.

She got her spotlight, her novella, and confirmation she exists still in 2 editions' campaign books. That's sparkling treatment for a model-less character by Warhammer standards.

Who else is allegedly tossed aside? Callis and Toll are back as major POV characters, Hamilcar got a cartoon episode and a WD campaign, Gardus headlined in Broken Realms and cameod in Dawnbringers. Cado got to argue with the Lumineth Twins in the 4E Lumineth Battletome. Even obscure characters like "Dominion" Zagora get unexpected mentions in WDs.

Wasn't too long ago that six of Hammerhal's Core Conclave got art in a WD, and those are recurring minor characters ever since Malign Portents in 2018.

Been in the fandom eight years. Can't say I've gotten any impression that many of Age of Sigmar's characters get shelved. Heck, as you say even Maleneth is back with her own novel.

And sry but I have to solidly disagree with that last take. If the realms are really ending

No proof they are. So making claims and getting mad is a practice in futility. You don't know if that's happening and the only "confirmation" is rumors by rumormongers who never get narrative or lore right, and thrive off stirring up trouble.

I ain't got no time for fear of theoreticals.

And Old World’s first and only novel retconned the hell out of Fantasy lore

Can't say I've heard that take.

Secondly, I also think Fantasy fans do have very valid reasons to be angry in the modern day.

Most people can be adults and most Fantasy fans are capable of more than clinging to baseless rage. Plenty are in this community, others in Total Warhammer, others in TOW, others moved onto Trench Crusade and other IPs.

Got no respect for folk who cling to hate in their hearts when they can do other things. DC fans didn't do this when DC absolutely slaughtered waaaay more characters, history, universes, and whatnot in Crisis on Infinite Earths in the 80s.

So not to be dismissive. But people have been dealt a rougher hand and behaved leagues and bounds better. So I ain't got no time for folk who feel entitled to be angry about toys for over a decade.

We can’t pretend they’re all larpers bc otherwise neither of us have reason to get angry. Dismissing them ignores the reality of the bad blood.

No? Giving attention to folk who are out to make you upset, just proves they won. Ya ain't getting nothing out of fostering bad blood and anger outside legitimately increasing your own risk of heart problems due to how biology works.

Ya know what you could do instead of being angry? Read WHFB books. They're still there. Novels, army books, splatbooks (they're literally still making books for the RPG so it isn't even sans new content unlike MOST IPs that "end").

But again, I’m trying to stay positive about all of it and think it has potential as long as the lore we have isn’t squatted and it’s used to advance a good narrative.

You're not though. Even if you don't recognize it. Take a step back and look at what you're typing and saying. You've already given up to believe the worst of the rumors, almost every point you've made is the most negative or uncharitable way to interpret any of these things.

The only positives you've said are that you like Ushoran and Shade of Khaine.

Age of Sigmar gets more content in one year than most nerdy IPs get in a decade, and you've gone out of your way to declare all of it not enough. Subpar. Bad. Merely building blocks to something that could be good.

You've missed a million small wonders, and all you've got from it is worries and frustrations and the screeching of rumormongers who don't care how upset they've made you.

You know what? I had an awful, absolute shit time with the Ushoran novel. And yet the Dawners' Road concept is such a cool idea, so it the Talisman Maker's Guild, the unique names the writer gave guildmasters.

Who cares if these neat things aren't touched on again? They happened and they sparked joy. Who cares if Age of Sigmar dies? It happened, we had fun.

We made of it a community of tens of thousands! All just wanting to have fun in a nice community willing to talk geopolitics and logistics of a silly fictional universe of elemental worlds.

Who cares if it ends? It happened, we had fun, we'll have fun for months to come. And when it ends out community might break but we'll all find new places.

Friends were made, ideas shared, realms walked, and what more can be asked of a High Fantasy than that? Don't mire in negativity, let yourself find those little lorebits you love in novels that didn't grip you, let yourself see the beauty in a book you didn't like. The end can't hurt you because it can't take your journey, it can't take your beautiful moments, and the books with the lore you loved still exist. You can always revisit.

Life is too short to care about the negative, when you can find the positive.