If you think that's wrong, feel free to explain.
Let me begin with a few disclaimers. (1) Promotional material doesn't always or even often reflect the game. For example, Dave marketed Primordia in a video that contains every single explosion in the game, with the tagline "What Happened to the Humans?" Primordia is not primarily a game about explosions or finding out what happened to humanity. So I am sensitive to the mismatch that can go on. (2) I really want Tyrrany to be great, not just because I like to watch people succeed and like to see the RPG genre flourish, but also because a short, systems-lite, C&C-heavy RPG is exactly the kind of thing I might actually be able to muster the time and will to play.
But still, I don't like your method.
It may well be true that "there's [no]thing you couldn't make look or sound banal to a jaded grognard," but it's silly to therefore conclude that one shouldn't criticize marketing material. If one isn't going to engage critically with marketing material, one shouldn't engage with it at all -- otherwise you are just letting yourself be sold a product, and one shouldn't submit to such blandishments without at least getting a free lunch out of it. Even aside from the standpoint of the proper dignity in the face of salesmanship, a critical reaction to marketing material helps the developer understand what the customers like and don't. It may be too late to turn the ship, but it might not be. Why not provide what feedback you can given the material you're offered to opine upon? The most useful thing the Codex does for the RPG industry is not the few thousands it throws at Kickstarter projects, but the intense analysis and criticism it generates.
In this specific context, I think your comparisons are inapt for a variety of reasons. As
Excidium II notes, one comes to Star Wars with certain expectations. The name "Darth Nihilus" is ridiculous but it's almost compulsory within the established property (
see, e.g., the insidious Darth Sidious, the revenant Darth Revan, the pestilential Darth Plagueis, etc., not to mention the lacivious Salacious Crumb, the acquisitive Greedo, the solitary everyman Han Solo, etc.). Thus, you can't put much stock into those names.
It is true that The Black Company and Myth names like the names in Tyranny, and that Tyranny appears on some level to be following those IPs. I would say that those names are pretty ridiculous in those settings, too, but they work for a fundamental reason that I don't think is true here, which is that they distance the superpowerful demigods from the ordinary humans whose perspective and experiences form the substance of the story. That doesn't seem to be true here for a variety of reasons: (1) the P.C. is almost certainly an exarch; (2) some of the archons do not track the Black Company naming system for the Taken (
e.g., Graven Ashe or Bleden Mark); (3) non-archons themselves have extraordinary magical powers, blurring the distinction that seemed more accute in TBC and Myth.
Anyway, I don't think people are exclusively riffing off the names, but the setting, etc., etc.
Still, I'm reasonably optimistic about things. You're certainly right that a bad marketer could've made Myth look horrific if, say, they focused on the goofy dwarves, Saturday-morning cartoon cinematics, etc.
