[9.1 Spoilers] Elune's Reveal: The Problem with 'Wait and See'

Lore Story Forum
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First off, since there are a few other, similar threads, let me start by posting the new video, to keep it nice and at the top.

Overall, this has been my favorite Shadowlands cinematic in that I didn’t actively hate it. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t hate it.

Moreover, I wanted to discuss something strange about the response to this cinematic. Normally, there’s a lot of arguing discussion on the narrative quality of the cinematic and the implications for the story based on what happened in the cinematic. However, on this cinematic, people aren’t discussing the quality and implications of what happened. They’re discussing what even happened.

I think the reason why is because of just how damn long it’s taken to tell the story. This is a reveal. This is something that is supposed to recontextualize Teldrassil. However, it’s coming three years after Teldrassil happened, so doing the mental gymnastics to place everything in the timeline is… Difficult.

Here’s the IRL year that we learned each story beat, but it’s given in the in-universe order of events.

  • 2020: The Arbiter breaks, all souls are sent to the Maw, anima drought begins
  • 2020: Ardenweald stops receiving souls due to the drought
  • 2020: Literally all the Eternal ones are incompetent, so they just shrugged and said, “what can you do?” intead of investigating
  • 2020: Ardenweald has to start culling groves and killing wild seeds
  • 2021: Due to this, the Winter Queen calls to Elune for help.
  • 2018: Sylvanas burns Teldrassil
  • 2021: Unable to stop the Burning, Elune makes the best of a bad situation and tries to send the souls to Ardenweald to answer her sister’s cry for aid
  • 2020: The arbiter was already KO at the time, so the kaldorei souls went to the Maw instead.
  • 2021: Seeing nothing, the Winter Queen thinks she was abandoned by Elune
  • 2018: The Fourth War starts
  • 2018: Tyrande performs the Night Warrior ritual to reclaim Darkshore
  • 2021: Thinking she helped the Winter Queen…
  • 2018: Elune provides assistance to Tyrande to help reclaim their lost homes
  • 2020: With the Night Warrior’s power, they reclaim Darkshore.
  • 2020: The Maw Walker arrives and informs the Eternal Ones that the souls have been rerouted to the Maw, causing the drought
  • 2020: To be clear, this is when the Winter Queen, who called for Elune’s help a dozen plot points back, learns the souls were in the Maw
  • 2020: Night Warrior Tyrande heads into Maw and helps with Kaldorei souls.
  • 2020: Idk stuff happens, lots of stuff
  • 2021: Tyrande fights Sylvanas. Runs out of moon batteries
  • 2021: This cinematic, Tyrande is saved from trying to guzzle the Elune’aid. The Winter Queen accuses Elune of abandoning her. Elune explains she sent souls to Ardenweald. Winter Queen realizes why she never got the souls an explains the Maw situation to Elune.
Patch Dates
Patch Release Date
BfA Prepatch 07/17/21
8.0 07/27/18
8.1 12/11/18
Afterlives: Ardenweald 9/10/20
Shadowlands Prepatch 10/13/20
9.0 11/23/20
9.1 07/27/21

That’s right folks. The reason isn’t “Elune hates the night elves” or “Elune is evil” or “Elune sacrificed the elves”. But, “The Winter Queen and Elune refused to text each other.” That’s what caused this mess. Spite and poor communication. If that’s underwhelming… It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?

Point is, to see understand the IC timeline, we have to connect our OOC timeline from 2020 to 2021 to 2018 to 2021 to 2018 to 2020 and back to 2021 again. It’s just an insane amount of information to have to keep track of over the course of three years.

I don’t blame the release schedule on the lore team. Obviously, that’s not their department. Likely, they were done with their work months ago, and the schedule shifted on them, and this has probably happened a few times.

However, the big issue is how little context they give us up front. They want to keep everything a surprise. They want to make everything a twist. Which is a risky move for a book or even a movie because all of those details are fresh on the audience’s minds.

But… A game that’s on as slow a release schedule as WoW? The trickle feed isn’t working. “Wait and see” isn’t working. People can be patient, but not over the span of literal years. Not to mention the risk of the reveal being poorly-received, and people having felt like they waited literal years only to be disappointed.

If Blizzard want to tell a big, grand story, then they have to work on their pacing and contextualizing. They have to stop withholding so much information just to feed speculation videos. They have to focus on telling a story, not selling a product or drumming up hype.

EDIT: Tables suck, converted to list.

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“Tyrande must choose, Vengeance or Renewal.”

Guess we know which she chose, huh? What a bunch of crap.

Shadowlands expansion was a mistake.

Edit: She’s clearly going to choose Renewal. They have been beating us over the head with the Vengeance-is-bad bat. Also, gods should run the afterlives of their followers, not disassociated Death Realm people.

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We won’t know until next summer

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Maybe they should explain why these two are mutually exclusive…

And I think Tyrande did choose when she wanted to pop Sylvanas’ head off so why did Elune deny her the choice then? The story cant be consistent for even one patch it seems.
Jesus christ people actually get paid to write this drivel. My god.

I am in the wrong industry.

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Thank you so much for this, I was very confused but you laid it all out wonderfully and succinctly!!

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This gets a lot easier if you just stop thinking of this as a story and start thinking about it as a toyline advertisement.

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Still rather confirms the Lowborne Night Elves have been batteries for their gods resurrections the whole time, and druidism and Elune letting them turn on the arcane was tricking them into following a path that ensures they go to the right place.

Mind you this whole Shadowlands narrative is a lot of face palms of ignoring simple solutions until problems grow out of control.

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Further proof that subverting expectations and twists don’t automatically equal good storytelling.

In a previous thread, I asked the following question;
Is the World of Warcraft story anti-justice?

This cinematic is yet another example of “The victim mustn’t pursue justice” (if it’s not justice, why bother giving Tyrande those powers in the first place?). Very intriguing that Blizzard keeps coming out with this narrative… very strange indeed…

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I’ve said this before and I will say it again and again and again until I die and it’s subsequently written on my tombstone.

Game of Thrones set a bad precedent.

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This sort of story telling didn’t start until really after Legion.
What changed after Legion?

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I think this subvert expectations, edgelord fixation and contrarianism fixation goes back long before Game of Thrones (as far back as the 1990’s, I say), but I otherwise agree with you.

In regards to Game of Thrones, I think it began in Season 5 with the butchering of the Dorne subplot, omitting Lady Stoneheart and the villain-batting of the Sparrows/Faith of the Seven. From there it built up until it boiled over in Season 8.

A lot changed after Legion, but there were hints of it there with Alleria and Locus-Walker’s Void training quest despite the clear dangers, the “Light and Void are equally blind” angle and the complete hash they made of the naaru character Xe’ra’s story.

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I demand better writers to write me as a self-aware NPC…

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I believe signs of the drought happened before the Arbiter breaks. Just going off the Afterlives Cinematic for Ardenweald and how Denatharius had his stone legion plant hidden anima cells in the other main zones for a while. Collecting that much Anima would’ve taken a LONG time.

Denatharius would’ve wanted to collect as much anima as possible, so turning off the tap early would’ve been counter productive (I am assuming it was Denatharius that launched the attack that shut down the robot). Better wait until you are near cap then do it.

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Very well explained. I don’t think most people remembered this much in this detail. I did, but I follow the NE story very closely so your timeline is pretty much what I had already worked out. That said, it does take a bit of Simone Biles type of gymnastics to be able to piece this all together. They spread this out over so much time it’s ridiculous. At the very least they could tie this stuff up in one expansion. It takes them too long to get to the point and it shouldn’t.

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The explanation in the more dialogue option with the Stonewright about her time as the Night Warrior. The Night Warrior’s rage doesn’t have an off switch and only ends when the host burns out or somebody else stops them. Basically put if Tyrande kept the power, even if she killed Slyvanas, she would eventually turn on everybody who was not a Night Elf as the lust for vengeance would just keep spiraling outward, and then turn on Night Elves that weren’t on her side enough.

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Well yes. And then the night elves would kill Tyrande.
What’s wrong with that for the night elves?

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Problem is also in that they do not communicate with us after their cinematics. Because cinematics like this leaves a lot of question.
For example - could Elune actually prevent Teldrassil tragedy or she couldn’t?
Or what is now with Tyrande, does she is bound to this forest now or not?

It would be nice if Blizzard would explain everything that they show, because its sometimes hard to understand what did they show…

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Pretty sure Legion was the last expansion the remaining older devs worked on. It’s all the relatively new people now for BfA and Shadowlands.

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No point of the whole Night Warrior thing .
Elune deserves to be backstabbed …

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Take it at surface level, my man.

Elune is a moon goddess. I don’t know why people think that means she’s omnipotent. Why does moon goddess translate into stop burning genocide?

Sure, Elune can do more than just moon-ish things (Night Warrior stuff, kaldorei psychopomp), but like… Clearly, she’s never been able to do more than bestow blessings upon individuals. Her power has never been demonstrated to be of the magnitude of preventing catastrophic events.

People just built her up to hype levels far beyond which she’s ever demonstrated. It’s head-canon gone wild, and I’ll confess, for a time, I bought into the hype. However, common, Western views of gods tend to be shaped by Abrahamic religions, wherein “god” means “nigh-omnipotent”. However, many other religions classify gods as “powerful in their domains, but not all-powerful in every situation”, which definitely seems to be the case for Elune.

It’d be like asking an Olympic heavy-lifter to deadlift a mountain. Sure, the Olympic heavy-lifter would easily out-class any normal person, but some things are just impossible for them to accomplish.

So, a lot of people (not everyone) hear “Goddess” and assume “near-omnipotence”, but that’s not the case, and it’s never been the case. Looking at WoW lore, “Goddess” simply means, “powerful being that is not similar in composition to other powerful beings, such as loa or Wild Gods.” In practice, it just meant Elune was something unique onto herself as of writing.

That’s if they even showed it. Most of the time they tell us. Sometimes, they don’t even manage that.

Still, explanations would be wonderful from time-to-time lol

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