I don’t know. And I don’t know how to expand upon that Jailor EoN stuff. Outside of that single Dev interview they haven’t even mentioned it again. Let alone “what capacity” she’s been working WITH him (or “met” him). For all we know all they meant was that she was working with his agents the Val’kyr, and didn’t officially meet the guy till later. Or didn’t come to start working directly for him until later. At the bare minimum though, we’ve never known a damned thing about her Nine, so you can’t really retcon anything about them.
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I try not to overstep interpreting what the devs say (though I’m just as guilty as anyone else) but I think you’re 100% right here and I think this is true (and what they meant). I know that if they had put it this way, it becomes a lot easier to sell (for me).
“Remember that sketchy deal she made with those Necromantic Angels that tossed her into WoW Hell? Right, well, turns out they’re working for WoW Satan and once he broke the Afterlife Sorting Hat, her bill came due.”
Done. Easy enough. I’m on-board. To me that narrative flows a LOT better in comparison to, “Sylvanas has been working for the Jailer since the Lich King died! Bet you didn’t see that coming!”
I actually pictured a dev meeting in my head:
Dev1: “So we’re going to WoW Hell next.”
Dev2: “How about, the Shadowlands?”
Dev3: “Except we’ve tied Shadow magic to the Void and …”
Dev1: “Love it. Shadowlands it is.”
Dev2: “Oh, and Sylvanas died and went to WoW Hell before, why don’t we make her have been working with WoW Satan the whole time.”
Dev1: “I love it! Way to think out of the box, no one will see this coming. It’s like M Night made an MMO!”
Dev3: “Won’t that be hard to justify in the …”
Dev2: “She’s a covert agent of Hell! An evil zombie fantasy archer James Bond!”
Dev1: “We can call her DOUBLE O-666!”
Dev2: "More like Double… "
We know where that’s going. Two of the imaginary devs in my head are awful people. They’re also the reason for the not-so subtle BDSM references in this expansion - and the tentacles in previous ones.
The interesting thing about this is they say the boy king serves at the masters table and there’s the lexical ambiguity about whether the boy king or the master will tell three lies. No big deal really - but then Ogmot in his journal says a lie has already been told.
Most people think the boy king is Anduin, but Anduin wasn’t “serving” the Jailer until after the journal. Then some think it’s Anduin serving the void due to a comment at the end of a book about shadow power on his arm. But unless they’re throwing in a retcon that he decided to join the C’thulu squad when he was a pre-teen, I’m not sure that fits timewise either. I hadn’t thought of Arthas, but even if it is Arthas I’m not sure where to go with it since Arthas apparently was a failure for the Jailer. Of course, like most of the void things it might be a red herring for a future expansion - but the Ogmot reference seems to make it feel like it’s relevant.
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“Three lies. Da first one been told.
Bound by dat throne? No. Free. Free!
Da next gonna come soon. Maybe dey see dis one.”
Soon like in BfA but also soon like in the next page.
“Other hammers here now. Dey talk and talk bout Argus. Bout da one dat got wakened. Bout great victory dat our enemy not even notice.”
My interpretation is that the boy king was wakened, the great victory could be the awakening but could also be something else(Arbiters shutdown maybe).
Arthas soul returned with Stlvanas after Eon in dormant state. He was awakened at the end of Legion and offered us the second lie, the forth war. The two Sylvanas of the OP are Sylvanas before BfA and Arthas after.
It would still leave her motives for starting the Fourth War as extremely weak. But that’s the only real problem with it, I think.
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FYI, it doesn’t sound like this is one of Ogmot’s visions but just gossip that he’s hearing in the camp. It sounds like he has a different opinion then they do.
I don’t think Val’kyr have that power. They’re (former) servants of Odyn, not Bastion.
My thoughts on the Jailer:
Just a plot device, high likelihood of being a plot device for Sylvanas redemption.
Who is this jailer guy? never heard of him.
The Val’kyr in question were servents of the Lich King, who was a servant of the Jailer.
I agree the Jailer didn’t exist during Legion but I disagree that Mueh’zala was going to be anything either.
He was clearly being built up as the big bad of the Traveler book series, and Roux said in an interview that when she took over for Traveler’s finale (the earlier books were written by Greg Weisman and she only wrote the last one) Blizzard told her to scrap all of Mueh’zala’s role, even though it suddenly made his previous encounter with Aram make no sense.
It comes off to me like they saw how the fanbase had latched onto Mueh’zala and decided to give him a different role than what he was initially planned for, Traveler’s narrative be damned.
Anyway the point I’m making is Traveler 1 and 2 came out during Legion, so the buildup toward Mueh’zala in Legion’s timeframe was all leading into him fighting Aramar. Volume 3 came out a little while into BfA, and so it would have been then that they decided to put him into Shadowlands.
I think the progression is probably as follows:
- Cata - early Legion: starting with the Val’kyr, her entire goal and motivation is to ensure the survival of the Forsaken by finding a means to keep their bodies working and to resurrecting new corpses. Helya was just the next attempt at this.
- Late Legion - early BFA: her goals align with some new cosmic power of Death, and her past actions are retconned to be a part of this plan. At this point, the Jailer and Mueh’zala are like ill formed ideas, there’s just a notion of a place-holder big bad.
Late BFA - now: The Jailer was fleshed out.
The critical piece is that I think in that middle time period there, they had a rough outline, but it was still fuzzy even within Blizzard. The role that Mueh’zala filled as Vol’jin’s manipulator was probably initially going to be the generic big bad, but then they realized it didn’t groove with the Jailer’s plan when they worked out the details.
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Most likely situation was that Blizzard had a complete plan going into Legion but something late in the story made them completely scrap that idea and they rushed to cobble together another story using the parts of what they’ve had.
Either they banked the entire idea on something that they later realized couldn’t of made sense (and couldn’t be retconned) or (more likely) someone from higher up made a change out of the blue and the Devs had to scramble.
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I kinda prefer to think of it as a bunch of people just writing random things and not caring what everyone else does.
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You’re attributing incompetence of many to what can be explained by the incompetence of the few.
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The first mention of the Shadowlands was, I believe, in Warlords of Draenor in the Ner’zhul fight, ie 2014. It was officially made the afterlife in Chronicle volume 1 which was released in March of 2016, so I’d say that they’ve had ideas for this expansion since 2016 at the latest.
Why? I mean I dont disagree, but the Traveller book series was meant to be the most cannon book possible in a young adult format (paraphrasing) and it would seem to me that the introduction of Muehzala as more than just a name on a tablet in ZF is the way you might want to start dropping hints about a future big bad. It fits the Blizz MO- mine old content for the next big bad.
The Jailer seems shoehorned in, almost as an afterthought. Maybe they thought everyone was tired of trolls? Maybe we were originally supposed to confront muehzala at the end of BfA. Idk.
Shadowlands was actually concieved of as endgame content for Vanilla but was scrapped. The original plan was apparently to have what we now know as the veil, inhabited by powerful boss mobs, and when you would do corpse runs as a noob, you would see high level characters waging epic battle against these denizens of the shafowlands, and it would generate some fomo to motivate leveling.
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English is not my first language so you are probably right. I think they wrote it that way because it has already happened, its not a vision its a fact.
Valkyr where created to ferry souls of vrykul to Odin, LK Valkyr had a similar design.
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His scene in Traveler vol 2 had him telling Aramar that the two of them were destined to have a climactic final battle against each other. If he for some reason wasn’t planned to be restricted to those books only, then it would have meant having a young teenager who almost no players had ever heard of before being an expansion’s main hero. Given that and that Roux did say Blizzard told her to scrap him from vol 3, I think him being planned for just the books makes more sense.
Again though: I’m not saying the Jailer was planned to be the big bad of SLands either. He clearly wasn’t. I’d say even in early BfA he wasn’t.