See title.
If so, how can you foresee it being a possibility? 'cause honestly, I haven’t been invested in WoW’s story since SL tore some of the oldest and most-beloved parts of it to pieces and defecated on the remains.
This isn’t just a thread for me being woeful, I’m curious if people have any ideas on how the current direction of things might mend some of those big, gaping, Jailer-sized holes left in the plot and characterization.
It can for sure but its going to be cheesy, at least the only way I can see working. I think we would have to say “SL was not the REAL afterlife, this other new realm is.” and DONT GO THERE!
And by dont go there I mean just have Blizzard leave it alone because…yeah, I dont trust them lol.
It can, but it won’t. Because bad writing and retcons can be used to get us into a garbage heap but they refuse to use it to get them out of it.
So before we talk about undoing the damage, I think it would be helpful specifying what the damage is.
Like, the existence of the First Ones, some progenitor or predeccessor dieties before the Titans and Eternals and whatnot. Is that something that should be changed because it is too damaging? Does it need removal or refinishing? Personally, I’m unoffended by them existing, but would appreciate some form of clarity on what they are before deciding any further.
Zovaal’s super-mega-10,000 IQ master plan stretching from the Dawn of Existence until we stopped it? Yeah, this can be fixed. Just have him be deluded from his ultra-long imprisonment and thinking things that happened because they just did were actually his doing. Maybe fine-tune that a lot to make clear what exactly his interactions did do and what they didn’t.
The whole nathrezim secretly working for Denathrius and causing Sargeras’s corruption? Well, no, those were actual void-corrupted nethrezim, Denathrius lost control over them and had nothing to do with the whole affair. Take Zovaal and Denathrius right out of Sargeras’s story. Now his master manipulator from the dawn of time gimmick folds on itself big time.
Lich Kings. I’m fine with keeping Frostmourne and the Helm as things Zovaal had made. I mean, Zovaal couldn’t manage to get the whole thing to work right for him anyway. Each one managed to resist him. No big imo.
Sylvanas. Yeah… Skip. I wouldn’t begin to know how to fix this. Lava eels, man. Freaking lava eels.
Anduin. Not much really to fix here imo. He went through something, now he’s starting to heal from it.
So that’s the major players out of the way.
Cosmology.
I’ll leave a bulk of this to smarter, more creative minds than mine. I got nothing. There’s a lot.
There’s even a mysterious new “Seventh Force” that just conveniently never even got hinted at anywhere ever before. I just can’t.
And tauren and orc ancestor stuff that doesn’t work with this new cosmology, because you’d think these spirits would be able to tell the people calling them to Azeroth “hey, death kinda sucks, I’m forced to fight in a squishy militant zombie zone for all eternity while your dad got sent off to become a blue angel guy because he really liked helping people, and he doesn’t even remember me or you now.”
And sometimes Uther is divided into two (or more) fractures, but two different ones (or the same one?) pop up on Azeroth (his shrine and in the Hall of Reflections) that don’t seem related to Blue Angel Uther or the Angry Uther fragment we merge him with, and I just cannot.
And that whole thing about Wild Gods from Azeroth going to the Emerald Dream to reconstitute after they die, something we even saw in Legion? Also bullcrap. It’s Ardenweald now, because it just is. Maybe they accidentally slipped through a crack.
Oh, and Elune could peak into the Shadowlands to know her sister was starving, but didn’t notice that the entire process was absolutely broken, so she unwqittingly condemned her favorite children to Mega-Hell. Also, she is worshipped on many other worlds by her not-as-favorites, so sucks to be the people of those worlds I guess. And she is totes fine with giving her favorite of favorites a major power-up that will absolutely kill her, but withdraws that power-up right as Tyrande’s about to do the thing she wanted the power-up for in the first place??
I can’t. I just cannot at all.
I am sure this could all get fixed or explained somehow, reconciled with the lore we had with the lore we now have. But just not by me.
But it’s helpful to have a list of major pain points (and I absolutely missed some or many) with the story I think.
Well Shadowlands is the realm of Death connected to our world just like the Emerald Dream but they are NOT the cosmology Realm of Death if you look at the Old Cosmology Chart… I guess they work like machines that process and recycles between Life or Death in our World in a sense.
Its not directly stated anyway but Blizz could take that stand… and say: “Oh, Shadawlands? Nah, that’s just like the port for Death Realms or to filter/recycle Death energies before they end in the Cosmology Realm of Death”
So, like Mopawl said it sounds cheesy or cringe but IMO its “one” way to retcon a bad or fail retcon… at least that’s what I do in a RPG were a campaign setting was not like by our group of RPers.
They can’t use time shenanigans because Primus said its not a construct of Death so at the Top of my head that what I do, because rolling back something that players have played through in a game, just feels a bit off or bad. That way you leave events that happened untouch yet leave the Truth about Death an still open mystery for your world building without reconing so drastically that would invalidate the players experiences. (IMO unless you have entities or powers given to average people that can rollback a universe or a whole world to literally re-write history/events in stories at a Comic scale beyond just time as a plot to a MC can redo his actions, just like you see in Isekai animes)
The Veil(misnamed the Shadowlands by the Chronicle Vol.1) is the Real Afterlife with the Shadowlands(named as the Realm of Death in Legion by Odyn) being a Cosmic Realm for Reincarnation aligned with Death where Souls most aligned with it will decay into it if slain there due to being that aligned with it.
The Veil is where Souls are supposed to go when not poached by the 7 Cosmic Forces.
Freya made it so that the Wild Gods’ have a Dreamform in the Emerald Dream(which she formed from a part of the Realms of Life) through binding their Soul to the Emerald Dream making sure that when they return to life from Ardenweald it’s in the Emerald Dream not on Azeroth.
Due to the tether to the Dream when a Soul sleeps in Ardenweald the Dreamform appears in the Emerald Dream until the Dreamform becomes a Body upon the Soul’s resurrection or until the Soul dies causing the Dreamform to dissipate.
Zovaal is the hardest one to work around. I think you can probably sidestep most of the cosmology stuff as the ravings of some lunatic in the Shadowlands. Unlike Chronicle, which was real world authors trying to establish a reliable framework for their setting, Firim and the Brokers and the Covenants are all (potentially) unreliable narrators. They inextricably tied Zovaal, however, to Frostmourne, the Lich King, Kel’Thuzad, and Sylvanas. Without his power of perfect prophecy except for the group of people he knows could curbstomp him and do, in fact, curbstomp him, he doesn’t convince Sylvanas over to his side. It is pretty impossible to skirt around him knowing Sargeras would stab Azeroth without killing it and leave his sword behind.
Seriously, just have Nozdormu show up and go “There you are! Let’s get you out of this nightmare alternate reality and back into the real world, Champion Mawmaw!”
Honestly, that one is an easy one to skirt around.
He had simply no idea Sargeras would do that, none at all. He was an opportunist and took advantage of that situation.
But what he did know for a fact was that his chosen asset, Sylvanas, was a zombie. She would continue to be his asset until some event happened that did massive damage to Azeroth. And given recent history had seen Azeroth shaken by the Cataclysm, that N’zoth was gearing up his plans, that a Legion invasion was on the way (even Wrathion knew that in MoP), and that Azerothians were making super-weapons (Garrosh and the mana bomb, a couple others), a major damaging event that would absolutely wound the world soul wasn’t a possibility; it was an inevitability, and one likely soon to come to fruition.
He didn’t have to know what Sargeras would do, just that with the number of imminent threats to Azeroth, one would get the job done enough for his needs, but not finish it (because Champion Commander Mawmaw and their 24 allies would inevitably stop it, hopefully).
Basically, he’s a gambler who knows the odds are stacked in his favor. And Sargeras just happened to roll a seven for him.
This is so true… the scope of where Blizz put Zovaal at the center of so much of Warcrafts history its so huge, it would be hard to sell even as a fantasy setting that he would make the mistakes he made… or at the very least as cliche as it may sound have a back up plan of sorts…
Someone with such a scope should not have been written to be this… incompetent IMO, ofcourse, since we never get ANY info of what exactly is the PC (US, the players REALLY ARE) to justify, how literally Cosmic Gods, or Godlike Universe Burning Demons fall to their might, yet we have Jaina and other less powerful NPCs miraculous surviving without a scratch an counter with a FULL RAID of US empower by X or Y seasonal juice?
Literally the story turns into a swist cheese with these many plot holes if you try to tie in and dig deep into the history and lore of WoW! 
EDIT: Or we can see it and work around it like Alynsa said! lol 
My many years of comic book reading makes retcons for character actions much easier to think of!!
I’m not sure what avenue of opportunism remains. He straight up told Sylvanas a sword would pierce the heart of the world, among other things (like “step out of the shadows and lead”) and this was way back when she threw herself off of ICC. There’s a bit too much specificity for it to be handwaved, I think.
At the very least, maybe Nozdormu can swap our Sylvanas for the Sylvanas of another timeline right before she jumps off of ICC, and just be like “hey, I’m going to show you how stupid you’re about to be, so … just don’t, and accept that the afterlife of this universe will always suck. Even after it is “fixed” it sucks. Hard. Like a big ole Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner, except instead of cleaning it just makes it worse. The filter of the Cosmic Vacuum Cleaner has not been changed and it is clogged with hair and feces.”
All things she remembered and recounted to Anduin, right?
Domination Magic. He needs her and everyone else to also think he’s the mega-mastermind. He altered her memories of those events, so that she’d follow him. If he can accurately predict the future, why wouldn’t she?
And there’s already precedent. He manipulated her from jump… Literally. His valks made sure she ended up in the Maw right off after she took her dive from Icecrown, instead of going to the Arbiter to be sorted. He had her shown the afterlives he felt would best work to sway her. He was canonically messing with her from the first meeting. Why not a little Domination Magic memory alteration later on?
Then you could even have the whole lava eel thing be his little troll against her. “lol, I even made her think it was lava eels that convinced her to side with me, roflmao!!!”
But… but… she will never serve! SHE WILL NEVER SERVE! fires nerf arrows at a cat while sobbing uncontrollably
yeah just ignore it like I do
Heck, I’d even lean into that part too.
The whole time, she’s clearly serving Zovie’s goals. She’s promised a something in the end (never going to the Maw? The missing piece of her soul? Both?), but he’s got her doing his bidding for his goals, and that is inarguably serving. Sylvanas isn’t a big dummy. She would know she’s the junior partner to a god-being. She would have known that when she joined up. And given how she keeps talking about “the Jailer’s plans” and never her own, it’s pretty obvious she does know she’s the junior parter and she’s serving him.
Now you have a way to square the circle of her “I will nevah… Swerve” scene. Because it’s weird, right? These people she hated last week, suddenly she’s arguing for Zovaal not to murderize them? That isn’t the Sylvanas we saw in BfA.
Unless recounting the events of meeting Zovaal to Anduin caused her to question them and the influence he had over her. “Wait… I sold out the entire world… Over lava eels??? That does make any sense. And if Zovaal knew a sword would stabbify the planet, why didn’t he know that the same champions who defeated Sargeras, who carried around the Heart of Azeroth, might be super-special and follow us here? Why is his foresight so selective?”
So if she’s suspecting Zovaal had been manipulating and controlling her, and she starts having questions about whether her will has been entirely her own and if he might just dispose of her when she’s inconvenient too… Maybe trying in vain to convince him to spare the other people who stand a shot at defeating him makes sense for a pre-soul merge Sylvanas. She has questions, and she doesn’t like the answers she’s coming up with.
Boom.
“I will nevah… Swerve.”
Even her Memories of Arthas’s torture of her become questionable leaving only the Novel as a Canon Viewpoint which leaves us with Arthas’s injured Soul(Dominated into being unable to control the Body which has become fully autonomous which of course backfires for Zovaal whose Domination Magic only works on Souls not Bodies) trying to stop the Body itself from it’s crimes only to get stabbed by Frostmourne and injured more before being thrown out along with Arthas’s Heart as Matthias Lehner.
That which returns to Arthas’s Body(receiving the Body’s Memories) and tossed into the Maw and eroded into nothing but the Lich King’s Memories is the first Soul Fragment(which Zovaal never bothered to Dominate as it was inside Frostmourne) claimed by Frostmourne. The other Soul Fragment which took the form of a Kid went to the Maw by default just like other selected Soul Fragments and was seen in Edge of Night by Sylvanas.
Arthas’s main Soul is wandering injured inside Northrend in the form of a helpless child.
To those that play troll stand point, make your own loa. Just out of spite for Shadowlands. That way Blizzard can’t touch them like they have with the others.
Or can ignore Shadowlands all together and remain to say one still can be in touch with their loa like nothing happen.
bruh
youre in way deep with this soul fragment stuff
this gonna be retconned in last titan when we go to northrend again
I like to think nerzhul still in that helm personally
In all honesty, as bad as Shadowlands was, it’s not something that really needs to be fixed because it can kind of just… be ignored. Nobody needs to mention the Jailer or the First Ones again, and all subsequent mentions like the importance of Ardenweald during Dragonflight are purely of Blizzard’s stubborn volition.
In terms of being a constant shadow hanging over the narrative, BfA continue to be far worse in that regard. Rather than altering the esoteric background worldbuilding for the cosmic realms, it altered the fundamental relationship between the player factions, and no story ever can exist without tying back to the damage BfA did. The sheer dissonance between the factions has resulted in the Horde and Alliance either not existing at all or pretending like they have no animosity whatsoever, because Blizzard knows that they can never truly write the factions on equal footing ever again.
In the long term, Shadowlands makes for a bunch of boring and nonsensical Warcraft Wiki pages to be annoyed by, but BfA permanently changed the way WoW tells its story in a way we’re never really going to recover from.
Shadowlands wasn’t that bad. So far what I saw from Fans was only the Arthas fanboys hated it the most. But what you need to remember is that the whole story can be ignored since it wasn’t on Azeroth. Since it’s likley we will never see the place again. Bfa was much worse I say and I doubt the Horde can ever recover from it.