“Shadows twist the strings of fate” i really hope they explore that and it’s not just some throwaway prophecy from BFA. Fatescribe Roh-kalo has similar relevant dialogue, in his case he may have implied it was the Dreadlords who were twisting fate. As servants of the Shadow, that makes more sense than the Legion, since the Dreadlords take credit for the manipulations of events, and manipulation of the Legion itself.
Yes.
ABSOLUTELY YES. Holy crap, over a decade of build up wasted right here. Bring this man BACK!
Eh… I can do without a writer’s self insert for his waifu. Then again, if Sylvanas stays gone, maybe Nathanos could be more than her trophy human man.
AU Zul who uses his powers for the benefit of the Zandalari rather than himself? I’d be down for that. He was pretty interesting, and kind of wasted as a villain.
Would be pretty great, honestly. I mean, if Ysera can visit, I don’t see why Rezan can’t be allowed to make a comeback somehow.
Nathanos has not acted any differently from day one of vanilla until his death, save for the brief moments where even he questioned Sylvanas.
He was not a self insert.
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MU Rezan dissipated to make Vol’jin a Loa. We are going to need AU Rezan.
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His lore has always been tied to humanity and paladins so if you don’t care too much about alliance story stuff its not too surprising.
She really wasn’t.
Elisande is an example to me of how Blizzard demeans their own plot in resolving stories with beat-down raid fights. The MAIN thing we learn about Elisande’s power is that she scoured all the threads of time, and we’re apparently just not bound by that. Because of… reasons. It’s like at the start of Shadowlands, when everyone’s about to die, but we miraculously escape because the player’s presence activates the relics of the First Ones and a teleporter lets us out.
Why is the player so special? “Reasons.” Why did Elisande go down the wrong route? Is it because she misinterpreted some nuanced aspect of a vision she had seen (the better way to write a story around a character with prophecy?) No. For unspecified reasons, she just couldn’t see the blatant power of our combined DPS.
They presented Elisande with justifications that were extremely good, and where for us to be right, something very clever should have resulted in her misjudging her visions. But there’s nothing clever about “beat this until it’s dead.” Which is the story of most of our raids.
It’s right up there with the part in Mists of Pandaria where we’re told that to defeat the Sha of Pride, we must purge ourselves of our own pride. “How do we do that?” “Easy, you punch your pride, which will now physically manifest, until its dead.” How do we overcome a being who viewed all possible futures and saw the Legion win? Did she misinterpret one as a Legion victory? No, we basically just had to punch the current timeline hard enough.
There really was a missed opportunity here - they could have had a well done quest chain taking us through her visions and demonstrating a failure on her part in seeing something. Oh well. Since she is all about “time” magic, they could conceivably backtrack and give a questline like this still. (Kind of like how all the best questlines dealing with Deathwing only got put in way after the expansion where he was the villain).
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Elisande’s defeat falls into the main theme of legion that can be summed up as “Destiny is BS”.
We elisande, all possible futures she saw, none where she lost and the legion was defeated.
Then we see Xe’ra giving us insight into how Illidan is this child of prophecy, the chosen one.
Illidan questions Velen’s reliance on his visions and prophecies, which later becomes critical with xe’ra trying to force Illidan into his supposed destiny and him rejecting this notion.
In the end, Illidan’s mad plan is what allowed the legion to be defeated for good, while Velen states: Our victory was never in fate’s hands.
People decide their fate, which is a ironic message since we players have no agency in the game’s events and Illidan ends up fullfiling his role even if it is in his own twisted way.
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Dude you put to writing my thoughts on the matter. The story of Elisande wasn’t one of her being evil for evil’s sake. She wanted to save her people by any means necessary and was forced to fight us, but some version of her still lives. We should hope she travels the timeways and returns to Suramar, our Suramar, and stands with her people in the upcoming saga.
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Even when you consider that Elisande operated out of a desire to secure Suramar’s future, her actions prior to her demise absolutely tip the scales to evil.
What else could you call cutting off dissidents from the Nightwell, caging Nightborne and displaying them in public as they withered, starving the citizens and depriving them of arcwine…?
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Yeah. Doing evil stuff for a city’s safety at the expense of the world because you couldn’t see another way doesn’t make it good.
She’s obviously villainous.
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Does that mean we get to see Elisande return at some point in the future? I mean even beyond death Elisande has controlled time so who knows.
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That’s what she did to prisoners to make an example out of them. We do the same in the USA just look how Arizona treats its prisoners or well much of the USA. We starve them, isolate them, humiliate them and force dissidents into two options capitulate or leave or die like in Rikers Island Prison.
She did the same thing. Shalassians who disagreed were free to leave and starve outside the dome and wither away. America does the same to people who don’t agree and we routinely use humiliation, fear and observers to make sure we are kept in line. Try to speak in a way not approved by the state and see how long your opinion can be held when the very system falls on you like a ton of rocks.
And outright ordering the massacre of the Waning Crescent. An action that further motivated the people against her, with even members of the Duskwatch switching loyalties to the Night Fallen out of disgust.
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I want to see Xibala.
If her bones are any judge of her scale she’d be a Dinosaur bigger than mountains.
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It seems like an AU version of her is making the rounds ensuring Suramar doesn’t fall to the Legion in any Timeline.
You’re right. It makes it morally grey.
That doesn’t make it not evil, lol. The United States does plenty of messed of stuff. Weird example.
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It would be sorta fitting if they DID make it so that the reason our Elisande died is because Variant Elisande meddled in her scrying. She needed our Elisande to die to ensure she got the disk she needed to figure out how to ultimately keep Suramar safe.
Temporal plots are such fun tangled knots.
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The way Elisande talked it seemed as if she was using us to test a theory on whether or not us winning will save Suramar and decided to defy fate by throwing her lot with us and being rewarded for her faith with the knowledge on how to save Suramar.
She has everything she needs to seal the Portals and create her own Arcan’dors.
AU Elisande is the center of a rope with other Universe threads contradicting her existence just as MU Garrosh was(all his AU versions were the best Warchief the Horde ever had).
The MU Garrosh thread burned in the Sanctum of Domination leaving the thousand threads that contradicted his personality to weave together to take his place in the Afterlife. Of the one and a thousand only one of the two spots was to win and it was the thousand it seems that won with the one destroying itself.
All ropes(Timelines, souls or peoples) have the challenge of 1 vs 1000(that the 1 contradicts) with it being up in the air which one wins or not.
That’s not accurate.
Lorekeeper: We’ve done some stuff that’s involved with time travel and alternate realities. What happens to those souls when they pass on? Do they go to the Shadowlands?
Steve Danuser: This is a complicated question. How do you deal with things like alternate Draenor? There was a Draka there. What is that Draka? Is she alive? Is she dead? Is she related to the Draka in Shadowlands that we see? Or is there another Draka? We know that in Warlords of Draenor, Velen of that universe died. Does that mean there is a Velen in the Shadowlands? But what about the Velen in Azeroth? All these things are very complicated questions.
The way I would have you think about it is think of a rope… If you look at a rope, it is one thing, right? It’s something that you can grab onto, you can hold it, you can see it; think of that as a character. Think of that rope as Draka or Velen.
If you look at that rope more closely, you can see there are different threads that make up the rope. There are different twines that pull together, and you can pull off one of these threads if you want. But it’s still a rope, and each of those threads you can think of as one of the realities of the character, one of the streams of time… There is a thread that is the Draka from Draenor we visited in the Warlords of Draenor. There is another thread that is Draka on Azeroth as we know her… And there are many other threads that could be other realities that we never peered into. But all of those threads at some time come together to make that rope. And remember also that, as you’ll see, that there are many characters in the Shadowlands when they refer to time, they usually say that time is not a construct of Death. Time and Death are not related. Death is about eternity, not linear time. The manner in which these threads come together, that can take a very long time from mortal perceptions. Those threads can be separated for a time, but sooner or later, they do combine to make one rope that is that character. You can think of it as the threads of that rope, all the individual threads, are just waiting. And over time, they will come together but they can exist as separate entities for a time. That still doesn’t change the fact that they are part of one rope.
In essence, as Death is about eternity not time, when an AU character dies, the thread returns to the MU rope. For example when AU Velen died on AU Draenor, his thread returned to MU Velen’s rope in the afterlife. When every version of Garrosh throughout the multiverse died, they returned to the main Garrosh’s soul. Thus when Garrosh obliterated his soul when killing Soulrender Dormazain, that was ultimately the end of every Garrosh. There is no fighting to create a new Garrosh for the Shadowlands, they were already returned to the rope of the main soul before its destruction.
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