Even before the veil broke between realms, the lore team thought that having draka and the other maldraxxians being able to just waltz about legion planets (in the mortal plane) was good writing…
I swear if I see a venthyr on azeroth… ever… I will lose it.
They thought writing ‘non-chris metzen’ lore for warcraft was a good idea, and it wasn’t… why have first ones and zereth mortis when we had the titans and titan forges? The cosmology of wow was grand enough, why did they destroy their own story???
I’m a retail baby (legion) but even I know this isn’t what warcraft feels like
This is a big point here. We literally had the same things ON azeroth as they had in Shadowlands.
First ones are just the SL version of Titans.
Zenith Mortis is just an offbrand Titan facility.
they’re almost identical, but you know the reason why SL is hated for those things, simple because they literally just made an offbrand version of their OWN product. And unlike the Titan lore on Azeroth, from Uldum, badlands area, and whatever classic Titan digsites and/or facilities were there and we explored them with quests or NPCs that told us some of the “already discovered” lore about them, but we still found “new” lore discoveries in those dungeons.
And while we still understood more about the titan stuff, they still remained mysterious.
In SL we had vague hits of the first ones and “the purpose” and then we find the “first one” area and immediately waltz into their world creator station. It’s like if a lvl 1 character decided to go up and slap Sargeurus, and killed him by doing that.
except the first ones literally created the eternal ones who have been said to be “titan++” levels on their own, I just dont understand how incompetent they have to be to have written shadowlands the way they did…
I would say that WoD did have some saving graces though.
Shadowlands just feels meh. The story is insulting. It feels boring. Most of the raid bosses are uninteresting. None really shine out for me other than Daddy D. Meanwhile for WoD you got Mar’gok, Thogar, Blackhand, Gorefiend to name a few.
Yeah, it kind of removed a lot of the mystery and really invalidates a lot of the different religions/spiritualities of the different races and you just go to the arbiter to be sorted. I assume that’s by design, again watering down everything so it’s easier to write.
Just off the top of my head it COULD end up being a story about “the first ones” were just a very advanced mortal race that essentially found out about the existence of a soul, and found a way to capture souls before they were actually going to the real afterlife. They created these machines and “afterlives” that essentially exist to be harvested for anima, they are sorted into different areas or categories by the arbiter maybe because different souls produce different types of anima.
This could also be why they need to keep creating afterlives, because some fill up while souls keep flowing so there is a need to create more. I don’t actually see the purpose of the shadowland’s afterlives other than places that needs to continually sustain themselves with anima. Maybe the devourers are things sent from the actual afterlife as a way to correct the natural balance.
I don’t know, but they did kind of ruin any kind of mythos in wow, I feel anything would be better than what we have.
Characters are only dead when they aren’t useful to the Rule of Cool plot or used for shock value and even then the shock value is generally only new or no name characters. They can also get an AU version suddenly relevant to the plot like we saw in WoD and Legion being caused by AU!Gul’dan.
Shadowlands did a lot to hurt the religion and beliefs of certain races and went way too hard on cosmic nonsense for a fantasy universe, but death was always on an “am I useful to the plot” basis.
Unless you’re Warden Stillwater, then it’s a “We don’t know the lore of all of our characters” thing.
Oh and Y’shaarj who was dead but his still beating heart was a thing that caused problems.
Throughout BfA I would say one of the reasons I supported Sylvanas was that there is something clearly wrong going on in the Afterlife, and she knows more about it than anyone on Azeroth. I felt like the Afterlife was substantiated and real in the WoW universe, so my Characters would want to set it right before they die - almost like a retirement plan for the soul. I was practical about it. No one seemed to be talking about what happens after we die except Sylvanas and she made it sound bad. Something had to be done and she was the only one discussing it.
Because the WoW Afterlife is already substantiated, it sort of never had that air of mystery in my mind, and always seemed like a part of the journey. Almost like the road from Senjin Village to Durotar to Shattrath to Dalaran will also lead to the Shadowlands, in time - both as an in game character storywise, and as a Player of a Game.
It’s kind of an interesting thing that Chronicle basically did the same thing, but no one really cared too much because it left open the possibility of other realms besides the Shadowlands.
Well, supposedly if you die in the Shadowlands, you’re, like, really dead for real. But I’m not sure I even buy that at this point.
Yeah, I started during BC, and sometimes I feel sad about how little is left of that lore. Not that everything in BC was brilliant, especially when it comes to individual character choices. But the world just feels different now. It’s not driven by the same philosophy anymore.
Unless you’re in Maldraxxus, since Maldraxians have the power of necromancy in the realm of death and can resurrect double dead souls into just regular death and into undeath, but undeath is the opposite of life so if you are undead in the realm of death you are unalive. I think.
Only if the Soul has a corpse to reanimate. Same goes for the Maw. The Jailer was able to use Anduin to raise the Mawsworn we kill while defending the Primus.
As long as there is a corpse(no matter how sundered and splintered) the Soul can come back.
Venthyr seem to have their Souls shoot up from their Bodies becoming Anima for the Shadowlands to prevent such resurrections! Other Shadowlands Races have no such failsafes and thus could potentially come back.
