I agree she is the only interesting thing in BFA and the ma’ghar with she thrall supporting Sylvanas isn’t a good sign for them but hopefully that means Yrel just did her version of purge of Dalaran and she will be like Jaina
I like to imagine it wasn’t one big thing that caused Yrel to go LUX VULT, but lots of small things all adding up her deciding that getting everything into the Light’s order was the best thing for everyone.
Road to hell being paved with good intentions and all that.
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I love this premise as the basis for a future expansion. An antagonist who is driven not by hate, fear or chaos, but by a noble devotion to Order that they simply take too far.
Lux Vult!
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This is a core theme of WoW, though (not to mention many other texts): every force strives for dominance, but balance is necessary. I mean, that’s Star Wars in a nutshell.
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There should be at least a little difference between the various cosmic forces beyond their favorite color and how many tentacles they have. In method if not in end goal.
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I think there is. The void is like this messed up chaotic survival of the fittest thing seeking to be unbound and dominant. The Light on the other hand has this ideal of perfect unity and harmony in the one true path. That doesn’t sound bad unless you consider that things like individuality and free will are counter to any idea of perfect unity and harmony. Diversity, by its nature, creates discord. Thus for the extreme of the Light, only a universe purged of any differences in thought or belief can achieve the Light’s concept of perfection.
The Light kind of has this “rob you of who you are for your own good” thing. “The Light will heal your scars” “The Light will take away your pain”
The thing is those are part of what makes us what we are. If you cannot feel sadness at the loss of someone dear can you really say you loved and valued them. Is anger never justified? People like the label of negative emotions because those emotions often feel bad but without the ability to feel them we would lose a vital part of what we are.
Personally I suspect the Draenei didn’t realise what they were giving away on Draenor when they got light forged. It is almost like an AU version of the Orcs getting tricked into drinking the Demon Blood but the Draenei falling for it instead. They trusted the Naaru and so didn’t consider that the Lightforging might rob them of their ability to act of their own free will.
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Blizzard has one consistent rule. No one gets a happy ending.
Keep in mind though that we’ve never been short of antagonists who use the Light… the various incarnations of the Scarlet Brotherhood, the Valkryior, etc.
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The only Orcs drinking the Fel in WoD were the ones who knew what it did so that makes them just more additions of the Shadow Council(especially since most of the Iron Horde were wiped out by the Alliance and Horde)! The duped race in WoD are the Draenei this time.
The Hourglass of Time’s sands/moments must all fall down one way or another. It doesn’t matter which order the sands fall as long as they fall according to Medivh.
One way or another Hellfire Citadel ends up being a Fel ruled fortress and one way or another one of the Races on Draenor is duped into accepting a corrupt power with the leader(Yrel for AU and MU Gul’dan for MU) not being exposed to the ritual.
Somehow the “the Horde tries and fails to open a portal” sand in the hourglass fell before the “unwitting corruption of a Draenor race” sand in the hourglass did.
Since names are applicable one might think that AU Azeroth will be the one blown up instead of AU Draenor. The sands will go down regardless of name, time and place.
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That isn’t true at all for the MU though which is what I was talking about. Most orcs that drank the demon blood just through it made them stronger. They had no idea about the side effects. Hell most of the orcs had no idea that the Demons were orcistrating everything. That is made very clear in Rise of the Horde.
Most orcs believed that the spirits of their Ancestors had directed them to destroy the Draenei as they were told that the Draenei were scheming against the orcs. The orcs foolishly and blindly trusted this. That is the same with the Draenei. Blind faith in their religious figures lead to them becoming enslaved.
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Exactly! That makes the WoD Orcs drinking the Demon Blood a different sand in the Hourglass from the Orcs drinking Demon Blood in the MU.
The taking in a Magic to make one stronger only for it to secretly belong to a malevolent force(as the Lightbound and Blood Pact both represented) is a specific sand in the hourglass different from the sand that represented the Orcs taking in corrupt Magic knowingly(which happened in both WoD and WC3).
The fact that the order in which these sands/moments happened switched is irrelevant as long since they still happened according to Medivh in the Last Guardian.
Removing a sand/event(though not a person) from the hourglass is what endangers Time it seems.
mashes Exterminatus button furiously.
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This is likely exactly it. They needed something for the Horde player to do to ‘earn’ the Mag’har favor and it was quick and easy for them.
That said, there is one other possibility:
Remember, the player is only getting one side of the story. It is very probable that the story we got is not the complete picture. Additionally, it is possible the player was straight lied to. Keep in mind, Blizzard just did that with another NPC. In the raid when recounting what the Alliance did, the NPC flat out lies to the Horde player about what happened. The fact that Blizzard introduced the idea of propaganda and NPC’s telling lies to the player is actually kind of interesting. And it does lead to the possibility that the Mag’har are actually the ones that sparked things. Or at very least were not the “innocent victims” they claimed to be.
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I’m more griping about that in that 30 years, a significant change occurred, and it’s merely breezed over for the Horde story, and is completely unknown in the Alliance story.
It’s basically “because reasons” and that’s not good story telling. It’s merely convenient.
Any power can be abused for any reason. The Blood Elves literally siphoned out the light from a Naaru to create the first Blood Knights. I very much doubt it was willing to be put into that situation.
The issue is, is that the Light is now more morally gray than the actual story, and the only reason it is is “because reasons”. There was literally nothing wrong with having one thing the player could turn to in the Warcraft Universe that wasn’t trying to eradicate or assimilate all life.
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The thing with M’uru is actually really weird. It’s described as resisting the blood elves when they siphon power from it but then its revealed that M’uru allowed himself to captured to redeem the blood elves because of Velen’s prophecy.
It’s possible that the process itself was painful and that’s why M’uru resisted but it’s still kind of bizarre.
What Blizzard is going for is that anything in extremes is bad and even things that seem malevolent can have in important role.
The Light acts in a way that pushes unity, harmony and peace. That is great and a very benevolent force in the natural Warcraft world. However to achieve the furthest, purest extremes of those concepts it requires the removal of anything that can cause discord, disunity or suffering. That includes things like free will as the existence of free will guarantees that people with different perceptions will have different viewpoints and that my it’s very nature creates discord.
Think of it this way. If you lived in northern Europe all your life without ever knowing the world was different anywhere else you would probably see the sun as a benevolent and life giving source. However if you had lived your whole life in the middle of a desert you would see the sun a very different way, dangerous and deadly. That is, in essence the nature of the people of Azeroth’s understanding of the Light. They have never really had to deal with it in an extreme and because in a balanced state it is naturally benevolent they have always seen it as such.
The reason Yrel switched is very clearly tied to the Draenei on AU Draenor getting Lightforged. How similar it is to the Lightforging we know is unclear but it sounds like they can force you into being devout to the Light. I suspect this is something the Draenei were tricked into by the Naaru who lightforged them, whoever this Light Mother is, rather than something they knew would happen.
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You know, something occurs to me about the draenei circumstance. When it comes down to it the Draenor that’s visited during the Mag’har quest is contemporary to our own present. It’s 30 years later than WoD, i.e. 30 years after the past Draenor we went to. As is the modern day on Azeroth.
And there’s only one Twisting Nether between both world, with only one Burning Legion. Which means as far as the AU Draenor with crazy zealot Yrel can tell, the Legion hasn’t been defeated by us for very long. From their chronological standpoint, as with the MU, the Burning Legion’s only been defeated for a few months, at best.
The demons were kicked off AU Draenor, but they remained an active threat throughout the cosmos the entire time after, until we stomped all over their chain of command, executed their top generals and locked Sargeras away.
That means none of this Lightbound stuff is the Light run amok because the Legion’s gone. The timing isn’t right. The Legion wasn’t gone. It’s hardly been gone any time at all, even now. It was still active and rampaging across the Great Dark for those intervening 30 years, and only recently - to both Azeroth and AU Draenor - has it been defeated.
That’s perhaps something to consider. Yrel and her Light Mother (whether it’s actually Xe’ra or another Prime Naaru like her) may have done all this aggressive, militant conversion of the orcs in the belief that they were forging an Army of the Light to fight the final war against the Burning Legion, unaware that we in the MU would end up winning that very war without them.
After all, we know Xe’ra was all about forcing prophecy and fate (ironically something she had in common with Illidan, albeit for different philosophical reasons.) Yet if AU Velen was any indication, coming into contact with Azeroth basically scrambled the fate of that Draenor’s universe, consequently breaking the ability of prophets and seers there to accurately foretell events in their own reality. So this could be the draenei erroneously trying to force a fate that no longer exists. Yrel and her naaru allies may well be doing what they’re doing in a futile effort to follow broken prophecies and inaccurate visions that can never be fulfilled, because the events of WoD basically derailed the intended destiny of their universe.
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Even Benedictus was able to use the Light while serving the Twilight Hammer. And does so to some effect in his final stand at Wyrmest.
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The whole Yrel thing feels like a really cheap way to make orcs look like victims and try and take away agency from their past actions. Not to mention it’s very odd lorewise, and really the scenario provides zero actual explanation about how exactly things came about, beyond from the orc’s perspective. And let’s face it, the orc perspective has never been shown as reliable.
We’re led to believe that the utterly shattered draenei, who lost all of their cities in WoD except for those in Shadowmoon, and not even all of the ones in Shadowmoon, who were outnumbered and outgunned by the orcs to being with, were able to suddenly start beating them at every turn. This in spite of orcs not only being able to breed much, much faster, and mature faster, but also retaining literally all of the Iron Horde tech, and their gronn, and if the Assault NPCs are canon, their usage of the Void as well. And with no Ogre Empire to contend with, the Iron Horde would arguably have an even bigger advantage than before. Literally all the same circumstances as before, but with a bigger difference in numbers and no need to split focus.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there can be evil Light users, we’ve seen that long before Blizzard started this narrative of the Light itself being a possibly brain washing force, but the Yrel thing is just so odd, and another weird kick in the teeth for draenei after we lost one of our few heroes to WoD. Not to mention it throws the Outland Mag’har under the bus, the ones who didn’t re-elect Grom Hellscream as Warchief after he led the systematic slaughter of draenei without Fel blood.
And don’t even get me started on the ‘Lightbound’ and all that. Barely months after we get an entire Allied race that’s based on using a magical, ancient forge to look at your darkest self and acknowledge it, making you stronger, we get told that there’s another version that brainwashes people and makes them zealots?
Honestly the Mag’har annoy me more than any of the other allied races, in terms of their backstory. Which sucks because I love their look and the variety of skins they have.
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To be fair, the Iron Horde orcs’ numbers and strength were probably pretty thoroughly crippled by the players and our forces, between getting slaughtered left-and-right under Grommash and then subsequently stomped under Gul’dan’s leadership. The Frostwolves were probably the only clan that came out of WoD without having taken enormous casualties. Not to mention most of the clans were rendered leaderless by the loss of their Warlords/Chieftains.
The orcs and the draenei evidently had to cooperate to drive out the Legion’s remnants after we left, so presumably the post-WoD Mag’har weren’t nearly as powerful or organized as the Iron Horde was.
Moreover the draenei didn’t completely lose Shattrath the way they did in the MU, nor was it seemingly accompanied by the same wholesale extermination of the city’s entire populace, so restoring it during the intervening 30 years was probably a lot more feasible for them when coupled with support from their settlements still in Shadowmoon Valley and the orcs being their allies at the time.
Plus it’s always possible that the naaru might have shown up on AU Draenor with more Xenedar-style interdimensional fortresses carrying Army of the Light-level technology to give them an edge in forcibly converting the orcs.
On top of all that, whatever the cause, the implication is that Draenor itself is dying. Under such circumstances a draenei society with access to technology that can supplement basic hunting and farming would likely gain a significant advantage over orcs who are still significantly reliant upon living off the land.
When have the Orcs been said to breed any faster than Draenei?
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