So this isn’t really to spark debate but more so I’d like to hear the communities personal thoughts / beliefs regarding Pelagos’ new philosophy as Arbitor. So he mentions personally as Arbitor he believes that no soul is beyond redemption, thus the maw doesn’t really have any further use in his eyes. I see it “sort of” like the death penalty debate, as in reality, I think death is the end all be all for most people. Do you think this is true in Warcraft? Is every soul deserving / worth redeeming? Or do you think some souls are too far gone?
I’d say I can understand where Pelagos is coming from, but at the same time I do think some souls are just not worth saving. An example for me would be that of Gul’dan. From what I recall fel completely obliterates souls and I feel that’s a fate worse than anything really, and Gul’dan has done that to countless souls and tortured and murdered countless others. Such as slitting the draenei child’s throats to open the dark portal. Or perhaps helping create Garona who was made by the forced breeding of draenei women.
A soul that goes to bastion and becomes an aspirant loses all memories or their mortal life. Isn’t that basically a reset button anything for bad they may have done, giving the opportunity to shape them into someone better? Why only use this functionality to erase the good and virtuous?
Kyrians don;t have to memory wipe anymore. It’s optional. If it isn’t hindering their ascension and they don’t wanna do it they don’t have to. Uther hasn’t and isn’t gonna do it.
Yeah I can see where you’re coming from. Eternity is a long while lol, so anything is possible no matter how corrupt the soul. I guess the more heinous the soul too the more resourceful it is for anima in the Shadowlands so it’d be kind of a waste to just dump it down the toilet.
How much anima could a soul have left after going through revendreth two or three times anyway? I mean they take for penance but they also take to survive. Eventually, you’ll end up with a drained shade.
Real Talk, the whole of the philosophizing of Shadowlands is terrible in all directions. It’s the equivalent of a bunch of high school stoners thinking questions like “Sure God’s all powerful, but does he have lips?” “Woah…” is at the level of Camus.
On an eternal scale? Yes. A soul, no matter what evil they did, only affected a finite amount of lives short of them literally ending reality itself in which case there would be no afterlife too. Eternal punishment for a finite transgression is not equal balance.
But I’m not too keen on the idea of ever sharing a cloud and a bowl of grapes with Hitler and Trump even if they got all redeemed either.
Talking about an eternity of time makes a difference in my opinion I think. Either they are imprisoned forever until they wither into nothingness or they can seize the opportunity to atone for their crimes. I like Pelagos‘s decision on this.
The thing with “redemption” is that someone has to want to change and accept the consequences of their decisions. It’s actually a trait of abusers and enablers to want to “fix” someone without that person being the one making the actual steps and work towards WHY there was the issue.
Sylvanas’ character was horribly written in Shadowlands, especially basically taking what were flawed and terrible decisions that SHE would have made, and doing the mass retcon trying to pin blame on the Jailer.
So instead of an actual strong willed villain, we have an emotionally fragile and constantly manipulated bimbo that not only used and led her people to destructive ruin, but also recreated the same vile behaviors that Arthas did.
It’s frankly dumb and insulting that it all gets handwaved as a “Oh well!” moment after the destruction of Teldrassil and the whole Night Warrior arc. But it was also stupid when Garrosh was “defeated” and put on trial for horrible crimes, and the Horde vowed to never repeat them… and turned right around and did it again anyway.
Either she chose to do them herself, or she simply “followed orders” of the Jailer. Either way, the actions were still committed, and her character should have faced the consequences for it.
I mean she’s stuck in the Maw until she gets every single soul out which, given that for a few years every single person that died in the entire universe got shunted in there, will probably take an eternity or two.
That includes everyone who died in the Fourth War, Teldrassil, and again, every other planet or reality across the entire Warcraft universe. And that’s discounting whoever was already down there before all that.
In WoW yes, in real life no. In Warcraft the “souls” do not have free will because a Dev makes choices for them. They are written a certain way and then another writing team makes changes next time around. Then yet another team makes changes and another over the course of the years.
Garry did not just wake up one morning and say “I’m going to drop a Manabomb on Theremore today!” Where as in real life there are crimes so heinous that people do of their own free will where they know the difference between Right and Wrong that death is the only acceptable outcome. In our real world Death is the ultimate punishment. In Warcraft it just isn’t. Even in the shadowlands you can be “killed” again and go into “nothing”…but of course there has to be something in that nothing because where does the nothing go to?
Pelagos’ craven timidity will be sure to inundate the Shadowlands with malcontents eager to mangle the system to their own ends as far as they might, and make certain final justice eludes those most deserving. Damnation is not a sentence unearned.
I was going to write out something well thought concerning the finite against the infinite but why should I put effort into the terrible storyline that was shadowlands? Im going into DF with ‘it was all a bad mawwalk’ mentality and SL never happened.
Course may just be a dragon flavored nightmare waiting for me.
I believe that every soul is pure, even if there might be some genetic predispositions that might alter how things work out later on. I think that it is their life circumstances from various interactions that affects their neurochemistry and ultimate ‘fate’.
Even Gul’dan, as you mentioned, was a victim of mockery and abuse due to being born weak and deformed in a culture that valued strength. So in a twisted irony, Gul’dan became everything that the Orcs wanted him to be, just not in the way that worked out in everyone’s best interest. Does it mean that he is forgiven for what he did? No. But it can be understood that at one point of time in his life, he wasn’t like that.
“A child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. ”
My personal belief is that no one deserves eternal suffering. Hold people accountable and make them atone for the suffering they inflicted, but no one deserves to be punished for eternity.