Destroying souls sounds bad at first, but apparently getting destroyed is the ultimate fate of most souls, and the ones that don’t die again in the afterlife have crummy existences anyway.
All your grr warrior guys go to Maldraxxus and probably double-die eventually, destroying their soul
Everyone in the 4th war went to the maw–warlocks making souls into fel mt dew in the war were doing a good deed
Bastion brainwashes them so their soul may as well be destroyed in terms of whether or not the essence of who they are continues existing
Revendreth they get tortured until they’re “reformed” and then they become torturers themselves, or go to the maw
Ardenweald is ok
Most of the afterlives are sort of hellish and most afterlife-dwellers probably double-die anyway, so why bother with 'em, just become a cast of chaos bolt
If you were RPing a morally conflicted Warlock, do they feel better about what they do knowing that the alternative isn’t much better? Maybe don’t harvest souls from druids and shamans and other likely ardenweald enjoyers, but everyone else sure take their soul
A slightly less bad outcome but with no altruistic motive does not make the Warlocks good.
Now if you were RPing a warlock like that… yeah it might make them feel better if they care about others. A “Well no matter what they would have been doomed anyways.”
But overall it doesn’t make warlocks as a whole good. Heck even your demon minions on your personal demon planet start complaining about having a Light Object in a “fortress of evil” or whatever they call it.
I don’t think Warlocks actually have power over spirit-drained souls. They control souls in the mortal realm, where the anima equivalent in the living world is used as fuel. I assume that souls that are consumed then die in the living realm but still go to the Shadowlands.
This is my theory ofcourse, but I do not see why fel magic should have any real power over what happens to souls in the realm of death.
Ok but the core realms of the shadowlands only contain a vanishingly tiny fraction of the souls that pass before the Arbiter. most souls pass into other peaceful realms and go do their own thing. Also, in Revendreth only a small number of souls are supposed to remain as Venthyr, and an even smaller fraction are supposed to go to the maw. It was supposed to be the absolute last option for a soul which absolutely refuses to reflect and atone, but the realm became corrupted from its intended function and they were just sending everyone there because the people making those calls were in Zovaal’s pocket. It is back to that function now.
When fel consumes a soul said soul is trapped in agony until it ceases to be sapient. It is the same as setting someone on fire.
Blizzard has shadowlands filled with ways to die, and has everyone who does (good or bad) end up in oblivion. I can’t help but thing that, somehow, they don’t see it as awful as many (or, at least, I) do.
I’m just waiting for it to turn out that souls that die in the Shadowlands actually go to Extra-Death, which is a realm of rainbows and lollipops and oh no there is a threat there and we need champions to save it because if anyone dies in Extra-Death they die for real!
The lore stating that Fel magic destroys souls outright is a bit sketchy, and never outright confirmed in anything more than some throwaway text in a few places. Something that consequential requires confirmation in something like Chronicle, I say.
Assuming Fel magic doesn’t destroy souls, and one can easily argue that the Shadowlands makes Warlocks even more evil. See, if the afterlife truly was infinite and joyous, then anything bad that happens to you in life constitutes exactly 0% of your existence, and someone killing you is basically nothing. If you only get two lives, though, then murdering someone eliminates half of their existence, and is quite consequential.
Doesn’t make them seem less evil in retrospect for me. When warlocks use souls, they’re either destroying them to make spell fuel, feeding them to demons or interrogating the dead.
And Revendreth is actually a place to punish the wicked, with the Maw for the unrepentant. After they’ve atoned, they can stay in Revendreth or go to another afterlife.
I agree there are warlock who might see the Shadowlands and think to themselves that what they’ve done with souls isn’t so bad or bad at all.
The Shadowlands straight up suck and any force that can prevent a soul from going there is a positive influence on the universe.
See your local Warlock today and consider total obliteration.
And if oblivion is too daunting, defer to our necromantic options.
Jokes aside, this is a common vibe I keep feeling for Shadowlands.
It’s chock-full of weird implications that the narrative doesn’t seem to really consider.
Like they just kinda threw ideas into a pot with no real consideration of how it tied into the overall picture.
Like, yea. Sure. Let’s say I come from a world where licking rocks was illegal and “immoral”. But I licked them rocks.
Cultural Sins count as Sins, so I’m sent to Vamp Land.
They torture me for centuries cause I licked rocks.
I refuse to acknowledge that licking rocks is bad.
I’m tossed into the Maw for eternal torture cause I’m an unrepentant rock licker.
This is the system working.
I imagine fel energy does in fact consume souls, because that is what chaos magic does. It consumes other things as fuel to continue to function outside the twisting nether.
It is a bit of an aside admittedly, but I imagine that the original function of Chaos as a force was to keep knocking down Order’s sand castles. When a world became too structured they were drawn to the abundance of Order Magic and rampaged across that world to reset it before going back home. To the titans it was senseless violence on worlds they ‘fixed’, but it actually served a broader cosmic function that due to their nature they simply were unable to comprehend.
Ive felt the fundamental largest flaw of the Shadowlands is its function is not linked into the larger cosmos. Its function should be to get a soul to a state it is ready to let go of its past self and be reborn in the cycle of life and death. A soul’s journey through the realms of death should be one of self discovery with a bit of wish fulfillment.
If that was the case, then the destruction of souls would be a horrifying thing because it slowly erodes the stability of the cosmos as a whole. As it is? There will always be more souls so to the beings of death tasked with their overseeing they are just a blank renewable resource.
It’s not even the fact that you can die again in the afterlife.
It’s that you’re second death can be something as mundane as being mauled by a bear.
Not “Your soul is consumed by an evil god.”
Not “Undone by a tempest of cosmic wind.”
Not “Some other third incredibly magical thing.”
Just, “You die and, upon waking, are mauled by a bear.”
This has been my opinion as well.
The Shadowlands is a system designed by the First Ones, but I cannot see the purpose in it for the life of me.
Why does it exist, and what cosmic significance requires souls be placed in afterlives?
They call it a cycle. They evoke the imagery of an Ouroboros.
But it isn’t. Not really. It’s a one way street from Life to Death.
Where your life is a miniscule lump of time compared to the eternity of your afterlife.
I always understood that mortals’ souls can be broken in the mortal realm and their remaining essence goes to the shadowlands, but warlocks don’t fully destroy the soul just extract the essence and the fragmented soul is sent off. Idk I wasn’t paying much attention to Shadowlands to comprehend every detail, but soul consumption/destruction is very rare and even soul engines of the Legion don’t fully destroy the souls.
It is vague, but the characters who we know were destroyed in a fel-destruction-kinda-way (Like Varian, or Kil’Jaeden and demons in general) are noticably absent in the Shadowlands. Doesn’t really prove anything since we don’t see that many characters, but there’s no evidence to reject the idea that fel/warlocks
destroy souls, which is certainly what their soul-resource magic seems to imply.
The most generous read on the Shadowlands would be that it does function like this–Kyrians collect souls, Venthyr break them down, Ardenweald take those broken down souls and send them back to reality, Maldraxxus prevents outside forces from interfering with this, there’s your cycle.
In practice it isn’t really described that way… Ardenweald seems to be involved with reincarnation to an extent, but to me it didn’t seem like its primary purpose beyond something they did for Wild Gods and stuff. And besides, it wasn’t really clear to me that Venthyr purify souls for the purpose of sending them off to be reborn anyway, even before Denathrius was sided with the jailer. If there’s text that indicates thats what they were doing let me know, but Revendreth seemed like a self-contained realm rather than a reform school where souls “graduate” to Ardenweald or something
