Now this is a very far-out-there Dumb/Rogue Thought Thread, but something occurred to me.
Azeroth has two moons, one large and white, the other blue and small. These moons are referred to as The White Lady and the Blue Child. In distant history, and under the influence of powerful Loa like Bwonsamdi, the White Lady has turned a baleful, blood-red color, but those appear to be localized, rather than the entire, actual moon turning a bloody crimson shade, and we have also seen the White Lady turn that same red color during .
Draenor has two moons, one large and white and the other smaller and darker, almost a midnight shade of blue.
The larger of the two is called the Pale Lady, and is a washed-out rosy pink color with three massive ravines on the hemisphere facing Draenor, as well as multiple large craters, and is very important to the Orcs as a ‘feminine’ fixture in their shamanistic religions of old, and the smaller is unnamed, but appears to be shrouded in dark blue, almost black clouds and vapor, rather than a solid mass of rock or ice like we see with the Blue Child, The White Lady and the Pale Lady.
Argus, from what I can see, doesn’t appear to have moons, but the planet appears to have been shattered. Not like Draenor was broken apart from being drained of its magic, but because it appears the Legion needed to gain access to the Titanic installations deep within Argus itself, to access the World Soul within and begin the process of torture and indoctrination that would turn the Argus World Soul into a Titan of Death, able to be used to bring Demons back over and over again despite the ‘rules’ of the Twisting Nether, and as Sargeras’s final solution, to wipe out all Life in the cosmos at once, including his own Burning Legion.
Or, in the case of Argus, judging from the player’s map and the way we’re running around on fragments of landmass roughly equal to the size of Stormwind and Elwynn Forest put together … I have a rogue theory.
Argus was never a planet. Argus was a moon. The giant planet we see when we face away from Azeroth in the sky is the actual planet around which ‘Argus’ spun.
https://imgur.com/gallery/argus-skyline-shots-Ihjydbq screenshots here.
It would explain the coloration of the Eredar people, what we see in terms of plant-life that still exists on their world and what they brought with them on their flight across the stars, a near constant state of dim light caused by orbiting a massive planet, and a dim sun, meaning plantlife would have to develop bioluminescence and pheromones to attract insects and other creatures for pollination from reproduction of the species, and the spreading of fruits and seeds between different areas to avoid parent-child competitions for space and resources. It explains why so many life-forms survived despite the Felblood infesting the regions and the lack of energy from the World Soul as it was being drained to fuel the Legion’s incalculable losses from dozens of planetary invasions going on simultaneously.
They were already well-adjusted to harsh conditions and needing to adapt rapidly to an unforgiving environment, and we see it with many of the Draenei buildings that still exist, and what we can see on the unreachable parts of the world, that there’s not many tall, thin buildings. Everything is elegant, beautiful … and well fortified to last tens of thousands of years with little to no maintenance and the infestation of Fel parasites and life-forms within their shells. Structures designed to survive strong gravitational forces and provide shelter from long, dark periods of time where the ambient temperature would drop rapidly.
This would also explain the Eredar/Draenei’s use of copper in their blue blood, as copper is significantly superior to iron-based blood for carrying oxygen around the body in cold environments, such as you would find in the bottom of the ocean floor, around thermal vents, or a giant moon that is very rarely exposed to direct sunlight due to the rotation of both itself and the world it orbits. It would explain why, even pre-Exile, the Draenei/Eredar had glowing eyes and seem to operate without issue in dark and dim environments, and why they worship the Light, and why their cities on Argus were so brightly lit. Light meant safety, meant growth, meant warmth and hope. So when the Naaru showed up to give their ancestors the Ata’mal Crystal, they took it as a literal divine gift, a glowing crystal that could provide for all their needs, and indeed, it seems that the Ata’mal Crystal in its combined form was able to rapidly accelerate and evolve the Draenei into their ultra-advanced state, which is where Sargeras found them.
Humanity got black monoliths and monkeys. They got the crystal from the cover of a Pink Floyd album and sentient wind-chmes.
But putting aside the Argus is a Moon theory for a second, something got me thinking.
Azeroth is, by the Titans own dubious confirmation, the ‘Prime’ World Soul.
We’re told that ‘Time’ is both a flat circle, meaning what has happened, will happen, and will happen again in the future, and that ‘Time’ is not a construct of Death, meaning that outside of our reality, the Mortal Plane, the Mundus, the Material Universe, whatever you want to call it, the flow of Time is not linear. It can be slower, faster, fragmented, entirely disjointed, based upon the nature and the inclination of the dimension you find yourself within and the God-like beings that rule there.
This is my Dumb Thought:
Argus, Draenor and all the other worlds we find with life on them … are ‘echoes’ of Azeroth.
There is only one World Soul. Azeroth’s World Soul. But as she dreams, She sheds ‘Aspects’ of herself, echoes, children, fragments, whatever you want to call them, that represent facets of what she can do.
Draenor, we’re told it had a core of spiritual energy but it had been drained by the Sporemounds … but that seems odd, considering that World Souls absorb spiritual energy, so why would plants assume gigantic forms when there’s a deficit of Spirit Energy? Why were Draenor’s Elemental Furies so calm and composed despite having even less Spirit Energy to feed themselves compared to worlds like Argus and Azeroth?
Why bother saving Draenor if its just going to be consumed by the Sporemounds, if the Titans will Re-Originate a whole solar system rather than let it be ‘imperfect’?
Certainly, Agrammar seems to be a Good Boi and would want to save Life where he found it, but at this point, by the Titan’s own words, the Sporemounds had essentially eaten just about everything on the planet and were on the verge of having to start cannibalizing each other to sustain themselves.
So where did the vibrant animal life-forms come from? The Talbuk, the Clefthoof, the Wolves, the Windrocs, all these varied and unique biomes couldn’t just ‘spring up’ without millions of years of evolution, unless something intervened.
Something like what the Titans did on Azeroth, with their facilities such as the ones we find in Un’goro Crater, Ulduar, Sholazar Basin, the Dragon Isles and the Golden Vale.
My theory is that Draenor was home to a minor ‘echo’ of Azeroth, and seeking out new World Souls, Agrammar found this ‘echo’ and raised her to Titan-hood, but she was weak, small and wasn’t able, or worthy of, becoming a part of the Titanic Pantheon’s upper echelons, especially given what we’re learning about Amun’thul and him being a gigantic man-child when things don’t go his way. And since almost every Titan has a dual nature, being both Entities of the Arcane and another force, be it the Elements, Life, or Time itself, a Titan of Life would likely fall under Eonar’s banner as an apprentice or an assistant.
Argus may have been Azeroth’s dream of death, of vengeance, of cleansing her surface of the Old Gods and their hideous creations, or may have been a deeper, darker dream still that was sent out and bound itself to the core of Argus to become a World Soul in his own right, or Argus might not have been a ‘Death’ Titan until however many hundreds of thousands of years of torment and indoctrination under the Dark Titan’s control.
The Draenei fled Argus on, and this is crucial, a Dimensional Ship. Not a Void Ship like the Legion uses during the Expansion of the same name, but a Dimensional Ship, intended to skip through the dimensions to carry the Draenei to safety. And the only way the Legion could keep tracking down the Draenei was if their travels somehow touched on the Twisting Nether, which according to Prince Mal’chezzar, who was an Eredar of some significant standing within the Legion, the Twisting Nether touches upon ‘All Realities, all Dimensions’, as he is able to reach out from the warped space atop Kharazan to the Twisting Nether directly, and we’ve seen in several other instances that the Twisting Nether doesn’t just open to one timeline, but multiple ones.
Gul’dan summoned Archimonde. Archimonde yeeted everybody’s least favourite Igor Cosplayer through the Dark Portal. And yet Gul’dan ended up in our reality. But we’re told that the comments about ‘all souls end up fused together with all their variations and counter-parts in the Shadowlands’ is false, and that each timeline has their own Shadowlands, their own Twisting Nether, their own Emerald Dream, etc etc.
So how did Gul’dan from an alternate timeline end up in our reality?
Every single timeline has one fixed point. Azeroth. One Azeroth across multiple timelines, that has been conquered, freed and conquered again by the Void, the Titans, by Life itself, by the Burning Legion and despite us being told that is ‘GG’ for the setting … these timelines still exist.
Our Azeroth is the Core. The Prime. The only ‘version’ of Azeroth that has the Prime World Soul in it. All the other Azeroths, all the other worlds with World Souls within them, be they Argus, Azeroth, Draenor or the other worlds spoken of in books and comics and in-game, are fragments, echoes, dreams of the Prime World Soul being cast out across dimensions, across realities, as Azeroth slowly narrows down what she wants to be.
And we’ve also found that once something happens, it kind of becomes temporally ‘locked in’. Azeroth has two moons, so every world where Life forms or a World Soul is gestating, has two moons, because that’s how Azeroth ‘dreams’ about herself, a thriving world full of life with two moons, one larger, one smaller.
Draenor shattered because of the opening of multiple Gates without proper anchoring, tearing the planet apart and draining most of its Spirit and Arcane energies in the process. AU Draenor was dying and starting to break apart because the Army of the Light was fracking it for energy to fuel the next leg of their Crusade. Argus was fracked to hell and back not just to gain access to the World Soul within, but for access to the molten core of metals within, as well as the bounties of ore, magical gemstones and potent magical energies that made the civilisation of the Eredar possible.
The WoW setting is running off a very Walmart-brand knock-off version of a type of Hinduism, where all things exist as part of the dreams of a God or Gods, and if that Divine Force ever wakes up…
Well, what happens to your dreams when you wake up?
We really need to stop all these cosmic forces from poking Azeroth because if she wakes up, and all things are her ‘Dreams’ … we’re gonna disappear like a fart in the wind and she’s barely going to remember anything about what happened.