So. Yeah. Kinda sitting here both excited and a bit stunned at what Blizzard’s dropped in our laps here.
Gonna try to parse it a bit better so its not the normal word-spaghetti that you get from me…
1) Children of the First Flesh
Spiders and Knives and Void, oh my
We were all assuming this was the Tauren, or the Troll, or even the Proto-Drakes, but why would the Old Gods give a flying heck about the natural life-forms of Azeroth? We're slaves at best, sacrifices on a normal day and chew toys for all eternity on a bad day. We even get an insight into this with some of the Time Rift quest items, where there's a few Old God items that paint the Black Empire as a place where even the mortals who do survive are treated as little better than farm animals, to be fed to sate the never-ended hunger of the Void-God that has replaced Azeroth's World Soul.But no, its the Nerubians, and they walked away from the Old Gods a loooooooong time ago. The Children of the First Flesh, the descendants of the first life-forms to be made from the Flesh of the Old Gods themselves, are the Aqir, from which the Nerubians, the Mantid, the Silithids and the Qiraji. And yet, the other off-shoots of the Aqir have always failed at the final step because they’re lost in the sauce, they’re the perfect vessels of the Void but by dint of this, they’re unable to focus enough to defeat us because they’re distracted by the whispers and the thousand futures and options always being offered every second by the Old Gods and the Void. None of the other sub-species of the Aqir ever stop to think “Maybe this is a bad idea…”, they just go all in because they’re hopped up on Purple Drank : Void Edition and they have all of the ADHD firing behind their eyes all of the time.
But the Nerubians went cold turkey and actively avoided or sealed up any Old Ones or Old God spawn they found and lived relatively peaceful lives, with an Empire that remained untouched and uncontested for tens of thousands of years, to the point even the batsheep insane Frost Trolls decided to leave them alone, only a single Vrykul king ever struck a halfway decent blow against them, and the literal sundering of the world was an inconvenience at best. Yeah, if spiders didn’t give me the heebie jeebies, I’d want them batting for me too.
Knaifu Waife, the Blade Bae herself, Xal’atath has been watching us. Unlike the other Old Gods, she’s focused, driven and controlled, hence why she probably got murked by the other Old Gods, but she was so useful that even in her diminished state, she was too valuable to get rid of and they stuffed her into the Black Blade of the Empire to serve as a tool of corruption for Mortals, even as they humiliated her by making her a tool for the Old God’s least servants to use. She knows us, she’s studied us, she’s been in our minds and knows what risks we’ll take and how far we’re willing to go to succeed, because she’s been involved behind the scenes in nearly every single mortal conflict since the fall of the Black Empire, and knows intimately that just raw power being flung wildly and chaotically around is just going to empower us. To defeat us, she needs surgical precision and calm, controlled misdirection, and the Nerubians are cold, methodical and precise to a T. Its a match made in heaven … for them.
For us, its a nightmare.
2) Primalists are not from our Timeline
Its a timey-wimey wibbley-wobbley solution to the question
So we’ve been wondering where the Primalist movement came from since, you know, after everything, any massive movement of people would trigger alarm bells amongst the spy agencies of the member-nations within the Alliance and Horde because we don’t want to return to war and the last time this happened in this exact fashion, the Twilight Hammer had cultivated and converted thousands of terrified civilians, disgruntled soldiers and embittered mercenaries to all move to the Twilight Highlands and Mount Hyjal and were in the process of turning them into a massive army before we swooped in to save the day and turned the Ogres and the would-be converts against each other in a brutal scrum that decimated both sides.
So where did the Primalists come from?
I think the answer is the Primal Incarnates alliance with Infinite Flight. When was this pact made? The fact that Chrono-Lord Deios was able to turn the Proto-Drake version of Nozdormu into the Infinite Dragon-Aspect Murozond is very telling that Nozdormu and Murozond are not the same entity, they’re two separate variants of the same entity. And the fact that Deios could take Iridikron back so far when Chromie states that only Aspects or very powerful Dragons could do this, and even then it was very draining, puts a very high mark against Deios’s power-level to begin with.
Furthermore, we have the Primalist Future which just … exists. Why does it exist? Possibly the Primalist Future was the timeline where the Primal Incarnates won the War of Scales, and realising that there was no other way to ensure the birth of their Aspect happened as intended, the Infinite Flight stopped mucking about and avoiding upholding their pact, and got in contact with Magotha and the surviving Grimtotems, and Twilight Hammer Cultists.
A few time portals open to the point where the Primalists still had massive numbers and they’re encouraged through, because whatever happened in the Primalist Future, we never seen the Primal Incarnates.
The implication is that either Fyrakk did go over the edge and it resulted in the planet being divided into segments, ruled over by Elemental Proto-Drakes of Aspectral power-levels fighting for territory and pride, in an ironic mirror of how the Elemental Lords waged war upon each other, or the Primal Incarnates released all of the Elemental Lords and that’s why the planet is so badly messed up and Primalists only exist in small pockets there now, because both the bulk of their forces got pulled through and the rest are trying to fight for their masters in a realm where the artificial Order that the Titans implemented to allow life to flourish got shredded and now their Azeroth is a death-world.
The worst thing about this is, being Time-jumping beings, the actual alliance between the Infinites and the Primal Incarnates could have happened at the beginning of the War of the Scales, or a few months back. For all we know, the Grimtotem Shaman who released Rasageth was preparing for years for this, or was pulled from the Primalist Future to free his mistress from her prison. If we include the possibility that the Primalists are not just disgruntled Azerothians from our timeline, but also an army pulled from a Timeline where the Primal Incarnates won their ancient war and have enslaved/enthralled Mortals to serve as fodder-troops and servants, it makes a whole lot more sense that they not only knew where the Dragon isles were, but got there even before the Dragon Flights did.
3) Anduin needs all of the hugs
So yeah, we’ve gone from
To this
And ended up as this
Damn, but they Nevil Longbottom’d him hard.
That said, all memes aside, let's dive down the rabbit hole of why Anduin is the broken man we see today
From a very early age, Anduin has been marked by tragedy and betrayal. From an assassin aiming to kill him at the tender age of three, to losing his mother to a stone thrown during the Defias Riots, to his father coming home after being lost and presumed murdered on a peace-delegation to meet with Thrall and the other Horde leaders, only to come home and be a buffoon and a simp for Katrina Prestor, Anduin had to grow up fast and didn’t have the childhood most other people did.
With no father, no mother, no siblings and no known relatives who could take up the throne, Anduin had a huge amount of pressure on his shoulders even as a child, and the manipulations of Katrina, the House of Nobles and the politics of the Alliance would have weighed on those small shoulders, already bowed with so much loss, and yet through it all, Anduin always tried to be bright, intelligence and kind, like he was told his mother was.
And yet, when his father returned home, Anduin’s work only got harder, and it was only after a long debacle of magical nonsense and being kidnapped by Onyixa and nearly being fed to her brood, with only broken weapons and half-gnawed bones to defend himself with, stalled for time until Lo’gosh the Gladiators and Varian the King, along with their allies, could show up and save the day.
And even after that, things still got worse for him. The two minds of Varian were imprecisely fused, leading to a struggle for dominance as the near-feral mind of Lo’gosh slowly but surely assimilated the intellectual mind of Varian the King, creating the man we came to know in Cataclysm, Pandaria and eventually Legion. Through this time period, Anduin went to Ironforge to try and escape the vicious cycle he was in with his mentally unstable father, and fell in love for the first time in his life, to a sweet and sturdy young Dwarven woman called Aerin Stonehand, whose help training Anduin to be the warrior his Father wanted, rather than the archer and diplomat that Anduin aspired to be, helped show Anduin that his true calling came as a priest, and ironically, she died even as Anduin poured all the power he could into her because the Light either could not or would not save her, either due to the severity of being crushed under the rubble, or perhaps because the Light has a thing from Broken Champions for its prophecies …
Regardless, Aerin’s memory drives Anduin on, to master swordsmanship even though he dreams of a world of peace and respect rather than unending war and grudge-fueled atrocities.
So we have his mother being killed while holding him in her arms, his father being absent for years and watching the adults around his tear the kingdom apart being selfish idiots for the most part, his father being a mentally unstable fusion of two very different individuals that struggled to pull themselves into a cohesive whole, the very first person he fell in love with and could have an actual, normal, healthy relationship with dies in his arms, and he’s not even 18 yet …
AND THEN THINGS GOT WORSE
His friendship with Baine, as two future leaders marked by pain and betrayal and the selfish and short-sighted choices of those around him, was a pillar of strength that sustained him even as he urged his father towards balance and helped guide the Alliance away from devastating extremes, only for Varian to descend into instablity again with the arrival of Genn Greymane and the bitter blood between the two Kings, for Greyman’s refusal to aid the Alliance during the Third War, and the creation of the Gilnean War that allowed so many people from Lordaeron to die as the Scourge crushed them between the unending tides of the Undead and the great gates that refused to open and grant sanctuary to the refugees, before Anduin decided that if he was going to become a Priest, he needed the advice of a mentor unaffected by the politicking of Stormwind, and Velen had already expressed an interest in training Anduin.
For fear of losing his only surviving family member, Varian refused and ended up physically harming his son in his desperation, before Anduin put an emotional wall between the two of them and left to study under Velen’s tutelage, cutting Anduin off from the only family he had for the sake of the Light … a sacrifice that would come back to haunt him, again and again and again, as the years rolled on.
After returning from his self-exile with the Draenei, Anduin returns only to find Varian is fully in the grip of his Lo’gosh persona, and even after reconciling at the grave of Tiffin Wrynn with his father, is again struck by betrayal with Twilight Hammer Cultists arrive to assassinate them both. Despite Varian telling Anduin he is proud of the man his son is becoming, Varian once again ignores Anduin when his son warns his father that something feels ‘wrong’ with Archbishop Benedictus, leaving the young Prince wondering if anything really has changed.
Then, the Bombing of Theramore happens and Jaina awakes from her coma and immediately, and understandably, decides its time to meet the Horde atrocity for atrocity, even going so far as to call Varian a coward and to rip absolute strips off Anduin for his ‘naivety’ and ‘gullible nature’.
Pandaria, despite all its horrors, would prove to be one of the few bright points of Anduin’s life, involving his meetings with the Celestials of Pandaria, his friendship with Wrathion, and his meetings with the Champions of both the Horde and the Alliance to reinforce his beliefs that everyone wanted the same thing, to be happy, safe and free to live their lives without fear or hatred commanding their actions, but ultimately this came to a bitter end as Garrosh, consumed with ambitions of the darkest nature, shattered the Sha Bell and buried Anduin within the rubble of the cursed artifact, leaving him nearly dead. Anduin would be barely conscious as his father naturally raged at this cowardly attack, and Jaina manipulated the situation to increase the aid given to her for her vengeance against the Horde.
Anduin is again betrayed at the Trial of Garrosh by Wrathion, and this cuts deeply, as despite the rocky nature of their relationship, a distinct level of trust and respect had been built up, and freeing Garrosh, who had done Anuin harm both physically and emotionally, cut as deeply as denying the people of Azeroth the chance to finally cleanse their own wounds of the filth and infection of decades of hate for each other. That Wrathion’s actions would also lead to the loss of so many of the Horde and Alliance’s greatest champions, the return of the Legion and the death of his father would also be a further drain on Anduin’s spiritual and emotional reserves, highlighted by that wonderful haymaker he delivered to Wrathion upon catching sight of his friend once again, strutting in like nothing had gone sour between the two of them.
Finally, we get to the War of Thorns and we see Anduin at rock bottom. Sylvanas has undone every positive thing the Horde has ever done or fought for, the Alliance is more divided than ever before, and his own attempts at peace and reconciliation were manipulated and abused by the Banshee Queen to pain him as a warmonger and/or an impotent king puppeted by his handlers amongst the Alliance leadership. Thousands more die, whole generations have been lost at this point, and Anduin is, for the first time, fully to blame for a large section of the horrors, and it weighs heavily upon him as Tyrande rages and refuses to accept logic and reason, preferring to throw her people into a meat grinder for revenge rather than pull back and save those she can, and even at the end of the War of Thorns, the end of all Warchiefs and the complete submission of the Horde … the Alliance still doubts and mistrusts him, spits in his face about his idealism and are still comparing him unfavorably to his father, often to his face in the case of Tyrande.
AND THEN THINGS PROCEED TO GET WORSE EVEN FASTER
Cue the Shadowlands, Anduin getting yoinked and subjected to unknown amounts of both mental and physical torture, Sylvanas gloating and twisting everything he did as he’s trapped, then telling him he has a choice of willing service or puppetry, and worse of all Zovaal actively sets up the situation so that Anduin is mentally aware of everything he is doing while the Jailer is puppeteering his body, can feel everything his body is doing, and periodically will let the control slip just so Anduin can have a breath of air before trapping him in the prison of his own mind again, in an ironic echo of what many strong-willed Forsaken suffered, being able to remember everything or the most traumatic events of their time under the domination of the Scourge.
And at the end of all that, he walks off into the Maw to try and come to terms with everything that’s happened to him, with being the monster, with being made to become the Arthas 2.0 that Garrosh and Sylvanas both taunted him with several times … and it breaks him. He goes from this smooth, perfect angel of a being to a raw, scarred, disheveled and broken man who has lost everything, every happy moment shattered or sacrificed for the good of others who do nothing to return the favor, or even work to improve themselves.
To take a mangle a rather brutal piece of media from another setting …
Anduin has been back on Azeroth for some time, we know this from the start of the Dragonflight Expansion when Mathias Shaw mentions that Anduin has been spotted, but has made dedicated efforts to avoid being contacted, and so Genn sighs and says they’ll have to just leave it till Anduin is ready to come to them.
Imagine coming back from that hell, from having lived that life, only to find the world is exactly the way you want it … and maybe it only turned out that way because you weren’t there anymore.
I got a lot of problems with Sanduin, but damn, the character has been through just as much grief and nonsense as 90% of the adult faction leaders who have people that they can rely on and trust implicitly, and this small boy grew into a man while being beaten on all sides by despair, doubt, betrayal and loss and people are giving him guff for breaking at the end of all that?
There better be a better /hug emote enabled for the next expansion because Gatt Dangus he needs all of the hugs!
