I’m still honestly legit confused, how does having a Solar God/Diety take away from Elune exactly? Most cultures IRL have a Sun and Moon Good to explain how certain things work.
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Because it’s easier to balance a pair of supreme beings that naturally parallel the playable factions
Same with Elune tbh
Which is just… all the more tedious.
I think Zahir dropped this argument at this point given he’s finally accepted the writing on the wall.
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The best of “both” worlds would be the following thing. Elune is involved in changes of the elves, Well of Eternity, and thus all of the stories that ever involved the region, from WotA to W3 events, to even obscure things like Illidan asking to bring a certain crystal to the Well 2.0 - all of those stories have to be recontextualized to fit whatever new idea would be.
What is the likelyhood that the narrative team already has the outline of all of those things by the time of the reveal, to move on with a coherent story, that would both fit the new ideas, and not ruin the old ones (one of true deities, mentioned places, etc.)?
gl hf
Doesn’t that book even have a preface basically saying none of it is hard canon because Blizz couldn’t be bothered to edit it?
None of it is hard canon but no that is not the reason
the official excuse is “it’s folklore”
the meta reason is probably “We’re not sure where we want to take the story”
The horde had more than enough hooks to have a lot of action and culture exploration in Shadowlands. Didn’t help.
What’s the probability of some reveal of “extra meaning” for Sylvanas being called “lady moon” by her sisters?
What would be a probability of the wound in the chest having a “surprise reveal” about another character with a wound in the chest?
gl hf
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My only real issue with the new expanded cosmology is that they’ve proven a ton of religions and beliefs as false.
Elune being a Life Lord is a bit boring because it contextualizes her but at least it isn’t the narrative going and saying a spiritual belief your role-play has accepted is factually incorrect.
One of the saving graces for Shadowlands is that most role-players are largely deciding to ignore it from their character perspective.
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I sure would like a race of some sort of cosmic importance.
My biggest criticism of the expanded cosmology is the compartmentalization of different forces into neatly defined categories. Elune potentially being a Life Lord means she’ll be a victim to some extent regarding that compartmentalization, but with as many different schools of magic she is directly associated with, it’ll be hard for the writers to ignore the inevitable questions of why her power is so diverse.
Unfortunately for a lot of other races’ myths and deities, at least those few that are even likely to have a place on the cosmological stage, it’ll be far easier for the writers to shoe-horn them into orderly domains like Life or Light without any consideration for the nuance of a complex system like the genesis of a universe.
Maybe we’ll find out that the compartmentalization of the universe into these neat cosmic forces is merely a perception of insiders looking outward, and that the reality is much more complex than initially proposed.
It would be neat if the writers actually expanded on ideas like those from the Broker journal detailing the fractals of the primal universe and the potential for infinite variety there in, but I have feeling that sort of world-building is just used at the surface level to make the cosmology seem to possess more depth than it actually does or will. They will probably just continue to rely on the six pre-established cosmic forces neatly packaged in their respective domains, with the mortal realm being the transitive plane between them all.
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That wouldn’t be that big a deal if the cosmology had more nuanced and borrowed from a greater diversity of sources and aesthetics
I mean, at the end of the day, all existent phenomena must be reduced to X number of fundamental forces/magics/concepts, with all other magics being emergent or composite from those fundamental ones. The concept of a universe that is logically coherent in any way demands this. So… how big does X need to be to be acceptable? 10? 100? More? I guess you can argue that we, the player, “shouldn’t” be savvy to this information, but that’s different from arguing that there are too few.
Certainly, six is far more than we assumed in the pre-Chronicle cosmology. Before Chronicle, everyone pretty much thought that only Light, Void/Shadow, and one of either Fel or Arcane were fundamental. 6 is bigger than 3, no?
Blizzard is constantly expanding the Cosmic Forces not shrinking them in the end!
Ontologically, you can argue that the division of power into six cosmological schools isn’t an objective representation of the world, but is a selective perception the writers use to illustrate that world. That gets into the philosophy of monism, particularly existential monism, where by any division of the singular is arbitrarily defined.
As far as how big it needs to be to be acceptable: the answer, ontologically, is one or greater. It’s perfectly acceptable now, but only if you understand the division as subjective. The real question is: if those six are ontologically independent, and their division is concrete rather than abstract, do they represent the diverse range of pre-established power structures in the universe?
I’d argue no. When you have entities like Elune or Eonar, the Nathrezim or the Naaru, none of whom fit into those compartments neatly, and can’t be concretely defined by a single force, but who are still placed in the domain of a single force, then those forces aren’t ontologically independent and probably shouldn’t be represented as such. It’s restrictive.
And don’t get me wrong: it’s fine for it to be that way, and it currently exists that way, but when those divisions merely serve as a subjective illustration of a cosmology (even an artificially constructed one), then those illustrations could be better.
You do understand that none of that RPG material is considered canon any more?
The Titans at the time seem to have been inspired by Marvel’s Celestials but it seems to me that with the change in writing teams almost everything about the metacosmos of the setting has been reimagined. Cenarius isn’t the sole starting point of Druidism, and when the Humans started turning clothie Priests into metal shod Paladins, they are only accidentally re-inventing something the Trolls of Zandalar had done tens of thousands of years earlier.
But what demands the concept itself? After all if the universe is when you get down to it fundamentally Chaotic, any appearance of Order is really just a momentary illusion even if to lesser immortals it seems like a persistent one. Order, in the end, is just one of the many temporary manifestations of Chaos doomed to ultimately be reabsorbed back into it.
I’m excited about this and I hope the writers expand on it.
I didn’t say it was. I merely said it set a standard of expectation for the fanbase. That section of the OG post was a contextual history of Elune’s narrative development. Nothing more. It only has weight in the discussion of her current narrative insofar as it defines what certain night elf fans (erroneously) expect her to be.
The older fanbase perhaps. The RPG itself, both editions have been out of print for over a decade.
You’d be surprised how often it comes up in discussions still. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
As a physicist with an email address that is required to be publicly available—and thus filled with spam from the public—it’s funny how the word “fractal” is one of the biggest crank magnets out there I know of, and people latching on to it is one of the surefire tells of crazies who think they’ve divined a theory of the universe “without math, just thinking about things.” My spam folder is full of people who mistakenly think that fractals have anything to do with anything in physics. Seriously, it’s one of the big don’t-interact red flags, alongside random word capitalization and frequent exclamation marks.
I’m sorry, I guess I’m having a bit of trouble, I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to get at with most of your post, but if the quoted segment is the crux of what bothers you:
Elune displaying powers from multiple different forces, yeah, that kind of messes with the idea of her just being a “Life lord,” you’re right, but come on… you know they’re just going to retcon things so that her previously-displayed Void/Arcane/etc blessings were just Life-related all along. 
You can feel it, can’t you? It’s soooo going to happen. It’s dirty, but it will technically clean up the inconsistencies.
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Is it really? I presume that you’d have a departmental .edu email address that isn’t supposed to be circulated outside the academic circle. I have a courtesy alumni email address from Rutgers that isn’t getting spammed because I don’t make public use of it. I’m pretty sure Professor Tyson’s email isn’t publicly available.
I’ve certainly never heard of any physicist, who receives any kind of state funding, who’s email isn’t listed on a departmental web page—but then again I don’t know anyone who’s particularly famous among the public. Maybe it’s my state, or university policy. Or maybe 99% of physicists just have it out there, because our culture is often insanely casual and colloquial compared to other fields. And yes, there are automated university spam filters that catch most of the unusual external addresses… but I like to look at the spam folder and read the good ones that make it through.
There’s all kinds of good stories out there of people sharing the best stories, though, if you’re interested, like the ongoing saga of Gabor Fakete.
EDIT: since I was gaslit into questioning something I knew with total certainty, I checked my university, Princeton, MIT, Columbia, and Harvard physics departments, and every single faculty member’s email is publicly available online—big names included. If you are faculty at a university, your email is online, period. Those of us who aren’t just students/alumni like yourself don’t get anonymity.
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