Honestly my first thought to all this, which I can’t believe I havent put together sooner, was MTG’s ‘system.’ If we can even really call it a system. But the themes they explore in their color combos, through Ravnica in particular, kinda fit here too if we try to simplify things a bit. If anyone knows much about MTG and some of the more developed sets they came out with, Fel lines up pretty well with a lot of Red combos. Nature at its most fiercest and survival of the fittest Gruul (R/G), innovation at its most stupendous (or dangerous) Izzet (R/B), unflinching power and force through Boros (R/W) yet still ordered to a degree, and the sadism and pure chaos of Rakdos (R/B).
If we want to explore Fel’s more neutral or even positive traits, taking some inspiration from here and similar systems could be useful for either Blizzard creating future stories or even our own personal ones in the case of RPers, heavy and light. I even took some heavy inspiration from Azorius a while back for a Nightborne destro warlock looking to contain and harness fel safely, if such a thing could ever exsist. I think Blizzard just needs to get a little creative with it and expand what fel is, as mentioned like they have with the void .
Chaos’ primary duty seems to of been to keep Order in line. Demons are attracted to Order Magic as we call it these days, and instinctively rampage on mortal worlds with a strong Order signature to scour them clean.
Order likes to try to build sand castles, and Chaos smashes them if they grow too large. This, of course, makes Order very cross hence they set Sargeras to the task of undermining Chaos. We never really got to see natural Chaos and demons doing their thing as the progenitors intended—It was corrupted from its true function before the Black Empire even fell.
Another of those “fans put more thought into it than the writers” situations. WoW cosmic lore these days is a stencil of a shadow of storytelling, nothing more.
It’s a Rubik’s cube where every square is grey, turn and twist one’s interpretation to their heart’s content and they’ll feel they’ve hit on something every time they reach a conclusion. Because it’s easier than admitting the truth about WoW’s current cosmic lore. We should all demand something better.
I’m starting to think Blizzard should start hiring and paying people like you rather than write their stories by committee.
Something to consider is that in light of what we’ve learned about certain things from Shadowlands, it’s not definitive if even the pre-Legion demons were truly being naturally drawn to invade and corrupt Reordered worlds, or if even that was the dreadlords deliberately corrupting mortal races into demons and steering them to do so in order to catch the Pantheon’s notice and peel one of the titans’ attentions away from the rest so as to prime him for eventually turning against them.
In which case, even long before Sargeras imposed an organized purpose and direction upon them in the form of the Burning Legion, the demons that kept intruding upon the Great Dark and being driven back by him and Aggramar may have already been a case of Disorder being compromised and manipulated into putting itself on the Pantheon’s radar as part of the Nathrezim plan to ultimately sow disunity among the titans.
Order and Disorder are their own category. Yet the other Cosmics also swing either Orderly or Chaotic.
Chaos is Disorder, so that’s simple enough.
But also Life is chaotic. It’s constantly changing and growing and evolving.
When the Old Gods wanted to corrupt the Titanforged, they gave them life in the form of the Curse of Flesh. Life is deviancy.
And then there’s Void. Void has been described as “countless possibilities”. It sees a multitude of truths, each shifting and changing.
Void seems to be the raw potential of a pitch dark room. Anything could be in it. And you won’t know till you turn on the light.
On the flipside, we have Order. Done and done.
And then there’s Death. And to me, Death seemed pretty orderly in the Shadowlands. Every soul has a set spot. Every afterlife its own bureaucracy.
And then Light. Light, which sees only a single path forward. A force described as encasing planets in crystal, trapping lifeforms in a perpetual stasis.
If Void can be described by the phrase “I could be…”
Then Light can be described by “It is!”
I’m curious if they’ll expand on this dichotomy they’ve created for the Big Six.
I get what you’re saying, and it will probably happen. But man, I am going to feel like a part of the very foundation of the fictional world dies on the day they do this.
This is why I don’t like the cosmic chart being added at such a late stage of game development: it involves too many retcons (and “recontextualizations” that feel like retcons).
In my opinion Fel is just Fire using more Life as fuel than usual.
Fel is Fire that feeds on Life to create more Fire while Red Dragonfire is Fire that creates Life and feeds on Fire.
Alexstrasza has her powers bolstered by the World Soul and according to the Aspects that power is not that of Titans thus not that of Order. In otherwords Red Dragonfire is not Order at it’s root despite being the opposite of Fel.
Red Dragonfire and Fel are two opposing ideals of Disorder: Fire to fuel Life vs Life to fuel Fire.
The opposite of Nature Life Energies(like that of the Dream) is Necrotic Death Energies(like that of Maldraxxus).
The opposite of Nature Death Energies of Ardenweald are the Blood Energies of Life.
I don’t think it’s that coherent. It’s more like… “Okay we’ve got an expansion coming up… What theme do we build it’s dungeons on… Okay… now let’s make a story that ties them together and hooks up to the tail end of the previous set. and let’s extendthis two expansions forward.”
Did the Void going from “Epitome of Evil” to “cosmic force with nihilistic inclinations that tends to be wielded for evil purposes” ruin the foundations of the setting to you ? To me, it didn’t. I thought it enriched the setting and paved the way for more divergent cultures and perspectives on the events that unfold. I’m only asking for Fel to receive a similar treatment.
And then there’s the big meta issue of : if we stick to applying the Good vs Evil dichotomy to the cosmic chart, then the “good forces” are Order, Light and Life—and these are all notorious for being strongly connected to Alliance lore, races, characters and fantaisies. Leaving Horde fans with the cosmic crumbs, as always.
I would argue that Life actually more connected to the Horde than Alliance, since Life is one of the fundamental elements of Shamanism, being the strongest and the one that animates the others. Blizzard just needs to actually use it a bit more instead of focusing so much on the Light and Arcane. In fact, I think only the Night Elves really go to deeply into Life through Druidism, and yet they’re still more focused on the Light through Elune.
Nah, Life is Life, the elements are treated as their own separate thing. The chart kinda establishes the elements as a “lesser cosmic force”, one that’s tied to the physical realm and isn’t part of the Great Six. And so far Life has always been very predominantly Nelf-centric. Hell, we just spent an entire patch in the literal Life realm, and it was just Nelf stuff. As was Val’sharah in Legion.
Unless I’m mistaken, Rise of the Horde’s old “Spirit of the Wilds” was later retconed/renamed the Spirit of Life. So you can argue that Life at least in some form is used more by Horde races than Alliance. It could be the Horde’s link to the cosmic side if Blizzard were willing to devote time to developing it.
Spirit is rather ill-defined but the actual cosmic charts always depicted it as one of the elements, not as part of Life. I think here we need to differentiate between “life” as a general concept (as in “related to the state of being alive”) and Life (a specific cosmic force). After all, as far as we know, life in the Great Dark was created by… the Light. Which makes the Light a force of creation of life too. Hell, Void is too, in some way.
Also, Spirit has been completely irrelevant so far. I’m pretty confident Nelves will always be the center of any Life plot at this point.
I’m looking at the chart in Chronicles and I might be reading too much into the position, but Spirit is right next to Nature and by extension Life. And since Blizzard has basically decanonized Chronicles by saying it’s specifically meant to be from the Titan’s perspective, they could easily just say that Spirit is in the sphere of Life, since in Shamanism it basically is Life.
It’s something that’s not horde specific. Not with druids and shamans on both sides. And Nature/Life is far more commonly associated with Night elves/Cenarion Circle than Shamans.