I feel like the biggest hurdle towards making Fel not evil by it’s nature is the effects it has on…pretty much everything. Fel consumes souls, turns people and animals into monsters, taints the land, and it appears to bring out the worst traits in those who use it. Void had a similar problem and personally I think they did a very poor job removing its evilness with all the Void Elf stuff. The best you can do is say that its only evil when it falls into the hands of beings with the ability to wield it, but in its natural state its a force of destruction and forced change.
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Now Now! Only the Sha(the last breath of a dead Old God) did damage like Fel.
The Nightmare merely made everything darker looking and the pure Void Corruption merely put patches of Void Portals around the area with some of it covering the trees while leaving them alive and the Old God Corruption induced Tentacles everywhere.
Fel kills the land(Terokkar and the Trees in the Fel-tainted parts of Talador being the sole exception). Void(with the exception of Sha) leaves the land intact.
Void is also a magic that causes madness in those who delve to deeply into it and is heavily associated with the Old Gods and Void Lords, who are described as basically being sentient black holes. Fel damaged the worlds it was used on, Void damaged the people who use it.
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Well, Fel is the only Cosmic force that needs souls to be destroyed to even work.
I think it works better if it doesn’t have redeeming qualities. The last few years have seen a lot of “tweeks” to our understanding of the cosmos. For example, the Light was more or less of a completely benevolent force in the universe. It could be abused (Scarlet Crusade) and even twisted, but at it’s core it was supposed to be the “light in the dark”. We supposed to be able to reliably turn to it as a force for good in our continued survival. Obviously, Xe’ra threw a wrench in that whole thing, and more or less encouraged a zealous fervor and obedience.
Fel however, just kind of works as a “evil” source of power. Demon Hunters use Fel as a “fighting fire with fire” They consume Demons Souls to strengthen themselves. The consumption of souls is required, as has been stated before. Additionally, we’ve seen what the influence of Fel has done to anything it comes in contact with. It doesn’t come out looking “better”. Charred landscapes, cracked skin, violent explosions of hellfire, it’s a fairly aggressive, destructive force.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, it works as the “bad guy” magic, and that’s okay. We see it used for “good” with Demon Hunters and Warlocks, however the cost still remains the same.
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I think Fel as a concept is entropy. It is the breaking down of order into chaos. It’s not evil necessarily because entropy isn’t. It just is. The Burning Legion used Fel for evil aims. But we know that Fel has existed as a concept since before the Burning Legion.
Why are we trying to ruin the idea of fel magic? It shouldn’t have to have any redeeming qualities. It corrupts and turns you either green or red from fel pox. It’s perfect as it is just being something absolutely terrible but powerful that always leads to disaster.
Why argue against enriching and adding nuance to a setting that so desperately needs it ? I know Fel is a destructive force. It should be. If you’ve read my first post, I’m saying there absolutely is value to be found in Destruction (depending on what it means), and so some people should find solace and guidance in the study of the nature of Fel, just like some do with the Void.
As I said, it’s perfectly fine that some forces like Life & Light are very largely wielded for good while some others like Fel & Void are very largely wielded for evil, simply because in most cases, the mortals’ interest tend to be much more compatible with Life & Light than they are with Fel & Void. What I’m arguing against is the idea of “inherently good” and “inherently evil”, which don’t even make all that much sense anyway, since good and evil are culture-induced and we’re only talking about freaking cosmic components that flow through the Great Dark.
(Also, sacrificing souls being required to use Fel is something that can be recontextualized very easily. For example, just say that it is only required for “impure/diluted Fel” or “forced Fel”, and people who have a direct connection to the Fel Pantheon - which Sargeras was never a part of - don’t need to do so)
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I realize this isn’t an opinion that is shared by everybody, but I don’t think neutral cosmic forces make for inherently better or richer storytelling than those with alignments of their own.
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I agree, I don’t think creating nuance with the Void, Death, and Fel magic really helps Warcraft. We’re here to kill bad guys and get cool loot after a long day of work or parenting. That doesn’t mean the lore can’t be fun and interesting, but trying to have some kind of game of cosmic 5D chess and giving Demons and Void Lords some form of nuance really kills the Warcraft vibe for me.
Look what they did to Death. Before Shadowlands if we talked about Death, we imagine the Lich King and Arthas’ story, Kel’thuzad and the Cult of the Damned, hordes of mindless undead skuttling around Northrend, the Plaguelands, ICC, the Wrathgate, the plight of the Forsaken, Death Knights and the Ebon Blade, etc. And the only thing beyond the Scourge and everything they’d done that we knew of was the mysterious Shadowlands, which we knew next to nothing about. It was badass, scary, epic, and made you want to bust down the doors of ICC and bring Arthas and the Scourge to justice.
Now when we think of Death, we imagine the most boring and circular city filled with robots, a zone of muscle mommy angels and their cute weight lifting owl friends, a zone that may as well have been called “we have the emerald dream at home”, a zone that the Scourge/Nerubians seem to just have stolen everything from without realizing it, the joke of a bad guy that was the Jailer, and the convoluted sorting hat system that was revealed to us about how the Shadowlands work.
These forces have been presented as so absolutely evil for the last 20 years, any attempt to pacify them and make them more nuanced just seems forced and lame.
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That’s the thing, if they’re gonna try and swing for the fences and have them be Forces of Nature (in the loose sense, not Tree-Nature) then having them have a role Within that framework is necessary.
We already have the shades of “Too Much light is Bad and makes you a single-minded Zealot” that came from the Maghar Orc’s Questline. We have lore that points at Demons being members of Civilizations and society in their own right. These are just surface scatterings that point to greater depths, and there is no shutting the case on that Pandora’s Box now that it’s out in the open.
And to imply that Giving substance and colour to things that were once singular shades is “pacifying” them is to think that everything once writ must remain in the stone it’s cast. New Knowledge can always be gleaned-new truths can always be revealed. If even Light can be a Bane, then Shadow can be a Boon. That’s just logical in how a setting with Polarizing forces work.
It could simply be that Fel’s place within the cosmos is simply as it is-Destruction and unmaking. As Creation gives form, something must take that form away. A force that exists for the sole purpose of unraveling, twisting, and unmaking would still be widely regarded as Unpleasant to those who like to exist, but it can also be an irrefutably necessary component of existence itself: That Eternity cannot be attained because all things must end, and that Fel can be the answer to things that seek to extend their existence beyond their bounds.
This idle musing was all it took to give Fel a place that doesn’t inherently mark it as evil, possessed of will and malice of it’s own, but one that can naturally extend to being used for evil ends, while also giving it a clear purpose in a wider tapestry. And this is just me firing from the hip.
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Fel it seems if heavily charged with Life starts spreading Life in the same way Red Dragonfire does as shown by the new Demon Hunter Glaive.
Fel it seems is a sponge that gathers anything that is Chaotic whether it be Void(making the hunger worse I.E. emptying the sponge), Fire, Air or Life(making the hunger weaker I.E. filling the sponge).
I dig everything you said. I can play off that Fel is the destruction that brings change and is necessary in some way, and since to accomplish that they have to be unrelenting, cold, and uncaring for life or civilization, which basically explains the monstrous behavior of demons while still giving it a slightly more nuanced underlying purpose amongst the cosmos even if for us 99% of the time it’s bad for what we the natives of Azeorth want for Azeroth.
But imo, they should avoid the type of in depth nuanced look we got into the Shadowlands.
Are we ? I don’t know. I don’t think I am. Especially since my faction (and arguably the race I play) has the unfortunate tendency to be dangerously conflated with the “bad guys” you’re mentioning. Maybe this is what shaped my expectations and appreciation of Good VS Evil in Warcraft, but that trope is not what I’m after.
What made Shadowlands a terrible expansion (and a terrible setting) was not that it nuanced Death though. Did SL even do that ? It was just bad and bland and uninteresting all around. And anyway, Death was never supposed to be an absolutely and inherently evil force : even druidism was always about the “cycle of life and death” ; more importantly, the very existence of the Forsaken always brought nuance to the portrayal of Death, since they’re free-willed zombies with legitimate aspirations and grievances who found renewed purpose and perspectives in undeath. The writers’ failure in that area was precisely that they failed to fulfill the initial promise of giving the Forsaken an actual Death culture, that is to say, a culture in which Death is the cornerstone of spirituality, philosophy and morality (they never gave the Cult of Forgotten Shadows the place that it ought to occupy in the Forsaken society for example). Nuanced Death is what made the Forsaken interesting in the first place.
… and the Forsaken played no role in SL. Smh.
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Not even a little, tiny bit. I don’t think anyone outside of some really oddball takes that require tremendous amounts of headcanon have ever called anything in Shadowlands in-depth or nuanced.
This.
It’s not very easy to want a Good vs Evil Warcraft when you can reasonably expect that if the Horde and Alliance get involved in said narrative, you’re already hands down the evil one.
I do not want a black and white narrative. I have justifed fears revolving around it. I want Warcraft to lean more into actual nuance and actual depth.
If that means Fel ends up having some non-evil potential? That’s fine, it’s par for the course with cosmic forces being untethered to the good-evil axis. And it’s historically appropriate for the franchise. The Light has been neutral since Vanilla, given Scarlet Crusaders use it. Life/Nature can be abused when misused since Vanilla, see Wailing Caverns. If you weren’t questioning Order since Vanilla (?) with the reveal the Titans basically stole Azeroth (revealed via in-game books) and remade it how they wanted, then you probably should have been.
If the generally viewed “good” forces are not necessarily good, why should be generally viewed “bad” forces be bad by necessity?
Maybe if we can get nuanced views of the cosmic magic forces, it could trickle down to the two playable factions before the Horde has to nuke another Alliance city/town.
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Imo there’s a difference between mortal races like the Trolls and the more cosmic entities like Fel, Void, and Death. Trolls are a mortal civilization and therefor have mortal wants and needs, and that can spin out of control towards butting heads with the Horde and Alliance. Just as the Horde and Alliance do to each other. The Trolls aren’t a cosmically and comically evil race, they’re just one that’s been on the decline and are backed into corners, and lash out in desperation and shame of their current situation.
That’s exactly it, it was boring, bland, and uninteresting BECAUSE they made Death nuanced. Sometimes it’s better to leave things mysterious and not try to fabricate entire systems and break the lore to unveil what makes an entire force tick.
Before this Death was the Lich King, the Scourge, Kel’thuzad, the undead Nerubian Kingdom, Necromancers, ICC, Naxx, the Plaguelands. The aspect of Death we dealt with was surely some kind of perversion of the overall cosmic force of Death, twisting people’s corpses and souls into hideous slave abominations, but it was the only one we knew and maybe it was the only one we needed to know. Maybe Death should’ve stayed mysterious and with the perversion of undeath no longer a major threat, maybe Death should’ve been left alone to do it’s own thing.
But instead, they showed us that Death was essentially a cold sterilized sorting hat system run by robots and that the subsequent realms that you got sent to were vastly different to each other and from the one shade of death, the Scourge, we’d seen so far. Along with people’s souls being used for little more than a resource, the multiple timelines merging into one soul thing, the purpose and method of the sorting system, the fact that there’s an even more ancient group called the first ones who seemingly set the entire cosmos up (yay more turtles all the way down) and all of the retcons about our previous understanding of Death/the Shadowlands.
All of this “detail” and attempt at nuance was boring, lore breaking, and confusing. And in the process, by destroying the title of the Lich King, they ensured this is basically the only version of Death we have for the moment, as the Lich King and the Scourge were the closest things we had to representatives here on Azeroth of that cosmic force. Even if it was a “perversion” of that force.
I’m not saying it’s good, but it was a lot more in depth than what we had before.
What was Death before Shadowlands? When you die, your soul goes to the Shadowlands. If you died in a specifically traumatic fashion, your soul would remain in the form of basically a ghost. Some people’s spirits could briefly return to visit if properly summoned (Like Uther). And sometimes a necromancer would try to yank your soul back and stuff it into your corpse or someone else’s, and that leads to all of the scourge stuff. That’s basically it, and relatively on brand for most fantasy universes.
Death after Shadowlands? An organized sorting system where when you die, your soul is judged by the sorting hat and sent to a specific realm of death based on how you lived your life. They even told us that all of the timeline’s versions of a person’s soul merge into one somehow and that is taken into account as well. That Anima is a resource created when souls arrive in the Shadowlands and it keeps the realms of the Shadowlands alive. That the Kyrian are in charge of ferrying souls and are what the Valkyr are based off of somehow and that righteous souls go to Bastion. That the Nerubians and the Scourge after, somehow copied the Maldraxxus architecture and vibes without knowing it and that Maldraxxus serves as a military arm of the Shadowlands and you go here if you were like…fierce and relentless. That Ardenweald is the place you go if you served nature and you go here to be reborn and that it’s connected to the Emerald Dream. Revendreath is the place where you atone for your sins in hopes of being resorted. And the Maw is where the worst of the worst souls go. It told us about Zovaal, how he was the first Arbiter, the First Ones and Zereth Mortis, how they created every cosmic force, and more. It went beyond in-depth.
I have no issue of revealing why a force is necessary in the universe and the upsides and downsides to that force. I like that Chaos is there to tear down Order and allow something new to emerge. And that agents of Chaos/Disorder need to be relentless to achieve their goals.
The issue is when they try to do it to the degree of Shadowlands.
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What was death before?
Well, if you’re a tauren or an orc, your spirit went to the ancestral plains. If you follow the Light, you became one with the Light. Night elves went all wispy, but I think that’s about 80% still the case. There’s actually a whole bunch of other things that I’m just not going to waste my time going into, but to say what Shadowlands gave us somehow had more depth?
Post-SL.
You go into the Arbiter’s sorting hat, and she decides you go somewhere. Your own beliefs were wrong, they have nothing to do with where you go, and you certainly never become one with the Light. If you thought that, probably enjoy living an afterlife with skeleton people or smurf angels.
That isn’t more nuanced. It’s just more arbitrary, and destroyed the pre-existing nuance death had in favor of having quest zones. It isn’t more depth; it is the death of depth.
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I’m not saying it’s good AT ALL. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that they created a detailed system that even included the reveal that there was an even more ancient pantheon that created all of the others.
They gave us a tour of the most important realms in the Shadowlands, revealed that the Kyrian transport our souls to the Shadowlands, where each type of soul goes based on how they lived their life, decided by the Arbiter sorting hat, revealed the function of each realm through and entire zone’s worth of quests each, revealed everything about Anima and how it effects the realms and keeps the gears turning, the Maw, the Jailer, the First Ones, we even went to Zereth Mortis literally the most ancient entities that we can convieved of so far’s workshop where they essentially created the Shadowlands.
Vs Souls go to the death place (name depending on culture) and sometimes they come back.
That is a detailed, in-depth, expansion long explanation of how Death, the Eternal Ones, and the Shadowlands work. Was it good? God no. Did I like it? Nope. Did it ruin a ton of lore and retcon a ton of stuff? Yes. Was it nuanced? Maybe I’m using the word wrong but it made a presumably death like realm filled with fairies like Moonberry, balldancing Vampires, and blue muscle mommies with owl friends.
Which is why I’m against this level of in-depth explanation to explain why demons want to kill my family or why the Void wants to consume the cosmos. They’re going to take us to the Chaos realm and explain to us how keeps the wheels of Chaos turning and introduce us to goofy Chaos characters who make us wonder where tf the bloodthirsty demons we’re used to come from.
And in a way they have to do something like this because they introduced the First Ones who we know basically made the other forces and based on what we found out in Zereth Mortis and Oribos,m their methods seems very orderly similar to the Titans, and it’s going to be revealed that the “backstage” of every force is First One tech that built that realm and keeps it running based on a specific design.
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Oh no, I’m not accusing you of that at all. You are rational. I don’t think many rational people would unironically say Shadowlands’ afterlife system was good actually.
I will agree that it is a system. But it’s also a very bare-bones system.
If you’re naughty, you go to Revendreth. Unless you go to the Maw for also being naughty.
If you’re a wild god or very nature-touched, you go to Ardenweald.
If you are very dutiful, you go to Bastion.
If you are a badass, you go to Maldraxxus.
That isn’t very detailed, nor is it nuanced. It’s the barest bones of a system, but it is indeed a system. It lacks nuance, because it’s all very straight forward once you know the criteria.
It did give us the first ones and the eternal ones, but again it’s still all very basic.
Eternal Ones are the Death counterpart to Titans. Except maybe not even as tough or strong, given we beat down two of them and help make a third one (but that’s also beside the point). They’re not very mysterious; we can chat with them, hang out with them, be besties with them. Things the mysterious titans never did with us outside of a raid encounter. And we know they’re not very… Bright. There isn’t nuance here, there’s the depth of a puddle, and they are far too human-ish to be the big mysterious lords of the realms of death.
We did get the first ones, but they are generic mystery boxes to replace the previous mystery boxes. Instead of a clash between light and void creating everything, it’s something not that. And they build things very mechanically instead of mystically. The only thing that is really different are that origination now has an aesthetic and a generic name.
Let’s be clear, we both fully understand this is bad. But you’re attributing that badness to depth and nuance when the truth is, it’s bad because it destroyed the pre-existing depth and nuance, while also removing the mystery.
What we have in place of a seperate realm that can only be reached by means of spiritwalkers and prayer is a big tower circle town with flight paths to the afterlife. Instead of the Naaru carrying Crusader Bridenbrad into the Light, they just subbed in for a kyrian and took him to the old Arbiter robot.
It’s different. It is neither deeper nor more nuanced.
It is a change for the sake of demystifying.
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I think we’re two sides of the same coin here, I just don’t think Blizzard is capable of achieving nuance with forces like Disorder and Void without neutering them, making them boring, making characters like Joey Chaos who humanizes Chaos somehow, and ultimately pulling back the curtains and revealing the First Ones were obviously here in the Chaos realm as well. Which would be the ultimate irony that the realm of Chaos/Disorder actually has some kind of First One Ordered system underneath it all that keeps it running.
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