As others have been over many times, I have no idea what the ‘intention’ of the replacement writers was with the shadowlands expansion; so I’m not saying anything about what those employees may have wanted or meant by what I had to read through and play through. But purely just by me reading it all and comparing what behavior was actually shown in game for that expansion I was left thinking that if a First One character actually exists in the lore, it very much seems like a villain to me. Every single one of the 4 afterlife robot islands seemed very unethical toward the mortal souls that were stolen and sent there. And over and over, we’d have leaders or servants in those afterlife robot islands frame all their dialogue and all their goals and all their measurements of success as making sure that “system” kept operating…never questioning if they should be doing all these unethical things to those souls to begin with. It was very disingenuous to be in dungeons or raids or campaign quests and hear those leaders or servants shout "for the shadowlands…! " when that was very clearly not my goal and not something that I respect or want to be happening to any of those mortal souls.
It very much felt to me that even though Zovaal as a Jailer was a villain…the First Ones that setup the system to exploit and cause suffering and squeeze out energy from mortal souls was also a villain. It is the treatment of mortal souls that seems morally and ethically relevant to me.
Now, we did have it implied by the quest campaign in zereth mortis that the Eternal Ones themselves did not create the system and there is a possibility that they are magical souls from somewhere else that got installed into robot bodies… just as the Argus magical soul was going to be shoved into one; and later the magical soul of Pelegos got put into one instead. Moreover, we saw that the empty robot body of the replacement Arbiter was doing the work just fine without a magical soul until the red light incident…so whatever the First Ones are, they don’t necessarily need magical souls to operate the system.
So that got me thinking. I don’t see any evidence in game anywhere that the First Ones are anything but villains. They don’t seem to have any souls of their own… and their entire system seems designed to steal energy from souls and imprison souls. Are we sure that they are not “interfering” with death and all the other forces rather than having any fundamental link to any of them?
Could the quote from the Korthia island that mentions “The seventh covets what the six hold fast. The fulcrum wavers. All will be undone.” actually be referring to the First Ones as the seventh…and what they covet is something they don’t have…namely, souls? Neither mortal souls, nor bigger souls like wild gods, and definitely not any World Souls? Could it be that the 6 cosmic forces we know were never created by First Ones and they already had a more natural interaction where souls kept rotating through them in a balanced way and the First Ones are an outside force, that is jealous of all the energy which souls had previously been conserving in their balance; but all the First Ones ever were was machines with no souls?
In other words, could part of the villainy of the First Ones be that they were trapping magical souls and forcing them to supervise islands where more mortal souls could be squeezed and processed for energy…all the while deceiving or keeping information from those supervisor souls to prevent them from disrupting the scam? Could the magical soul inside the Primus and the Winter Queen and the Archon and Denathrius and even the previous Zovaal all be victims of the villain First Ones that all came from somewhere else? But they don’t even know it? And by extension, wouldn’t every other Zereth installation be an interference with those forces, not the source of any of them…?
Lastly… if Elune is a default powerful magical soul from Lifelands… then even if the Zereth Vitae facility has been deceiving or using any of those magical souls in their villainous plans…it could still be possible to say that whatever interaction Elune had with a Winter Queen was part of that deception, and Elune could stay a magical soul in the writing and not a robot as many of us fear.
Full disclosure, I got no quote or source handy and can’t be bothered. I could have sworn it was heavily implied, if not outright stated, that The First Wuns were each embodiments of the cosmic forces we know today: One was Void McNurpleson, one was Light MacShinedown, one was Life McDonalds, one was Death MC Zippytoots, etc.
I look at it the same way I answer the ‘problem of evil’: Basically, the system they made was just the only way reality could work, need to break a few eggs to cook an omelet.
It used to sort of feel like to me that souls were going somewhere horrible, and the First Ones designed the Shadowlands as a self sustaining thing to divert souls from some evil crunchy thing.
I don’t know why I had that feeling. The Maw sort of is that… was that… but I feel like Zovaal took the idea of the Maw from a past long passed.
It almost feels like we are on the second iteration of reality, or I should say a secondary iteration of reality.
I acknowledge these are my feelings, just a guess I may hazard… not something definitive.
Everyone jumped to the opinion that Elune was a robot too… but I didn’t see it that way.
To me it seems like Elune and the Winter Queen were sisters in some other cosmic reality, and the Winter Queen’s soul/essence was robotizied with other cosmic beings like Danathrius and the Archon… but Elune and possibly others escaped the ordering of the First Ones.
Heck, maybe Elune defeated the First Ones after they took her sister’s soul and put it in a robot - maybe Elune led some cosmic rebellion against them, because she didn’t want to be put into a robot.
I always liked the idea that the anima originally was in the maw to start with and drained from there and the jailer was the first arbiter who got usurped.
By forcing all souls to the maw the goal was to renew it into a paradise again one day which is why Sylvanas sided with the Jailer. It would remove her from eternal torture in the Maw by saving it
and then none of this was canon
did we ever find out why the heart of azeroth reacted to the maw thing
Wait until you learn that one of the First Ones realized that the pattern of his fellow First Ones is flawed and so he go rogue and become the Dark Tita…i mean first one!
But Zovaal was already a blue Sargeras, so wait and see when we will get the Sargeras of the First Ones! (And if you even ask : All of that narrative of the Godlike being going rogue its already Amon from Starcraft.)
The First Ones are the answer how the universe was created at the beginning. The Titans ordered it sure. But stuff existed long before Aman’thul was born.
Thats not even true, as we know the univers existed BEFORE the First Ones, the Shadowlands existed BEFORE the first ones. Its said by the people living in Ardenweald.
Meaning the First Ones did order an already eixsting universe, just like the titans.
Thats exactly what the First Ones were made as : Bigger and BETTER titans, the “always bigger always better” concept…
And well, you even joke about saying they are the “creations of the Progenitors” while Progenitors is a words used for the First Ones…just like the term “Makers” was used for the Titans at frist, but then in SL we find out its used for the First Ones too.
I like how this was typed entirely out without a thought to the fact that the entire plot of Shadowlands is that it is in crisis… and not how the realms are supposed to work.
I mean, I get it, the actual plot was dogwater, it literally had more holes in it than a wiffle ball, but at least get the BASIC facts right before trying to analyze it. https://gardeniaorganic.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/wiffle_ball_set_tips.jpg
They’re advertised as real deities yet they designed the cosmos in such a way that one cosmic power was almost able to subjugate all the others. The zereths should not be able to be networked the way Zovaal was able to do.
I initially thought (especially after Korthia) that The Maw was perhaps the entire Shadowlands at one point, since broken into infinite pieces to seed individual “afterlives.” Zereth Mortis kinda atomized that notion, though.
The concerns re: WQ and Elune being robots stems from Zereths being a feature across the entire cosmology. If we were in the Orderlands(? The DMV?) it probably wouldn’t be off-putting to find a 3D Printer of the SuperGods with empty Divine Miniatures meant to house the OtherGods. Nothing about The Realm of Death™ occupies that same flavor, however, which certainly implies a unified system of Zereths function in similar capacities (which would mean Divine Miniatures housing OtherGods as a general rule).
