Zan’do killed, as she twisted him into reviving Kith’ix and all that was ever found of him were bones picked clean of flesh.
Modgud killed. Xal’atath abandoned her to die at the hands of the Wildhammers. Modgud literally died saying “You promised…” over and over, clearly referencing something Xal’atath told her.
It is highly probable Xal’atath got Natalie Seline killed by turning her allies against her with inciting covetous feelings for the black blade that lead to them murdering her in the middle of the night.
She then repeatedly tries to get you to do things she must know will result in your death, even if canonically you want to say the Shadow Priest Adventurer resists her many temptations to an early grave.
…and in the end she literally sold you to N’zoth as part of a deal she struck with the old god.
To each their own. But so far Bel’ameth is shaping up to be a pale shadow of what Darnassus was in terms of ambience. Walking into Darnassus from the front gate in Vanilla and hearing the music intro is a core memory.
Edit: also, wait… you did lose Sylvannas and are likely getting a modern capital, and the Forsaken have been featured prominently in several arcs
no we didn’t, We were left out of shadowlands entirely safe for a last minute 15 minute questline, and then in all of dragon flight we got the heritage questline, Our city currently is just a tent in ruins with a single portal, Blizzard has said they are updating quel’thalas but hasen’t said they are updating UC
It’s not just a nostalgic memory though, Darnassus is fantastic. I have nostalgia for vanilla, but I don’t enjoy PLAYING Classic. Darnassus was pretty peak when it comes to Night Elf aesthetic and ambiance.
That is what I mean with Amirdrassil being too bring and sunny compared to Teldrassil. See how you can have a more somber purplish atmosphere even during day time. This is what I would expect for Night Elves to get from their “reward home”; a place where they can finally rest and be comfortable.
That wouldn’t be farfetched to imagine because it’s after all a magically grown tree made by the Goddess of the Moon.
I think varying interpretations are fine, unless Blizzard outright tells us a direct play-by-play we’re probably not going to know the answer 100%. I feel like Blizzard has this strange habit in their storytelling of both being super overt and obvious at times when it’s not important and then the other points in the story that seem incredibly important are kept vague.
The main takeaway I wanted to stress is that Elune isn’t as horrible/useless as people are claiming, since it’s seems to be a prevailing theme among the plight of Night Elf fans as something that has been ruined in recent years. She’s just not as omniscient or powerful as some thought she was, which goes in line with other interpretations of deities in the setting. Elune isn’t an exception.
When it comes to the character of elune or any deity in wow, it kinda gets the writers between a rock and a hard place.
Like, there can’t be a “correct” religion in the setting, but you can’t also prove a religion entirely wrong, because attacking directly a religion in lore is the same as attacking the lore of the race attached to it. Like, they can make the light not as good as it seemed before, but they still need to show the good side of the light.
With elune, there is the bigger problem of her being the night elf deity, and well, night elf fans can be loud, so any lore development on her will have to be cautious at best.
Exploring Kalimdor is problematic at best and should be discarded in all honesty. I could do a better version of the book and not do a copy paste of what’s in game.
I was so excited to read Explpring Kalimdor and learn how things finally got better for Night Elves after the WoT and the Night Warrior thing only to learn thay Horde is still in control of part of Ashenvale.
It’s funny you say that because I’m convinced they came extremely close to doing exactly that with the tauren. It’s already weird enough that everyone in the universe seems to use Elune’s correct name except for them, but the combination of the forgotten teaser of Baine “learning the truth of his people” from Cairne, the fables book that came out talking about the way An’she was wounded, and Zovaal’s design around his open chest cavity, I think it’s a solid pattern to suggest that Shadowlands was going to reveal that the tauren were mistakenly worshiping the jailer and only swerved away from that because of cut content.
Feel like the main issue with Exploring Kalimdor is that Blizz really had no idea what they were going to do with Kalimdor… Really, ever.
That and just the way they packaged the book is faulty to begin with.
Exploring EK had two characters, one which was largely focused on the actual political climate of the area while the other talks about the more casual lived-in side of the area…
Exploring Kalim didn’t have that, rather opting for basic and unflavored bland descriptions of areas which have been locked in time since Cata.
Just given the amount of focus that Blizz ever touches on Kalimdor, they clearly never cared to flesh out anything beyond the basic stuff they threw out about it at vanilla’s launch. Which seemed to be rushed considering most of Kalimdor is empty desert with nothing in it.
We’ve barely seen how any of the nations on Kalimdor have developed at all, really.
Weird considering there’s plenty potential to get into about how the nations there might’ve grown or regressed since Cata…
My only guess as to why they did this is because Blizz is afraid to flesh out Kalimdor beyond a ‘wild, unsettled, and untamed’ landmass as it was originally pitched.
Given that Exploring Kalimdor was their chance to relay anything new on us about Kalimdor and they didn’t do it, just proves to me that they’ve never had any real desire to explore it in the same way that they did with EK because there’s less pre-established legacy there dating before its introduction in WC3.
That bothered me less than the fact that 100 years ago, y’know during the War of the Ancients, Sargeras tried to use the Dark Portal. Which now sits in the OG Well of Eternity?
There’s definitely a lot of “interesting” details that could be collated revolving around the Tauren.
This might sound more conspiracy theory than normal, but follow me for a bit.
Pre-Shadowlands, there was information hinting that Baine would interact with Cairne, and would “learn the truth about his people”.
Now, I haven’t been able to source this to its origin. I dunno if it was a throw-away line from an interview or a leak or what. It wouldn’t be the first time Blizz teased a story beat only to completely cut it. (You guys remember the primordial Trolls in Dragonflight?)
But then we have the fable about Anshe. Where Anshe is described as having a wound in his chest that would never heal.
Who else do we know had a gaping chest hole?
And a small, probably irrelevant, detail. But in that same fable, the Blue Child is described as… well… a blue child.
Who else is blue and bald (and probably messes his pants?)
But wait. There’s more.
And by more, I mean Charred Behemoths. They’re the massive Mawsworns that look like minotaurs. They got the hooves, and the horns, and a general shape that’s very minotaur-y.
Very similar to our favorite bovine-inspired race.
And we know WoW loves to do the “Magical thing transforms into new race” shtick.
We got people who come from robots.
People who come from rocks.
People who come from Wild Gods.
Whatever Elves are.
And yet, I have one final piece to this grand conspiracy of Bovine Origination.
And its name is the Tarragrue.
You might be familiar with him. He’s a special Mawsworn that’d sometimes showed up in Torghast before ultimately being a Raid Boss.
He’s a Charred Behemoth. Very big. Very cow like.
How cow like?
In the early Shadowlands alpha, if you killed the Tarragrue, he’d transform into a steak.
A. Steak.
100% grade-A beef.
You wanna know who else is made of 100% grade-A beef?
You already know the answer.
Connecting all those points, and the picture is clear.
Baine was supposed to learn that Tauren are somehow related to Mawsworn. Perhaps an early attempt to create agents on Azeroth that quickly spiraled out of control. The only remnant of this origin being the iconography they associate with their Sun God.
There is one problem that people don’t seem to see in this potrals. They are held by 2 mages in completely random, unguarded places.
If someone kills mages or disrupts their work, the Night Elves will be more defenseless than during Wot. They immediately lose connection to their base of operations and separated them from the portal to other zones. Returning from the islands using ships will take much longer time than from Silithus.
An easy solution would be, if instead of mages the portals was inside of big trees just like the old portals to emerald dream. Dragons from each flight should defend entrance to show the bond between dragons and night elves. The safety of Amidrassil itself should have been one of the Aspects top priority. If this tree was involved in giving them new power, they don’t know what would happen to Azeroth’s blessing if the tree was destroyed
I think it’s worth adding to your point that the tauren heritage armor from BFA has Maw looking spirits appear at sun rock retreat, a place said in tauren mythology to have been kissed by An’she and have a close connection to the spirit world (shadowlands).
