WHAT? Y’all this is wild and I’m SHOOKETH I didn’t pay attention to Tauren lore enough to notice this.
That’s basically all there is to it. Admittedly it’s an assumption on my part, but the “truth of his people” bit came from an interview (Ion, I think?) talking about Shadowlands.
IIRC, The tauren fable about An’she was that he was wounded in a fight (think it was said against the void, but I can’t remember) and had his heart cut out, and Elune had to put him away so that she could try to heal him.
The reason why I think it was going to be linked to Zovaal was because, well, his power as arbiter was pulled right out of him and the bit around his open chest cavity might’ve meant to resemble a black sun motif.
To be fair, nothing was ever confirmed, just a suspicion. It’s possible they were still toying with the general idea via the Beacon of the Beyond trinket, which is said to pull the power of “An’shuul, the Cosmic Wanderer” from the void to damage your enemies.
It also explains why Baine was present but just sat around during the whole SL expansion. It was always weird that the most spiritual player race (as in dealing with deceased spirits) never got any story in the expansion despite having their racial leader there.
However in two of the books released during the time of shadowlands, the fairytales one got the An’she chest wound story, and the broker book has the broker encounter the spirit of Baines mother. It’s pretty strange that the two books released (outside of the Sylvanas novel) spent time on the tauren. It seems a bit like it was building up to, or complementing something that would have been in-game.
Even more so when taking the offhand comment of Ion of how Baine would discover a secret of his people.
Exploring Kalimdor should be regarded as junk lore, honestly. I’m not a fan of discarding anything that Blizzard has written (though as many of you know I’ll still complain endlessly about it) but the book is so insanely egregious that there’s no way it would have passed muster in normal circumstances.
It somehow manages to contradict almost every development we know to have taken place in Kalimdor while also taking weird potshots at nearly every race mentioned. Not to mention thinking it was a good idea to have the white coded Elf character be teaching the PoC coded Troll character… how to read and write.
Zekhan is a Shaman, Shaman are the spiritual leaders and advisors in the Horde. Zekhan grew up in Thrall’s Horde, where as a Shaman in training he would have been required to learn as much as he could for the sake of his status as a spiritual leader and advisor. Zekhan is no longer a novice Shaman even by BfA launch because he is capable of cracking the earth open like an egg. Zekhan definitely knows how to read and write Orcish.
Anyway, opportunistic rant about Exporing Kalimdor over.
4 Likes
He should also know what the hell erosion is lmao.
5 Likes
It’s definitely junk.
It’s incredibly unfortunate that it’s the single most recent source about Kalimdor’s current state… With the next most recent being WoT in BfA and… Cata… Woof.
They recanonized a few little things which were left assumedly uncanon since they were added into canon around Cata in sources that mentioned Med’an or were just generally incredibly old lore.
That’s the only real use for it.
Everything else is left vague, the same, or just not touched on at all.
Such a waste.
Yeah, that stuff is just Blizz once again relying on old outdated correlations between tribal/non-western people and illiteracy/being generally uneducated as a fantasy trope…
Which, y’know, based entirely on racism.
Realistically any regular person who lives in a major city like Orgrimmar would know how to read and write.
That one is particularly funny LOL
Guess they didn’t teach basic geology in Shaman school.
Ironic.
1 Like
The evidence of this An’she-Jailer stuff could be a stretch, but it also seems pretty damning (especially the “Baine learns the truth of his people” part). But one thing to consider: wasn’t the Jailer redesigned? His original design here https://i.imgur.com/LE6Xclr.png doesn’t have the chest wound, but if the An’she stuff was an early plan then wouldn’t early design iterations include the wound?
Side note, why tf didn’t they use that design wtf.
2 Likes
Right? Like with basically everything about Shadowlands, it was a choice that makes no sense.
That’s enough for night elves now. This game isn’t just about you
Calm down, Furos.
The Orcs already had their time.
Orcs can only dream of the attention night elves receive.
Orcs are the second most overexposed race in this game. There’s a reason Orc fatigue was a thing during WoD
1 Like
Tbf, most orc content is: look how cruel orcs can be.
But yeah, WOD is basically an entire orc expansion that segways into legion.
Honestly, I feel that draeneis had just the right ammount of attention, they’re almost always there somehow, and their full story arc was made part of the content without anyone saying: UGh, i’m tired of draenei stuff.
3 Likes
I hear the heritage quest was pretty fantastic 
1 Like
Bruh, there was an entire expansion that focused solely on Orcs.
Everything was some variant of Orcs in that expansion, literally everything.
No other race has ever had that kind of exposure lol.
Meh, kinda hated all the Draenei stuff on Argus personally.
Felt like a little too much as well. The exposure was fine in WoD, though.
I also just hate everything they ended up doing with the Draenei in general.
How so?
I really dig all the argus lore and all draenei stuff i’ve seen over the years (i even consider maining one instead of this Nelf from time to time) so I’m really curious what you don’t like about it.
Orc fatigue derailed WoD before anyone got a chance to even play it. I know people complained about it but I think it’s a bit overstated.
2 Likes
You assume schools are a thing.
We have multiple records in lore that education is not something that everyone gets, including the ability to read and write. Lord of the Clans for example, the book that details Thrall’s rise to power to become the Warchief of the Horde, clearly shows that not only did he not know how to read and write (until he was taught), but neither did his human jailors.
When he was caught after his escape by three footmen, they found letters that he and Taretha Foxton had written to each other, none of the footmen could read them. Neither could Lieutenant Remka who got the letters after Thrall was taken to her camp. The contents of the letters were only discovered after Blackmoore, a wealthy noble, got his hands on them.
Now admittedly, that’s the Alliance. Maybe things are different with the Horde. But we don’t know, because there’s few references to the education practices of the Horde. We know Trolls created tablets with writing on them, but was that done by the upper class of troll society? Or could every single troll read? It’s really not clear.
I will say that Zekhan being taught by Lor’themar is a bit strange. Zek’han shot to fame during BFA and would otherwise be a nobody if it wasn’t for his work with Saurfang, but despite his new level of importance among the Horde, I don’t think he’s that important that a leader of a Horde nation would take time out of their day to teach him how to write along with specific words like erosion. That, respectfully, probably should have been done by Rokhan or another notable Troll.
Well, it’s kinda weird with the Draenei right.
I’ve always been incredibly mixed in how they’ve been represented.
There’s things I vaguely like about them, then there’s things I absolutely hate about them.
They’re so incredibly inconsistent.
For me, it feels like the Draenei are entirely different in each expansion that they became centered around.
The Draenei as they were portrayed in Legion feel like an entirely different race to the Draenei we saw in TBC, as an example.
I also just find that the stylistic and aesthetic inspirations for Draenei were lost long ago, especially in and around WoD.
This is largely an entirely aesthetic thing (I’ll get into the story stuff later), but I absolutely hate how they reworked the Draenei’s models in WoD. The original concept for the Draenei and their poses was to make them especially striking and dynamic:
h’ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kei61shkWhU
Something which wasn’t especially done well originally, but they didn’t care to improve on when redoing the model, and arguably made them worse.
Along with their general appearance hinging on the idea of them looking exceptionally alien and off-putting in a way, but also inspiring and interesting to look upon another thing lost in the model revamp…
Something that used to be reflected in their racial ability presences, also.
A lot of what they originally were as a race in exile and diaspora from both Outland/Draenor and Argus was lost when we later revisited them in WoD and Legion.
Instead of a race on the brink of extinction, cobbling together bits and pieces from their former civilization, they’re entirely Sci-Fi with incredibly advanced crystal technology. They also appear to have no care at all for the civilization they once had on Outland/Draenor.
Formerly, at least to me, it seemed like the Draenei as they appeared in TBC were just as advanced as any other race, they weren’t necessarily ‘sci-fi’ in the traditional sense more so just had an incredibly alien aesthetic. When shifting to WoD we encounter Draenei robots, crystal laser deathbeams, and other traditional sci-fi flare which I didn’t care much for. A lot of that stuff as seen in TBC wasn’t attributed to the Draenei, but rather to the Naaru and their own technology.
Along with that, a lot of the sci-fi elements that were added into TBC were done in such a way as to make them fantastically unique.
In the words of Metzen:
The draenei ‘nether-ship’ you’ve been hearing about is far more than it seems. It’s part of a larger dimension-traveling fortress called Tempest Keep that essentially teleports through alternate realities. It doesn’t bank and roll or shoot proton torpedoes (not yet, anyway)."
Which seemed to me like a unique way of doing sci-fi technology while having it fit within the more magic-orientated setting of Warcraft, right. A ship which travels through dimensions, rather than one that just flies around shooting laser beams. However, this was lost over time with the integration of Vindicaar as being a traditional spaceship in everything but appearance.
The clothing/designs of the Draenei within the original artworks are also a lot more stylistically interesting and alien than anything they ended up doing in WoD and Legion (there’s too much of a stylistic emphasis on crystals).
I also think the general MENA cultural inspirations for both the Draenei and Belves on Outland were interesting, yet they seem to have gone completely missing by the time we get back around to them in WoD and future expansions.
On to actual story stuff, though:
I find that the Draenei, instead of going forward and creating their own identity as a people decided to go backward and focus solely in and around Argus.
I don’t really find Argus interesting at all, and I would’ve preferred that the Draenei didn’t have their connection with Draenor become increasingly minimal as the expansions rolled along… I feel like that was largely due to laziness on Blizzard’s part on not wanting to create an entirely new history of civilization for the Draenei.
At this point, the Draenei have barely any connection with Draenor at all. They also feel like they have barely any history to or relations to any of the other races on Draenor aside from the Orcs (which doesn’t go much beyond the genocide). With Legion revealing that the majority of Draenei had been born on Argus and in WoD they revealed the Draenei had only been on Draenor for between 200-20 years.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I suppose. I just hate the idea of the Draenei having no real ‘cultural memory’, if that makes sense. Instead of Draenei characters speaking about the stories or mythos surrounding Argus, they instead speak of the world first-hand.
I find that with the Draenei, if they really wanted to push the idea of creating a ‘spiritual’ people, the idea of legacy and storytelling as a method for which that mysticism was pushed is an incredibly important thing to having it be portrayed believably. Which seemed to be what they were originally portraying in TBC:
h’ttps://www.wowhead.com/tbc/quest=9693/what-argus-means-to-me
What does Argus mean to you, ? Many draenei probably do not know or remember our home planet. It is there that we split from the man’ari: the twisted demonic reflections of ourselves that were ‘gifted’ by Sargeras. Or as they call themselves, eredar.
Which, even within this timeframe wasn’t even consistent, as stated in the 2006 Rise of the Horde novel:
“All but a handful of us know what we fled on Argus,” said Larohir. “We remember it. We remember what Kil’jaeden did, what happened to our people. We would—we will—happily die to preserve even a handful of our race uncorrupted.”
And then we have the one Draenei NPC in Azure Watch which states this:
Ten lifetimes spent fleeing from the madness of the Burning Legion… here we finally make a stand.
Which would seem to imply that the Draenei have had at least several generations come and go since Argus.
This speaks more to my hatred of how bad long lifespans are for the Draenei story-wise. Feel like having ‘immortal’ being a special adjective applied to Velen alone was fine, but it seems to have been placed on every Draenei now so they don’t have to think about the actual logistics of a race of people who can apparently live for eons (which is just stupid to me, personally).
This also creates an annoying inconsistency in terminology, some Draenei will refer to their ‘ancestral homeland’ as Outland/Draenor (even though they have no ‘ancestral’ presence there) while Draenei in later expansions refer to Argus when they say that.
It’s also the original reason they even fled to Azeroth to recruit allies to begin with, they wanted to retake their homeland of Outland:
Having fled the ravaged world of Outland, the noble draenei used the dimension traveling Exodar to reach safe haven. Inspired by tales of the heroic Alliance that stood against the might of the Burning Legion, the draenei have come to enlist aid in retaking their shattered homeland.
Something which is reaffirmed as their reason for joining the Alliance in Cata:
Empowered by the Holy Light and the undying strength of their convictions, the draenei led the charge against the demonic Burning Legion in Outland. Now, with the Legion’s defeat, they have completed the desperate mission that first brought them to Azeroth.
Yet we never hear about the Draenei that went back to Outland to rebuild it ever again:
Though some draenei were sent back to Outland to revitalize their former civilization, the majority have vowed to stay and uphold their sacred commitment to the Alliance.
Instead, for inexplicable reasons the majority decide to stay on Azeroth… for really no reason at all.
This is also odd when in TBC we’re tasked with going to several different ‘sacred’ or ‘ancestral’ sites for the Draenei, but any real sacred connection has only existed for an extremely short amount of time by Draenei standards.
Oh, and how the story behind Draenei shamanism sucks and doesn’t make any sense at all.
I hate how they handled that, and haven’t touched on it since.
TLDR: I think Blizz has never had any idea for what they wanted to do with Draenei and because of that they’re entirely inconsistent within every facet of their portrayal.
One last thing: I hate Velen and Blizzard doesn’t know how to write for a ‘prophet’.
I don’t find him compelling at all and I thought everything they did with him in Legion was laughably bad (especially the stuff with his son).
Sorry for the long post lol.
1 Like