How Shadowlands Nearly Destroyed All of WoW's Lore

Community General Discussion
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Shadowlands has irrefutably put a deep wound into nearly every ounce of world-building lore there has ever been in WoW since it’s origins.

The biggest wound that has ever happened to World of Warcraft’s lore, was summing everything up for the past 2+ decades to some bullied robot who gave the cosmos a thumbs-down and had virtually 5 minutes of screentime in his own expansion.

To add salt to the wound, in a pure act of cringe, Blizzard tried to make players feel sympathy for him. The Jailer of the Maw, driving suffering across all of Azeroth since the Burning Legion and deliberately damning innocents to a realm of unbridled torment so horrifically unimaginable that it could be said to have outdone nearly every other villain we’ve ever known of in the past.

And Blizzard tried to get the sympathy card out of players for him. Zovaal did not deserve the slap on the wrist Blizzard wrote for him. He deserved far worst than a simple death.

So here we are, with an expansion that now makes me say everything else was great up until the end of Legion, instead of up until WoTLK. Because between these past two expansions it can very plausibly be said, that Blizzard just used a random prompt generator they found online to direct the story.

Not everything needs a reason, not every literal major thing in the lore needed to have such a blanketed singular conclusion. The most fun I ever have with Warcraft’s lore is theorizing all of the possibilities and coming up with my own thing.

At least 85% of that fun, is gone now. I just want to pretend that BFA and Shadowlands never happened.

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Even if you don’t like the explanation behind it, this does not change the lore of Azeroth. The things that happened, still happened, and few of us are privy to what was seen in the Shadowlands. The conflicts and rivalries that existed before are still there. The scars of past conflicts are still there and affecting everyday lives.

It’s kind of like a storm or an earthquake causing destruction. Regardless of whether you think a fault in the planet’s crust slipped, or an angry god decided to punish you, the home you lost is still lost, and the friends who died are still gone.

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I can’t do a quest involving death without thinking about the Shadowlands. Summoning ancestors or the like just makes me question why they weren’t sorted properly by the Arbiter.

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And now we know why they did. And it could be better.

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I still say we need a followup expansion where it’s revealed that Denathrius was pulling Zovaal’s strings all along and it was a long con strategy to get control of the Shadowlands by placing an easily conquered Pelagos as Arbiter (as well as allowing Denathrius to access the forge of afterlives and sepulchre without suspicion or opposition).

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Denathrius was a better antagonist than Zovaal was, creatively speaking.

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It absolutely ruined a lot of the prior lore related to death along with some of the gods/demi gods and so forth. Made a mess of everything it touched quite honestly, they did such a poor job with it most of the RP community tries to ignore it.

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I agree. Sadly the reminders will be conspicuous for a long time.

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You can’t unknow something, sadly. On the exterior, nothing changed, sure, but the implications of like 90% of WoW history has been completely changed on a fundamental level.

Let’s look at Ner’zhul, for example. Without the Jailer, his is a story of a power hungry villain with just enough of a brain to realise a raw deal when he sees one. First he makes a deal with the Legion, then realises they’ll make him a slave and decides to back out of the deal. They turn to Guldan instead and Nerzhul gets betrayed. Then when Guldan goes off doing his own thing and the Orcish invasion fails, Nerzhul knows the Legion will come to punish the Orcs, and they’ll especially punish Nerzhul for backing out of the deal. So he does a hit and run on Azeroth stealing artifacts that lets him open portals to many other worlds, destroying Draenor in the process, hoping to go to a random world and escape the Legions wrath. He instead walks right into Kiljaedans clutches. KJ torments Nerzhul but ultimately gives him one final chance, creating a suit of armor, putting Nerzhuls soul in it, and hurtling it to Azeroth with some Dreadlords to watch over him and make sure he plays ball. From here, he perfects the Undead plague, begins his domination of Lordaeron, and manipulates Malganis into luring Arthas to Icecrown, to become the Scourges champion. Malganis is tricked and killed, as the plan was actually to use Arthas to free Nerzhul from the Dreadlords and the icy prison. And it works, to a degree, leading ultimately to Arthas overpowering Nerzhul and becoming the Lich King, creating his own citadel to conquer Azeroth from.

NOW we are to believe that this was all part of the Jailers plan. Even if we ignore the extremely contrived parts like Nerzhul backing out of the deal being part of the plan, and KJ not questioning how the Dreadlords suddenly came back with a Helm of Domination and an undead plague stolen from the Shadowlands, we still have some major plot problems. As the wearer of the Helm of Domination, Nerzhul should have been under the Jailers control. The Dreadlords were also under the Jailers orders, as they served Denathrius and Denathrius served the Jailer. Yet apparently part of the plan was to corrupt Arthas so that Jailer could use Arthas to… defeat the Jailers servants… what? This makes no sense. And the entire point of this was so that the Lich King could construct the Icecrown Citadel and the Forge of Souls so that many many many years later Sylvanas could break the hat, linking Icecrown to Torghast, and he could use the Soul Grinders from Zereth Mortis to… tbh I still don’t know what he was doing.

If that’s all he needed why didn’t he just use Nerzhul and the Dreadlords to build the citadel? Why did he need Arthas at all? Sure he couldn’t conquer Azeroth yet because he needed Argus to break the Arbiter so all the souls would go to the Maw (a plan that has its own slew of issues) but he could have just defied the Legion. Nerzhul already did as is, and KJs plot for vengeance was Illidan, which failed, mostly because of Malfurions intervention.

This went from a story that made sense on its own merits to one that is completely nonsensical purely because of the addition of THE JAILER PLANNED THIS THE WHOLE TIME MWAHAHA

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Crawl to me on your knees. Surrender, and I will grant you a merciful end.

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Now imagine a Shadowlands after 4-5 years of Denathrius having unimpeded access to unimaginable power…

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Yeah and then you get inconsistencies like this.

I read it all word for word. I didn’t even regard all of those inconsistencies and things that don’t make sense at all anymore now thanks to the Jailer being shoehorned in. With inconsistencies this blatant and clear, I can guarantee you Blizzard either just as well assumed that we forgot, or they forgot their own story entirely themselves.

There’s a lot more reparation to the lore Blizzard has to do than I thought. Thanks for taking the time to write this out.

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lets hope d4 turns into the new wow