It’s difficult to even retcon Shadowlands alone because, as much as it is the biggest offender, much of the issues are due to cumulative problems that started as far back as WoD, and Chronicle Volume 1. Conversely, there are parts from each of those prior expansions that are pretty cool additions to the setting, even if some of them are products of that retconned and messy lore.
The problems we’re seeing in Shadowlands have their roots in WoD, and even Legion to an extent. You get rid of Shadowlands, okay, we still have the Burning in BfA and all the wonky Void lore and the Night Warrior stuff and the Saurfang stuff. You get rid of BfA too (thus casting aside the Zandalar and Kul Tiras stuff, which are both actually really cool) and you have Legion, where we got Allied Races and their insanely contrived lore to start, as well as the Great Value Army of the Light, and Shaladrassil being entirely made up, as well as the Illidan retcons. Get rid of that and all of the cooler aspects like the Nightborne arc along with it, and you’re left with WoD and Chronicle, which took a shotgun to Orc themes and upended a lot of Draenei lore, to say nothing of all the weird alternate timeline stuff. Get rid of that, however, and you also get rid of Khadgar and the backstory stuff we got for the Frostwolves, which was a highlight.
So really, the only way to truly excise a lot of the lore damage would be to retcon everything after MoP and invalidate Chronicle entirely. But in doing so we’d also lose a lot of really cool lore and characters. It’s the lack of consistency when it comes to quality that’s a big issue, it’s not uniformly bad, or good (until we reach Shadowlands).
You can always add those back in, just in a better overall context. None of the good stuff depends on the bad stuff to such a heavy degree that it’s impossible without it.
BFA and Shadowlands would be the easiest thing to retcon…
As Sargeras is pulled to the Seat of the Pantheon by his kin, in a last ditch effort to prevent the corruption of the final Titan, Sargeras plunges his sword deep into the earth’s crust.
Illidan, remaining with the Pantheon prepares for his final battle with the Fallen Titan.
A sigh of relief is exhaled by Prophet Velen, at long last, the Burning Crusade… is over.
Pan back to Azeroth-- Chains shatter.
A dust cloud moves across the land, eventually rippling into the sea.
The camera sinks below the waves, deeper and deeper.
N’zoth’s eye opens. Void lashes out, consuming all in darkness.
…All eyes shall be opened…
Doom. Void Nightmare.
But what of Sylvanas in Legion? Well she was working with Helya to kill Odyn, cause Odyn is an orange pickle.
In return, she gets control of the Valkyrie to ensure she never dies.
The biggest thing to change going forward (since it’s most likely going to come up again) would be changing the First Ones from being the architects of reality to just the ones that added structure to the Shadowlands. Can just say that they’ve been mythologized by the dead and were not actually as monumentally important.
They are unable to write themselves out of this mess that was constructed out of reckless lack of foresight and intentional malice from the former creative director.
You cannot continue building a new floor with both the foundation has cracked and the preceding floor lacks the proper infrastructure.
The thing I been thinking about lately and struggling to reconcile is, there are so many religions in game, from ancestor/elemental worship, to Loa/Wild Gods having their own afterlives(According to Cata lore in Hyjal anyway), Elune, Bwom An’she, etc
And Blizz threw it all away for what? This expansion had such a huge potential to expand on what we already know or been speculating about for years. It’s just….it’s sad actually.
I mean blizz did think about the repercussions for people like the Tauren and Auchenai draenei priests?
And they still do. But those afterlives aren’t central to this story, The realms we visited are the service after lives… the ones that keep things going for the whole shebang.
They haven’t been “thrown away”, they simply aren’t relevant to this story.
Such as there aren’t any? The Happy Hunting Ground is still there. As to Draenei priests, they were never developed as anything more than Stormwind Priests with horns, so there’s nothing to lose. The next chapter is going to take us to a place where afterlives are MADE.
Judging by the reactions here, a chapter nobody wanted or asked for. The amount of old lore that had to be outright retconned to make SL work is staggering.
Hate to break it to you, but 9.2 and SL in general isnt as good as you think it is or want try to convince everyone it is
I’ve never said it was good. The creative team hasn’t been firing on all thrusters since the beginning of Battle for Azeroth and it shows. But some of your conclusions such as the idea that these four shadowlands and the Maw are the entirety of the afterlive are simply not supported by the game lore which references an “infinite number” of afterlives that the Arbiter sent souls to.
The fact that you still can’t grasp how stupid all this is…is sort of sad. Bwom, all the Loa and Wild Gods originally just took their followers to their own specific afterlives.
Until you know, we learned only Bwom still has his own afterlife and all the Loa/Wild Gods go ardeanweald for rebirth or stay in Ardenweald if they have no world to go back to, hence retconning them having their own afterlives
Why cant you just admit SL did more harm than good?
The Loa and Wild Gods aren’t your standard diety figures. but given that they are at best side figures in the story (Ursoc only appears to undergo final death in a short), and that Blizzard was in a pretty messed up place, it stands to reason that the resources weren’t there to create whole new realms just for minor plots.
It’s an MMORPG where the player engages with the World via our chosen Avatars, each with a Race/Class each with a specific body/range of fantasy we choose.
If the world building does not build upon pre-existing fantasy that we have chosen and is the source for our buy-in/opt-in/attachment to the universe, then the world building fails to do its job.
That is the ultimate problem with the entire design of the shadowlands from a thematic standpoint:
The Universe’s Psychopomps are Blue Humans with Hellenic Motifs
The Universe’s Purgatory are Vampire Humans with Balkan Motifs
The Universe’s Nature Afterlife is Dark Enchant Western European Fairy Forest with Irish Motifs
The Universe’s Death Army is just Vague Zombies with Roman Motifs
Rather than build upon the pre-existing Death Lore of each race/class, they threw everything out the window, chose not to reconcile the various myths into being cosmically central, and instead centered these four realms with these arbitrary fantasies that don’t relate or tie back the fantasy of the race/class we are choosing.
The point is that their core plot sucks.
Bad.
It’s ridiculous.
Incoherent.
Not only thematically (and mishandling of other issues therein), but the entire metaphysics of this whole thing makes zero sense if you bother to think about it for five seconds with at least two brain cells.
This was an experiment, and sometimes experiments fail.
None of these are necessarily terrible by themselves. But I agree that they don’t quite ‘click’ with what we already had. I think it would have been better if either
there were a few more afterlives that DID suit stuff that already existed, like expanding Da Other Side to a full zone, and a tauren/orc ancestor zone- maybe adjacent to Da Other Side, or ‘between’ Bastion and Ardenwaeld?
Go the opposite route and make the existing zones much less ‘human’ and much more alien. This a bit harder to explain and would thus probably be harder to implement in-game. After all, why should the afterlife be anything like mortal existence? Because our limited mortal minds imagine it so, unfamiliar with anything else?
They are terrible when they break and undermine pre-existing fantasy of the game that is why people are attached to this game because of the entire dynamic of race/class fantasy in an RPG
Literally it would’ve been so easy:
Bastion is the same except everyone keeps their “original form” but it’s blue because “purity” or whatever, and make the Archon more Spooky Abrahamic Angel (maybe four heads, 8 wings, 6 arms, on fire, idk)
Either make each Ward’s Venthyr unique or have Venthyr keep their original forms too but they’re just vampires
Add biome diversity to Ardenweald, at least different kinds of forest, THEY LITERALLY ALREADY HAVE A BUNCH OF DIFFERENT BIOMES READY DUE TO BFA’S ECOLOGICAL DIVERSITY
Add more aesthetic diversity to Maldraxxus; why not model the House of Constructs (Surgeons) after the Temple of Asclepius, why not model the House of Rituals after Egyptian pyramids and other tombs, etc?
And of course, INCORPORATE THE ANCESTRAL SHAMANISTIC RACE FANTASIES INTO THE CENTRAL GOVERNANCE METAPHYSICS OF THE DAMN COSMOLOGY LMAO why in the Hell wasn’t Muehzala an Eternal One?
That’s hilarious, considering Bastion is already filled with countless “ghostly” NPCs that look like Azeroth races with vague humanoid-shaped ones occasionally flying around.
Yeah yeah, I get it, other worlds besides Azeroth, but like they can still design a couple of “alien” races to represent important story NPCs. We wouldn’t even need that many. I’m sure there’s money in the budget for 5 characters with completely new models.
Either one of two ways generally speaking without getting into too many specifics.
1st way: It was all a N’zoth Dream/Vision.
2nd way: The Shadowlands was simply another realm that had heavy ties to undeath etc without necessarily being the true afterlife and messing up established lore. The Jailer could have still had some links to the Lich King without being a 5D Underwater Chess Villain that was behind everything.
If it was simply its own realm we went to and not really the “afterlife” i think that alone would have fixed a lot of problems.
Thats pretty good point.
If Shadowlands was a waystop before the “Great Beyond” it would have worked much better. We aren’t interfering with the afterlife… we are just removing the roadblocks the bad guys put up.