I would literally vomit blood if they went with a lazy cop out like that.
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There was never any rehabilitation in Revendreth; it was purely a method of identifying souls that could be further squeezed for anima for longer and longer.
That’s not how it works. They need something to do the work of extracting the anima…it’s not automatic. That’s the entire point I identified in the initial topic post… they put in place all these deceived workers to do the job for them.
I haven’t made up any fact of any kind. The Shadowlands writers showed us that anima is being stolen from mortal souls, full stop. That is the bare fact. That’s what the writers put in the game. That is undeniable and must be included in any interpretation that anybody wants to make of what they played.
Conveniently dodged Ardenweald there, huh?
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There is no dodge. Ardenweald “consumes” and destroys mortal souls by the billions…stealing all their anima; and sends about somewhere from 10 to 26 wild gods at a time back to mortal life to generate more anima which will be stolen yet again by the shadowland factory farm tragedy. Feeding worms to a pig long enough so you can kill the pig and sell it and send the cash as a dividend payment is not sustaining nature, it is exploiting and degrading it.
Nah, but SL would unironically make a lot more sense if the entire system worked that way.
Be born → make anima → die → shed anima → be born → …
None of Shadowlands included anything like that. Mortals were not shown to be born again, only some wild gods (not all… some wild gods were apparently completely destroyed to feed others) …and meanwhile mortal souls had their anima fed to wild gods. Ardenweald was cosmic horror…
Ardenweald, and Kael’thas’s whole plot in Revendreth. And the entire Revendreth story.
Still confused on the whole “destroys mortal souls by the billions” when mortals rarely go there and the only soul we really saw be destroyed there was a wild god, but eh!!
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And said choice was a difficult one. It was ursoc dying or Ardenweald dying.
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You’re derailing this topic, when I already had a separate topic covering the First Ones and the unethical deeds there… when this topic is about the Lonely Gardener Model for Titans.
In the meantime, Ardenweald was not only a destination for wild gods (as I mentioned… the ratio of mortals to wild gods being sent to Ardenweald was billions compared to somewhere between 10 and 26 wild gods) …but those mortal souls were just being used as anima sent off to First One installations, and a little bit to wild gods so they’d generate more anima for the next time around.
But again… this topic is about the Lonely Gardener Model for Titans.
Because it didn’t. Unless they think Shadowlands with an offline Arbiter is the intended design, which would be bizarre with how much they beat us over the head with that not being the case.
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The default of shadowland was unethical. The default of Ardenweald was unethical. None of what I have ever said was ever about any absence of any arbiter. Not only the robot replacement arbiter, but the zovaal arbiter and the pelagos arbiter. Take your pick of any arbiter, and the default of Ardenweald was to consume and destroy mortal souls to send off the anima to First Ones; with a small portion reinvested into a tiny number of wild gods that would be sent out into living worlds to gather more anima and continue being harvested and sent off to First Ones greedily.
I’m responding to where the conversation had gone. If you do not wish a topic to be derailed, you should not engage in discussions that have derailed the topic.
I’m not even sure if that’s the case. I think this is more a case of seeing one thing, and concluding fifteen other things that are tangentially related to the one thing.
You don’t have an accurate understanding of how the realms in Shadowlands function, which means taking your assumptions about the First Ones as correct is not possible.
But I do otherwise dig the Lonely Gardener setup.
Nah, they brought up First Ones being greedy anima thieves in the OP.
Not at all. I correctly dismissed them, and there is now no reason to ever even pretend that Ardenweald was ethically “good” for mortal souls. Topics sometimes need a cow-catcher on the front (like a train) that can scoot and deflect irrelevant attempts to derail that train.
The 4 zones were written and identified as stealing anima from mortal souls… full stop. By default. Not because of a drought, even before the drought, and after the drought, and during the drought. At all times, the zones steal anima from mortal souls. No matter what your head canon would have preferred they do with shadowlands.
So all the mistaken derailing about you trying to defend first ones can be ignored and the topic resume as it was beforehand.
Did he mean the Eternal Ones? Them I could see, but the First Ones?
If they made all the everything, like stories about them try to claim, why bother making anything other than the Maw for souls? Why have these arbitrary bonus extra steps of other afterlives, when you could just drop everything into the Maw and make it one big anima cauldron?
Not full stop, because your head canon is not an accurate model of the Shadowlands… full stop. By default. In utero. You have to prove The First Ones are stealing the anima and you cannot, which you initially claimed in your OP.
Nope, First Ones. Because doing mental gymnastics to explain a needlessly complex system of infinite anima fueled realms somehow makes more sense than … just collecting the anima.
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Wait. Ok, so new question.
The Firsties allegedly made everything. Like, all the things. Including everything that generates anima. And anima itself.
Why would they need to steal it? How is it even stealing if they created the very process by which it is made, including all steps involved?
Better way to phrase it is that the way anima is generated and distributed is extremely inefficient. All it takes is someone to hoard all of it and the shadowlands begins to die
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… chickadees. Little baby chickadees.
knowing nod
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