I feel like this has been answered somewhere before but I can’t seem to find a definitive answer.
In WoW, when you kill a mob is it canonically dead or is respawning canon? This is more a question focused at something like named elite mobs. I was playing classic and got the quest “Gammerita, Mon!” to kill a turtle named Gammerita. I remember that later in Un Goro there is a quest, “The Super Snapper FX,” to take a picture of the same turtle.
What are the implications of this?
Theoretically, Gammerita could have been canonically resurrected in several different ways. “re-spawning” as a mechanic is not canon, but things come back to life all the time.
Edit: it honestly wouldn’t shock me if the Revantusk themselves resurrected Gammerita, after the local fish population was replenished.
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This is slightly more complex than it seems. But simple answer is that when you kill something in-game, it is dead. The respawning has not actually brought it back to life. Mainly holds for unnamed NPC’s or those you kill for a quest.
Now, some NPC’s don’t follow this in the lore. Usually a lot of named NPC’s that you can kill outside of quests. Killing Anduin in a city raid does not kill him in the lore. And then there are ones I’d call retcons. Such as killing Hogger in Classic, but he is updated to Cataclysm where he’s instead captured.
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When blizzard did the Cata remake for a lot of 1-60 vanilla zones (now 1-30), in Azshara there is a quest chain where you are sent by Kalecgos to find Azuregos. Turns out, Azuregos remained in the veil because of the times he was killed and ‘resurrected’ by a spirit healer (sorry, Kyrian Watcher). The two ended up dating and we ahhhh, cause them to break up. This is more of a joke towards key kill targets, such as world bosses respawning. Although blizzard could take the joke and make it canon, at least for named quest targets to some degree. But respawning is mostly just a game mechanic. It would suck if X enemy was dead for good once someone killed it.
There are also some who straight up act like their defeat never happened. Such as Lord Kazzak when TBC launched. His vanilla encounter is treated as if nothing happened because he is the one who opens up the Dark Portal. He got a promotion to Doom Lord Kazzak as a result.
Dead is not always dead. Sometimes an NPC registers as dead in game but they are just ‘knocked out’ or ‘banished’ or ‘returned to their original plane of existence’.
So some respawning is indeed canon, though that is mostly in the case of things like Elementals, Spirits, Ghosts, Sha, Memories, Sins, and other ethereal and/or energy type beings.
To an extent respawning is also canon for some forms of undead, as many times the force that is causing them to rise in the first place will just cause them to rise again later on - such is the explanation behind all the old Scourge bosses being alive again during the prepatch event. When you ‘kill’ a skeleton it turns into a pile of bones, but there’s no reason that the necromantic energy that animated that pile of bones couldn’t raise it again, causing it to ‘respawn’.
The obvious cases where it’s pure game mechanics though tend to be with mortal races, animals, plants, and other such finite creatures. There are a handful that are specifically being revived (usually by a nearby Priest or Druid) but in most cases that respawning is just so you have more opportunity to loot bear behinds.
TL;DR some respawning is canon but most is not.
The game does not operate on the presumption of a single unified canon. There’s canon for you the player, for the group of players, and for the game itself which ignores the presence of the player.
Story is here to serve the game mechanic, not the other way around. You have to relax your conventions a bit and remember that this game isn’t for you alone. The NPC respawns so t hat others can play too.
As far as your direct questions, the implications are that multiple authors are writing quests for that turtle and they generally aren’t talking to each other. If you’re looking for some cosmic revelation to reconcile the two… that ain’t happening.
Consider how many quests ask you to “clear a path” or some such thing, by taking down 5 mobs.
Basically, once you kill random animals/monsters, or named ones that you are MEANT TO kill, they are dead.
Lorewise, traveling across the many fields of Azeroth (and other realms) will NOT attract random mobs “aggro” to you every 2 steps…most places are peaceful and don’t have beasts and cultists ready to attack you …because they were already dealt with during our many campaings.
There will of course still be some dangers on some places, such as…say, a gnoll camp somewhere. Gnolls do reproduce after all, and we didn’t kill every single one…but most of the defeated enemies were killed, and the “evil” organizations don’t respawn members, they are dealt with.
Game scale =/= lore scale.
I’m very distracted you have the old worgen model and it’s bringing back memories.