Everyone who dies in the World of Warcraft universe goes to the Shadowlands — even creatures from planets and zones we haven’t seen or heard about yet.
I don’t think Blizzard’s quite put thought into the immeasurable numbers of questions and implications this raises. Did anyone else catch this?
If a character in WoD dies, do they go to the shadowlands, or is there a shadowlands for every timeline that exists? Does it matter what timeline they’re from or can five hundred gul’dan’s be in the same, infinitely large Shadowlands?
Wouldn’t this leave the door a bit too wide open for there to have been a few other Sylvanas-Equivalents on other planets who’ve already attempted their coups on the Shadowlands before?
I don’t know about multiple timelines, but yeah, the planets thing does seem to be something they’re going with. IIRC, in Revandreth, you can find tombstones sinstones that list an individual’s name and their sins and some of them reference characters/organizations/events that I don’t think are from Azeroth.
A lot of text is still incomplete though, so they could be placeholders.
In Legion, there was a DK follower mission where you retrieve an essence from the soul of Soulbinder Nyami, as part of the Unholy Attainment questline. So I’d say yes, for worse or for worse, somehow Draenor is still tied to the main universe Shadowlands.
Unless Blizzard retcons it, or we simply just see no acknowledgement of the various characters that might’ve died during WoD.
Multiple planets for sure, as when you first get to Bastion, one of the constructs gives you the following questions:
Greeter Mnemis: Which planet, system, entity, realm or form of existence do you hail from?
Greeter Mnemis: Please provide your world of origin.
Greeter Mnemis: Greetings, denizen of Azeroth! Your deeds in life have earned you a fate most noble. You are destined to become a Kyrian!
Multiple timelines, though, I’m still not sure of. Though, knowing Blizz, I’d tenatively say yes, since that’d make things more complicated than they have to be.
I am not sure if they have stated that the Shadowlands are like the Legion, where there is only “one” in all timelines (literally what), but I would err on the side of “Barbara from WoD will not be joining us in the SL”. Other than that, I think Blizz knows exactly what they’re doing in regards to one SL for every world. As they said in the interview, it can add some interesting new future plot points. I would DIE if there was some new npc with a completely new and foreign model (from some other world) who is also a maw walker who rips into us thinking we’re top dogs of the world because of all we have done, but have no idea about what any other of the countless worlds have done. My god I want this to happen.
For all the questions I still have raised, I will say I do like the idea of them pulling something a la FF14 where the heroes of another world show up. My problem’s mostly just with the scale of it all wildly surpassing the scale of the affairs of just one world (and how said affairs of other worlds may already have had their influence on the Shadowlands.) But then again, they are said to be an infinite expanse.
Shadowlands is cosmic in scope yes, they said they like doing high concept stuff and shadowlands is effectively our first stop on a sort of ‘tour of the planes’ where we take a focus on one of the cosmic forces each expansion (or honestly our second stop, as we have already exhaustively covered Fel).
The way they cope with the infinite variations of life is by using a sort of vague spiritual form, like such:
The lore reasoning is any race you have no concept of your mind fills in with an amorphous stand-in. It is sort of interesting because it means we living people are an oddity… as solid material forms everything can see us but we cannot see them.
There’s only one Burning Legion because there’s only one Twisting Nether. And that one Twisting Nether is what connects every false possibility-born reality to the one, true reality and its one, true timeline.
The Legion specifically targets the primary timeline for destruction because all others are transitory and fading, their ephemeral existences tied entirely to the continuance of the main course of events. So with the primary reality’s end, all those other possibilities end with it.
And it’s been an ongoing process. For every world destroyed and every life ended in the true timeline, an infinite multitude of possible worlds and lives spun off from their possible futures were being erased in every offshoot reality.
Those other realities couldn’t assault the Legion in its own realm as ours did because they lack the solidity and permanence that ours has as the reality born of and perpetuating the one true timeline.
The entirety of WarCraft since it gained any cosmology whatsoever (i.e. with WC3) has centered around the idea that our Azeroth, in our universe, in our timeline is the only true one. It’s the premise from which our Azeroth’s continuing successes against the Legion stem. It’s why our Azeroth is “special” so to speak. Because it’s the Azeroth of the only reality that’s actually stable, actually permanent and actually matters. The reality from whence all other realities are spun for the comparatively short time in which they exist before vanishing, as is the eventual fate of all false possibilities.
Okay, you genuinely gave an excellent explanation that I hadn’t fully considered for the state of time and the universe, thank you, well done.
This is kinda sad, though. I assume it has something to do with time being a river, and different timelines might be scooped out and examined, but ultimately all must return to the main river or just evaporate?
That’s how Nozdormu in Twilight of the Aspects and the section on Time in Chronicle explain it. Effectively in order for anything to have actually happened, there has to be a singular and inviolate “river” of time in which the certainty of what is exists. Everything else is what “might have been,” and becomes less and less stable as the march of time moves events farther and farther away from the point at which those alternatives were a possibility.
Without that fulcrum of what is, if there are an infinite number of equally possible realities that can interact and cancel each other out instead, nothing can exist because given the nature of infinity, any of the things that happen statistically will be undone by the equally infinite number of other things counteracting them.
It’s why the Infinite Dragonflight’s attempted alterations were framed as a greater threat than just the introduction of nastier futures than the present we know; replacing the certainty of what actually happened with the uncertainty of what didn’t happen would risk destroying the mechanism of time itself, because something has to have definitively happened in order for everything else that follows to take place.
Of course tampering with those streams makes them stable which is why AU Draenor can threaten the True Timeline.
Once an event happens, it cannot be changed. These events and choices, made up of all creatures and forces in the cosmos, join together like a river, sharing the same reality. Different choices and different possibilities naturally spin off the river of time like small creeks and estuaries, ebbing and flowing for a while. If these shades of what could have been are left alone, they will eventually dissipate into nothing. If efforts are made to preserve them (or alter them), they can indeed remain in existence indefinitely. They can even be made to feed back into the main river—dead creatures can seemingly “live again,” and the past (or future) may literally come back to haunt you. This is not a natural phenomenon, and the inhabitants of the main timeway will often find these experiences to be quite alarming.
The AU Azeroths from War Crimes of course destabilized when the beings whose desires fueled those AUs resolved their emotional issues. They were literal “What could have beens” from the minds of those present in the Temple of the White Tiger.
AU Draenor was likely born from Garrosh or/and Kairoz’s emotional issues and thus when he/they died in that Timeline and the Legion invasion was fully pushed back it stabilized.
Steps taken to alter an AU will stabilize it. Furthermore War Crimes makes it seem as if the Timelines are tied to specific people and if said person resolves their issues involving that matter the Timeline will fade with that person’s AU counterpart.
If Thrall’s corpse from AU Blackmoore’s Universe was brought to Azeroth it would have faded when Thrall killed AU Blackmoore.
Anyone whose issues could have created AU Draenor’s Universe(Maraad, Garrosh, Kil’jaeden and Kairoz) are most likely dead so it is not fading unless convincing the guy who created AU Draenor’s Universe to accept the past is the main plot of an AU Azeroth Expansion!
In all known realms of the cosmos, time flows forward, ever forward. Chaotic energies in places like the Twisting Nether can affect how quickly it flows, but it only flows forward.
Once an event happens, it cannot be changed. These events and choices, made up of all creatures and forces in the cosmos, join together like a river, sharing the same reality. Different choices and different possibilities naturally spin off the river of time like small creeks and estuaries, ebbing and flowing for a while. If these shades of what could have been are left alone, they will eventually dissipate into nothing. If efforts are made to preserve them (or alter them), they can indeed remain in existence indefinitely. They can even be made to feed back into the main river—dead creatures can seemingly “live again,” and the past (or future) may literally come back to haunt you. This is not a natural phenomenon, and the inhabitants of the main timeway will often find these experiences to be quite alarming.
But the only timeway that has a permanent effect on the cosmos is the main timeway. Creatures like the bronze dragons, who have command of temporal magic, can see all the countless tributaries of alternate universes and timelines, and they can even move back and forth along the stream to observe the past and the future.
If that main river is disrupted, it could spell doom and disaster. All life on Azeroth depends on time to flow ever forward. Without the surety that the sun will rise and set each day, the seasons would not pass, the cycle of life would become meaningless, and all living creatures would eventually die from being unable to sustain themselves. It is the most sacred mission of the bronze dragonflight to keep that from happening.
