I can only share my head canon/what I think. Idk really as they’re not my invention but as I see it, DKs are in a kind of stasis.
They did die but then it’s like they froze in that particular place, unable to move on, leave their bodies, yet are not alive.
And I think there’s pain in that but how much, Idk. I also don’t know if they become used to constant pain.
For a long time I didn’t roll a DK because I didn’t like vampire type stories but then I did and had more understanding of them.
When Arthas was LK, he turned others into DKs and made them do stuff they normally wouldn’t do.
When Arthas was defeated and his hold broken over the other DKs, that freed them up but they’re all still in stasis.
Idk if they still need to torment others to relieve themselves but I don’t think so.
I think their lives would be mostly boring. Not able to feel much if anything at all, unable to move on, slow moving but once they have a goal they tend to achieve it.
I don’t think it would be a particularly fun or good sort of life.
If they were real and I was one, I’d be seeking out my final release.
Disclaimer folks, pandas are still bears, which means they’re still the size and weight of an average male person at 6’3 and 220 to 250 pounds on average with the same claws and fangs a Grizzly has… (because despite eating bamboo which evolutionarily they shouldn’t be doing they are still meat eaters)
They’re not Polar bears who’ll actively hunt you down and eat you, but they’re just under the Grizzly in suppressed rage and need to maul.
If you want a sweet cuddly teddy bear… the pansy that is the Black bear is like…right over there. Their main surival mechanism is running up a tree like a scared child.
You realize the only reason for this is zookeepers intervening, yes? The pandas in question didn’t just bite them once and back off, they bit into or clawed into the victims and held them there.
They had to FORCIBLY extricate the victim from the bear.
Second generation DKs were transformed over time by their runeblades, per Ner’zul’s machinations. Each use of the weapon saw more of their life and will stripped away, until eventually they became proper death knights. This generation did not suffer from the eternal hunger.
Third and fourth generation DKs, those of Acherus, are reanimated corpses. Third generation death knights are slightly more powerful than the second and fourth gens, likely because the Lich King was at the height of his power when creating them. In any case, the process left them as proper immortals rather than mere undead, resembling the state Arthas himself was in after donning the Helm of Domination.
As for Pandarens; they are of the fourth generation, and at this time we don’t know whether or not Bolvar’s death knights carry the eternal hunger like their third generation counterparts. If they do, it wouldn’t matter how centered or peaceful pandarens are. They would either inflict pain on others or succumb to the hunger and the madness it brings.
Blood Death Knights explicitly ARE vampiric, and heal damage to their bodies by consuming the life energy in their enemies’ blood. When Arthas became a Death Knight, he didn’t “die and then get raised up” like you see with most undead. It was a long, slow, almost imperceptible process, until eventually his heart beat one last time, and then never beat again. His body never stopped moving.
Some other Death Knights have been well and fully dead for long periods of time before being raised, of course. Sally, among others. When I think of undead, I see them as a broad category of various types of reanimated/repossessed bodies, of varying quality and type of magic. Death Knights, like all undead, are associated partly with unholy/shaow magic, but also with frost/ice magic and blood magic (which I still hold is a sort of bootlegged Light magic, taking the growing/connective power inherent in the blood of living beings and stealing it for short-term use by the dead).
So the Blood magic restores their form to a semblance of life, the frost preserves and maintains them, and the unholy holds it all together and binds the soul back into the deceased corpus. Forsaken (the race) aren’t as “high quality” as Death Knights in terms of the types and interactions of magics that animated them, generally speaking. They’re largely a result of a weapon of mass destruction meant to reanimate huge numbers of people in as quick and dirty a way as possible, whereas Death Knights are mostly all custom-crafted, premium undead, made with better techniques.
I interpret this as them being able to eat, as long as the blood magic is subbing for their metabolism. I still think it kind of just goes through the Forsaken, even though you can see in Undercity that they do eat.
I do think that blood magic allows them to at least emulate metabolism. Looking at other undead types for instance:
Liches and San’layn. Liches are unholy/frost with almost no ties to blood. They don’t resemble living things at all, their spirits are just tied to their bones and preserved via frost. Sometimes they’re not even tied to their bones but to objects. They’ve completely lost their connection to living things because of the particular balance of the magics that hold them together. They’re basically soul software running on whatever hardware they can find, whether a body or an object. They’re almost robots.
San’layn, meanwhile, are animated with unholy/blood magic. They seem to be more emotional than many undead, maybe closer to living things in some ways, but they are extremely vampiric, and rely on a constant flow of blood to keep them the way they are. Kind of like how Blood Elves went into withdrawal when they lost the Sunwell for a bit. San’layn clearly eat/drink. My guess is they would go feral without regular intake of blood, but as long as they have a constant source of blood, they’re almost alive. They have less association with frost magic, and so there’s no sense of preservation to their form. They constantly have to be repairing it with blood.
I think Death Knights, at least the ones players get to play as, are just a very well-balanced (magically) form of undead, able to keep their hungers in check and able to retain some connection to the living, with effort.
I read somewhere that the panda would have become extinct if it were not for China saving them. The reason they would have become extinct is because they’re not very smart survival wise.
Idk if that’s true but it sounds about right.
Another thing I learned a long time ago about bears is this:
If it’s black, fight back
If it’s brown, lie down
If it’s red, you’re dead
If it’s white, goodnight
Black bears will kill you if they think their cubs are threatened, as most animals will.
Red bears, Kodiac and Grizzly, may not attack but if they do, you’re probably not going to survive.
Polar bears, while seemingly cute and cuddly, will kill you.
I’ve seen northern fortified trailers used for research torn apart by a polar bear to get what’s inside.
They make fast work of those trailers, which is saying something because those aren’t the typical trailers you’d see that people live in.
They’re built with very harsh conditions in mind and used in off months for scientific research on ice, perma frost, etc… so you live in one for a matter of weeks, sometimes for about 3 months before you return to base.
Those bears will rip the roof off of one of those, or the walls, just to get to what’s inside and if that’s you, you better aim well with the guns you have on hand.
Those are powerful bears.
See the above about eating a salad as a carnivore XD. It’s not just that they erringly eat bamboo when they should only have a small part of their diet as plants and more so fish and smaller animals, it’s also the pandas’ weird reproductive cycle and complete lack of libido.
(I am so so sorry Pandaren Roleplayers, you poor poor people)
Only ursid on the planet actively on the man eater list, even grizzlies won’t try to kill you for food, only for territorial or paternal reasons, if it’s brown lie down isn’t to play dead, as this for sure is a good way to at least get a nibble on an arm or a leg if the grizzly or red thinks you’re a corpse, they are opportunistic scavengers afterall.
They won’t mate. China has had major success artificially inseminating them. Because there’s nothing wrong with them. There’s no reason they won’t mate. They just won’t mate. It’s funny.
Pandas don’t mate because their rituals were destroyed by humans. Their bamboo forests were destroyed and people wonder why they stopped doing their thing.
