I wanted to see if there was anything ICC could give us in the way of hints to the Jailer’s scheme, as it’s been retconned that it was the Jailer who was the puppet Master all along.
And some Lady Deathwhisper quotes really stood out to me but this one most.
This line here: “it is a weakness; a crippling flaw… a joke played by the creators upon their own creations.”
Now, this is familiar, because in Dawn of the Aspects, Deathwing has some interesting lines about the Titans. Deathwing also implies that Azeroth was an experiment to the Titans. A Plaything. When they were done, they turned their backs on all of them, indifferent to the broken world they left behind.
What exactly Lady Deathwhisper is referring to been referring to has been a mystery. But now with more context of the Jailer’s plan I’m wondering if it’s one of two things. It could be about free will or hope or rather, the loss of it.
She also says "those who serve utterly, unquestioningly will be rewarded. " but that requires giving up free will and in order to give up free will first you must give up hope.
That in itself paints the Jailer as potentially the worst villain in WoW history. It could also explain how Sylvanas has become, over time, broken down to the point where she questions if free will is real and she could have easily fallen into this idea that through service to the Jailer that she would be elevated, and through that elevation she could find a means to overcome this mental prison.
There’s also the idea that hope is the weakness that the creators played on their own creation. Like Pandora’s box, it was the one evil that stayed in the box. But who are “The Creators’? was it the Titans who we know from Chronicle who claim to have made us as perfect Titanforge creations before we were corrupted by the Curse of Flesh.
Or were we organic beings made from the Old Gods, and were Cursed with Stone? in the alternate history found on N’Zoth cultists.
One of the things that is still on the table, until proven otherwise is the idea that whoever created life in the WoW universe did so to create and feed off anima. Yogg-Saron’s puzzle box says “All things have souls, all souls can devoured.” anima is at it’s very core concept, fuel. It’s the fuel that powers the very cosmos. Old Gods admit to tasting peoples anima as a way to judge their character maybe it’s no different with the Titans. It’s becoming more and more evident that the Shadowlands was Ordered by the Titans. The Purpose, the unquestioned system that the Shadowlands uses to function, is hiding dark secrets.
This can be setting up an existential question that will run it’s course through the plot of Shadowlands and that plot is, is the illusion of free will simply a joke or a weakness played on us by our creators? Perhaps the idea that we have any power to resist this oppressive system is just a grand illusion.