“They conceived and put in place the six governing forces of reality—Light, Void, Order, Disorder, Life, and Death—as well as the pantheons that embody them.”
That’s lame. No one likes that (Well, an extreme few might).
Them being responsible for having forged a large sum of stuff in the Shadowlands, I’m fine with that to remain if anything — But making them the makers of everything is lame. Like everything being a construct / robot / synthetic & all calculated math - especially in Shadowlands, it removes the fantasy out of the fantasy game. It makes it cold & cheap, especially when it trashes on the origins & lore that most relatively liked from Chronicles.
As a rule I don’t ever like retcons… unless if necessary and then its very small details.
But first ones?
Nuke it from orbit.
I am ok with Eternal Ones… or just Eternals for short (dontsuemeDisney) which will refer to any higher level bieng whether we are talking about titans, winterqueen, elune, demon lords and etc.
Just make it a category of higher biengs fall into and thats it.
Maybe that will do some damage control for what shadowlands did to the lore.
Prototype Pantheon – Bereft of the cosmic spirits of the Eternal Ones, these incomplete host bodies can only carry out their base directives without mercy or compassion. With the enemy at the gates, Lihuvim has little choice but to activate these dangerous prototypes.
Furthermore the Jailer has a corpse Model that is clearly a Robot.
The implication seems to be that the First Ones used the Robots to contain the Eternal Ones and Zovaal’s Robot like the rest of the Prototypes wasn’t able to bind the Eternal One to the First Ones’ grand design like they expected.
Of course instead of going off the rails like his fellow Eternal Ones did when they were sealed within the Prototypes(necessitating a transfer to better Robotic seals that keep them from causing any more problems) he instead kept his head low until the First Ones left then made his move(and got imprisoned within Torghast for his efforts).
It turns the First Ones into the First Summoners who tried to subjugate the Gods and not the next tier up from the Eternal Ones!
Imagine what Elune is like unbound to the First Ones’ Robotic Seals! N’Zoth knows as shown by his comments during the Uu’nat Encounter:
“The fall of Night reveals her true face. She will bring only ruin.” - N’Zoth
Jeeze … I use to love the lore of this game, with such fervor & passion - but ‘The First Ones’ & ‘The Jailor’ lore makes me so so depressed, because of how they retconned & implemented the lore behind the reasoning for old lore. Like it just cheapened such great fantasy, and make it cold calculus robotic bs.
Aaaah! Just make this trainwreck stop! I want to remake the burning of Teldrassil cinematic to show the Horde fire-bombing a gigantic Shadowlands Collector’s Edition Box with Sylvannas forcing whoever wrote that retcon to watch the destruction…then she will chillingly whisper as the box disintegrates: Let it burn.
I want it to end so baaaaAAD!
I think so too. Elune as First One, as a purely energetic being - a kind of “embodiment of the cosmos itself” - that could have worked for the First Ones.
The First Ones would be thus the cosmos as entity, split up into several conscious beings. The question thus what was there before, the cosmos or the First ones would be with it a question without clear answer, did they create the magics, or did you originate from it?
That all would be with it a question after chicken and egg, which was first, one would have had something mystical.
I am OK with the First Ones, but this really is pushing it for me, as far as ancient progenitor/creator-like entities. I will really start to sigh and scoff if we get to some higher order above the First Ones - the Even Firster Ones… the Second Twos… the Third Threes…
I am not for a retcon, but I hope it stops at least. Blizzard needs to stop building on top of shaky foundations, and work on strengthening the foundations they have.
I get that we likely would see the background machinery behind creation and existence and the cosmos, over time. But adding layers to it, while leaving previous layers devoid of information, makes it all unsatisfying.
I think Blizz had to go this route eventually. So I don’t bemoan the notion of “demystifying a fantasy world”. But there are other ways to expand the lore than :
Players : “Why is that creature godlike and powerful?”
Blizz : “Because a more powerful entity made them that way.”
Sure, many people have made good points about how damaging the First Ones are to the lore, but have any of you considered what getting rid of them would mean? It’d mean Blizzard couldn’t use their totally cool and rad “mAChIneRy oF DEaTh” phrase. We can’t have that now, can we?
The problem as far as I can guess is no one expected Warcraft to last this long. My guess is if Overwatch had remained an MMORPG WoW would current be in a sunset mode now.
As it is Blizzard needs to create new lore that can last last for maybe a decade or two.
Simple way to fix this is that it was not elune talking through tyrande but something else hijacked her and tricked the winter queen. That or they really should of made eonar her sister.
Honestly, I would’ve considered it more problematic to actually confirm true Gods for the setting.
Just brings a lot of questions for how the people who don’t have gods can compare.
As far as the First Ones go, I’d say just lower their importance to just setting up the Death and Life realms since they now have to reconcile the Winter Queen and Elune being sisters in some manner.
I don’t necessarily dislike the concept of the First Ones, but they kind of hamstring the narrative at the cosmic level with the way they’ve been portrayed. Especially with the Void, since creating something that explicitly wants to eat existence itself is just strange.
The Void could be a byproduct or “waste” material. But it is weird that these “first ones” would create something that can infect, corrupt and kill people. Much like Dark Eco from the Jak and Dexter series.
I will laugh if blizzard makes it so that the Void Lords are void corrupted First Ones. Much like how the Dark Makers were Precursors who were corrupted by Dark Eco. Given Blizzards love of copying and pasting ideas and concepts from other games… I can see it happening.
From the lore we know, Eonar is moreorless the aunt of the Winter Queen - given it’s suggested the Eternals of the Shadowlands were created by ‘The First Ones’ and ‘The First Ones’ are essentially Titans+