Rogue Thought : The Purpose of the Fel and the absence of the Fel Pantheon?

Wyrmrest Accord
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Now, there’s a couple of things to process here before I shackle you to my deviant grey matter and throw us all into the moist, squirming recesses of my noggin.

  1. The Twisting Nether is a place of absolute chaos, where all manner of things exist simultaneously in a state of chaotic flux, and it is only the influence of a strong will that can turn that this chaotic mess into something solid, stable, and useful. This allows the Legion to basically assemble anything they need, simply by having enough powerful, strong-willed Demons in one place, thinking the same thing, resulting in them creating … basically any material they require, assuming they can pile enough consciousnesses together, get them focused on this one single thing, and keep them focused on it long enough to stay in that form until it can be imbued with the Fel or brought into the Material Plane (our level of reality) wherein it will literally ‘permanently’ solidify into that substance.
  1. While Blizzard is walking back a lot of the absolute nonsense brought up in Shadowlands about all souls being fused together after death , and that all souls are saved or damned based upon the actions of their version in the main (our) Reality/Timeline/Universe, but they still have not walked back the line All realities, all dimensions are open to me! from Prince Malchezaar in the original Kharazan raid, implying that the Twisting Nether is still, somehow, able to touch all the layers of reality, and all the alternate timelines.
  1. We’re told most Alternate Timelines will fade away on their own, but Nozdormu is also mostly restricted to Azeroth’s timeline, and fighting to keep Azeroth’s alternate version separate and distinct from the ‘One True Timeline’, yet in Dragonflight, we’re introduced to multiple Alternate Azeroths where the other Primal Powers have won, and yet since they’re not reality-warping demi-gods able to push us aside like nothing, we can assume there’s one thing that’s no carried across to every Timeline and Alternate Reality, and that’s Azeroth’s World Soul, hence why all the Primal Powers get so moist to twist it to serve them.

Now, hear me out as I put these three clues together.

We know that there’s Alternate Timelines that exist and have not simply faded away. Draenor still exists, albeit its temporal speed has vast accelerated, catching ‘up’ to us, and presumably will continue to advance even further, and faster, and that ties into my theory.

No matter how many times an Alternate Timeline or Reality is split off from the ‘main’ one that we occupy, no matter how the Primal Powers struggle and push and shove, the World Soul never transfers over to the new Timeline/Reality. Now, these Alternate Timelines are perfect breeding grounds to raise armies to attack the main timeline, as we saw with the Draenor Expansion, the Mag’har Recruitment Scenario and the Time Rifts leading to the alternate timelines that are thriving and show no signs of decay or falling apart, but their timelines are erratic. The Legion-one is set in, unsurprisingly, the aftermath of the Legion expansion, where the Demons won, while the Murloc one seems to be a mish-mashed hodge-podge of Cataclysm and Legion, given we help them fight Murloc Deathwing and then immediately after we fight Gil’dan in Wyrmrest Tower.

So, my theory is thus:

  1. All Alternate Timelines are doomed to fade away, inevitably, but that process could take thousands, or even millions, of years if the Primal Powers put their backs into propping the Alternate Reality up. Doing so is costly, but allows them to ‘farm’ souls for Anima, raise armies to either expand their forces in the Main Timeline or replace their losses, and to gain access to resources that they otherwise may not be able to safely access in the Main Timeline.
  1. Even with all the Alternate Timelines being propped up here and there, inevitably you’ll reach a point where you’re putting in more than what you’re getting out, and its easier to just let it go and fade away. But where do all these Alternate Realities fade into? The Twisting Nether itself, a place absolutely infested by the Fel, a Primal Force that, unlike every other one of its rivals, is purely consumptive. Death recycles things into Anima to feed itself and the other Primal Powers, Void makes you go crazy and grow tentacles out of strange places, the Light makes you believe in something and will empower you so long as you remain a fanatic towards this, the Arcane is just Super Maths and is used to order the Universe(s) to sustain the cycle of souls in and out of the material plane, and Life just pumps out life-forms to feed that cycle. Only the Fel consumes and gives back nothing.
  1. We’ve seen what happens where the Fel is allowed to leave its mark and the Legion has no interest in hanging around. We’ve read about it in books, specifically Illidan’s novel where he goes on an astral projection round-tour of the Legion’s previous conquests and finds whole worlds reduced to dead, sterile orbs drifting through space, with only a few garrisons of Demons left behind to keep watch, with not even bacteria in the oceans or lower life-forms crawling through the dirt and bones. The Fel consumes all other things to create more of itself, and will even consume the caster if they lack the will and the knowledge of how to safely call upon and channel the Fel. The Fel consumes and absorbs these Alternate Realities, effectively forming the function of a Cosmic Janitor, taking what does not live and thus cannot be turned into more Fel and turning it into matter to allow the Demons access to metals, landmasses and other useful items, and either kills or corrupts everything living, turning them into more fuel for the Fel or reshaping them into useful additions to the Demonic races of the Twisting Nether.
  1. The Shivarra state that their allegiance with Illidan is … complicated, while we see a great many of them have whipped the Legion into a religious frenzy around Sargeras himself, stating that he is, in fact, their ‘God’, which leads to the question, what happened to the Pantheon of the Fel? Did they consume each other for power as the slow starvation of the Primal Powers by Zoval and Denathrius in the Shadowlands gradually took affect, is there even a Pantheon of the Fel, or just one single Caretaker who uses the Shivarra, the Pit Fiends, the Moarg and the Wyrmtongues, all seem analogues to the entities we met in the Shadowlands. Pit Fiends are the equivalent of the great war-leaders of the Maldraxxus Houses, and the High Ones of the Smurfs from Bastion. Shivarra seem to be closer to a mixture of the religious fanaticism we found in Bastion and the fanatical followers of the Winter Queen in Ardenweald. Wyrmtongues seem to take the place of the Moist TOwlets and the Dredgers from Bastion and Revendreth, being small, servile labourers that serve with little complaint, and the Moarg take the role of rank-and-file soldiers, siege weapons and combat engineers, again mimicking what we see in Maldraxxus, Bastion and Revendreth.
  1. If there is indeed a Fel Pantheon, they may be as fractious and divided as the Demons themselves, and Sargeras may actually have no merely united the Demons of the Twisting Nether and races from the Material Plane corrupted into Fel-infused mockeries of themselves, but he may have killed or conquered the Pantheon of the Fel and used the same Entropic Magic that he gained from Denathrius through the Dreadlord agents he ‘recruited’ to his Legion to bind these Titan-level entities and leave them weakened enough they had no option but to remain loyal, or at least subservient, to his cause.

So, to TL:DR this, the Fel consumes all living things, from bacteria all the way up to Titan-level entities, The Twisting Nether really does touch all realities and dimensions and thus is the ultimate fate of all Alternate Timelines, given enough ‘time’ for these Timelines to collapse in on themselves or decay to the point the boundaries between them and the Twisting Nether fade away to the point a Demonic incursion can just sweep across them unopposed, the Legion serves Sargeras with religious ferocity and zeal and he may have killed or subjugated their Pantheon, leading to him becoming the new ‘Highfather’ of their twisted, Darwinian-like Realm.

What are your thoughts?

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How come we have peanut chicken, peanut pork chops and a bag of peanuts in this game, but no peanut butter?

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I’ll do a dive on the history of that after work, but I’d imagine peanut butter as we know it is a rather modern source of food.

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Well, this led me down a rabbit-hole, but considering the Inca and Aztecs were the first to make a peanut paste as a form of cooking additive, I think we can definitely throw this at, of all people, the Mogu and the Twin Empires as the originators of this plant being grown specifically as a food-crop.

The Trolls probably grew it for the rather surprising amount of nutrition, protein and monounsaturated oil, which considering their dietary requirements given their regeneration, probably made it a staple crop, albeit with a rather slow harvesting rate compared to other crops, and given their lack of need of nitrate in soil, would have made the plants incredibly useful with crop rotations to help re-invigorate and renew fields, especially when rotated with plants like clover, radishes and winter or field peas. Radishes and winter peas during the cold wet months, peanuts during the warm but still wet periods, and clover during the dryer periods as fodder for animals to consume, who will in turn poop in the fields and help fertilize them there.

With the trade between the Mogu Emperors of Pandaria and the rulers of the Trolls’ Twin Empires, it is inevitable that seed-crops would have been exchanged along with other trade-goods, and considering peanuts can be eaten both raw and cooked, and can be prepared both as food for the elderly (which is what Peanut Butter originally was developed for, given its high nutritional content and the ability to consume it without needing teeth) and the fact most types of peanuts pair well with chilli, salt, molasses, chocolate, honey and even marzipan, would have made it a very valuable and profitable crop to produce. Combine this with the speed and size to which plants and crops grow in Pandaria due to the effects of the waters from the Golden Vale, and peanuts would have remained a popular crop to grow even after the fall of the Mogu Emperors and the rise of the Jinyu, Hozen and Pandaren Empires.

Given the value of the crop, it is quite likely the newly ascendant Kaldorei Empire likewise adopted the crop as a staple part of their diet, although the pods that grew from fertilized flowers digging down into the earth might have made them less popular as they were ‘hiding’ from the sky, specifically Elune. I could also see the Tauren taking great care to seed and tend to patches of peanuts, like most nomadic peoples did, planting valuable medicinal or edible plants along their migration routes to ensure the health and safety of their people on those long migrations, and considering the Quel’dorei ended up in the Eastern Kingdoms, as well as the surviving Troll Tribes there, Peanuts were likely well known to Men, Dwarves and Gnomes, although I’d bet given the origin of the plants, there might have been bias amongst the Humans to produce the crop as an edible, but rather as a source of oil for cooking and a fodder plant for livestock.

Gnomes probably would fight you with a bent, rusty spoon considering the many uses and health benefits of the peanut crop, as peanut oil is an excellent cooking substance, but given the rather high ‘smoking point’ of the refined oil, would likely have been a rather valuable lubricant to them for their machinery and mechanical constructs.

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A lot of information to unpack in that post. To heck with daily cooking missions that have me checking on kimchi pots and collecting rice cakes. I want peanut butter cookies.

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This kind of is what the fel gives back, more of itself. It doesn’t consume and destroy the energy from existence. Life sort of does this too, consuming and giving more of itself.

The lack of a pantheon for fel and being the recycler of existence in all realities seem like separate things to me.

Here is my thought; perhaps there is no fel pantheon because the pantheon thing is not something that is part of the grand design set forth amongst the cosmic forces. The pantheon of order is something these fake gods decided to make up and use for their purposes.

The whole pantheon of death is something i think players labeled them as. They operate more as custodians in a machine than the titans do. They also are open about being set up by the first ones, but the titans are not. So, they seem different enough to me to not be the same type of thing. If they are indeed different, then that could indicate how pantheons are not a standard for each cosmic force.

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It could also be conceived that what people considered a “pantheon” is arbitrary. Consider the “Loa of Change” that was just recently introduced and who, by all accounts is quite unusual. Have they always been or are they new? And our favorite loa “Bwonsamdi” who used to be a mortal priest. Tie that in what the idea of the Death Pantheon being more akin to machines or constructs than what many would consider ‘gods of death’, and I think you have your hint. There are not ‘gods’ per se so much as powerful individuals or groups who command respect/authority. Whether granted, constructed, or taken.

That is my two cents anyway lol

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I’m gonna be shooting from the hip here with some possibilities, please be gentle when throwing furniture at my head.

I’d argue the opposite, that these two points are critically interlinked. The Fel is both a tool to cleanse the cosmos of unnecessary or dangerous alternate timelines, and a danger because like any fire without control, it has the potential to cause tremendous harm, and without a Pantheon or some other form of control, it has run wild.

Certainly, we can lay a huge amount of blame at the cloven hooves of Denathrius and his Dreadlords for helping the various Demonic Races of the Twisting Nether ‘leaping’ into the Material Plane and other layers of reality, but the Demons are already highly aggressive and prone to predation on anything that is even slightly weaker than they are, or that they feel they can betray safely. But given that, up until recently, the ‘Great Cycle’ of life creating things, them dying, and their souls fueling the Shadowlands who then fairly portioned off that Anima to all of the Primal Powers, any conflicts between the Primal Powers of Arcane, Void, Light, Fel and Life seemed to be reduced to small-scale skirmishes and the occasional argy-bargy that might spin off an Alternate Timeline, or scenes like we saw in Shadowlands, where the Void attempted to break into Bastion, and the Light threw a rager in Revendreth because the Dreadlords were mucking around in the Light’s own realm.

For the most part, the Titans held sway in the Material Plane and the other Primal Powers basically kept to their own realms.

Actually, it does make me wonder, was Sargeras always a Titan? I mean an Arcane Titan? Or was he always a Fel Titan, and the reason Aman’thul calls him ‘brother’ is more to do with how all the members of the various Pantheons all seem to be inter-related to each other or in relationships with each other, and may have been a singular faction at first, created by the First Ones, before personal feuds and ideological splits caused them to fracture into Pantheons? We already know that the Chronicles are Titanified Propaganda materials spewed out by Odyn to lionize the Titans and either erase or demonize the positive points of the other Primal Powers.

For all we know, Sargeras was always a Fel Titan and Odyn wrote him into the Chronicles as a ‘Fallen’ Titan because it was the simplest way to keep the artificial narrative he’d concocted for the Chronicles, and it would also serve to make sure Sargeras and all his minions would be perceived with negative bias by anyone exposed to said Chronicles. It would explain the worship of him by the Demonic Races, both Natural and Uplifted.

Now the Chronicles tell us he was considered the noblest of the Titans and the ‘Defender of All’, but the Chronicles are the ‘truth’, but they lie by omission and through leaving gaps through which logic-leaps and reader-bias are used to cover awkward or potentially damaging topics, such as the ‘progress’ of the Black Empire and the advancements of the other Primal Powers.

For all we know, Sargeras might very well be the leader of the Fel Pantheon, and always has been. We know that Eonar and Elune are lovers, and quite close emotionally despite Life being Chaotic and Arcane being Order, we know Aman’thul (or at least highly suspect him) of trading the secrets of Temporal Magic with The Primus of the Shadowlands Pantheon in exchange for something, but we’re never told exactly what. It could be that Sargeras existed to purge and prune dangerous alterations to the Timeline and, during a period before the Primal Powers went into open warfare against one another for control of Azeroth, he did indeed take Aggramar under his wing as an apprentice, since Aggramar is portrayed as quite inexperienced in actual conflict, and the two became brothers-in-arms, with Aggramar serving as Sargeras’s lieutenant during the war against the Demons.

It could be that, just like Zoval, just like Denathrius, there was revolt amongst the Fel Pantheon and Demons serving this rebel, or rebellion, escaped out into the other planes, and Sargeras required assistance in stopping them from burning all of creation down. Aggramar, being powerful but inexperienced, would make for a fine companion with Sargeras, whom the Titan could learn from and become and experienced and weathered soldier in the process, further strengthening the Titan Pantheon in the process. And somewhere in this conflict, Sargeras was either exposed to, or contacted by, Zoval or Denathrius via the Dreadlords and was educated on the nature of this great ‘Flaw’ in the Cycle that had driven Zoval into open revolt against the Creators and Denathrius to rebel in secret.

This would explain the ‘betrayal’ of Sargeras as perceived by the Titans, since while Sargeras might have been ‘Chaotic’, he was a servant of the Cycle and kept ‘Order’ by pruning and consuming alternate timelines and preventing temporal paradoxes from corrupting or destroying the One True Timeline. And by painting Sargeras as a Titan, the Chronicles also conveniently allow themselves to ignore and ‘white-wash’ all other Pantheons from existence.

The Pantheon of Death is, by Danuser and Co, equivalent to the Titans, which means they are equal to the Titans in most ways. Furthermore, the Winter Queen is the ‘Sister’ of Elune, and Eonar is the lover of Elune, so this adds further interconnective narrative to the concept of each Primal Power having a ‘Pantheon’ that was created and assigned to oversee and guide each layer of reality.

I’d put your argument into reverse here. The Pantheon of Death, the ‘Eternal Ones’ in their own words, are indeed servants of the Cycle and stay in their realm, which begs the question, since Odyn’s own writings state that the First Ones ‘Gifts’ to the Titans are to be lionized and attributed to the Titans themselves as ‘Mortals would not be able to conceive such enlightened beings’, where were the Titans supposed to be?

If the Eternal Ones were meant to stay in the Shadowlands, why are the Titans not in the Realm of the Arcane? Why have they abandoned their posts to come to the Material Plane instead, and if they haven’t abandoned their posts, who or what is manning the helm back home? Is Aman’thul the actual High Father, or is he a servant of the ‘True’ Titan Pantheon, and the Titans we have come to learn of are just projections of, or worse yet, servants of this ‘True Titanic Pantheon’? Lesser members sent down into our layer of reality to ensure events unfold as they are supposed to, with Aman’thul going rogue and subtly diverting the timeline until he got caught in his own web and got his entire squad clapped by Sargeras?

We saw Lightbulb Boi get turned into a new Arbiter of Souls, its entirely possible the old Pantheons have fallen or been toppled and, unlike Peg-a-goose, didn’t have access to a First One facility such as Zereth Mortis, might never have been able to create a new ‘member’ of the Pantheon. It appears to require a World Soul (or a compatible Mortal Soul and a massive amount of Anima) and a First One Construct to create a new Titan or Titan-esque entity capable of functioning along the lines that the First Ones planned for, and if the Demons literally did kill off most of their own Pantheon during a revolt or a civil war between the Fel Pantheon, it would explain why the Twisting Nether is such a messed up place, its literally a dystopian hellscape because there’s no Pantheon to regulate the realm like the Eternal Ones do the Shadowlands, and with nobody there to take charge of the anima or direct it to where it needs to go, there’s nothing to fuel the Fel properly, meaning the Demons have to invade and actively convert the Living into Fel to sustain themselves and whatever remains of their civilisation(s), hence also why they have to find, corrupt and convert suitable mortal races to take up the slack of missing caste-races they may have lost to old First One facilities breaking down due to age and battle-damage.

This could also have been the reason the Legion went after the Titans so hard, because if they could corrupt and control Titanic races, such as the progenitors of the Doomguard who the Titans had enslaved and turned into trackers and blood-hounds attuned to ‘sacrificial magic’, then its likely that these races would then be produced in Titan facilities. Take those races, get them to take over the facilities in turn and produce Fel-tainted versions, and the Legion would be able to spread its influence and possibly find ways to repair or even replaced damaged First One installations within the Twisting Nether.

A further Rogue Thought, do we have any proof that the Twisting Nether was always a place of madness and chaos? Or are we just seeing a realm that was so utterly and completely decimated by a cosmos-shaking conflict that reality itself broke down and became such a mad conglomeration rather than a sane and orderly processing center designed to handle and contain temporal paradoxes and dangerous alternate timelines? A realm where all but one of its Guardians and Caretakers were toppled or destroyed by rogue agents or conflicts with the other Pantheons, until the ‘cleansing flame’ of the Fel instead became a toxic and ravenous scourge to all of creation, not just the dangerous parts?

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pantheons are dumb. especially when they can be identified and killed so then its like “what now?”

everything just keeps going to whatever the default value is

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I mean, the Pantheons being taken down one-by-one, by each other, by rebellious servants, by malfunctioning First One facilities, all make for a compelling story to me. What happens to the cosmos when the caretakers keep falling and failing, and those that step up to take their place, either out of hubris or desperation, have no way to properly shoulder this mantle of responsibility?

Is this just the First Ones’ plan falling apart without them there to continually micro-adjust their plans, or is it the machinations of this mysterious ‘7th’ Primal Power that was so dangerous that all of the 6 Primal Powers we’re familiar with united to disperse it and keep it sealed away?

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But he wasn’t pruning other timelines, he was just focused on our worldsoul. The only instance i can think about alternate timeline shenanigans i can think of are dragon related.

This is a better way to put it, but it still feels like different things between first ones and titans. Dannuser said they are equal, but that could just mean in power rather than purpose. Tin hat to this question though, I’d say the answer is in that Dreadlord book in Revendreth. Titans left their post because they were shown a threat to the cosmic balance, where there was none. And, since the agents of Danathrius were from Shadowlands, they didn’t bother doing something similar for the Eternal ones to go hunting for.

If it had any order to it, wouldn’t it be no longer a place that’s opposite to the Order/Arcane realm?

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I’m going off of the old phrase that the Twisting Nether ‘touched all timelines and realities’, and Prince Malchezaar saying that ‘all realities and all dimensions’ were open to him, and my theory that the Twisting Nether functions as the end-point for all Alternate Timelines, regardless of which Primal Power has control over it or is continuing to prop it up.

And that is what makes me think that the Pantheons are either dead or in hiding. Chaos is useful to create new solutions to arising problems, but uncontrolled Chaos will inevitably topple even the most sturdy systems and overwhelm their redundancies. The Void Lords have a reason for their shenanigans, but the Fel? Fel without a steady supply of Anima from Life and Death (and possibly the Alternate Timeline angle) will literally burn itself out because it cannot naturally replenish itself. Out of all the Primal Powers, the Fel has the least reason to upend the cycle because the worst thing it can do is win, because then it consumes itself and all of Creation goes poof as a result.

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That last bit reminds me a lot of the discussion of how in Warhammer 40k the worst thing for the Chaos gods to do is win.

Overall there are a lot of really interesting points brought up here. And it’s definitely something to think about. However, if I had to hazard a guess about any of this we will probably not know for certain OR it will be something that is supposed to be unexpected when revealed…Just based upon the fact that World of Warcraft is not known for its overwhelming narrative complexity… there have been so many soft and hard retcons over the years…the most likely answer that will be given is probably hints at something else. After all, we didn’t know until Dragonflight came out that there are other capitals (Zenith) of cosmic forces except in a throw-away bit of reading in a book in a dungeon. Which, if history suggests true, can easily be retconned.

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