Shadowlands lore still hurts me to my core

Lore Story Forum
#1

I get they tried to say “oh look bro there is unlimited after lives these are just the houses that look after the souls.”
I mean, come on. really? Also, making the troll loa just a small area? Troll afterlife should be WILD af, like upside down pyramids and dinosaur gods that are as big as the sky and floating pyramids and all that jazz.

And i absolutely hate how death is just a “realm” you can go to at will. and it’s slightly disturbing for all the characters to know all about death and what happens and can freely travel between the realms.

Maldraxxas was an ok idea but i would have rather not see it. I would have rather only heard about it. Then they turned it into a quarky area where the necromancers and lichs give life advice about how to be a good person? blah I would have rather seen them as a evolution of a vicious scourge.

and revendreth was ok. but i would have rather seen those races as mortal beings and that whole area as a far off land in a new zone.

Just some of the ideas they played with are uncomfortable and they just didn’t know where to take it besides “This character is quarky, this character is edgy and quarky.” like they’re all cartoon characters.

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#2

Also don’t forget that some denizens aren’t bound to stay within the SLs, why the Kyrian are the obvious example but Drakka shows us that even the Maldraxxi aren’t bound to the SLs. . . . Also still hate how they changed scourge architecture to be from Maldraxxus

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#3

I get by people not too invested in nature lore don’t get just how damaging Ardenweald actually is to the way nature was depicted in Warcraft lore. But it genuinely has soiled every concept tied to nature in one form or another, and it’s only redeeming quality is semi decent aesthetics- but incredibly bland and generic ones, honestly, that already woulda worked as a part of the Dream’s own aesthetics.

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#4

Oh come now it wasn’t just nature that got ruined, we all had to savor the bitter draft that SLs peddled by uprooting a lot of things we loved. As I have lamented in another one of these forum threads SLs really gave a middle finger to DKs, and awesome stuff like the helm of domination.

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#5

True- Ardenweald is just one of the only ones i see people try to defend because ‘aesthetic’ even tho THAT AESTHETIC ALREADY EXISTED IN THE DREAM ANYWAYS.

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#6

Aesthetic is not a good defense for something that thrashes lore, like I am sure there are people that defend Maldraxxus for it’s aesthetic but I don’t like it. Cause it is basically nostalgia bait for people who played WC3 and Wrath “Oh hey! This looks just like the scourge stuff!”

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#7

No races are bound to stay in the Shadowlands. They can leave at will. They just choose not to. Firstly because they have their duties to perform, and secondly because it’s not actually easy to move between the Shadowlands and the other realms, including reality.

The Brokers literally move between realms at will, capturing creatures to fight in the Maldraxxi Arena.

If Kleia and say, Renethal wanted to travel to Azeroth they could. They’d just need the Brokers to open a portal for them. And the brokers aren’t going to just open a portal for anyone, a deal would need to be made, and it’s unclear what the price for a service like that would be.

#8

Do you not see how antithetical that is to what is supposed to be the afterlife? No matter how difficult it MAY be to leave the fact that they can without some necromancer to pull them out is ludicrous.

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#9

I don’t think so.

Honestly I think it’s actually neat that beings from the Shadowlands can return to Azeroth either permanently through resurrection or via a Broker portal and if they do so via the latter, they don’t lose their memories of what happened within the Shadowlands and upon their death, should they die on Azeroth, they’d just be sent back to the Shadowlands, much like how a Demon is sent back to the Twisting Nether when it dies.

#10

It makes Necromancy and Resurrection a more damaging ordeal as it wipes the Memories of those brought back via that method rather than through deals with the Brokers.

In otherwords Necromancy and Resurrection are shortcuts that lead to less savory results.

#11

It still haunts me even as I play Dragonflight. The quest where you summon the ancestor’s spirits for the centaur made me question the logistics.

Did the Kyrian forget to pickup the ancestors’s spirits? Did the Arbiter “sorting hat” not put them anywhere?

The whole concept of the Shadowlands, as the team implemented it, is horrible. How can it even be fixed without retcons?

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#12

I mean it would make sense considering Warcraft 3 Acolyte summoned their buildings. So its clear they were summoning it from Maldraxxus.

They have given some half answers to it. That there are powers beyond the shadowlands that let spirits stay in the physical world. A Broker wanted to know why Baine’s mother was able to stay but couldn’t get a clear explanation.

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#13

Coulda just as easily have been summoning it from Northrend, tbf. Blizz are the ones who said it was nerubian architecture, not from the afterlife lol.

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#14

My thoughts exactly on it

#15

Sounds almost as if the Shadowlands is for Souls who are highly civilized while the Physical Plane is for Souls who are Primitive and tied to Traditions involving Ancestors.

Infact in Rise of the Horde it is stated that offing yourself causes you to be unable to join the Ancestors so there are rules that decides who stays as an Ancestral Spirit and who is forced to go to the Shadowlands.

Incidentally places like Duskwood, the Plaguelands and Karazhan seem to shackle Ghosts to their location so they must be kept in mind as well.

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#16

Nope, because not all souls go to the Shadowlands, something that Blizzard already confirmed but people keep ignoring either because they’re not aware of it, or they just want to bash Shadowlands a bit more and choose to be ignorant of it.

#17

Do you have any references for this?

#18

That one still annoys me. Scourge took the architecture from the nerubians once they won the War of the Spider. And now the Nerubians stole it from Maldraxxus? HOW. Blizzard never said how, nor why.

Kyrian Watchers can tell when a soul is ready to move on, even if the soul itself thinks they aren’t. This is from the Kyrian campaign where we journey alongside Kleia in helping her collect her first soul. They also have to respect other forces. Either when they claim the soul first, such as the Val’kyr or Bwonsamdi, or if the soul is being anchored to the mortal world by some other force. That is from the Kyrian only WQ. An example of the latter would be the souls being pulled into Dark K’ure.

3 Likes
#19

Don’t think about it bro, even in game, they have you just do BFA! XD

#20

I think the Kyrian are the worst bit for me.

First, there’s the Watchers. These are, like, the 3rd retcon for Spirit Healers. But now they magically know “when it’s your time”. If it isn’t “your time” they resurrect you.
What does it mean to “be your time”? Who knows.
It honestly would have been better to not try and canonize Spirit Healer rezzing.
Or at least leave it as it was previously.

Then there’s how weirdly stringent, yet willful they seem to be.
They stress that they cannot interfere with The Cycle.
Yet sometimes they’ll bring dead kids back to life just because.

A necromancer can disrupt the cycle enough for the Kyrians to resurrect a warrior to kill the Necromancer. Yet the Kyrians were no where when it came to the Scourge and the Legion.

Kyrians just make things messy.

Also, lol at the fact that you can bypass Vampland just by being super good at murder.

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