That wasn’t an alternative WotA. It was still the one in the main universe. Our impact made such minor changes that it didn’t matter. Nozdormu even mentions that the moment he lost his power, the Dragon Soul returned back to the exact time he stole it. Therefore it was never gone in the first place. Think of the time heist in Avengers Endgame. The only Caverns of time instance that is an alt timeline is End Time. Where it is a possible future.
This is a bit tin-foil hat-ish (especially since it is expecting this to have been thought of by Blizz), but I think what they were going for was this:
Madraxxus → Yogg-Saron → Nerubians → The Scourge
I say this because Yogg-Saron is referred to as the God of Death, while this is never brought up or explored in-game in ANY way, I think they were trying to have their retcon and their previous canon at the same time by (poorly) implying that there was a link there.
If so, then the link was so poorly done that most just took it for a wholesale retcon, that said, I could be missing something where it was, in fact, stated to be a full retcon and not a 50/50.
I can get where you are coming from with this, but considering Bolvar could peer into the SLs which would imply Ner’zhul could as well there would be no need to pull said architecture from some spiders He beat.
More then likely it’s what you said, they wanted to have their cake and eat it to. But the addition of Bolvar being able to see into the SLs opens up problems, also the plague of undeath coming from maldraxxus would imply Ner’zhul ripped other things from there.
Honestly Shadowland is a fan fiction coming from an incompetent part timer rather than a professionnal writer, no more, no less.
It was obvious at the very beginning, with the cinematic of Bastion.
Uther took Arthas’s soul with Deva, ok but there is a “little” problem: All the souls released from Frostmourne with Terenas speaking to Tirion at the exact same time as well as… the part of Uther that was taken by Frostmourne.
Don’t you think that at least this Uther would have something to say to his other part?
Back to Legion, we do see Uther’s soul who was “bursting of health” compared to his Forsworn counterpart.
We also saw Arthas as a DK four times, no explanations given at Shadowland.
In short: The incompetent writer(s) completely disregarded everything related to death even until Legion.
It also destroyed the legacy of Warcraft III, going as far as erasing literally Arthas’s soul from the universe in the least respectful way possible.
All in all, Shadowland can’t be canon by any mean and Danuser can claim everything he want on the fact that we saw nearly nothing of the afterworld, the fact is that we saw enough to no longer take anything related to death seriously or with a headache.
This one illustrate the problem of consistency: If the Naaru can take the souls of their believers to their own realm, what about the others paladins?
They should go there as well but it’s not the case.
Even worse: The lightforged, you can’t found a being closer to the Light and yet i found one or two in Bastion so… why the Naaru didn’t take them?
It simply makes no sense.
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It still makes me rage at how stupid it was that they showed the Kyrians just willingly bringing souls to Oribos only for them to be KNOWINGLY sent straight to the Maw. There is an. Entire. Questline. Showing them just doing it with the handwaved excuse at the end being bUT tHe PuRpOsE. You are knowingly and willingly damning/feeding innocent souls to your enemy AND NOTHING IN THE STORY ACTUALLY ADDRESSES THAT AS A PROPER PLOT POINT??? And nobody actually properly stops and says “hang on a minute”, not even the Primus who is supposed to be a tactical genius??? You couldnt have the Bearers just take the souls somewhere else like a waiting room afterlife???
It’s so mindnumblingly STUPID.
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This is generally what happens when you have one lead narrative designer lock in plot points, only to have another lead narrative designer step in and finish the work based off only what you’ve fleshed out so far.
It’s basically what happened to the Belko Experiment.
For those unfamiliar, since I’m not sure how many watch horror, the Belko Experiment was written by James Gunn, but by the time it came around to direct the film he was busy with his work in the MCU and so Wolf Creek director Greg McLean took over. Because of that the film has been noted to give tonal whiplash. James Gunn wrote in a bunch of dark humor, implying that it was supposed to be a more lighthearted horror movie with a few gags here and there, aka office space meets battle royale, but Greg McLean’s direction took what was there way too seriously, which isn’t really faulting Greg McLean, he’s just used to directing much darker, gritty horror films like Wolf Creek which is a really creepy, horrific movie.
That’s what we get here with Shadowlands, because all the major plot points of Shadowlands were already locked in long before Steve Danuser was in a position to actually change anything. He didn’t get the role until a year after BFA launched and by then Shadowlands was already deep into production. He could make some minor changes and try to salvage what he could, but he couldn’t scrap everything and start again, not without seriously delaying the expansion, which he couldn’t do.
Blizzard overplayed their hand in SL, not so much because of the main afterlife zones, but because of Zereth Mortis. It seems like an attempt to insert Platonic Idealism into WoW: The place beyond space and time containing the blueprints of everything in the physical world and the afterlife, and the true birthplace of every soul in the WoW universe. Such a place should fill the player with awe, but in the end it’s just another hub to do dailies. A more grandiose version of Mechagon Island, if you will (“A conveniently placed robot island nobody heard about until now, but is also super important and legendary”).
But that aside, I’ll always appreciate SL for the Revendreth and Mawsworn mounts and transmogs. Returning from the Realms of Death with gloomy armor and a big skeleton mount feels like a throwback to the end of Wotlk.
I was under this impression as well. Yogg, or whoever Nerubians worshipped, “pierced the veil” and saw the Shadowlands (mainly Maldraxxus). They saw what they liked and it helped influence their architecture, which was then later used by the Scourge when the dead spiders were assimilated.
I don’t even think the Zereth stuff is a bad twist in a vacuum, it’s just a little too high-fantasy for Warcraft and I don’t trust them to pull it off satisfactorily given recent track records.
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The idea of necromancy coming from the afterlife is weird to me. Necromancy is a magic that defies Death as a cosmic force. It is all about shackling souls outside the cycle of life and death, and making unruly corpses refuse to be lay down and rot. Why would the realm of death be its source?
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Cause blizzard writing doesn’t understand what would be natural for a realm of death?
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I mean, why wouldn’t it be?
Magic has to come from somewhere, that energy has to come from somewhere. It has to have an origin point. The use of all arcane magic comes from the Realm of Order. The use of all light magic comes from the Realm of Light.
So why wouldn’t Necromancy come from the Realm of Death?
Ironically enough Sindane makes it clear that Necromancy is not limited to one Cosmic Realm but can be preformed using power from any Cosmic Realm.
Light can preform Necromancy as can Void, Life/Blood, Decay and Fel.
Indeed it seems as if Decay is tied to most Necromancy considering Drust Necromancy, Maldraxxi Necromancy, Blood Magic(which is tortured Life and we all know that tortured Magic is supposed to be tortured by Decay), Fel and the Emerald Nightmare.
Necromancy for the most part comes from Decay.
I honestly never really liked how WoW handled its afterlife concepts before SL and after SL…Only made me not like it more.
I could write a long list of all my problems but most are probably already covered here. All I can say is I am glad its over and I am just going to use a lot of head canon when it comes to WoW’s afterlife.
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Because realistically, it’s a reactive force that logically cant exist without life.
Why does Arcane need to come from somewhere either? Things can simply come into existence in the universe. Why does life need to some from some cosmic realm rather than it simply existing from the fundamental conflicts that make the Warcraft universe?
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That’s what I dont get. Why isnt the ‘life realm’ just ordinary reality where everything is already alive? Are the denizens of the life realm doubly alive? You’ve heard about double death now get ready for… uh…
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The Emerald Dream I think has the only concepts I can rationally see? Semi-Afterlife for specific creatures (but honestly, thanks to the awful retcon that is Ardenweald, the fact it’s only some and not all makes no sense?) that contained all evolutionary possibilities, but also just an underlying realm representing the interconnectedness of all living things on a primordial level, past the illusions we create in civilization to differentiate ourselves from other people or things.
It shouldn’t necessarily be life’s source, anymore than the death realm should be the source of the energy of death. Those two are the weirdest parts of the post-Chronicles cosmology, imo.
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Because you can’t make something out of nothing.
There has to be an origin point for everything even if that origin point is nothing but a bunch of compressed gas that ignites and creates something crazy.
The First Ones created the cosmos as we know it, they created the various cosmic planes and within those cosmic planes are the energies which have created the magic we know of and use. That’s the lore. So why? Because the First Ones said so when they made the cosmic planes.
As for the cosmic realm of life, I’d imagine that life there is much more primordial. Not your standard garden variety druidism or something that looks like the Emerald Dream but a place where life grows and mutates, unchecked, something closer to this if I’m being honest with how I imagine it:
Well, shadowlands doesn’t really work as a death realm. If death were a cosmic power akin to other cosmic powers it would want promote itself causing death. Shadowlands is more like a bus station whose only purpose was to shuttle souls. Zovaal as death was just a glitch in the machinery.
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Even Westfall has a lighthouse ghost just casually haunting it, not evidently to do with the Scourge or the power of Karazhan or the Scythe. This lore tends to benefit from not waving away the fog of mystery, because doing so usually reveals nothing but holes at the cost of all the intrigue.
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