My thing with Zovaal, I hope we beat him, but I hope we beat him at the last possible second and his big rewrite reality beam goes off. I want to wake up on a completely different Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.
I know it won’t happen, but hey, it would be cool.
This is my understanding of the sequence of events, from halfway paying attention through cutscenes and skimming quest text and reading exactly zero books or lore deep-dives:
In the beginning, there were SuperMakerDudes who made some other dudes who made some dudes in turn, and eventually you get down to a level where the dudes that they made were our characters. It will likely turn out that there are at least five more layers of mysterious makers and creators hanging out out there, coinciding with whatever Marvel puts out over time.
When the us-level critters died, they needed to do something with the wispy vaguely person-shaped energy left over that shed valuable Spirit Gunk. They made the Shadowlands, and put in an Arbiter - at the time, Zovaal - to judge the energy and place it into the appropriate receptacles. In those sorting facilities (Ardenweald/Bastion/Revendreth/Maldraxxus are the ones that we know of), it would be decided by another layer of denizens who had these Sigil deals if the soulbits should be returned to life, put to some kind of eternal service, or milked for the power to light up a lamp or something.
At some point, Zovaal decided that his job was dumb, the SuperMakerDudes weren’t the boss of him, and he wanted to remake reality to his liking, with blackjack, and ladies who spend time with you for pay, where - and this was the most important part - he was in charge and everyone spent all their time telling him how cool he was. Because this is freaking always what evil dudes want.
Zovaal was like, “Gimmie the sigils I’m gonna make my own deal” and the SuperMakerDudes were like, “uh, no?” And they destroyed the sphere thing in his chest that made him able to judge the Soul Gunk and banished and chained him up in a tower so that he couldn’t get out and mess things up. Then they put in a new Arbiter and flipped the switch back to “on” and went about the business of being vague and mysterious again.
Zovaal got mad and stayed mad for an unspecified amount of a really long time, but somehow he tapped in to the Maw’s power and finally started to either persuade or corrupt people and entities to follow him. He attacked and broke the new Arbiter’s chest-orb Soul Sorting Deal so that all souls would get funneled right to the Maw.
The Kyrians continued to throw souls at the clearly broken Arbiter because, and this can’t be emphasized enough, they were apparently just that dumb.
While this was going on, the Jailer also provoked unrest in the Soul Sorting Bins by getting the Kyrians to forswear their duties and attack each other, and by getting some factions in Maldraxxus to try to overthrow the others, and by funneling off all the SoulGunk that Ardenweald and Revendreth needed to function and do their thing. “Their thing” was respectively to cocoon souls in a restoration-pod-thing so that they could be reborn and to throw raging parties for their powerful elites, respectively.
Revendreth was, in particular, the leading manufacturer of Soul Goo by torturing it out of souls that needed some stepping on until they’d be nice good souls again. Their leader, the Dreadguy Sire Denathrius, continued to be the only person in the entire afterlife with a discernable personality and any sense of ironic drama about the situation, made sure that every soul was judged to be a Very Bad Soul who needed a good draining, and arranged the funneling of all siphoned Spiritual Residue to the Jailer in the Maw.
At some point Zovaal got in touch with Sylvanas and was like, “Hey babe, the world is unfair and dumb. You wanna kill all humans with me and remake the world into something where soda runs in every fountain and lunch period is three hours and there’s no homework?” And Sylvanas was like “DUDE, YES.” Nathanos gritted his teeth in a masculine fashion about this.
Sylvanas was sent for the crown of the Lich King in Icecrown to break it and sever the barrier between the world of the living and the dead, which would free the Jailer - I think. Or maybe it would just get her into the afterlife to free the Jailer. Or maybe he was already free and he just wanted that barrier brought down For Reasons.
With the barrier down, Sylvanas was like, “Hey, you wanna get the living world on board with Project New Universe? Show them how arbitrary and dumb the world is now, take away their hope by stealing their leaders. I had a whole animated deal about this after I burned a tree, it’ll really tick them off. Take that Anduin kid in particular, he’s just so blindly cheerful but I bet we can get him on our side if we explain what we’re doing, making a new fair world and all,” and Zovaal was like, “Ha ha yeah, fair, sure babe. I’ll get the kid on our side, WIIIIIIIINK,” and she was like, “What was the wink about?” And he was like “Oh nothing babe you know me I’m so random”.
With Sylvanas gone and hanging out with Zovaal, Tyrande jumped out of nowhere like, “BLARGHLE! I am consumed with RAEG!” and cut off Nathanos’s head. Zovaal most likely pocketed his soul, and also Sylvanas’s so that he’d have some leverage, and didn’t tell her that her boytoy was killed to keep her on the task of trying to sneer Anduin into giving up his hope and willingly becoming the Lich King 2.0 because she was still into the whole “free will” thing and he was willing to give her a little leeway if it meant she’d be a better little minion.
Instead of breaking everyone’s hope and making them just go “fine, whatever” to the plans to remake the universe, taking the leaders really ticked us off and sent the Heroes of Azeroth swarming into Oribos and the Soul Sorting Bins. You know, like it basically always does.
As we took down Sire Smarmypants, ending Zovaal’s supply of Red Soul Mist and went around fixing the broken Soul bins and setting loose all his prisoners, Zovaal realized he was running out of time to let everything destroy itself and decided to take direct action. He was like, “Okay, we’re done with this waiting for Golden Boy to agree to our plans business,” made the Primus that he chained up to have him make him cool toys make Anduin’s sword into a Mourneblade, and forced him into being Lich King 2: Electric Boogaloo so that he could get close enough to the well-protected Bin Leaders to get their sigils.
No, I don’t know why he had to rely on a “gotcha” exactly once, I assume it has something to do with Anduin being Super Powerful or something.
Forcing the loss of free will made Sylvanas start to go “Hmmm…this is all really familiar but I just can’t quite put my finger on it…” Right up until Zovaal basically won, got the Sigils, conjured the portal to Zereth Mortis, and was like, “MWA-HA-HA, kneel!” And Sylvanas was like, “Dude, why are you sticking around just to rub it in their faces, let’s just go and get to remaking the new Awesome Universe?” And he was like, “Yes, the new universe where everyone will SERVE ME! Hah! You didn’t know that was what I was going to do, did you? I mean, it was incredibly obvious that it was going to be something like that, just look at me, look at the things I do and the way I treat people. BOY do you look dumb right now.”
Sylvanas was like, “DAMN it, why do I always fall for the bad boys and then get surprised when it turns out all they want to do is subjugate the universe when they know it triggers me?” And wherever it was, Nathanos’s soul, banished to the FriendZone, shed a single tear. She fired a breakup arrow at Zovaal, which he caught and was like, “PFFFF. C’mon Anduin, let’s get out of here. You don’t have any of that pesky free will business so you’re my favorite minion now.”
In leaving, he threw Sylvanas’s soul at her and restored it and was like, “Good luck dealing with those dudes BTW” as the faction leaders’ chains dissolved.
Zovaal and Anduin have headed to Zereth Mortis, the new super superreally this time important area where afterlives are actually put together using the tools of the SuperMakerGuys. Tools which, one assumes, they’ll use to make the universe into the Zovaal Show, Starring: Zovaal, in which everyone else is in eternal chains because evil is never allowed to have an imagination in stories like these.
That’s pretty much the gist of what I got from the story so far.
Apparently He needs his spare keys as he lost the originals while trying to steal cookies from a sleeping gnome that chased him out of the Winterspring cottage.
Anyway long story short, the Jailer needs that spare set to let his mother-in-law out of a cell 'cause its almost Thanksgiving.
Zovaal was the Arbiter. He did the job for a while, and then he decided it was stupid and he wanted to quit.
What changed? As far as we know, nothing. He just said “lmao Zovaal smash” out of nowhere and everyone else said “no bro dont do that” and he said “no im doin it” so everyone else was like “were gonna put u in super jail” and he was like “bet” so they put him in super jail and then he was like “im still gonna do it nerds” Shadowlands
I like to think that wow ended when arthas was killed on WOTLK. After that wow lore was gone… they introduced asian pandas, make demons from mystical and evil beings to dumb creatures and then they created this ridiculous lore called shadowlands
Jailer came as WoW reset button. They can use jailer to go in any direction they desire now, because why not. Why do we have more NPS’s that are trans? Jailer did the reset that’s why? Why is Azeroth changed to look like parade? Jailer did the reset. So blizzard can do whatever they want and please who ever they want, with excuse “Jailer did the reset”
