Honestly wasn’t paying attention to SL lore but I just finished reading the Sylvie novel. Her whole motivation was fixing the sorting hat so did Pelagos improve it? Also, did the Jailer ever tell Sylvanas exactly how he would remake the Shadowlands? Like any specifics at all or was she just like ok the system is so broken I’ll just do whatevs you say.
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who cares?
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With a new Arbiter, souls are no longer falling into the Maw, with Pelagos directing the flow of souls to the afterlives they deserved. He also vowed to give each soul a choice in their afterlife and rejected the use of the Maw.
So Sylvanas got her wish in that souls have a choice over being forced somewhere.
As far as I know, he didn’t go into the details on how he would fix the system.
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Can souls visit their family or once they choose their afterlife thats it?
The orc heritage quest shows us that spirits can indeed visit. I assume that a shaman has to call them or a ritual performed, but spirits can definitely visit.
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What about visit each other in the Shadowlands? Sylvie was so upset about her family being apart in the afterlife so I hope they allow visiting now.
It’s possible. But with an infinite number of afterlives, you’d have to know which afterlife they ended up in in order to visit them.
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In theory Pelagos is injecting mortal compassion into the sorting process, as Arbiter 1.0 was sort of a cruel judge, and Arbiter 2.0 was an unfeeling automaton. He said he would take the wishes of each soul into consideration, instead of ignoring them as his predecessors did.
We will see how long his compassion endures having to witness every terrible deed of every soul that ever lives from hereon out.
Zovaal was weird. He seemed to have one motivation to “unshackle death” to consume the cosmos, and then towards the end they decided to change it to try to make him some sort of antihero Sargeras knockoff. In any event, he lied through his teeth to Sylvanas and then manipulated her into agreeing with his false narritive by cherry picking situations that he knew would pluck at her heartstrings and showing them to her.
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I think Shadowlands is going to remain one of those situations where attempts to mitigate the damage done by the expansion make it perpetually unclear what is true/factual going forward.
I feel like a lot of people would be volunteering to become Forsaken if it were taken as it is, even with Pelagos in charge of SoulUber.
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You would think it a crime in the realms of the dead to resist your forced attendance, but we don’t see Kyrian plucking random Scourge up and forcing them to be judged, so it seems Undeath is simply viewed as a extremely long term life extension.
Not to mention the fact that the Shadowlands views the incoming souls as a RESOURCE which they depend on to function. They extract your personality little by little to power the very world you inhabit.
That’s like Azeroth demanding that the Horde and Alliance return to war, because every Orc and Human who falls on the battlefield, bleeds all over the ground and the blood absorbed by the soil sustains her. Would you still view Azeroth as worth protecting?
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That depends. Does she punctuate the demand with “zug zug!” or not?
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Some catapults, a dash of Burn It, accompanied by several Zug Zugs and off to war we go 
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Not just with them, not sure what expansion that got added in, but also in Dragonflight, immediately after Shadowlands, with the Centaur, for example, we see spirits running around all over the place… which if Shadowlands was “cannon” wouldn’t really work as they’d be getting grabbed up and taken
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The Grimoire of the Shadowlands does…technically… answer this. It is just a very insulting answer: Ancestral Spirits are just echoes of souls, and not the real deal. Its just tribal societies are too dumb to realize this.
Its the same book that went on about how elemental magic is the stuff of primitives, so… yeah…
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That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. There’s a lot of passive aggressive, and just bluntly insulting, bs related to beliefs in this game. It’s been there all the way back to vanilla it was balanced by the devs at least pretending it was just cultural bias on the part of the quest giver/speaker only in recent expansions they’ve stopped trying to present the other beliefs as just as valid.
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Shadowlands ain’t real. I’ve read the theories.
All we know is that, at the final moment of sucess, the jailer starts proclaiming “all shall serve” him. This didn’t fit with what Sylvanas was going for, she tries to kill him and says “I will never serve”. Watch the Jailer raid finale cinematic.
In the end, the Arbiter gets replaced with Pelagos who vows to arbitrate with compassion. As you know from the book, this was one of Sylvanas’ objections to the old system. But there is no indication of how close (or not) that was to what she had wanted.
I would say it would be more like Azeroth demaning that twice a year every soul on the planet gives a couple quarts a blood. And you have to be given a job you have to work for the rest of eternity. (Not sure if they let you choose that now.)
This is Lava Eel Vore erasure and I will not tolerate it
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Danuser and Golden and Copeland and Afrasiabi and Ion will one day pay for their contempt against the global south and nonwestern religiosity made manifest in this video game
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