The question on whether or not any given Scourge undead has a soul or not is muddied beyond repair because that’s what introducing the concept of free willed undead on a large scale does. It leads to questions like “so what’s the fundamental difference between Scourge undead and Forsaken undead aside from circumstance” that the writers were never prepared to answer.
Free will is not relevant. We know how undeath works. It attaches a soul to a body, imperfectly, except in the Shadowlands.
So what’s the difference between a skeleton and a ghoul and a Forsaken?
That’s also irrelevant. We could discuss their mental state, and their, yes, free will, but the mechanics of their creation are similar.
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Some of them do not have souls cuz they’re just random bones doing a little pew pew dance
Like that one boss in Scholomance
He’s not a dude, he’s just a bone construct
But again, Blizzard has failed at the metaphysics and it’s falling apart now lol
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Derek will return and it will be glorious!
He will rally the Fogsail Freebooters and set up shop in Theramore.
According to the bfa mission table the horde considers rebuilding it.
I assume you mean because blizz failed to explain why Azerothian necromancy is different from maldraxxi necromancy/fleshcrafting? 
Among other things but yes
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I’m guessing you still remember brief glimpses. Almost like a dream. Heck, Ysera seems to know she has been in Ardenweald before.
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So Azerothian Necromancy is a blending of other types of magic—Maldraxxian Necromancy, and Domination Magic, with likely a dash of Legion Fel magic tossed in for some spice. Zovaal spread those hybridized teachings through his material realm agents on Azeroth.
Maldraxxian Necromancy isn’t generally about raising and controlling the dead in the same way the Cult of the Damned did. It is about the manipulation of anima and anima flesh. Manipulation and control of a soul is the purview of Domination Magic. The Maldraxxi dont control ensouled beings, only soulless constructs.
It seems like once you gain a body of anima flesh your soul becomes infused into it and cannot be disentangled so easily. Your anima flesh “remembers”, so unless you purge it of memory, even after “dying” if you infuse it with a jolt of anima using maldraxxian necromantic techniques it will hop up and carry on its merry way. Rather or not what wakes up is the same person or a sort of philosophical zombie is a matter of debate I suppose.
Hey now, Orcish Necrolytes were combining Void Necromancy from a Dark Naaru + Xalatath whispers
I dont really know how to rectify that one, so I have to chalk it up to “Oh blizzard, you’re so silly.”
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What does the development of the plague have to do with Sylvanas forbidding or not forbidding Forsaken to (a) refuse to serve her or (b) think about their past lives as humans?
None of her plans would have worked had any significant number of Forsaken done either of those things.
So either she was unreasonably confident/incredibly lucky that the Forsaken getting 100% completely unfettered free will just so happened to conveniently align with everything she needed to execute her plans no matter how morally reprehensible, or their free will was largely an illusion and they never truly had it.
Blizzard chose to go with the latter because frankly, it’s a better choice than the former (which is that everything coincidentally worked out for her for no reason)
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And mind you, it’s not like Sylvanas manipulating the Forsaken’s “free will” should it not end up where she wanted it is unprecedented. As early as Vanilla she was assassinating Forsaken who wanted to reconnect with the Alliance.
Amazing topic here. this should have been one of the main focuses of the SL but… here we are.
First: Which plans? Sylvanas’s plans have changed more often than the definition of orcish honor over the course of WoW.
Second: It’s true that raising people into undeath only to have most of them run off and do their own thing would have been useless at best and counterproductive at worst. If it wasn’t working, she’d have stopped doing it, so her confidence was not, at least after a certain point, unreasonable. As for the second issue, the game has already demonstrated that allowing the Forsaken to think about their past lives did not undermine Sylvanas’s status in any way, shape, or form. Because it was allowed and even encouraged from Vanilla up to the publication of Before the Storm.
First: Hiring adventurers to track down a small group of what she would see as traitors is not proof that she was manipulating the entire society on a large scale. All evidence points to the majority of Forsaken being actually loyal.
Second: The problem wasn’t that they wanted to “reconnect with the Alliance.” I doubt she’d have wasted resources on tracking them down if that had been the only problem. She didn’t send anyone after that guy who went and joined the Argent Dawn, for example. The problem was that they made off with some highly classified information that she didn’t want the Alliance to know about. And before you say that project was highly sketchy, yes, of course it was, but that’s beside the point.
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“It is said that only the most powerful can dominate the wills of the risen”- flavor text of Brynja’s beacon…Brynja being one of the Valkyr that raised Delaryn and Sira. They wouldn’t put that line there for no reason.
I think some souls on Azeroth work differently and don’t go to the shadowlands. Remember when you die and you see that huge swirl in the sky? Something keeps us away from getting sucked into it.
It is because a Kyrian has to collect your soul. You don’t get sent to the shadowlands on the moment of your death. Since spirit healers are now Kyrians as of shadowlands, they say that it is not your time and they can resurrect you. We see an example of this in the limbo world quest with a mantid. Where the kyrian resurrected the mantid to give him a second try at killing a necromancer attacking his nest.
Because Kyrians have to manually come to your soul, other forces can collect it if they get to it first. Such as the Val’kyr. Who have the advantage of being able to move between reality, the veil and the shadowlands unlike Kyrians who cannot enter reality. However that doesn’t stop them from collecting a soul on the moment of death. Arthas is one such example.
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