The Elune paradox

I know blizz one time said Elune is a true God(dess). IF this is true (dubious, blizz rarely honors their own lore statements) then we have a Paradox.

Either she is a “true” God, and has immense power, and thus lets her followers get burned alive en mass without saving them, or she wanted to help her followers, but was not powerful enough to do so, making her not a “true” God, since she’s no different than say an old god or wild god.

Personally I lean toward the latter theory, since she does not appear to be malevolent.

2 Likes

You need to take into account loa are also considered gods so its a very loose term.

Elune has more direct interventions than the Light, which is a fundamental force of creation and thus logically more powerful than she is. I don’t understand this argument, honestly, it ignores events in lore for the sake of an odd ‘gotcha’ moment towards fans of kaldorei lore.

Direct Elune interventions in lore:

  1. Stonewalling Archimonde from hurting Tyrande, only causing the protection to fade when Tyrande asked.

  2. Cleansing the spirit of the giant spider on Teldrassil.

  3. Turning a Satyr back into a night elf when he fully repented and proved his purity.

  4. Empowered the PC to wipe out the last remaining corruption in Teldrassil.

  5. Smote an entire enemy group of Satyr in Desolace by way of a ritual calling on her power.

  6. Freed Ysera’s soul from the grips of the Nightmare and ushered her, apparently, to Ardenweald.

  7. Healed Shandris from death/near death at Tyrande’s plea.

  8. Spared the kaldorei suffering by lulling them into a slumber so that they wouldn’t feel pain when burned to death.

  9. Empowered Tyrande via the Night Warrior ritual.

  10. Has apparently empowered many Night Warriors over the years, each one could count as a direct intervention but we’ll stop at ten.

If we say Elune isn’t a true goddess because she doesn’t intervene all the time, then we need to hold the Light, which is presumably more powerful and has far more agents in the form of Lightspawn and the naaru, to the same standard.

By the lore we’ve seen in Ardenweald, Elune’s reach is apparently across the cosmos, which would mean that intervening on a large scale all the time is more difficult, since she’s a singular being, as opposed to the Light which is a building block of creation and thus embedded in every world. The fact that Elune can empower Night Warriors on other planets while at the same time still granting Sisters of the Moon their abilities makes her a true god, even the Titans can’t project their power to that extent, they needed to physically be at Azeroth and then grant that power to their vessels.

Elune was able to give Archimonde the proverbial middle finger via a divine protection spell from what was, conceivably, thousands of light years away. I’d say she’s a true god by most standards in fantasy.

22 Likes

Its not a gotcha moment, its a legitimate concern. Sure, Elune has all these interventions. But she’s not there when it counts. Sargeras was about to destroy Azeroth, the most important planet in the universe, did Elune do anything about it? Was she powerful enough to oppose Sargeras even? A bit after most of her followers get burned alive, and the best she can do is ease the pain of some of them.

I’d say the Titans are above her, seeing as how she was not able to do anything at all to prevent a direct attack on the world by Sargeras, and the “she works in mysterious ways” don’t cut it here, since Azeroth is so important, logically you would think she would go all out in trying to prevent him from destroying it.

I feel like you’ve answered your own question. If the writers feel no need to constrain themselves with continuity, Elune is as impotent or omnipotent as the plot demands at any given point in time.

It’s a meta answer. But all we really have in-universe is vague statements about her being a distant, kind of hands-off goddess.

9 Likes

Or god is busy

1 Like

Again, you can’t compare her to the Titans, you compare her to the Light. The Light is the other divine force in the Warcraft universe, and the more omnipresent one in the lore.

She’s quite similar to practically every other god/goddess in other fantasy settings, in that she’s not omniscient, but can hear prayers and occasionally act on them. By the definitions of pretty much every fantasy setting Warcraft pulls from or was inspired by, she’s a true goddess.

Moreover, we have no real idea how important Azeroth actually is in the cosmic scheme of things, at all. We have what Chronicle told us, but that’s from the PoV of the Titans, and of course they’re going to think that a Void corrupted Titan would be the end of the universe, they’re fairly arrogant in their thinking and constantly think they have the right to impose order on worlds. We don’t even know if Azeroth is the only Titan still sleeping, it’s just the one that was found by the Pantheon. Moreover, every single Titan came from a world that had life and went through a very long development cycle, same as Azeroth, but none seem to remember it, since they were ‘asleep’ mostly. All this stuff with Old Gods on Azeroth could very well have happened with one or more of them when they were sleeping.

Again, the lore implication is that Elune has worshippers on many different worlds that are lightyears apart. Titans aren’t gods, they can’t hear prayers, but she can, which means that by fantasy definitions, she’s a goddess. Why she doesn’t always intervene on Azeroth is another matter, but she intervenes, again, far more than the Light does, empowers all the Sisters of the Moon, Tyrande, etc, while apparently doing the same for other worlds too.

7 Likes

This doesn’t make her a “true” anything. Old Gods can do the same thing, as seen in outland when the Arakkoa tried to summon an old god into the world they had been communicating with. Whether the old god was on another planet, or in the void still, either way, it was communicating across light years.

Even Demons like Kil’jaeden can talk to people on the other side of the universe. Mentally or otherwise. As seen when he was getting Ner’zhul then Gul’dan to do his bidding on Draenor.

Both demons and old gods can also “intervene” on other planets without being physically present. Old Gods/Void beings have corrupted things without being on the same planet, like with Sethe and the pale orcs.

I’m not entirely sure this is the case. Apparently there’s only so much Elune to go around:

With Tyrande donning the mantle of the Night Warrior, much of Elune’s power is taxed. Asking for another favor is not insignificant, but I must try.

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Make_Some_Noise

Blizzard doesn’t say anything about what a True God actually is…

For all we know they are the WoW counterpart to Xel’naga!..or literally Xel’naga for that matter…

find out in the moon expansion

4 Likes

Spoilers, Elune is one of the first ones

Spoilers, “true gods” aren’t that powerful in Warcraft.

As a Shadow Priest in the Temple of Elune (Tomb of Sargeras) in Suramar, you’re given the option to attempt to drain Elune’s power using Xal’atath which results in a debuff that kills you in two ticks. Afterwards, Xal’atath has this so say:

Xal’atath: My mistake. It seems the upstart “goddess” still holds sway here. Oh well…

I suppose that Xal’atath is ancient enough that any entity that came after her would be considered an upstart, but the term goddess in quotes is interesting.

3 Likes

Something to keep in mind with gods and goddesses in fantasy is that often they’re the manifestations of fundamental aspects of reality, meaning their very nature can limit the scope and conditions of their intervention in the material world.

It’s easy to think being a goddess should make her able to do anything lesser beings can do, only better, but that’s not necessarily the case. It’s a common trope in fantasy for deities to be in many ways more limited in their range of interference than non-divine entities because they can’t just arbitrarily expand or redefine what they’re capable of doing, as the scope of their existence causes them to perceive and interact with reality differently than lesser beings do. Especially when they’re abstract and conceptual gods and goddesses of cosmic forces.

In many ways, past a certain point the more powerful an entity is, the less it can do hands-on because everything it does by virtue of its power and scale can have vast and widespread consequences far beyond the singular thing it may be trying to affect. For all we know, as a goddess Elune’s power may always be spread across the entirety of creation as part of the machine of existence, and Tyrande (or anyone else) becoming the Night Warrior may cause Elune’s presence to temporarily lessen or even outright withdraw on a million other worlds until the power can be returned.

Moreover, if we’re to consider the possibility that she’s a out-and-out god, then we have to also consider that she doesn’t adhere to the same scale of moral immediacy that we do. As mortals, not preventing something like Teldrassil may seem like a heinous abdication of justice to us, but the worst things we can imagine happening may well pale in comparison to the worst things imaginable to a nigh-omnipresent deity with an ageless comprehension and awareness of the universe as a whole.

Elune’s also potentially a First One, and in fantasy universes, “creator gods” in particular can often be portrayed as so vast in nature that they literally can’t consciously manipulate events as we perceive them because they outright don’t comprehend existence on the level at which mortals live, so their involvement is more often manifested as roundabout series of events and generalized aligning of circumstances rather than pinpointed cases of tangible intervention.

And atop all that, when one gets into ideas of universal gods and goddesses, one has to consider the possibility that she has been intervening all along, and we just don’t recognize it because the nature of her intervention isn’t usually obvious. Or even that by the nature of such things, the very fact that we and the lore characters act and resist these threats to our world may literally be Elune (and perhaps any other gods/goddesses like her who may exist) making their moves to preserve creation through us. Because if she/they can’t shape the course of events through constantly overt manifestations of their power, they may rely primarily upon nudging and inspiring and influencing those beings who can do so in a billion different ways that aren’t usually perceptible.

13 Likes

This statement is loaded with a lot of unspoken baggage.

There is no definition of “true god.” Can you find any source where a meaningful definition of the this term is given? If I may make an assumption, it sounds like you’re trying to pin the properties of a “Three O’s” deity onto a character (that nothing is known about) in an attempt to slam Blizzard with The Problem of Evil. There is no evidence at all of Elune being omniscient, omnibenevolent, or omnipotent. Even if you did want to force the three O’s onto Elune (despite there being no evidence of this), most theologians in modern history are very good at running rhetorical circles around this philosophical dilemma anyway.

4 Likes

elune is a goddes of balance, and the cosmos right now is everything, but not balanced, i think she is too busy fixing the whole universe, as a first one.

she helped her followers any way, she considered them as “her childrens”, and helps them constantly, but not in a “I fix that for you” way, more so in a “i´ll help you to find your way, but you have to fix it for yourself”. And even maybe, she have to allow teldrassil, to fix the shadowlands through us.

and yes, elune seems atleast omnipresent, she even manipulate saurfang unseen to spare malfurion, she remembered him, what it means to have honor and he understand, he have non.

1 Like

I’m not putting this on elune, blizz is directly and indirectly doing so, calling her the only true God, while showing her doing things like taking souls and turning them into star constellations. If she can create dozens of star systems, why couldn’t she stop Sargeras or prevent Teldrassil.

This is not true, and it is absolutely not stated anywhere by anybody.

sometimes, the way of god are not understandable through mortal eyes.