The Homogenization Issue: The light, the void, fel, etc

Community General Discussion
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As others have pointed out the current direction of lore regarding the cosmic chart and even that of which was once regarded as spiritual realms (No more it seems) is that the cosmic forces do not at all boil down to Good VS Evil; rather, they’re just primordial components represented and regulated by their own Pantheon and they’re ultimately looking to assert their own interests …

And I’ve honestly got to say:

I really, really, really — REALLY despise this direction of the game …

It feels less & less like a fantasy game and just more and more heavily (and solely) into the sci-fi component … Which yes yes, I know “WaRcRaFt HaS aLwAyS hAd!” :roll_eyes: But it’s getting ridiculous to the point where it feels like there’s some arrogant developers who hold some rampantly borderline OBSESSSIONS @ eradicating all the core fantasy concepts, the majority of spiritual concepts & designs, etc.

For instance, as a priest

I enjoyed RPing the fact the core realm I tap into holds its ideals of good, at it’s utmost core & fundamental values – Even though the lens of reaching that power, the realm & beings from such a distance can’t detect the wielder’s love or hate; yet CAN feel their devotion & conviction, thus grants the power of their grace towards them.

But in person however, such is another story … The Naaru can see, feel and witness the life, events, mind and soul of the individuals — and pass their judgement, grace, wrath, forgiveness and transformation to the better :grin:

Holding righteous ideals and claiming power out of such makes me feel like my class – a priest!!!

As a warlock

I enjoyed dabbling into the powers of volatile realms, even if they are sci-fi.
But I also enjoy tapping into realms of chaotic mystical power of demons, horrific creatures and taboo spiritual ordeals — Whether through

  • offering a switch of energies (Energy of life for the energies of their realms)
  • or through stealing or overpowering the parameters of such realms, to claim that power as my own.

That which made me feel … Like a warlock!!!

And that ultimately:

With their NEW direction however — Resorting both these classes as merely one & the same, but just a “different flavour of icecream” with 0 moral or idealistic value on their power? :unamused_face: It just makes it incredibly boring :pensive_face:

  • It feels like the writing’s now done by those of Concord or Dragon Age: Veilguard

That overall – The new direction seems to lacks TRUE depth and just homogenizes certain narrative elements for the dull convenience of morally equalifying everything :upside_down_face: Whether that’s by making the light more morally abhorrent, the fel more “misunderstood” and the void more useful and necessary. It’s lame.

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So we're really doing "the Light is bad actually" huh
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If you have to be told ‘you’re on Good Team’ to feel like you’re on Good Team, that’s hardly true devotion, that’s fair-weather faith. Very un-priestly or un-paladinly behavior.

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The Light was never represented as solely a force of good. The Scarlet Crusade is as old as Warcraft itself, and despite demonic interference, the people in its ranks that wield the Light have no qualms in murdering innocents.

You can RP whatever you want. We still haven’t seen whatever concept, law, council, or individual drives or directs the forces of the Light in the Material Plane. Maybe it’s a force of good that is stretched too thin to properly rebuke its naughtier acolytes.

But the Light and Void being defined as ‘Lawful vs Chaotic’ instead of ‘Good vs Evil’ is healthier for a game like WoW in the long run.

The Light is not ‘the will of God’. Priests and paladins who come on here pretending that it is only out themselves as never having read quest text or lore, ever.

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Literally was.

It was presented as a “force of righteousness” as far back as WC2.

Perhaps not “Solely” – I’ll give you credit for that, but it was at its fundamental core - represented as primarily a force of good.

The Scarlet Crusade isn’t necessarily the fundamental source, nor a prime representation born of the core values of the light itself.

Having bad actors of those who wield it is fine :slight_smile: I’m all for those storylines.

:grimacing: That said however, and ultimately overall — Acting out the narrative as if the light is “just as bad” as the fel or the void - is just pure brainrot ideology & terrible writing. Period.

At this point with the light? …
:person_shrugging: The game should just remove “Priests” as a class title

and at best merely re-name them to ‘Astronomers’

I say that for valid reasoning - since there’s 0 spiritual relevance to the light or void now — Utterly none, which has been re-emphasised HEAVILY again, and again now in the pass few recent years … and it’s ultimately now all just mumbo-jumbo sci-fi cosmic power tapping. There’s 0 moral or idealistic value on their power either.

  • “The light has no purchase in the shadowlands” – Kyrian, in the expansion Shadowlands.

There USE to be spiritual relevance with the light, many of which further emphasised the light being a fundamental source of good. There’s even been multiple quests on it.

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It sounds like you might be having a crisis of faith in regards to how you understand the force you’ve wielded?

Why does the fact that it might not be some objective Good make any impact on your devotion to the causes you deem valuable? The Light empowers your character, it doesn’t control it. Are your causes suddenly less Good now that the image of the Light may be blemished? Is a hero less heroic just because the divine source of their power may not be as pure as once thought?

If your course is one you believe in, then walk it without regard for the nuance. That’s how the devout do.

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I really, really, really — REALLY like this direction of the game. It gives the lore a whole lot more depth.

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They don’t feel “the same” to me at all.

And if any blurring is happening, it’s between Light and Order/Arcane… and between Void and Chaos/Fel.

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The problem with trying to “demonize” the Light is… we already have demons. And no, I’m not specifically referring to the Fel, but just talking in metaphorical terms.

We don’t need the Light to be bad - we have more than enough bad with the Void. And no, it’s not a “nuanced” or “complex” sort of “bad.” If the Void were some sort of fundamentally neutral force, or shown to have just as much good as evil, that’d be one thing, but no. It’s just plain, default, 100%, mono-dimensional, 0 nuance, capital ‘E’ 𝔼vil.

So we have absolute Vanta Black. And yet, here they are, smudging the only sources of white like it does anything but kill the contrast and turn the whole story into a greasy grey smear. Even if there are “problems” with the Light, it is still the absolute best choice in this conflict and trying to faff around with that is just tedious and annoying.

It doesn’t make the story more interesting - it just makes it obnoxiously nihilistic.

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Well WoW is heading towards disneyfication…

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Having one school of magic always universally be “good” literally is a homogenization and would go against what is established in lore for schools of magic.

We have seen fel and shadow be used for good purposes (Priests, Rogues, Warlocks) for years - yet those areas have been sorted into the evil magic for years. Why can the inverse not apply?

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The big problem, for both you and the in-game paladins, is that Human and Draenei culture treat the light as a god in and of itself.

It’s not.

Worshiping the light is like worshiping inertia, or Newton’s laws of motion. It’s not a person, it doesn’t have opinions. So when the heartless, faceless, brainless force behaves as it does, you suddenly find yourselves in crisis because your “god” is just magical physics.

The solution is obviously for everyone to move on to worshiping a real God, like Elune.

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There is no evidence that they are bad. In at the cosmic level it is not clear that "good"and “bad” mean anything.

The Arch Bishop of the Light that we talked to said the “Light” is mainly looking for someone who believes something deeply because it can use them as a lens.

By the way, an example of the Light not being “good” was when Xe’ra, the Prime Naaru believed Illidan was the “Child of Light and Shadow” and tried to force him to be infused with the Light.

Illidan shattered the Naaru leaving me to pick up the pieces.

Taking away Illidan’s free will is hardly “good”.

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The fundamental problem with the Light being the universal “good” is that half the playable races do not worship the Light. They either have some alternative deity or belief system or worship just isn’t a large part of their culture. Night elves, orcs, tauren, gnomes, trolls, undead, etc.

For the Light to be the universal good would completely invalidate numerous cultures and religions and push every race in the same direction of Light worship. Which would be horrible for the lore and story.

It’s bad enough that Light worshiping races have already been homogenized this much. There was a time when draenei and human religions were markedly different despite both ultimately worshiping the same thing. It’s bad that blood elves have become increasingly Light focused making them more in line with humans than they should be.

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Blizzard’s turned the light and the void into just another version of shamanism. Yellow shaman and purple shaman, just wielding forces of nature. Can’t let them get out of balance. Too much Light, and your plantlife becomes a new plague of Lordaeron, creating Light abominations. It’s all the same really. Remember last expansion when we fought Light-zombies in the priory?

They let us know that was coming before to be fair, when they raised Calia to undeath with Light magic, which formerly in WoW was used to heal and even resurrect people (extremely rarely), but never to unnaturally reanimate them as corpses. Necromancy and the Light used to be unquestionably antagonistic forms of magic to each other. But an expert necromancer in Shadowlands helpfully informed us of the modern retcon that all magic is the same and necromancy can be done with any of them.

Hilarious to read people thinking the “Scarlet Crusade” (a group just known for having misused the Light) somehow stretches all these major retcons back to the point where they aren’t retcons. Very obviously Blizzard’s radically changed the cosmological setting from what it was in the time of TBC and the Lich King. Maybe it was inevitable with their very bad decisions to use up major cosmology threats to fuel raids. They guaranteed they’d need to change foundational elements, because the old foundations of cosmological conflict (remember Sargeras?) were de-fanged.

Still, I didn’t expect it to be quite this bad. A light plague in their void expansion, what a joke. (Though, maybe not as much a joke as the Night Elves, whose druids getting in touch with nature and their world trees for 10k years didn’t know about the root world and Haranir… imagine how embarrassed Malfurion must be about how bad he was at his job.)

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It already did. The Scarlet Crusade was a prime example of free will using a universal good for evil. It does not invalidate the immeasurable amount of good the Light has done across Azeroth.

No, it doesn’t. It just makes pretentious Redditor-level readers even more obnoxious about ‘muh nuance’ and ‘muh THEMES’ instead of actually reading the story.

Except you already had ‘Lawful vs. Chaotic’ in Arcane vs. Fel. Two entire expansions based on it. No need to homogenize every other cosmic force into that.

Blizzard writers took one of the simplest concepts in WoW and couldn’t resist grey-sludging it with moral ambiguity just to appease no one.

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I feel like it was. Sure, there was the Scarlet Crusade, but this felt more like a case of “Those nutjobs twisted the light’s power for what they believe is good”. It was a huge exception. In every other instance the Light was the force that was hurtful to all evil and all corrupting powers, filled the hearts of the people with warmth and strength and even offered solace to the dying.
Now suddenly there’s a new narrative how the Light itself corrupts places and drives creatures mad, which has never been the case before.
The concept of “The Light is inherently good but can be used for bad intentions” and “The Void is bad for you but it can be used for the good of the world” was quite intriguing, but now it feels like every cosmic force is literally the same, just in a different colour.

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It’s a clear shift in the philosophy behind the game (not that WoW’s ever been deep, but it’s a shift all the same).

Devs don’t want to tell those kinds of stories any more with that kind of background. Its too judgy.

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Again, no one is discounting that. After all, the modern cosmology only started in Legion and a lot of Light lore basically had to be written in Chronicles 1 because Blizzard never did explain it when naaru got introduced.

I wouldnt go that far. Its just Blizzard making all the cosmic areas the same thing (can be used for good, but can be corrupted/too much is bad).

We have seen every point gone to an extreme BUT Light (I would count Xera for this but anything Illidan id rather forget).

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Do you guys have anything of substance in your criticisms and feedback… or just F-tier memes that get repeated ad nauseam about “disney this” and “disney that”?

What does that even mean, beyond “if you know you know” or “I can’t openly say it here so I’ll make a reference I think is clever”?

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The next time I play DnD and face Tiamat, the Goddess of Destruction, I’ll have to stop to think “Hm… maybe she’s just misunderstood?”

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