Wowhead posted a purely speculative lore article and I found it a bit fascinating to be honest.
TL:DR - Could it be that the Primus dominated the Jailer and is the actual evil mastermind?
Granted, even the author puts forth that they don’t expect this to actually be true (and I don’t disagree) but for some reason I find the evidence strangely compelling.
It’s certainly interesting and the author does make a good argument for the Primus being the secret big bad the entire time 
No, because the Shadowlands Story is over.
Though I wish they’d retcon the entire thing along with BfA 
I feel like we are just looking at artefacts or residue of an evolving story which never quite evolved to where it needed to be.
I mean it’s clearly tinfoil hat, but there’s some points where I honestly was thinking that it made more sense than what we were getting.
Which … might be sad? Or cool? I don’t know, but there are a number of connections that make the Primus seem sus.
It certainly would have made the SL story far more interesting. Kind of sad when tinfoil hat theories are more thought out than the ones these experts get paid to come up with.
(And I use the word expert loosely)
pokes horrible dead fish-mammal hybrid of a story “Let’s see, it developed legs and fur, but somehow never thought to develop lungs instead of gills before trying to crawl out of the water. Strikes me as poor planning.”
SL feels worse than WoD when it comes to cut content. I wonder how much that could’ve better explained the story and certain characters motives were left on the cutting room floor.
Sire Denathrius would have been the better “bigger bad.” Change my mind.
Mal’ganis: Everything is going to plan Sire… but I fear the Titan may need more persuasion…
Sire: The World-soul, have you found it?
Mal’ganis: Yes… but it may require…
Sire: Show it to him. Now begone, I have other matters to attend to.
Mal’ganis: A world beyond saving… dreams turned to nightmares. It will tip the scales. You know what you must do.
Sargeras: This Soul, it… it cannot be. No… no… I must before it’s too late…
Primus: Brother, good to see you after all these ages!
Primus: Is something wrong, you look… troubled…
Zovaal: It’s nothing… it’s just… A soul came to me.
Zovaal: Infant, but corrupted…
Primus: Ah yes, I’m afraid even Gods aren’t immune to the effects of corruption…
Zovaal: Perhaps. But this feels different. As if there’s something more…
Goosebumps. I should’ve been a writer.
Also, more on topic. I think this memory cinematic:
Kindof shows the Jailer was in control and he was extracting memories to aid his armies.
Unless the Primus was showing us a “fake memory” in some giga 1500 IQ 6Dchess kind of way.
I mean if the Primus wasn’t “really” a prisoner and instead was dominating the Jailer, showing a fake memory seems like an appropriate step.
Though it doesn’t explain much about why he’s willing to craft us legendary items.
Either way, it’s a super tinfoil hat theory, and extremely unlikely. I can’t put my finger on why, but I just would like it to be true. It would, at the very least, make the whole “mastermind” thing fit. And the name “jailer” doesn’t fit someone who is actually jailed.
Maybe it’s just the lackluster current story so I like the idea that there’s something more at work here. You know, beyond “the threat that is to come.”
I had already thought the Primus being behind everything made more sense (although I suggested actual Zovaal was already dead and the Zovaal we were dealing with was the faulty prototype, dominated and reactivated). This article goes through a much deeper dive than what I had even considered, so I’m onboard. Zero chance of it being accurate, but the pieces are there to stitch it together.
Wowhead and Taliesin have been doing these type of things throughout Shadowlands. Massive lore theories that turn out to be 100% wrong. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but at this point I just don’t get it. It’s abundantly clear that the WoW devs and writers are simply not capable of the deep lore some people expect them to be putting out. It could just be clickbait, I guess.
I was about to make a thread about this too. This is REALLY interesting. I’m really into this and my brain is going into overdrive.
I think it’s probably not true, but even if some of it is, I’ll be ECSTATIC.
Yeah but I usually never buy their theories and tend to feel unsurprised when they’re wrong.
But this? I think there’s something here.
There probably isn’t-- but it’s such a good piece of speculation that I am in love.
It’s hit or miss for me, honestly. I don’t think the Primus was particularly that great of a character.
It would help explain why he was just an abysmal “Protector of the Shadowlands” though. He wanted access to Zereth Mortis, etc…
I just think Robot Zovaal was a poorly told Ultron Story:
I can one up this WoW head theory.
A fragment of Yogg-Saron attacked Bastion and was thrown tnto the Maw.
The Primus we rescued isn’t actually the Primus, the Primus looks like the huge skeleton staute in Maldraxxus, he’s a Lich.
We released Yogg and lead him right to the Sepulcher.
I’m in the rare minority of people who actually really liked Ultron. Though it’s entirely as a character basis. It felt like he was the internet personified, with all it’s know-it-allism , random facts and quotes glory.
But man you know it’s bad when your story is being called a poorly told Ultron story.
Either way, it would have been so much better if the Shadowlands pivoted on villains halfway through. Imagine, after going through these lands we realize it’s horribly controlling and one dimensional in scop. We talk to Devos after she’s imprisoned instead of killed, and she sets us on our path of doubt.
At the end of Sanctum of Domination Sylvanas and Zovaal get their butts kicked by us and the Eternals. Zovaal is imprisoned again. Sylvanas is dragged to her own special wing of Torghast. Bolvar wants to interrogate her and bring her to Azeroth to face justice, but the Eternal Ones react almost violently to the request. Bolvar, the former Lich King after all, is smart enough to piece things together. He sends the players with Darion to Torghast to find Sylvanas and learn what she knows.
When you find her, Sylvanas begins to plead with Darion. You know those “injustices” she kept alluding to? She points them out.
Your eternal rest is decided by a robot made by these Eternal Ones. It sends you not to the best place you deserve to be in, but the best place you can be processed, where the Shadowlands can best feed off your anima.
Your reward for selflessness is to be brainwashed and have your body warped to fit this… “idealized” race. To have your memories and loved ones leeched out of your brain and converted into anima.
For being competent at war, you are forced into a place of constant battle, never knowing rest. Your body gets chipped away and stripped of identity from the continual battles. Every time you die you come back with just a little more anima skimmed off the top and you become more and more mindless like the Scourge.
Our gods and greatest champions of the world are placed in pods or turned into fauns tend the pods and told “this is the way”, which in fact they just had to go to the Emerald Dream all along. It’s an anima farm that drains the potent anima of wild gods while they recharge before sending them home.
And of course, people are sent to a hell where they are flayed while unable to die because they felt arbitrary negative emotions that the Arbiter decided was “evil”. A place where your are tortured horrifically to extract your anima until you are gaslit into joining your captors, sent to the Maw to be obliterated into identityless soul blobs, or sent to a new facility for processing.
Zovaal, who was on board at first, started to witness the lives of souls as he judged them. He saw everyone’s hopes, failures, loves, and stories that made them so special. He fell in love with mortals. He decided enough was enough, only to be cast down by his dogmatic siblings and tortured by his spiteful, cruel brother.
Eons of isolation and torment twisted his mind. By the time Sylvanas met him, he was just as cruel as the other Eternals. Yet the cunning Banshee Queen knew he could be a means to an end. His sympathies for mortals were still in there, buried deep inside. She could use that. Of course, he intended on using her to exact revenge on his captors, a sort of echo of the Lich King he inspired.
She knew now there was injustice, that no matter what we did in life, we’d be sent whatever hell the Eternal Ones felt they could get the most power out of us. So the two teamed up.
She couldn’t just tell us, however. If we entered the Shadowlands geared to take them down, the Eternal Ones would put on their best behavior and trick us into thinking she and Zovaal we’re the villains all along. She had to string us through the zones, really get us to see why this was a system that had to fail. Use the complacency of the Eternal Ones to show us their injustice.
And it worked. Our eyes were opened. So we break Sylvanas out and the rest of the expansion is working with the Jailer’s team to end the eternity of suffering. It can climax with the reforging of the Helm of Domination so Sylvanas can become the Lich Queen and send the entire Scourge into the Shadowlands to keep the Eternal Ones in check or something forever as the hole in the sky seals shut or something idk. Sort of like some kind of afterlife rebellion that liberates souls and fights this system, since the Eternal Ones turn out to be too powerful to just chop out of the system.
Couple of fun facts that probably were just oversights and part of the rush job that is SL, but I’ll add them to the pile:
When the Jailer regains his core, he summons his GWAR costum… I mean, hyperDK armor. His chest piece has a giant, gaping hole in it, seeming to indicate that his core was ripped out of him through said armor.
When the Jailer is on trial in front of the other Eternals during his death scene flashback, he is not wearing his armor and there is no hole in his chest.
To be fair, it’s extremely obvious if you’ve done the raid that the whole bit about SFO being intended to be the final raid as it currently is has to be a lie. We know there was something -more- planned for this story, we just likely won’t ever know what until 2040 when WoW’s long over and someone does a Twitter or Youtube AMA going into what was planned for the expansions with massive cut content in Cata, WoD, and now SL.
It’s not like Blizzard isn’t capable of telling a big deep story, they’ve done it in the past. Blizzard just can’t take all the plot points and wrap them all together whenever they have their backs against the wall and content is being cut from the game.
Blizzards quality of writing when they’ve been going for nothing but shock value since it’s become quite a few writers there are really big fans of Game of Thrones. BFA’s particular story made a lot of sense for the most part, it’s just no one enjoyed them doing massive twists in the middle of it and burned through massive lore and expansion quality major stories in single patches.
I just quoted this bit of your post - but I really would’ve preferred your story to what we got. Honestly, when I saw Bastion at first, I thought they were going to go down a similar route, that’s how unrelatable the Kyrians were vs the Forsworn and how badly the Kyrians came across.
Maybe I misunderstood Ion, but I thought he was saying they only intended to go to 9.2 (or 9.2.5). I basically took it as him skirting around the issue of the lack of content by just saying they never intended another raid patch. I could see that being true, I just think they had to cut a ton of other content.
So, part of it is it’s obvious that parts of SFO are inspired more so from ZM itself and almost completely outdoors, like it was an outdoor part and SFO was supposed to be a 9.3 zone and the inner bits that you see crafted from the Dreadlord/Rygalon area is remnants of what would have been the 9.3 raid.
When you do the raid, it’s like Vigilant Gaurdian was originally what was going to be the 9.3 raid, they then ripped part of ZM’s zone textures to give an outdoor area up until you beat Anduin, then you go back into SFO.
The other part is, when they announced 9.2.5, they ripped chapter 8 out of the campaign. That’s also ignoring that most of the story campaign that we’ve done so far, is a hyper abridged story and there’s very obvious bits missing like the actual First Ones. Next chapter becomes a little odd, because we find out a very critical thing is actually being built outside of it. The crown of Wills is also advanced, and the idea of creating it after saving Anduin by the looks of it should have been the question leading into 9.3, and crafting it happening in 9.3 itself.
That also said.
It makes more sense that Jailer always WAS intended to be the last boss of 9.2, but we lose to him, and the room he’s in was intended to be the room we fight him in 9.3 and we become empowered by Azeroth during the fight.