The Other Afterlives

I’m glad they chose to make it clear that the five afterlives we go to are just five of many, because I always felt like they were very strangely specific. What do you guys think the others are like?

Unless they become relevant to the story, they are by definition… irrelevant. I won’t project my own beliefs, because I don’t believe in an anferlife at all.

Since they are by definition, infinite, apparently whatever you can imagine…exists.

Back a while DC had an interesting take…

In the Swamp Thing odyssey, the Swamp Thing finds that there’s an individual Heaven for everyone that needs one. Alec Holland and his wife share a private forest idyll while they debate on whether or not to reincarnate. She’s pro, but Alec is hesitant given how his last life ended. (he was the original Swamp Thing)

Hell however is a singular dumpster for the self-condemmed.

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Since many of them are defined by so much as a single soul to a small number of souls… probably like a multiverse…that is to say, infinitely variable and growing…

I know this is a nitpick, but people have kept saying this very specific thing ever since Shadowlands released, and it isn’t true. There is not an infinite number of afterlives, as the number of mortals that have ever existed in the universe is finite. No matter how long the universe exists for, that number will still be finite. Very large numbers are finite, no matter how big they are.

It’s not even certain if there’s ‘room’ for infinite afterlives, as the size of the In-Between is not even guaranteed to be unbounded. Who’s to say what topological structure the Shadowlands have.

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You’re right it’s a nitpick. People can be… and often are more figurative than literal in their speech.

Technically that may not be the case. Since apparently alternate timelines’ denizens go to the same Shadowlands as those of the main timelines, sort of “rejoining” their primary selves, then theoretically anyone who dies in those alternate realities that doesn’t exist in the main one would constitute a separate soul in need of a destination when they cross over.

And since there are an infinite number of possible realities constantly being generated by the flow of time, that would make for an infinite number of souls without primary timeline equivalents to rejoin pouring into the Shadowlands, necessitating an infinite number of constantly generating afterlives for them to inhabit.

Plus even without that, since souls are perpetually being generated by the universe to eventually die, unless there’s a preexisting hard end to reality at which the flow stops, that lack of a terminus would amount to an infinite flow of souls.

At least one developer interview also included a mention of the Shadowlands being infinite, so it would seem that they and the Twisting Nether share such a boundless dimensional scope. Which may end up being the rule for all of the “outside” ethereal realms of the six cosmic forces. Each is seemingly singular in its existence, with only the Great Dark existing in different forms across multiple alternate realities, while the realms of Death and Disorder (and possibly Life, Light, Void and Order as well) are both infinite and singular in existence, each solely functioning in their respective roles for all of the Great Dark’s possible timelines and realities.

This is plausible, but only if there are AU souls that have no MU counterpart, and assuming the existence of such beings is very much a huge assumption. Not all universes are equal in WoW, there is an MU. But sure, there’s wiggle room here.

This one is just mathematically wrong, and is a misunderstanding of the number line. Given an arbitrarily large amount of time passing, an arbitrarily large (but still finite) number of souls will exist. The universe will never get so old that it suddenly crosses over into being infinitely old, that’s nonsense. Pick any large number of years to pass, as big as you want. At that given time, the number of souls that exist is finite. You can’t say “at time equals infinity.”

I mean…Geya’rah is such a person. As is AU Grom’s Lightbound son. And that’s just two examples from a single alternate timeline, of which there are an infinite number. Despite having the same parent(s) as two MU characters, they aren’t actually alternate timeline versions of Thrall and Garrosh. They’re completely different people born at different times under very different circumstances, with no equivalent in the main timeline.

And that sort of thing is happening an infinite number of times, across an infinite number of possible realities whenever anyone is born after the point of divergence from the main timeline, and then eventually dies.

I hope one of the other realms we haven’t seen is Robot Hell like in Futurama.

If you can imagine it… it’s there.

Crazy that there’s an afterlife in WoW where you’re stuck in an eternal looping cycle of taking a shower and slipping on a piece of soap

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Generally when people say “goes to infinity” or something like that it is simply a very large number. You can never reach “infinity” really. However you can reach a set of very large numbers where there is not a significant difference between them and how they interact with things. Which is why language such as “tends to zero, tends to infinity” etc are used. So you could argue that when blizzard says there is an infinite amount of afterlives in the Shadowlands, it is an ever expanding universe with a very large number of afterlives and that number is increasing at a certain rate. Obviously that rate is currently 0 since nearly every soul has an express ticket to the Maw whether they like it or not.

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If the devs say there are infinite afterlives, then there are. This is simply not how any of this works.