Yup, you’re right. It’s been a while since I saw that ever-spamming message and thought it mentioned Yoggy or an old god or something, but no.
So people probably don’t know Yoggy is dead, but they likely don’t even know he was a thing that happened because Ulduar was about stopping the Titans from murdering us all. At least as far as would commonly be known.
I’ll go back to my original point; there might be some footnote in the story of Arthas’s defeat mentioning the heroes taking a side trip to beat up robots, murder a Yogg-Saronite thing, but that’d be it. If anything, it’d be more remembered for that time the heroes stopped the titans from reformatting Azeroth and some big robot that really wants some play time.
Old Gods are planar beings, so you cannot really kill them on Azeroth anyways. The most we can do is discorporate them, and then we are left to handle their exceedingly void corrupted corpses; it is basically the wow equivalent to handling radioactive waste. The main difference seems to be once ‘dead’ the remains of an Old God loose direct agency as their spirit has gone back to the void. The Sha did not spontaneously manifest of Y’Shaarj on their own—They needed a third party manifestation point of negative mortal emotion.
Maybe I’m missing something. And probably I’ve done like two dungeons and have mainly been doing side quests. So I know more about Centaur courtship than the Primalists. Something about a thunder chicken getting falsely imprisoned for tax evasion or something idk I’m out here making soup.
But so far do we really know much about their motives beyond cult de jour? We’ve certain been drip fed enough to conclude a reasonable person might have legitimate beef with the Titans and their pet mutant lizard geese.
I hope so at least. WoW’s never been one for nuanced villains. But after Frownbad The Soul Slaver I could certainly go for a villain with a goal that’s not completely wanton dickery.
For the bad dragons, it’s pretty simple; they like elemental chaos, that is their preferred world-state, therefore they want it back. It’s as simplistic and logical a motivation as we’ve ever gotten. “Back in my day, the better days, I could just fly through lightning tornados in the lava fields of frosty buttocks. Those were the good ol’ days!!” It’s no different a motivation than we have for opposing them. The current state of the world is the state we thrive in, the chaos state is where they thrive in.
As for the non-dragons? I believe they share the same thing that worshippers of normal dragons have; if I am really good to the dragons, they will make me big. It’s what we see with Kellogg’s Grimtotam, whatever his name really is, in the Dracadactyl starting zone. I’d assume it’s a similar motivation, and also one we see across the board with WoW cults; I will serve, just make me big.
The Primalists are wearing their motivations on their sleeves. Literally. Have you seen those mogs? Considering that we’re willing to slaughter left and right for hand-me-downs, it makes perfect sense that they decided to follow the Primal Incarnates. They’re grinding renown for the incredible appearances.
… What Old Gods? They’re all dead. The fact that Sabellian’s dragons can return without getting instantly smacked with corruption (like Ebyssian did a few times) is proof that Void corruption isn’t a concern for anyone anymore.
So they have not directly said it and it gets hard to divide what the game has said and what I remember from interviews, but the primalists view seems to be the world soul is inherently an elemental being. The wellspring of the dragon isles was sort of like a natural miniature version of the well of eternity, more of an artisanal well than a giant magic sea. Somehow Yogg managed to taint the wellspring slightly, and it resulted in Giant Mutant Multi-eyed Galakrond. Big mutant dragon got taken down and the Aspects got titan-ified as a reward and founded a kingdom with the aid of Tyr and his titanforged attendants.
When the Aspects came into power they apparently mandated rules be followed by everyone, which the Incarnates and other primal dragons rejected. As beings of Order the Aspects didn’t take kindly to this and the primal dragons got marginalized and looked down on as inferior ‘proto-dragons’. Around the same time Tyr goes and builds the halls of infusion to curb further void taint in the wellspring as well as make it Order-aligned, which means it began ‘order-corrupting’ eggs and dragons that touched it. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. To the primal dragons and the incarnates the aspects betrayed who they were as primal dragons and became bound to Order as its enforcers. They helped the Keepers to further Order’s domination of Azeroth and its world soul.
The Primalists, however, are your typical doomsday cultists. Some likely want the world to burn. Others may believe they will become elemental ascendants for loyal service. Others may legitimately think the Titian’s version of the world sucks, and the Primal Incarnates are offering an alternative. The last option likely explains why so many Kaldorei are among their ranks.
It is interesting how all primalist NPCs seem to be races that have shaman as a class, or night elves. Lots of tauren, dwarves, and draenei, no humans, undead, gnomes, or Thalassian elves as far as I’ve seen (this is all just my vague recollection so forgive me if I’m wrong)
Basically, if the Primalists are sort of “shaman fundamentalists” who want to return Azeroth to a metal hellscape of the four elements raging around, I suppose normal shamans could have been misled by the elements they communicate with. A shaman’s day job is keeping the elements calm and balanced, but I’m sure they occasionally encounter a strong elemental baron who wants to convince them that Ragnaros is actually cool and should rule the planet. Razageth herself didn’t start this incarnation of the cult–they freed her, presumably at the behest of the elementals they were serving.
As for the many Night Elf primalists, idk what they could be–flame druid holdouts? People who lost their faith in Elune and the titan-created realm of the Emerald Dream during the war?
I’m 99% there have been a couple of Thalassian elves, and I only noted it because I was shocked as they are non-Shammy’s.
At this point I would argue that these are the equivalent of the DHs that joined the Burning Legion, except the Shammys job was never to beat the elements but to work with them. I’d assume the Nelves just want revenge, or that some have learned to commune with the elements, but I truly don’t know.
Definitely have not seen any humans or even gnomes though.
The question is, why would they devote themselves to crappy dragons that already lost. What are they being promised? Seemed to a lot of night elves. Just seems like a lot of followers to an occult that has no plan.
It isnt even devoting themselves to the dragons. They are actively infusing unwilling non-sapient proto-dragons and eggs with elemental essence to force convert them into troops for the Incarnates. They also do not seem to care if it kills some of them as they cannot adjust to the power. At the climax of the Green Dragon leveling arc our primalist baddie literally kills her protodrake companion as she steals their elemental power for herself.
And they also seem to be intentionally disrupting the elements to whip them into a frenzy and doing some kinda dark shaman-y elemental binding. They read more like a self destructive doomsday cult out to wipe the world clean with elemental chaos than anything else.
So there’s an obvious example in American politics about people devoting themselves whole heartedly to people who lost, but I’ll say no more. If you know, you get it.
Just because the proto-dragon things lost in the forever ago past isn’t relevant to people in the now. Cultists would be able to excuse that obviously and create any number of scenarios why the proto-dragons were cheated out of victory or whatever. But that’s not as relevant as the scenario today.
Back then, it took five fully fledged aspects to take them out, and presumably their still-extant flights.
The modern world doesn’t have that. Each of the Flights have been severely harmed. Only two OG aspects remain, and according to a cinematic, they’re de-empowered now. Of those two, Nozdormu is also compromised, with the whole Murozand business looming large.
From an in-universe perspective, those crappy dragons who just barely lost last time stand a very good chance of winning this time, just by the state of their enemies alone.
They are, in essence, a cult. Cults don’t prey on people who want something, but rather people who have nothing. Sure they are promised power or whatever, but really they were likely just down on their luck and easily manipulated, for example the Teldrassil survivor.
Also worth remembering they also had the aid of the Titan Keepers, particularly Tyr. Most of the keepers have come down with a bad case of Dead, and the majority of the titanforged on the isle were destroyed by the sheer passage of time.
They may not even be aware of the Old Gods’ existence. They’re proto-drakes after all. They don’t maintain libraries or even subscriptions to Crystal-Vox.
Not really most. Only 4 of the original 9 are dead. Those being Tyr, Archaedas, Loken and Ra. Thorim, Hodir, Freya and Odyn are still alive. Mimiron I’ll say is half and half. While he is still ‘alive’, he is not in his original body and is in a body of a mechagnome. So he basically lost his keeper powers but he retained his big brain. Hence why he fights us with his technology when he was controlled by Yogg-saron.