One thing that really bothers me about shadowlands is how the realm of the death. Has little to no death/spirts in it. There should have been zones with spirits, not of nature, light, gothic. Would a realm of the light, void, arcane or nature have other entities in it?
This is where shaman or spirit walkers would have shined. Heck we don’t even know how shamans or spirit walkers summon the spirits of the dead. From what we seen in the shadowlands is they get changed
Forgotten Realms is far too focused on it’s two Planets for my liking. Planets are designed to be not very Magical as a way of grounding the setting.
That’s why I prefer Planescape since it features Infinitely Vast Single Biome Cosmic Planes of Existence! It practically begs for the Writer to put more Wonder, (in a word)Magic and Mystique into the story!
Take for example:
Mount Celestia’s 1st Layer the Heaven of the Moon Lunia is an Infinitely Vast Starlit Moonlit White Middle-Eastern Desert with an Infinitely Vast Starlit Moonlit Sea of Holy Water with Infinitely Vast Islands one of which is an Isle of Redwall-esque Holy Rats and another is an Island of Land Before Time-esque Talking Dinos!
It also has an Infinitely Vast Shinto Realm in the Starlit Moonlit White Desert known as the 8 Happinesses as well as an Infinitely Vast Viking Realm known as the Court belonging to Tyr!
So many Infinities inside an Infinite Starlit-Moonlit Sea… The Magic… The Mystique… The Wonder!..
Elune and the Light are the only actual valid religions now didn’t you hear? All Horde religions became obsolete at shadowlands and now the Horde has nothing left for them.
At least Forgotten Realms has lore reasons/storylines for why some of the gods in the setting change profiles and or avatars. Blizz just…wholesale retcons older lore or writes new lore and tries to cram it in to make it work with the older lore
Hence why the Jailer fell flat. Not that he was necessarily a bad character per se, my MAIN issue with the jailer is they tried making him the ultimate big bad behind everything and it just didn’t work
This was basically my point in Shadowlands. I hope An’she is relevant in a new Light/Void expansion so he can either be a cautionary tale about the power of the Void, or we can heal him and return him to the Light.
The thing is, sinxe WC3 elune was set to be really important, and the night elves as well.
It is clear they want to develop elune as an entity without necessarily envolving night elves in the mix, but every time they do so, people complain that said new expansion is also night elf adjacent.
Much like the light every time it is expanded it is considered “more alliance stuff”.
I think there is a level of maybe people should just relax and see the big picture.
Problem with this is that I’m not seeing anything for me in this bigger picture and it feels like there’s no room being made, or even interest in doing so, for the races and their themes that I want to care about.
Like, at least on a story level, I don’t know why I should want to care about the next two, maybe three entire expansions in a row. It feels incredibly discouraging.
People see the big picture and realize that catering to just night elf fans because a 20 yr old game made elune super important sucks
Sorry, but not everyone cares about elune and are tired of her being the only damn religion that matters or the only important one or the only true religion
Do ypu mean for the horde in general or for tauren religion in specific?
It is something that could be tackled, I am not knowledgeable enough on either to make any claim, but exploring certains misteries of the lore can take some time and some buildup, and it might happen sooner than later.
And if An’she is healed and saved while Mu’sha turns out to be Elune’s Enemy Xal’atath?
Yes Xal’atath who when we first saw her was an Eye just like Mu’sha, treats Elune as an upstart “goddess”, in her newest form has a Moon Symbol on her face and is clearly too arrogantly possessive of the World Soul to be Lo’sho whom one would think would give off signs that she is doing everything for her sister and not herself if Mu’sha was a rival of Elune.
Eh? If Xal’atath is Mu’sha just what is in that Crystal in Hallowfall you might be asking: I suspect the Darkness that the Kobold regularly chase away feeds on the Light of that Crystal and whatever that Light turns it into once spat back out leaves it without a form desperate for Light hence why it targets the Kobolds.
That suggests it is a Naaru(what else would want the Light back?) and that the Light of Hallowfall did not return it to normal which brings to mind the Wriggling Mass’s vision of the Black Goat with 7 Eyes(the same number as the Nathrezim with the only other Void Entity with that number Y’Shaarj having Fel-Green Flames emanating from his head and mouth).
Hallowfall is in my mind a prison for Nathrezim that Denathrius set up letting Lothraxion get purified with the intent that he would spill these Nathrezim’s location to the Naaru and that they would imprison them in Light then send them under the waves.
Purify Mu’sha in that and you get a Golden Moon tainted with Sin by Nathrezim super-charged with Sin rising above the Horizon in defiance of the White Lady Elune.
An’she being redeemed unlike Mu’sha would at least give the Tauren Lore.
And every recent lore development on elune made exactly sure that she wasn’t the one true religion, showed a lot of flaws in her powers and untied her from night elf exclusivity, so should not that be a win in your view? Any development towards her makes her less night elf centric and less important on the cosmic scale.
I’m just generally sick of night elves in general. We been dealing with them in some form or another since vanilla and every single expansion we deal with the night elves or night elf related lore.
Just want them to go away for a while.
Some of the horde, at least. I liked the faction for it being a collection of misfit monster races that could be hero protagonists and important in their own right, etc. So orc/troll/tauren/forsaken/goblin, mainly.
That’s exactly the problem, though. There hasn’t been any build-up for this, and now it’s too late because you can’t build up emotional investment and anticipation in a story after the first act has started. From the look of things, it sounds like I’ll be going into TWW following around Anduin and Alleria and Magni and Jaina and maybe Moira while learning about dwarf progenitors and yet another Elune tree offshoot with Na’vi expies and a lost kingdom of human/high elf hybrids and I’m left wondering if the game’s just assuming I’m playing an alliance character for all of this.
Amusingly, I’ve heard Thrall basically disappears after the intro so… welp.
Earthen are coming to the horde too, so any earthen development is faction agnostic. The Arathi also have roots with elves and the forsaken could also have a link. There will be a goblin focused zone it seems.
Thrall chsracter arc might become major, he has been in every cinematic and promotional material, even if he doesnt do much by 11.0.
There is buildup to explore the horde, plenty even.
Nah, that feels like a cop-out by essentially pushing hand-me-down lore on the horde from alliance themes. Prior to this, the earthen have always been an extension of dwarf lore. Their being added doesn’t help the horde on a story level, IMO.
From what I’ve heard, there’s no actual goblin zone; you’re just killing them to protect Elune’s roots and the Harronir.
As for the forsaken, undeath and being apart from humans is central to their lore. The time to expand on that was in Shadowlands and they completely botched that.
Thrall is sadly just repeating an elemental dysfunction arc for the third time in a row, but that’s all I’ve got to go on for this expansion. 
To me you’re jumping to conclusions about a lot of these themes.
Yes, earthen and dwarves are connected by ancestry, so is night elves, blood elves and trolls, the horde has some races that were part of the alliance at some point as well, bringing earthen to the horde was a deliberate decision, earthen lore will be just that, earthen lore, the same we consider pandaren and dracthyr lore faction agnostic.
And then there is the fact that these earthen are not ancestors of the dwarves, dwarves come from the northrend earthen, this group here has its own culture and beliefs, much like the forsaken are a different culture of human compared to stormwind, even before undeath.
I’m not saying you are wrong, you might be right, but what we looked now is a fraction of what the expansion will be.
I mean, yeah it’s possible I’m jumping to conclusions? But if there’s more to the expansion, they haven’t even attempted to advertise it yet. And I promise I won’t be any more invested in earthen lore just because they were added to the horde. They’re just dwarf reskins and that’s all they’ll ever be to me - just another previously alliance-associated theme taking up space and diluting what I liked about the faction I play.
It doesn’t really matter if they’re technically not direct ancestors of the current dwarves, since I’m talking about theme relations. Just like it doesn’t really matter that night elves are mutated trolls because it won’t make me care about Elune more.
Fair enough, I really don’t have an opinion, I just think new race means new cool lore.
Void elves are literally former horde mostly, and i like them a lot.
I’m intrigued by the undermine content they’re teasing, think Last Titan might give me some of what I want regarding an expansion actually involving the H/A as a whole as the groups we work with, otherwise… I’m with you.
Someone awhile back said that the current era of WoW feels less like WoW and more like a mediocre DnD campaign where the DM needs to constantly cater to a specific player or two to keep them from getting upset. And honestly, I agree with that sentiment.
Shadowlands proves every religion has been wrong. No matter what you believed, your afterlife isn’t what you expected. Apart from trolls and The Other Side. So we can say that the Horde won in this area.
Even when blizzard tries to show neutral Elune content, people say that it’s Night Elf stuff without even giving a chance. Before the arrival of the souls from Teldrassil, there was no visible NE in Ardenweald. They don’t get a special pass for worshiping Elune, so no one can say that the Winter Queen favors them because of that. But still… ThIs Is nIgHt ELvES zONe!!!
From an aesthetic point of view? Yes, it’s very fitting Night Elves. Just like Bastion to Humans. Maldrxxus to Forsaken. Revendreth to Blood Elves.
We don’t see much of Elune in the Emerald Dream outside of the Raid. And even Amidrassil himself focused more on Titans and Aspects. I can understand some complaints because we do see a certain presence of night elves there. However, Harronir, a completely new race that has nothing to do with the Elune culture as we know, is already considered by many as a just underground night elves. Who knows if there will be anything about Elune at all? Maybe only Eonar send them as a guardian and we’ll only be left with Titans, again.
Elune’s religion was never THE most important. All the time we dance around the Titans, and it was always the champions of Light who came forward to defeat the great evil. ( We also currently have a large crystal of Light above us.) She was often wrong. The night elves thought that the Blue child was the White Lady’s child. Wrong, they’re sisters. The Taurens were right. She also has no influence on the afterlife. She can suggests to her followers a lifestyle that will help them reach the best afterlife. But she has no power like Bwonsambdi to fool the Arbiter’s system.
I have the same thing with Human and Orcs. It is always these two races that appear in the most important moments. Often for no reason, stealing spotlight from heroes of other races who are way more suited to the current situation. The difference between them and elves is that, Night Elves are never the center of attention, they usually get a little side story in the corner of some zone. If you only do the main story, you will almost never encounter NE, but Humans and Orcs are next to you at every step doing important things.