No wonder Sylvanas has her panties in a twist. So if you die in Shadowlands you’re just gone? Wow…Those poor, poor bastards in Maldraxxus where they get killed in the arena after getting thrown in there.
10/10 Blizzard, your afterlife blows.
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Sad thing is, nobody really acknowledges it either. I’m asked to go all murder hobo and quite literally send people to their oblivion for that xp and gold. I feel especially terrible for the forsworn aspirants who committed the crime of depression/doubt and feeling like they weren’t able to succeed on the Path. And then instead of trying to help them through diplomacy, the quests just go “damn, how sad. Anyway, just kill them.” Is there even a quest at all where you genuinely try to help some of the forsworn become ‘better’? I also feel terrible about the possessed Sylvar. There’s not even a mention at trying to help them overcome the possession, I’m just told to shiv them.
I mean sure, you kill lots of people on Azeroth, but damn, at least they’re not turned into soul soup and actually ‘live on’.
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We kind of have to remember that the after life that we see is broken and thing were way more peaceful before the Jailer plan.
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Somewhat. But we also get to see a past void invasion of Bastion and the armies of Maldraxxus are armies for a reason. And all sorts of crap in Ardeanweald seems to want to chomp down on the residents, so the Wild Hunt is a long-standing necessity.
Why they don’t hunt the hostile wildlife for anima in this ‘drought’ is a complete mystery. We’re sent off to do it often enough.
Ardeanweald is even worse than Bastion in many ways:
‘Oh no, Fairy Bob put on a wooden mask. Welp, hero, you need to go murder my friends forever.’
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To be fair, the person under the mask isn’t really them anymore. The Drust perform rituals and they’re basically lost and under Drust control. Evidently it starts with sticking the mask on, and then something about a dagger.
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Have you read the fine details of most mythological afterlives which are the foundations for fictional ones? Most of them REALLY SUCK. You are often stuck in a place about as fun to look at as the maw. Forever.
Just offhand the Greek Afterlife, for most, meant you dank from the river Lithe and forgot who you were and wandered Hades forever wailing and senseless. The Babylonians had a dreary bureaucratic afterlife where the dead seemed to also forget themselves. For the Norse even if you avoided going the dreary grey wastes of Hel you went to Valhalla where you were expected to prepare for Ragnarok where you would almost certainly die and cease to exist altogether.
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Incorrect. At least for most souls. I’ll give a link to my defense of Hades in another recent thread where I gave some information on the underworld there.
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It really depends on the source you follow and at what time period. During earlier periods and more militaristic periods being a warrior and going to the Elysian Fields was really sold up. Hesiod called depicted the typical person’s afterlife as “dark, dank, and sunless” for example. It was not a place of torment, but it was not a nice place either. It sort of really sucked to be there.
Most afterlives historically punished you if you were not heroic by what their culture saw as heroic. As an example, the Aztecs saw human sacrifices, warriors, and women who died in childbirth as heroic and got a way better afterlife than someone who died from most diseases or worse old age.
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Ordinary, non-heroic, non-notable souls in Greek mythology went to the asphodel meadows. A sunless plain, where they just… kind of exist, as shadows.
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yes, one must remember that the Greek myths were not one canon but a body of tales from different (closely interrelated) cultures that evolved over time. There were also more negative depictions of the god Hades (though certainly nothing that came close to pointing him as demonically villainous).
Actually many slain in Maldraxxus can be raised again, and some mention having died countless times. Hell, the house of Constructs has a big ol soul vault where they put people waiting for a new body to be built.
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if you die in shadowlands you go to shadowlands 2 light boogaloo
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A scifi show from the early 2000’s named Lexx did a season about the afterlife. In theirs, if you’re killed in the afterlife, your soul sort of goes into a form of stasis until a replacement body forms for you. It could take a while for the process to complete though. I think I’d feel better about WoW’s afterlife if it was more like that. As it is, it feels less like an afterlife and more like a bonus stage.
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World_Of_Warcraft.doc
it’s one of my biggest gripes about this franchise; for a war to have meaning or impact it must also have an end. To end war, you need diplomacy.
Instead everyone fights to the death battle after battle, until all resources are exhausted, then there’s a lull, before htey start murderign everyone again. It’s absurd.
I get the feeling that Warcraft is leaning real hard into its origins as a Warhammer ripoff… After all, “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” Problem is… Warhammer 40k is intentional self-parody. it’s a big joke. But Warcraft wants to be a serious story, with real literary and character chops. It doesn’t work
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It is sort of a logical consequence of how the Warcraft cosmology works out. Death is just one of six (roughly) co-equal cosmic forces, rather than anything special. So, the same rules apply for everyone, if you die on your home plane, you become energy that dissipates into the realm
The real question it brings up, is if souls are native to the Shadowlands, who has been feeding them into the mortal plane to stuff in bodies? I have pondered that a lot when I consider Sylvanas’ quip about the world being a prison.
Do we know that souls are native to the Shadowlands? I had been assuming that souls were created in the Life realm, then shift over to the mortal realm when they’re born into bodies, then finally shift over to the Shadowlands when those bodies die.
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Don’t even get me started on how the Horde and Alliance seem to have an infinite number of resources and soldiers that also never rebel despite being forced to fight for 20 years straight in world-threatening war after world-threatening war.
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by my reckoning the dwarves are the only military presence that should be able to fit two soldiers together at this point, and those two soldiers would have very expensive therapy bills
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There are a few quests where you try and prevent them from becoming forsworn. However it would seem that once you go full forsworn, you can never go back.
The Sha of Doubt would be pleased with Devos.
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I don’t think you’re ‘dead’ dead when you die in the Shadowlands (barring current events that are disastrous).
I think reincarnation is certainly a thing that can happen judging by the concept of Ardenweald and Cudgelface’s commentary on sin stones, that those who’ve atoned of their worldly burdens “move on” or become Venthyr, with a world quest in Revendreth explaining that your sin stone breaks down into anima that sustains the dimension.
All of the motions of every afterlife we have access to seems to be apart of leaving your past behind, which would be crucial for reincarnating, I think. To live a new life, not knowing your last.
Save for the Wild God entities in the Ardenweald, who just come back just as they did before.
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