I’m wondering if there was any concept art, or if we will at some point see what the Ethereals/Brokers/K’areshi looked like before they became that way.
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Low key choosing to believe the short story art is accurate (they were mildly horrifying mannequin race with no face)
Closest thing is the cover art for the Doom of K’aresh short story but it’s pretty stylized. https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/File:The_Doom_of_K%27aresh_-_chapter_2_art.jpg
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I was just thinking about this! Has there really never once been an instance in which an Ethereal has described their former appearance?
No wonder they gave up their physical forms so easily.
lol, they didn’t give up anything. Someone, the Revel, chose for the rest of their people what was going to happen to them. Then just to make sure it landed correctly we got an unreliable narrator story, actually handled correctly in that regard, about how none of them understood what was happening and the transformation was presented as some kind of divine intervention.
Nope. They actually do not even remember what they used to look like anymore because they have been arcane ghosts for so long.
Which is fair given they have been stuck like that for longer than humans have existed on earth IRL.
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The K’areshi artist who made that, afterward : “I’m a landscape artist, what did you expect. None of you can even do a stick figure.”
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I guess I’ll just have to accept that a race of beings known for their technomancy were incapable of creating a technology to capture and preserve images.
lol
One would expect statues to have survived somewhere, given people are able to find personal items 100ks of years later right where they left them.
Being fair… they have apparently been stuck like that for hundreds of thousands of years. A CD has a maximum lifespan of a century; a cassette tape is 30-100 year in ideal conditions. Having your world blow up is hardly ideal conditions.
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I’m going with they have/had a cultural aversion to depicting the physical form… also as much as we’re being led to believe these guys are the end all be all of their people… I feel like it’s probably safer to say they were just one element of a far more diverse culture… even if Blizzard, and a vocal minority, seems to be allergic to their races having diversity of cultures.
I mean brokers and ethereals alone suggest layers to Kareshi culture. They’re similar sure but in many ways very different from one another. Compare Ven’ari to Locus Walker. She’s very to the point not overtly emotional extremely cunning and endlessly determined to succeed in her ultimate goal(which she did). Locus Walker is in fact quite emotional even in his average speech, extremely prudent and cautious, hesitant. When everyone’s skin started to fall off from the toxic arcane exposure under those domes holding back Dimensius who’s to say who « survived » and who was left to go untethered. We don’t know their whole story and likely never will.
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I have my criticisms about how K’aresh is depicted, but the Ravel, the Oracles, and how the ethereal vs. broker forms are used all suggest cultural splits within their society. I would argue K’aresh is probably the most robustly differentiated society we’ve ever seen launch in WoW.
Drae, Trolls, and Nelves might be differentiated more, but they did not launch that way.
It’s still a monoculture, but it is notable progress for WoW.
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You’re not wrong. I just find myself feeling like we’re looking at instead of the survivors of a world. The survivors of a single large island, or small continent, because I have a hard time believing everyone has such a strongly similar culture.
The oracles at least depict that these people weren’t static since their world died, they shifted and became something different, maybe even something they wouldn’t have recognized if their past selves could meet their current selves.
Personally, I believe these were a single people who over time drifted away from each other in directions the others didn’t accept as they all tried to cope with their new reality in their own ways.
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Only that they once had material bodies.
I feel like there were certainly multiple peoples on K’aresh, the ones we know are the ones whose skill in technomancy and possession of the Reishi wraps to fuel their arcane barrier reactors allowed them to survive when everyone else became a snack for Dimensius.
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The old Ask CDev post that gave us the first version of the ethereals’ backstory said there were several races on K’aresh, but who knows if that’s canon anymore because other parts of that post were changed with TWW.