While we can admit Blizzard tends to contradict the lore of a three decade old franchise, one thing that always sticks out to me is things we learn by reading in between the lines.
So, here’s I go. When we go to Draenor and interact with the Draenei there we notice they have no shamans yet (lorewise they only get them after they lose everything) and we see that many Draenei comment on Draenor being nothing like Argus.
Fast forward we go to Argus and it appears to be the absence of elemental/primal power, like we see on Azeroth and Draenor. If Argus lacked elemental lords, beings that we have on Azeroth and Draenor, does that mean when it was created it was a more light-shadow world?
On the flip side, is Draenor absent of light? The Orcs don’t know what the Light is until the Draenei come by with the Naaru. Which we can assume means the light is not native to Draenor in the same way it is for Argus and Azeroth.
Where am I going with this besides a fevered rant about a make believe world? Do you think that Draenor and Argus represent the extremes of a created world? Draenor being primal and Argus being… uh… opposite of that.
Tl;dr: Is Azeroth the “middle” world, a balance between Draenors primality snd Argus’ Light/shadow?
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You should read Chronicle. It’s not as contradictory as many people say and is one of the first actual attempts at consistency Blizzard made.
Anyway, Argus didn’t necessarily have elemental lords, but it did have elementals. It had to have. Every world in the universe has elementals, because they’re an element of cosmology. They’re a constant, like life, death, chaos, order, etc. there’s no such thing as naturally occurring “light worlds” or “dark worlds”. Or “middle worlds”. We didn’t see elementals on Argus because all that was left was about 12% of the planet floating in space.
I have read Chronicle. It makes me want to cry and throw away all the short stories and books I have collected in my 15 years of franchise enjoyment.
And I was referring to elemental lords. If they existed on Argus, shouldn’t the Draenei have understood shamanism better, instead of only awakening to it after the end of their world, basically.
Kaldorei are old as dirt and have no shaman.
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Trolls have them, though, and Night Elves come from Trolls.
Okay but night elves don’t still is my point. The presence of elementals on a world doesn’t mean shaman are present. Even orcs existed for a significant amount of time before discovering shamanism.
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Fair point. Though now that you mention it, does the more advanced a culture become the less influence the elements have? Night Elves had an empire until Malfurion and Cenarius said “Yo, bro, let’s woodstock this shizz”.
Because the Draenei were an advanced culture and so are many of the non-Shaman races. By advanced I mean arcane-ly advanced. Societies with a ton of magic permeating everything.
Trolls actually didn’t practice true Warcraft shamanism until they met tauren. They called on shadow magic and the spirits of the world, but not the elements.
Witch doctors and shadow hunters are canonically distinct from shaman.
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Is that in chronicle? It makes sense, I suppose.
I dunno how we define “advanced” in Warcraft terms, but supposing we mean “urbanized and industrialized (through either tech or magic)”, as opposed to nomadic or agrarian cultures, then Kul Tirans would be an example of an urban, industrial, shamanistic culture.
Anyway on the question of Argus… we don’t know that much about the history of Draenei civilization on Argus. We only get the end of Argussian civilization with the arrival of Sargeras. The only pre-Sargeras lore tidbits we have are that they were not in contact with the Naaru prior to Burning Legion contact, and they apparently had a problem with fel-user rebellions
So for all we know Eredar could have practiced shamanism at an earlier point in their history, or there could have been other sentient, shamanistic races on Argus who were wiped out at some point.
But it is true that the elementals are different on different worlds, though I think all planets have some elementals. The difference between Draenor furies and Azeroth Elemental Lords is apparently pretty striking, so who knows what Argussian elemental lords were like and whether or not they trained shamans.
Another possibility–as one of the most sophisticated arcane civilizations in the universe, maybe the Eredar bound or bargained with the elementals as Mages do without making much of a religion out of it.
I guess a silly more brute force way to think about it, lets say all cellphones in the world stopped working forever. Suddenly you’re gonna need to learn how to live very differently than you did before because how the heck do I find anything without Google Maps???
You could surmise that this is how the Draenei reconnected with the elements and thus became shamans. On Argus they were a very advance super powerful magical arcane dependent people. After losing it all was likely a huge cultural shock.
It’s like having me needing to make fire without the aid of a lighter or matches and have to go OG prehistoric. I’d be a huge mess but eventually I’d figure it out (hopefully or the elements will claim me). Replace me and the real world with Draenei and magic and some how this lead to some of them reconnecting the elements and founding their own shaman order.
Do we know if any of the Kor’kul on Argus showed signs of Shamanism? I’m having a hard time remembering but that might be interesting if some of them did.
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