We know that shadowlands has infinite afterlifes and infinite destination for the arbiter to sort you to, but we visit 4 very specific ones, and I can’t help but wonder how this will affect religions and cultures in azeroth when people know about 4 very specific places that they can end up.
Maybe this will all get mixed up with “eternity’s end” but if it isn’t, are we expecting to see major impacts from shadowlands into the world?
Are we going to see druids commune with night fae in the future, or impliment the winter queen into nature worship?
Will entire paladin halls be established in the religion of service? Will people want to avoid fighting to not go to maldraxus?
Probably not, it’s in Blizzard’s best interest to just ignore everything that they wrote in Shadowlands so they don’t have to actually spend time addressing it.
I don’t agree. The afterlife and the cosmic pantheons matter and have always been a part of the story since void and light conflicts were introduced. There’s a lot of things introduced in the expansion pack that aren’t going away (epecially not denathrius and the dreadlords).
“Just retcon it and start over” is a great way to train an audience not to get invested in something, so I am interested to see where these new worldbuilding aspects lead.
I’ve been wondering that. Theorically, the implications should be groundbreaking. It would shake all of the cultures and religions to the core.
…which is why I think they won’t address it. TOO MUCH implications, and they don’t like having their “hands tied by story continuity”. So I think the following might happen : either 1) the champions who traveled to the SL collectively decide not to spread any knowledge about it upon returning to Azeroth, or 2) they get their memories of the place erased at the end of the expansion.
EDIT : come to think of it, there’s also the option of the SL not actually being the “true afterlife experience”. That’d probably be the best way out of that delicate situation imo.
I feel like this is not the case especially for nature religions. People knew Loa went somewhere, but there was never lore for where that somewhere was. Now there is. And that’s awesome?
I think this would be real bad for Draka and Kael who had important character growth in the shadowlands. I already think they solved the issue of the afterlife with there being infinite places souls can go and only getting to see 4 of those places.
Well now we know that Loa just go to a regular afterlife (the one a vast majority of the Kal’dorei go to), take a good nap, and return to Azeroth. Is that a good thing ? I don’t think so. It deprives them of a good portion of their nobility, divine status, and mystery.
We just shouldn’t know about these things. About what’s death, what afterlives look like, how were gods created, and who are these gods’ own gods. We most certainly shouldn’t. Now we do, and that’s bad, and I hope we leave that knowledge behind, because personally, I have a very, very hard time feeling invested in that cosmic delirium, and I know many people feel the same way.
They abandonned world building at the second that they gave new customization options.
Let’s say that i was called a racist for asking where all these black elves, black gnomes and black mecagnones come from.
I have no problems to have them but they have to come from a place (or the use of a certain magic in the case of the elves) to make it credible and not breaking immersion.
This is world building and yet you have nothing around it.
As for the religions…
The best case in this regard is the Night elves:
Knowledge that Elune intentionally let Tel drassil burns to help her sister - that none of the night elves were aware of -. It can crush many belivers.
Even if you worship Elune, you will not go in the goddess embrass like you believed but could go in Maldraxxus, Bastion or Sylvarden.
It’s not even Elune who will choose where you go but an idiot with two left hands.
In the case of Sylvarden, a night elf could wish to go to the Winter queen. She is the sister of Elune after all so going to Sylvarden can be the closest thing to their religion.
It can be a great change in the worship of Elune as the Winter queen could now be included despite the fact that the later can’t act in anyway to guide a soul to Sylvarden.
And i’m only talking about the night elves but except for the trolls, nearly-all the religions are more or less invalidated.
The thing with these writers is that they don’t think at all of the consequences of their story.
Tel drassil was already a big case but the knowledge of the Shadowlands is even bigger…but will not have any spotlight.
Too big and too complicated for them i guess.
This is not the case, though. This afterlife is designed for loa. Mortals being here isn’t an ordinary thing, it’s only for those who have devoted their existence to cycles of life and death. It’s a very special place.
I don’t think everything needs to be a mystery for it to be inherently better. I mean, when you have a world of high magic where necromancy and reincarnation are canonical things, I think it’s perfectly fine to explore them through the lens of fantasy.
I think mystery is nice but I don’t think everything has to be a mystery to enhance it. Otherwise we need to retcon stuff like ulduar and the seat of the titans and most people do not call for those changes.
My big gripe is making everything robots. I don’t need things to be overexplained in terms of technological processes.
I /really/ want to see winter queen worship take place in the world. Especially for those who are mad at Elune.
Ah, not exactly. It’s designed for “Wild Gods”. So all of the natural spirits in the Great Dark Beyond end up there, including the very bad ones. That’s a whole lot of gods.
And the souls in Ardenweald merely belong to the individuals who, as you said, have devoted their existence to cycles of life and death - so really, a big majority of the “nature religions” worshippers, and we know that nature religions are probably the most common form of spirituality among mortals. So again… that’s a lot of people.
You can lift the veil on some mysteries, it can be a good thing. Like, for example discovering what the lineage of the races actually is - learning that Elves descend from Trolls, that Humans descend from Vrykuls, learning a thing or two about the Titans, etc. That’s all good. But getting to hang out with Elune’s sister ? Learn about the precise mechanisms behind death ? Water a bunch of sleeping Loa as a daily quest ? Getting to visit the “workshop of the First Ones” in which they’ve designed all things in the Universe ?
Eh, I’d argue the light is the biggest religion among player characters. Most blood elves and humans and draenae.
I unironically love all of these things except for the last one. I don’t think I want to see the workshop. To me that’s just getting to the point where it’s almost getting to too meta terriories. Like, the workshop of the makers is just taking you to a blender program and one of the quests is rigging character models. I don’t think that serves a fantasy world super well.
With the creatures of the Titans (gnomes, humans, dwarves and their relatives) - no problem.
With elves, in theory, there should be no problems either. Did their colors range from pale green to deep deep pink? The ancestors were dark purple trolls. All black elves are the most pronounced descendants of dark trolls.
Is it okay?
…
What color are dark trolls?
I’m not so sure, it means that they are the same as the Wild gods and still have a divine status.
The main problem for now will be to explain to the people why Ursoc and Rezzan will never come back, i bet that their followers will be devastated.
For a world to be interesting, it needs to have mysteries and if solved, to have an answer good enough to be satisfying and bring more good mysteries.
Shadowland wouldn’t have been a mistake if the covenants where like described by the religions of Azeroth. It would have bring the mysteries of the others religions of the universe and their influences in the world of the deads.
Elune should have stayed a mystery to keep her mystic. Now she is just a construct from another pantheon and a dumbass on top of that.
You can say that the writers brought the First ones as a new mystery…except that i royaly don’t care about them, they are just like a ++ version of the titans and that’s it.
I don’t care about their new cosmology and their cosmic delirium.
I don’t like the fact that the divinities of all the pantheons are just robots without mystic behind.
Truce to be told, i really resent the writers to have damaged - if not destroyed - nearly everything just to put in place something boring and uninteresting.
I think Elune didn’t need to stay a mystery-- but I do think making her a construct was a bad choice, if that’s what the actual implication is. It presents the idea that there is a creator deity, and that she’s not part of that.
There’s too many beaurocratic layers of divinity which is the thing that I find boring.
They put in place a rule showing that an elves has his color skin / eyes change depending of the magic drawed (last case is the Void elves) so sorry to ask which magic they are using to turn black because it interests me.
Your theory around the dark trolls is interesting as it could imply an undiscovered civilization.
Also for someone from a non-elf race to have a black skin, the race has to live in hot area for centuries.
Did these gnomes lived in Tanaris? Did they came from Tel abim? (a mystery since Vanilla).
Being interested in discovering new things and cultures, asking these questions shouldn’t hurt any sensibility or labeled you as an anti-black dude.
Agree, you can lift some veils without completely give the answer and you could also do that without making the character an idiot.
She is the sister of the Winter Queen so the shortcut that Elune is a construct is very easy.
In my case, making any divinity a construct is a very bad choice as it removes all the mystic being them.
I wonder if the current writers hate to have mysticism in a fantasy world?
Yeah, for now we have an additionnal layer with the First one but who know if they will add again another layer?
Too many layers is bad but that’s just my opinion.
Neither the WQ nor night fae are nature deities. They are death entities.
Religions arent going to change any more than they did when important govt officials and military personel found out we were created by aliens. Or they didnt… we wouldnt really know, because no one tells us.
They are 1/2 of a life and death cycle that is seperate but interacts with nature deities. Elune is the life half of the death half. Life is the pantheon of half of nature I believe.
Dark trolls lived in caves under Nordrassil, near the Well of Eternity and two points in between. According to WC 3, their skin color is dark purple.
M… It is unlikely that Yogg-Saron bothered with the level of melanin (what is responsible for skin color?). What was the color of the metal, and turned into that. Humans had good starting technologies, which probably hurt natural selection.
It is easier to take into account the opinion of furious singers, they will still become “ours”.
Elune didn’t intentionally let Teldrassil burn, she merely felt the burning occur and then sought to send the souls to her sister. In all honesty it’s actually left ambiguous if she was even aware of the War of Thorns, because it was unclear if it was Saurfang’s guilt complex or Elune that stayed his hand when it came to killing the wounded Malfurion.
This sentence put this in my head.
Trolls: Learn about the Maw and how Bwonsamdi personally did everything in his power to prevent any of them from suffering such a fate.
Also Trolls: Bwonsamdi for Super Loa God!
Bwonsamdi: This pleases me.
Talanji: And here comes the ego.
It will have virtually no impact at all. Azeroth isn’t the modern world where information and literacy flows like it does in 21st century Earth. And again the 4 realms of the expac are not even the tip of the iceberg.
Sure, the Trolls along with the Horde were sidelined for this “Sylvanas vs the Alliance - guest starring Thrall” narrative… but lore wise, they came out pretty well. At least the Zandalari and Voljin.
Bwonsamdi is actually pretty effective at what he is doing to save Zandalari souls. He is having a hard time, but he is successful. And he might have gotten a promotion of sorts, with Muezhala contained and out of his way.
Trolls might be one of the few races to have their faith renewed, and strengthened.