What does "hell" mean in warcraft lore?

Community General Discussion
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It’s mentioned a few times. But doesn’t seem to have explicit lore like it does irl.

I am also wandered. Grommosh and Garrosh’s surrname is “Hellscream” What does this mean? What is “hell” in the context of hellscream? Where did it come from?

We know hell as we know it on earth doesn’t exist. The closest is revendreth or the maw. But neither are called hell.

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I mean you talking about a name dating from the 90s with no concept of existing for 30y of stories

So yeah. Grain of salt.

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nothing anymore Light use to be good, shadow/fell evil but those are concepts the west doesn’t like to talk about so everything is nuanced into nothing.

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noun

noun: hell

  1. a place regarded in various religions as a spiritual realm of evil and suffering, often traditionally depicted as a place of perpetual fire beneath the earth where the wicked are punished after death.

“irreligious children were assumed to have passed straight to the eternal fires of hell”

exclamation

exclamation: hell

  1. used to express annoyance or surprise or for emphasis.

“oh, hell—where will this all end?”

I like thinking its the annoying usage so they’re just “Annoying screamer”

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Revendreth is like Purgatory. Hell is the Maw. There’s no rule that it has to be named “hell.”

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oh me.

If my pillow could talk.

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Hell is the maw apparently. But its a disney version of hell. Hell-Lite ™. It ain’t no dante’s inferno.

But tbh, after Danusers efforts at breaking the lore, you can make anything you want be hell OP, the choice is yours

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Eh. I always thought dante’s inferno lacked… imagination.

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it’s where i send the draenei to.

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Shadowlands. The expansion, not the concept.

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It’s why my friends and myself use “Fel” as the expletive in RP.

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Hell in warcraft is being stuck farming high % drop mounts but racking up triple digit kills without success.

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If Arthas had succeeded and all of the living became undead, would he have been the ruler of hell?

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Maw dailies.

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Well, I imagine honestly, “hell” is used much more loosely as a concept, rather than a direct place. In other words, it’s essentially used as to describe the concept of a place which is hellish, has fiends, so on and so forth. This allows it to remain vague enough that it doesn’t need such a rigid definition, but it can still fulfill the linguistic purpose it does in our personal lives, which is something WoW does often. Specifically the idea behind conveying a message through modern ideas / language, but not actually correlating it in game.

For example, BFA has two obvious situations of this happening, one less so than the others. When Ashvane is attacking Boralus, she flies the white flag to signal surrender. However, specifically in pirate culture, you do not fly a white flag, you fly your ship’s colors to signal surrender. But because the white flag has stereotypically been associated with surrendering in the past, Blizzard went with that because the likelihood of someone knowing pirate culture / lore vs. just generic “the white flag means surrender” is actually pretty low.

The other example is if you know anything about hyena, at one point in Vol’dun, there’s a hyena supposedly going around and killing people, cackling while he does it. But if you know about hyena, you know the ‘laughing’ sound they make is actually one of distress, or wanting something to cease. When people think hyena are playing and chasing one another with that noise being present, it’s actually the one being chased vocalizing it wants to not be chased so it can enjoy its food.

The use of ‘hell’ in this case within WoW is much the same, merely being a super vague idea or concept surrounding a plane inherently “evil” with fiendish souls occupying it for the sake of facilitating linguistic norms such as Maiev being like “WHERE THE HELL IS OUR BACKUP?!” during the Broken Shore intro.

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As far as I understood it, “Hell” in WoW lore is more of an idea than a physical place, and I don’t think it has anything to do with religion. “Demons” in Azeroth are not literal demons as known to various real world religions, but there are similarities. I take it demons and hell are concepts Azeroth has for places like Hellfire Peninsula: fiery, arid, and dangerous.

For Azeroth it seems Hell is more a metaphor than a spiritual realm people believe in, but it does seem to also suggest there might be something of Earth’s influence on Azeroth. That’s always been my headcanon anyway, that what we’re seeing in Azeroth takes place a very, very, very long time after Earth is dead and gone.

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An endless supply of belly button lint.

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I mean.

A lot of Dante’s Hell is just people kinda walking around.

A lot of the Maw is souls being chained up and tortured into insane non-existence.

So I dunno if I’d go as far as “Disney version”.

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Shadowlands