So I’d like to get at the physical and mental changes that are brought upon a person who becomes undead.
First the physical, undead do not have bodily functions, which means they do not need to eat or sleep. Why then do they have the cannibalism racial? Why can undead be seen eating frequency, does this food get processed/excreted? It has to go somewhere.
Undead look fragile, and someone can correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t they constantly repairing themselves? That seems really impractical and would severely limit their efficiency in battle.
What happens to the mind of an undead? They seem to remember who they were but what happens to their emotions? Death Knights and most forsaken seem evil or at least apathetic toward the suffering of others. Why is that? Why does becoming undead make you this way?
Undead people who aren’t evil seem miserable with the state of their being. Is it painful to exist as undead, the alternative is WoW afterlife (whatever that is). Are undead capable of happiness?
I understand that their are different types of undead, with varying degrees of intelligence. What determines this intelligence, is it simply the condition of the corpse upon being raised?
Finally, this is a hard one. One of Sylv’s plights was her people’s inability to procreate which I don’t need to explain. Since necromancy is found to be taboo by basically everyone and no one would really choose to become undead, doesn’t this spell doom for the forsaken as a people? They will anger everyone if they start raising people against their will, and become targets. Maybe the freed former scourge of Lordaeron should just fade away, they seem miserable and newly without a purpose. (Maybe this one deserves its own thread)
It varies by the person. Some people are powerful and are able to harness the new enjoyment of living forever albeit in a decayed body. Others go insane or crazy.
Sometimes it works to drive insanity into positive conviction (Sally Whitemane is rather a positive example of undead).
I think it’s less that they’re constantly repairing themselves and more that they’re extremely resilient. Canonically, it’s extremely difficult to actually kill the Forsaken without some sort of magic or total bodily destruction, if I understand it correctly.
Most of the “good” emotions (eg. joy, happiness) get muted if not entirely lost as a result of the magics involved. To add onto that, Arthas specifically raised DKs to have a need to cause suffering to others to make them even more prone towards violence and cruelty. In theory, the DKs that Bolvar raised might not have that same addiction.
I think it has a lot to do with the amount of power invested in raising them. DKs and Liches are intelligent and powerful but they’re a lot more difficult to raise than a mindless skeleton.
If you look at the new Undead starting zone, the newly raised are given a choice. If you hang out there for a minute, you’ll see some that go crazy, some that choose to join the Forsaken, and some that good to go back to being dead. There are obviously some that would prefer reanimation to death for various reasons (for example, the Tidesage we raised during the war campaign).
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Life challenged. Bit like a lot of us, really.
it means being ambient temperatured and obscenely strong
Its skeletons all the way down. The forsaken are skeletons who have yet to shed all of their flesh.
In pretty much every fantasy setting I’ve encountered, the undead are enemies of life. They resent the living and want to absorb all of them into undeath. The fact there’s an undead playable race only makes sense in terms of oldschool scourge fan service. They did an okay job of making it work, I suppose but if I was an orc or troll or especially tauren I wouldn’t trust them in power, like ever. Maybe not even trust them fighting alongside.
Like they say, it varies from person to person.
But there are many descriptions ingame and in lore to address that question in a more “canon” way.
There was even a questline which sole purpose was to understand “undead Arthas”.
The DK old starting experience also had many insights on what is to be undead and what is to be out of LK power.