What Happens When a Titan Soul Wakes Up?

So if the titan soul inside of a world wakes up, does it burst out of the planet or does something less dramatic happen? I was wondering because if their awakening is catastrophic then wouldn’t that be a big problem for everyone living on Azeroth?

This is perhaps the most fundamental question of Warcraft’s foundational lore. We simply do not know. We do not know what happens to a Titan born of a world soul. We do not even really know if the Titans were actually genuinely born of world souls or if that’s just what they believe or if that’s just what they’ve come to believe about themselves.

We also do not know if Azeroth is actually a Titan or something else entirely.

Good question though. We’re in the middle of an expansion where Blizzard is trying to recontextualize a lot of the lore Chris Metzen created in the Warcraft 3 instruction manual and what we know from Chronicles (which was written before Chris left Blizzard). So in a lot of ways we just don’t know yet. Which if the Warcraft fanbase were a little less jaded would actually be a really fun place to be…except we have to argue about Sylvanas and Teldrassil every night for the 780th night in a row.

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Blizzard may have even contradicted fairly recent lore: Chronicle I seems to indicate that the entire planet literally unfolds into the Titan, with the planet’s features become its skin. But seeing Argus’ world soul, and then a physical body of him, in Antorus? That seems to imply the world soul just separates from the planet.

I really dislike the latter, and wish they would have stayed true to Chronicle.

Thanks for the answer. Maybe we’ll figure it out in the next expansion. I think that a problem with a lot of serious fan bases is that they think that the characters they like are infallible. If characters don’t make mistakes then nothing interesting would ever happen. You could argue that every decision that a character makes is out of character but every decision is always out of character because it’s never been done before. If nothing happens then there is no reason to be interested in a story. This story also isn’t finished yet so there is always time for things to make sense in the long run when it’s finally over.

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“cough” Argus “cough”

We actually see Argus “grow” from his world soul state into his phyiscal form when called upon by Sargeras.

Could be that Argus is just the exception since he was teleported to the Seat of the Pantheon and did not have a “natural” birth.

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Agreed.

People are supposed to be flawed, they are supposed to make mistakes. They are supposed to disagree. That is the crux of interesting story-telling. Having every character agree with every other character all of the time is a recipe for stagnation and infinite boredom.

What I like about the recontextualizing of Chronicle is that Chronicle set a lot of questions in stone, it left too little to the imagination. It gave too much power to obsessive-compuslive control-freak personalities that want every aspect of the Warcraft universe placed into neat little boxes.

No thank you. I want chaos, I want multiple interpretations, I want disagreements, I want Warcraft.

We see what we see, we know what we know. Until we don’t know what we don’t know. We only know what we see. And what we see can be flawed.

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I don’t understand why people think the Argus fight is representative of a titan’s natural birth.

It seems obvious to me that Argus was an unborn spirit forced to manifest prematurely after being tapped like a keg for thousands of years, and not anything that’s supposed to happen in a titan’s life cycle.

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Well not just premature he was extensively tortured, and forcefully brought into the seat of the pantheon.

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Where did you read this? Because Chronicles has a distinct lack of any information about the birth of a titan

Just because it’s unnatural doesn’t mean a natural one happens differently.

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Vice versa though. It doesn’t mean a natural one happens the same way either.

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No we have seen titan planets before eg. Orcs home world and the planet is still in one peice. Yet it does appear (refer to previous example) that when a titan is born from its planet that the planet can no longer sustain life and slowly dies

/offtop

We literally have characters like that in the story, and those characters are called out for being a problem for the story.

The entirety of BfA was build as “wait and see”. We know how happy in made the players. So, depends on the dev team and audience. In this specific case, with these dev and this audience, it’s a dead end.

No disagreement allowed, and we see all swooped into Anduin team.

Chronicles has plenty of self-contradicting parts. To untangle them could be an interesting story by itself (not to mention that Chronicles in the preface called a book “This book—this chronicle—is meant to bring it all together”… “intertwining patchwork of myths, legends, and world-shaking events”)

Arguably not possible with the current narrative team. As it seems that even when there are rightful reasons in the alliance to have something for arguing, etc., it’s about to be swooped aside for the narrative convenience.


gl hf

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Chronicle I, Chapter 1: Mythos, page 19: “When the titans finally awoke, they did so as living worlds. Cosmic winds howled across their gigantic forms, bodies shrouded in a cloak of stardust, skin criss-crossed with silvery mountain peaks and oceans shimmering with latent magic.”

This is literally page two of the actual text.

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I always took that to mean they copy features of the world they were born in and their bodies ended up looking like it. As oppose to outright folding a world into itself.

Draenor is not a planet with a world soul. That is a major lore point as to why the planet had tons of spirit energy that allowed the Elementals to live in relative peace (until Gul’dan used the cipher of damnation), but also allowed plant life to grow exponentially. To the point that it would’ve destroyed the planet if Aggramar didn’t interfere by creating Grond to put a stop to the overgrowth.

There’s a lot of misconception that Titans actually have a Physical form within the Planet, when everything we know indicates they exist as Literal “World Souls” and only take Physical form when they completely fully awaken.

Something like this perhaps

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Isn’t it a moot point, though? Pretty sure they said that Azeroth can’t ever wake up now, especially after Sargeras impaled her with his sword.

WHICH WE STILL HAVEN’T PROPERLY DEALT WITH YET.

Argus wasn’t a natural titan “birth”. He’s an unborn world-soul that spent millennia being tapped like a keg by the Burning Legion, then his soul was teleported to the Seat of the Pantheon, forced to manifest by Sargeras (who possessed him in the mythic version of the boss fight) and slain in the boss fight.

I think it’s still up in the air what happens when a Titan/world-soul is born (and after re-reading this, I realized that the titan Argus might be the most tragic and tortured character in the Warcraft franchise).