Zovaal never had a chance, specifically because the story has been incoherent, and its never actually been about him. He’s kind of a side salad Dreadlord who is doing stuff, while the story focus’s on what the Azeroth characters are up to. In the scene where he transforms and says goodby I feel like saying ‘gratz, see ya later, happy world destroying’.
21 Likes
Nobody has told him that we’re clowning on his stronghold so hard that we’re holding speedrun competitions with each other now
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Isn’t Sauron pretty much the same as Milton’s Lucifer with the whole “Rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven” thing?
Sauron not only refused to return to the Valar to receive judgement but joined Morgoth in the first place to bring Order to Middle Earth which seems to be what Zovaal is doing with the “All shall serve me!” thing.
No Sauron and Morgoth were both motivated by envy and pride more than any political governance metaphor 
Morgoth envied Eru’s power of creation and so wove discord into the three attempts at the song, the first one doing so unintentionally and so the creatures spawned didn’t obey him.
Sauron betrayed the other Maiar to follow Morgoth, but Tolkien was always ambiguous as to Sauron’s precise motivations.
It’s why it’s the wiggle room for every noncanon Tolkien game
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I was kinda hoping for a Sheogorath/Jyggalag kinda reveal. Seeing as Zooval has his own platform for the primarch Zoom meetings, I figured he once ran a much different Covenant and was tossed into perdition perhaps for being too powerful or something. Perhaps he was the God of Order called the Architect once or something.
As it stands though his only trick being domination and misery really not only makes his character less interesting, but makes it very confusing why anyone would side with him.
And having to wait for the Sylvanas novel to maybe explain any of this really does sum up Blizz’s approach to writing these days. Tune in next financial quarter, maybe some of this will start to add up, but only some of it. Because we saw the world intrigue scribbled on a bathroom wall once and that’s as far as we understand the concept.
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Wait, the Legion is still a thing? Is that a logical deduction or is that something I can read somewhere?
Logical deduction. We just killed Sargeras not his whole army. A whole boss fight in Antorus is all about shutting off the portal network to stop the throngs of reinforcements from pouring in and overwhelming us.
So there’s presumably a massive power vacuum. I’m picturing sort of like the breakdown when Alexander The Great died only with Demon Lord’s controlling whole Legion planets if not galaxies.
I’ve said elsewhere I think it’d be really cool if we had these feuding demonic states try to hire Azeroth’s heroes to stack the deck. They’re not stupid enough to invade Azeroth again but they’d remember how dangerous it’s residents were.
Be real cool if you had like Mal’Ganis and Magtheridon offering the PCs deals to help damage the others kingdom.
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Well there’s still two Burning Legion leaders who are still out there; Tichondrius and Mannoroth.
Mannoroth was killed on AU Draenor, but not in the Twisting Nether, so he could return if he gets a body from another dimension over to the MU.
Tichondrius died in the Nighthold, but between his demonic nature and given what we know about the Nathrezim and Denathrius, he could easily come back.
So there’s two leaders the other demons could rally around, but that’s probably a long way off.
Back to Zovaal the Jailer, I think he has potential, but it’s hard to take him seriously given that, due to the meta, it’s unlikely he’ll survive the expansion and because most of his interactions with our world are the product of many retcons.
The Shadowlands being stringently ordered with a clearly defined heirarchy (complete with Zoom-equipped meeting room for its execs) spoiled the whole afterlife concept for me.
I would have preferred it be more mysterious and ill-defined, with an unknown number of realms, vastly more ‘alien’ than the four we’ve seen, and no governing heirarchy or ‘purpose’ to the different realms.
Discount-Sargeras fueding with the discount-Pantheon is boring. We’ve pretty much done a better version of this already.
And no, “but this time Sylvanas is sad” or w/e is not compelling and doesn’t elevate the story.
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The fun part are all the implications depending on some factors. As I said either the Warcraft-universe is comically small because a few thousand dead night elves are a big deal…or the Burning Legion is capable of conquering or destroying trillions/quintillions of worlds each passing day. Which also means that there are so many demons serving the Legion that each square meter on Azeroth would have been stacked by thousands of them…if not even more. In turn making each victory even more ridiculous. The Tomb was open, space ships serving as mobile portals…so yeah. Even if it takes millions of demons to kill a single soldier…who cares? We have an endless reserve!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale
Unless the Sepulcher is located inside a black hole (which is currently busy sucking in some sun) and looks like a tesseract from the outside all while the inside does not follow any kind of logical of physically possible structure…it will be a disappointment.
It will probably be some extremely generic looking stone structure similar to Oribos. So…yay?
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Seems more like the Titans thing, not Zovaals and this was not Saurons problem but that was already addressed.
Zovaal manages to make Cata-Deathwing look like an interesting and nuanced character 
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In a way their more alike than you’d think both being motivated by hating the job their boss/creator gave them, and thus wanting to destroy everything.
I don’t think Azeroth is modern earth populated, but I’m sure the population of races is higher than a few thousand.
A structured afterlife with power structures and organizations and bureaucracies is just inherently lame to me. It was genuinely so much more interesting when the Shadowlands was just the greyscale world that ghosts wandered in aimlessly, with powerful spirits like Helya and Bwonsamdi carving out their own little domains in it.
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Well we all know how Blizz’s attitude toward population goes.
I was really shocked Orgrimmar has something like less than 200k residents. Which is nuts because you had cities much, much larger than that in the actual Medieval period.
And this setting has commonly avaliable magical and alchemical medicine. To the point where you can count the number of plagues Azeroth’s had on one hand. So the problems IRL cities had (that more people were dying than reproducing and population growth was due squarely to economic migrants) until basically the modern era is a non issue. You’d think there’d be population sizes rivaling at least Ancient Roman and Egyptian numbers.
Really is bizarre how little research they put into things. Seems the rule of cool is the only rule in WoW. But here’s the thing; cool is subjective as hell. Not a good rock to build on.
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Part of the problem is that a lot of it feels like a place that could exist anywhere.
We visited the Emerald Dream from Azeroth before. Some freed undead going wild could have happened on any world that made the bad decision to use necromancy. Bastion at least has a distinctly heavenly vibe, but feels too much like a more outdoors Jedi Temple than a domain of the actual Valkyries of the setting.
As far as Warcraft goes, it’s actually pretty mundane as far as magic rich locations can be, and the true death thing just makes it seem like Mortal Life 2 more than an afterlife when combined with the job aspect.
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But how many of those planets have beings tied to the energies of a Titan growing within their planet?!
We are special. 
Outland and Argus felt more alien than the Shadowlands. The least they could have done is at least do cool stuff with the skyboxes like they did on Argus.
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The thing is they haven’t even confirmed that.
As I’ve said elsewhere it would be so easy to just say proximity to Azeroth’s world soul gives you super potent anima. And the Kaldorei, having been functionally immortal up until 9 years or so ago, have extra potent energy. Also since Teldrassil was a bootleg world tree tainted by the nightmare make that the big red gloop that gums up the Arbiter’s gears.
Boom. We now have a perfectly good explanation not only for why the Banshee’s war was vital to the Jailor, but also why Teldrassil and the Kaldorei were targeted immediately and with such hostility.
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