… Precog in the entire Azerothian universe. Until he suddenly isn’t.
Don’t believe me? Well, now that my premise and clickbait title are out of the way, let me prove it to you.
First, let’s address the Five Predictions Zovaal made to Sylvanas.
- Predicting the Burning Legion would return is about as impressive as predicting it will rain sometime between May 2022 and September 3033. Toss that away.
- Predicting Vol’jin’s final words to Sylvanas about stepping out of the shadows and leading? Easy to do when you’re working with the guy who whispered in Vol’jin’s ear. Toss that away, too.
- But Sargeras stabbing Azeroth right through the heart? That requires knowing the Heroes (us) would defeat Sargeras and that Sargeras would have the opportunity to stab Azeroth and that Azeroth would conveniently rotate Silithus in his direction. This requires a lot of very specific information, such as the roughly accurate time we’d defeat Sargeras, that Sargeras would do some effectively light stabbing (that sword sure is pretty dang big and going to the hilt would have definitely been fatal).
- Knowing Sylvanas would hold Azerite in her hand sounds big, but it really isn’t; if you know Azeroth’s gonna get stabbed, you know she’ll bleed. And if you already know that blood is powerful, you know the Horde and Alliance leaders will probably touch it. Toss this one away also.
- And of course, predicting that this would convince Sylvanas to join him and take Bolvar’s cap and break it’s also a wash.
So, just one accurate prediction that can only be a prediction?
Nah, I got more evidence. Most of which we already know or suspect; his plans required too many fine details to work out exactly right, from Sargeras finding the void world in all the cosmos, being convinced by the nathrezim to go cray-cray, that Sargeras would find Argus of all the worlds in the cosmos, that the Legion’s three attempts on Azeroth would fail, etc etc. There’s a lot of things that had to go exactly right, and did.
But let’s focus on what we can prove. Let’s turn our attention to the in-game events of WoW the MMO and what specifically had to occur.
Let’s start with the Argus rocket that killed Robo-Arbiter, because if you don’t believe Zovaal is the greatest seer in the entire Azerothian universe now, this must convince you. I’m going to skip a whole hell of a lot of steps to avoid going down the rabbit hole, and work my way backwards to reach a key point, so follow me on this journey.
For the Argus rocket to happen, Zovaal had to know we’d kill Argus. To know that, he had to know we’d invade Argus, and how it would happen. Any sooner and Sargeras wouldn’t have reached Azeroth’s heart, any later and Sargeras would have finished the job. To know we’d invade Argus, he had to know we’d free Illidan and get the magic keystone, which requires Zovaal to have known Gul’dan would have stolen Illidan’s body in the first place. Speaking of Gul’dan, he needed to know that AU Gul’dan would get yeeted through the portal, because without Gul’dan the Legion wouldn’t have arrived when they did, leading to the rest. Which means Zovaal knew we’d end up on Draenor, which in turn means he knew Garrosh would find a McGuffin that would allow him to reach Draenor.
There’s a whole lot more accurate predictions going from there, regarding how he’d need to predict everything from the BC-era opening of the Dark Portal so Thrall could find Garrosh, and you already see how deep this rabbit hole goes.
Some of this can be chalked up to a many layered plan to provoke certain events from occuring. But a lot of them require people making very specific choices at very specific times. Garrosh, AU Gul’dan, Illidan, Khadgar, Velen, all of them and more could have made a different or even slightly different choice and thrown this whole thing off entirely. He had to know exactly how they’d react, and to do that, he’d need to have accurate predictions of their future behavior.
But Argus isn’t the only one. Let’s go for a shorter trip back to patch 9.1.
Primo hid his sigil away. He hid it in a whole other land lost in the In-Between, locked in a memory, hidden in a broken building. Zovaal clearly already knew all of this. Part of why he needed Korthia, perhaps the biggest part, was he needed all five sigils and one was here. From there, the Maw Walker goes, stumbles on to the sigil, opens it up or something, and brings it to the Primus… Where Zovaal and his forces are already waiting to attack and immediately did so. Now with the sigil not protected by all its traps and shenanigans, Zovaal just took it by way of his already-prepared and uniquely qualified pet Anduin.
All of Zovaal’s moves here led to the exact moment he could claim the fourth sigil. He was prepared for every step, right to the end.
But maybe you’re unsure. Maybe you’re thinking “well, he can’t predict our actions!” And… You’d be wrong. Because he absolutely can and did, and we were key components to his plans, as I’ve already outlined.
- He needed us to defeat Argus right about the moment we did.
- He also predicted our victory in Hellfire Citadel, because without it, Gul’dan does not get yeeted.
- There’s also us freeing Illidaniel and accompanying him to Argus.
- More importantly, he foresaw our involvement with the Primus’s sigil.
This last bit is important, because if we’re going to establish Zovaal’s prescience, we need to know it’s limits. And clearly, whether in an alternate timeline, on Azeroth, in the Shadowlands, on Argus, even in the Maw, Zovaal sees. And Zovaal knows. Heck, he even knew we’d follow him to Zereth Mortis and left forces waiting for us as we arrived. He even required us to follow him so we could access First Ones technology (we’re told in quests nobody else has been able to do this, and Zovaal had to brute force his way through what we could do pretty easily) to prep the new Arbiter body so he could try and fit Argus in it.
… Which is suddenly where his precognition fails him. Because starting here, literally everything falls apart for the greatest seer. He can’t foresee his own defeat and can’t piece together we’d beat up Argus again. Because this great skill that allowed him such microcosmic precision as to predict within minutes our defeat of Argus just… Stopped working. Because.
…
So what’s the point of all this? Why’d I type this long essay to convince you of Zovaal’s near-perfect prescience? Why am I wasting my time?
Because I’m bored as heck, obviously!!
And because this is all the hallmark of bad writing. This level of required foresight that suddenly stops for the plot is emblematic of writers trying to write a hyper-competent mega-genius. They start with the end goal and work their way backwards, attributing far more than necessary to their villain to make them seem like a master planner. But then they realize they’ve painted themselves into a corner and either force into the narrative a reason why the mega-genius misses some key detail, or just don’t.
This is a case where they just didn’t. They wrote Zovaal as impossibly competent, capable of seeing the future to within the very choices people will make, when they’ll make them, and how they will implement those choices. If Khadgar decided Illidaddy might not be the best person to hold on to the magic keystone and held on to it himself? Narrative falls apart. If Turalyon swung just a little harder, or even a second time, the whole plan falls apart. If N’zoth just blew up the reorigination machines because they could be used against him, the whole plan falls apart. If we fell to Argus, the whole plan falls apart. So on and so on.
And because they wrote Zovaal so hyper-competent, they ended up forgetting to put a flaw into his competency that would explain his defeat. It can’t be “Zozo can’t predict Maw Walkers” because he’d been predicting them since day one. It can’t be “Zovy can’t predict in ZM”, because he predicted we’d find the Arbiter Husk and get it refitted.
So instead we have a stealth plothole; hyper-competent, mega-genius Zovaal who can absolutely see into the future in exacting detail suddenly loses all of that, just in time to be stopped.
Rant over. The end.