Zovaal the Jailer’s gender-confused soul

I mean, don’t think that’s the case, as when Zovaal took back the Arbiter the whole thing disintegrated.

If that were the case, draining the anima and taking out the sigil would’ve just left a suit of armor.

The Arbiter Construct was built of his anima and sigil entirely.

This isn’t true lol least of all this entire expansion, look at the Centurions, or the Stoneborn, each has a self contained gender.

1 Like

While you may be right, I think it was ultimately pointless for the devs to make the Arbiter female, since she did nothing this expansion but be unconscious and then get absorbed by the Jailer. Given what we learn about her from the Primus, she was less a character and more a MacGuffin.

But that would mean actual effort and asking hard questions (by the way, in that case they really should’ve had a theologian when making their Diablo games). And current Blizzard seems to want to use the angsty 14 year old approach to the game’s cosmology (grab bits and pieces of every fictional cosmology they like while simultaneously axe-grinding against real-life religion… with Yrel’s group as the the latest example since the Scarlet Crusade weren’t enough apparently).

Well, the thought process at the front of the mind could easily have been:

How do we not tell people this is the Jailer-Zovaal’s job, while also putting a little plot-tag on the Arbiter so people can look back and see it wasn’t an Eternal One; and something would happen to it?
He’s a big male Eternal One, make it a her, and etherial/angel/magical fits with it being made of anima. Give it a good/wholesome feel, that’ll set it apart. And it’ll be an emotional tag, when this nice thing empowers this bad looking thing.

Thing is, it still is a very laden set of images that do carry concepts which suggest things about the back of the mind.

5 Likes

It’s funny but I realized this a few weeks ago and mentioned it in a handful of discords, and now Thadeus has realized it, meaning The Masses™ will soon begin realizing also that Blizzard accidentally made WoW Sauron Lucifer trans.

Which is a facepalm so hard that I risk decapitating myself.

If they just stopped and thought about the meta implications for any of their damn lore for five seconds.

1 Like

This isn’t a subject I took seriously at first, but reading the posts here makes me realize that this is a subject which has some credibility whether Blizzard intended for it or not. Shadowlands is an expansion that moves away from anyone having to simply be male or female, through introducing transgender lore characters and even characters that don’t have genders. The Tirnenn are genderless, and when going against Oranomonos Moonberry puts emphasis on calling the creature they/them. This sets precedent in the expansion itself, meaning that the Arbiter didn’t need to have a gender and from what we know it wouldn’t majorly affect anything. Now I’m wondering what the implications for Lei Shen and the Throne of Thunder are when put through this lens, since Lei Shen was using something else called anima to create mechanical beings and flesh shape creatures.

5 Likes

I am a HUUUGE fan of that old show Frasier. This thread turned into an argument between Niles and Frasier, and I am here for it lol.

2 Likes

I don’t know why I expected the forums to be any different than real life.

It deeply saddens me.

1 Like

How so, Renautus?

Which really undermines Pelagos. It just didn’t need to happen.

I spend a lot of time reminding people to project their ideas out logically, to their ends. To think about where it leads, and then decide if they still like what they did.
It’s not going to be comfortable a lot of the time, nature of the beast.

IIRC Bastion Covenant questing does that also.
Just those extra thought cycles: “Using notes, let me go back over this and check I kept it consistent. Let me project this idea out, and check it’s not headed somewhere I don’t want it to.” Helps a lot.

Yeah, and that’s part of Baalsamael’s point of them needing the help of a theologian. Note the Arbiter is judging things which are not bipedal anthropomorphic’s, biasing the image of the Arbiter any appearance way would be weird if you’re a sentient with another form. Do those beings have to think themselves lesser because they’re not like the Arbiter…?
I kinda think the what isn’t the Arbiter approach would have been better.

I’m going to just assume right now that they hadn’t thought about this stuff back then!

Hah!

2 Likes

And again to emphasize: in proper Apostolic Christian theology, that the Russian Orthodox Church agrees upon, angels are genderless theologically speaking.

Kyrestia would’ve been they/them and it would’ve been fine.

2 Likes

that’s not at all what I was referring to but it’s okay, it’s not important.

Sorry I misinterpreted then.

no worries.

Did you mean OP’s title choice? Knowing the implications he was gesturing to? :frowning:

Cuz yeah the title is kinda wild

1 Like

OP’s title choice was definitely a red flag that this post would become a topic of queer discourse for sure. The word choice of “gender-confused” made it clear which side of the argument OP lands on.

I want to talk about the implications of duality and Jungian concepts of the soul without the topic getting derailed by Christian denial of concepts like soul androgeny, or Anima/Animus duality, or even native and spiritual concepts of soul genders without close minded thinking trying to push a cis narrative. We have so much more theologicial discussion from Plato to Jung that there’s more than two biological genders.

2 Likes

Yeah par for the course Thadeus, and he should def change it.

But yeah Blizzard kinda messed up

3 Likes

I also don’t think that Blizzard is making any statements about his gender fluidity with Zorvall’s anima being female either. I don’t think Zorvall is trans.

I brought up Jung as an example of how even in cis men as Jung’s theory was, contained a feminine duality, in this case it was Jung’s categorization of masculine and feminine - feminine being characterized as caring, compassion, empathy… all of these things we see in the Arbiter and do not see in Zorvall. this can be paralleled with Arthas who literally carved out his own heart so he wouldn’t feel empathy. In a lot of ways, this denial of the feminine archetype in cis men and the shame of it is responsible for homophobia and sexism, so these themes definitely overlap.

I feel like it’s less a point about being trans (Pelagos already exists) but I think Zorvall is supposed to be a metaphor for divine masculine ‘out of touch’ with his own Divine Feminine. This is emphasized in the Fairytale story of The Embrace, where in Alchemical Marriage terms, the Sun was devoid of all love for anyone but himself because he was in a way cut off from the Moon, his duality. (again this lends more weight to my Zorvall = The Sun theory, I know you don’t agree so I won’t push it.)

Or at least that’s how I interpreted all of this lore.

3 Likes

Maybe, which in turn indulges into a bit of gender essentialism but we know Some Of The Writers love gender essentialism.

I don’t think Zovaal is trans but rather the lore they’ve written allows for that interpretation.

Which is an indictment of the lack of thought with regards to meta implications of the writing.

1 Like

Yeah but everyone is going to interpret the story in their own way.

We can all be accused of projection and inserting meta where there’s room to. everything in this game can be broken down in to archetypes, tropes, even unintentional implication. It’s just par of the course.

Eh.

If they hadn’t made the Sigils the “essence of their being and purpose” this interpretation wouldn’t exist.

I would have preferred that the sigils don’t exist at all, and instead the Arbiter had a Crown-Helmet (like Hades weapon of choice the Helm of Invisibility which undoubtedly served as a basis for Helm of Domination) that the Primus imbued with Zovaal’s anima and power through Domination, so a construct made around the helmet would be the Arbiter.

The Sigils have been the weakest part of this story over all, and are the root of a significant amount of narrative incoherence, and is why this problematic interpretation is possible.

If the Arbiter had simply been Zovaal’s anima, it would’ve been a simple Jungian reference.

But Zovaal’s sigil? That was ripped out of heart? That has meaning.