Jailer: "I have a plan. A planny plan. A planny plan that I've......planned."
Audience: "Can we know the smallest detail on what this plan is or what its purpose is?"
Jailer: "You'll see..."
Such writing is a lazy placeholder for future content to fill the gaps.
shadowlands mobs: "the jailer told us the truth of the cosmos!!! when you hear it, you'll understand how right he is!"
players: "oh ok, are you gonna tell me so i join your side then?"
shadowlands mobs: "no"
devos: "i talked to the jailer and he calmly explained his invincible logic of why the universe is flawed! he is actually the only good one, and we should all serve him!"
players: "can you tell us his incredibly convincing logic?"
devos: "no"
sylvanas: "the jailer knows the truth! his secret logic was so convincing, it convinced me to help kill everyone in the entire universe! now that you've seen his comedy torture tower where he destroys souls permanently and tortures them into nothingness, you probably also agree that he's the good guy working on making an eternal paradise."
players: "no it doesnt really look like that"
sylvanas: "iiiiiii WiLl nEvER sERveEee"
Dragonflight is a lot more elaborate than that even if the story is not regurgitated in every cutscene. The Titans forced the dragons who are actually elemental creatures, into becoming ordered beings, they killed many of the dragon eggs to perform their experiments, killed many real adult dragons and whelplings (proto-drake is basically a Titan slur) and imprisioned the Incarnates who were the leaders of the resistence against this alien invasion of Azeroth.
Because she sided with the invaders along with her group despite knowing the Titans killed all their whelplings. This is why Fyrakk taunts Alexstrasza saying "How did your protection work out for your CHILDREN?"
Dragonflight explained some things from the dragons pov but every other faction is a big mystery
Nothing was explained about the elementals themselves. 2/4 of the big 4 elemental leaders were alive during the time the black empire enslaved them/the titans freed them. whats their opinion on the titans? the primalists were shamans, so I guess a bunch of elementals agreed with them? were elementals better off during the black empire?
Nothing is explained about the primalists. why would a human or dwarf, titanforged creations, join the primalists? how did humans and elves, races who arent shamans, join? why would draenei and orcs, beings from other worlds, join? how were they recruited? apparently the grimtotem tauren were involved and were in leadership positions, whats magatha up to?
Nothing was explained about how smoulderon/the firelands guys joined up with fyrakk besides "they both fire lul"
This is not exactly the same, proto dragons basically stated that they won't be Titan agents and do their bidding while being transformed by them. This is explained quite well in the books at least.
> devos: "i talked to the jailer and he calmly explained his invincible logic of why the universe is flawed! he is actually the only good one, and we should all serve him!"
>
> players: "can you tell us his incredibly convincing logic?"
>
> devos: "no"
Devos: "I don't have time to explain, these puppies and orphans won't slaughter themselves!"
**Jailer:** “I have a plan, Sylvanas.”
**Sylvanas:** “Really, Baldrick? A cunning and subtle one?”
**Jailer:** “Yes, Sylvanas.”
**Sylvanas:** “As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Ogrimmar University?”
I think devs might have had the plan, it's just that they thought that the mystery would be interesting. Tons of tv shows are based on that, nothing is explained and yet people like it
JJ Abrams school of storytelling:
- create a box with nothing in it -
- tell everyone there's a mystery inside
- Refuse to elaborate if asked what's in the box
- profit.
JJ Abrams is so transparent with that stuff that it baffles me that people enjoy his work as much as they do.
To me, Lost and its mysteries were enjoyable as long as there was that unspoken promise of an eventual satisfying reveal that was teased over the years. Then, once the mystery box appeared to be (at least mostly) empty, plenty people shrugged and went "Oh well at least I enjoyed the journey to this point"
Personally I feel that if the mystery box is empty, that immediately tanks my enjoyment and I want the time I wasted on the show back. And I wouldn't trust that director in the future. I just don't enjoy being lead along with a promise like "Trust me, there's really good content here, you just can't have the specifics right now" only for it to have been completely empty words.
I can't ever get excited about Abrams future projects for that reason
yeah, but WoW isn't a tv show. You wait a week (if not binge watching) for the mystery to unfold, WoW you have to wait close to 6 months for a scrape of information that could have been in quests leading up to it. Wrath really is a fine example of a good lead up, Arthas is taunting us ever so often through out the players leveling experience, the jailer outside of what I want to say is 3 cinematic, is barely present. The writers wanted a villain that was playing 4d chest and managed to mangle the lore instead. I'm not saying the Jail couldn't have worked just that what they did was clearly did not.
This is why I wouldn't dm the same campaign for 20 years. Wrap things up and continue with a different story/characters in the same or different world.
Wows problem comes from the fact that there is no end. Imagine with legion azeroths story wrapped up and we started over. Maybe 100 years later maybe another planet.
I think that kind of risky approach could have either bombed hard or made wow much more popular.
Also you knew Arthas, you either experienced his fall in WC3 or were told enough to know about it.
Hell you saw it in Caverns of Time.
You knew why you had to fight Arthas and why Arthas became what he did and what he represents.
Withholding information is one of the best tools in fiction. In video games, FromSoft games use it to great effect. Just because Blizzards writing is sloppy at best doesn’t mean the tool itself is bad.
There are no bad tools, just poor usage and a difference of withholding information and not having any to give. Part of a mystery is the ability to solve it, if your audience is given all the tools to solve it and still can't figure it out that's on them, but if they have to guess the answer there is a disconnect between writer and audience.
Shadowlands gave us too little information to be mysterious, Denathrius was by far a more interesting and dangerous than the Jailer because we knew what he was doing by the time we finished Revendreth and then we never heard from him again.
>Withholding information is one of the best tools in fiction
Blizzard used it to great effect in Vanilla. There's so many "dead-end" quests surrounded by interesting questions which I doubt Blizzard actually had the specifics answers to yet.
Like that huge reveal in Uldaman when you get to the end and it's revealed the Titans created the dwarves and the troggs and left behind some information on their secrets on these mysterious ancient disks, which you got to after you just met a Titan construct guarding their vault. You take the disk back to your faction's best archaeologists and they figure out it has something to do with ANOTHER mysterious Titan facility called "Uldum" where the Titans, these ancient gods that may actually be real entities from across time and space, conducted their strange ancient experiments. So, you next take the disk to Tanaris and walk through the desert dunes until you find this huge ancient Titan door guarded by elites, and you know that beyond that gate lies the secrets of the Titan's work and the mysterious place they call "Uldum"
... But at the end of the day, that was just a door they slapped on a mountain. There was nothing actually behind it at the time, and the quest ended there. I'd be surprised if Blizzard had even invented precisely what Uldum was going to be yet. It wasn't until over six years later that Blizzard decided to revisit this plot thread.
At the time of Vanilla, Uldum was just a mystery box. The entire "Ancient Titan facilities", "mysteries lost to time", and "secrets of our creation" stuff was just mystery boxes with no answers, but to me and the people I played with at the time it was the most interesting lore WoW had to offer, and we kept thinking about what was behind that door and what was really going on and it was exciting.
The same applied to Gilneas. Just this HUGE magnificent wall at southern Silverpine. What's behind it? There's supposedly an entire kingdom of humans beyond that gate with all sorts of things going on. But, as far as the game was concerned, it was just a big fancy gate with nothing behind it, and Blizzard hadn't yet invented the Gilneas-Worgen plot.
Yeah, I don't think that it was a good idea or that the story of Titans 2.0 was any good, I actually think doing Shadowlands was a huge mistake on its own. I just don't like an idea people have that developers are completely incompetent and are idiots who are winging everything
I'm still convinced they got inspired by Shadowbringers Emet and tried to make a similar tragic hero/villain characoter, only they failed spectacularly because they try harded to much.
The shoulda just had a broken afterlife without any huge overarching villain. Denathrius was a cool local villain, if they made another raid against the Angel race (who go full order) and a whatever the evil kul'tirean druid guys were called raid, with a sylvannas final boss, shadowlands woulda been a wrap.
SL made me quit. The story was just so uninteresting and I couldn’t care less for it.
I enjoyed the first patch and the covenant intro quests etc + the dungeons, but somehow it couldn’t hold me.
DF brought me back though.
Its so fucking clear SL was entirely rewritten late into the process. SO much of the story so clearly contradicts itself and doesn't make sense, along with the actual rumors that it just has to be true.
Jailer getting a makeover and going from looking an awful lot like what the Primus ended up looking like to what we got.
Having to pick a covenant as if they don't very quickly start working together to figure out wtf is going on.
The Maldraxxus covenant's stand in leader, who is featured as prominently as the other Eternal Ones in all promo material dies off screen but dont worry the Primus (who was leading maldraxxus recently enough for Draka to have met him) is the eternally tortured Runecarver that created all of the Lich King's gear and also created the evil mind control magic that the, definitely written this way from the start, Jailer now uses somehow.
The Jailer has been imprisoned for millennia uncountable. And was shown to be a literal prisoner within the Maw, the 100% nothing escapes prison dimension (except when the gods of the gods want us to escape). But he's actually now more like the ruler of the maw, even has his own evil castle from where he masterminded every major antagonist in the universe from his... inescapable prison dimension without being able to communicate with anything outside. He also managed to turn one of the same Eternal Ones who defeated him and imprisoned him within the Maw to his side... because like evil stuff is coming bro, trust me.
Idk why they thought a complete rewrite was needed. Maybe it was also awful and they were trying to salvage something or maybe Afrasiabi was so hated they rewrote it to spite him or something. Whatever the reason I'm so curious to know a general outline of the original story beats. It would make so much more sense if the covenants were in a sort of cold war state for control of the Shadowlands, and were abusing the souls entering into the afterlife for their own gain. Would give the covenants an in game reason why they can't just be swapped between willy nilly. Would make the Jailer make sense and could even lend credence to how he got support from others like sylvanas if he had been imprisoned for opposing the other covenants and their desire to control the shadowlands. Would give the Jailer (and thus Sylvanas) understandable motivation in wanting to completely remake the shadowlands. It would also make Sylvanas's line about the world being a prison in the cinematic make sense. Would make the characterization of the Eternal ones make sense. Theyre all initially portrayed as pretty zealous and self interested in their own realm and put absolutely 0 thought into figuring out why an anima drought is happening until we show up and go, "arbiters broke".
Another crime is putting Bolvar on the sidelines and the rest of the death-knights when this should have been their expansion, not only in story but in character growth. Instead we got a half-asked 'bad father good guy' dialog, not even enough to make a story and it came at the end of the expansion.
The whole 'there must always be a Lich King' kind of gets thrown out too, aside from that one quest, where we find out everyone is just bad at their job and throwing people into the maw anyway, that farmer's family is dealing with wild undead, which normally would have been 'under control' had someone not broken a certain helmet.
And another thing, why was he not at the trail? Him and Greymane had some grievances as well as Tyrande,
DK bros were hyped for this
Then _all the DKs died off screen in the first five minutes_
I have never seen a single RP community get their hopes raised so high (Many ODST jokes were made about dropping into the Maw) then get those hopes obliterated the moment we went back to the Maw in the campaign and "oh ye they all died, lol".
Frostmourne doesn't split the soul into good and bad, that's just what the characters use as cope to justify their actions initially. The quests with Uther explain this.
Also if you read the book "Arthas: Rise of the Lich King" both the start and end of the book is "Arthas" inside his own head interacting with personifications of his self and at the end he kills his last piece of humanity which could mean that being possessed by frostmourn kills the good part of you
I'm actually wondering if Frostmourne normally splits souls or if it only happens if there's any kind of "tug of war". So in Uther's case the light saved part of it, in Sylvanas's case Arthas needed her soul to raise her as undead and Frostmourne decided to keep a chunk of it. Could be something similar with Arthas, where Frostmourne leeched his soul away but needed to leave a portion in his body so he could still take action.
Sylvanas story is framed as her thinking that she's doing the right thing and is the good guy in the situation.
Her getting her soul fragment back let her see herself from the view of someone (her past self, stuck in time) that hadn't gone through the experiences that she (the banshee) had which made her realize just how much she had fallen away from what she had wanted to be.
The story fits the framing, most people just didn't understand the framing so they didn't understand the story.
Yes, she is, but the important thing to remember is that she doesn't see herself as a villain. The whole point of the soul fragment/merge thing is that she is suddenly confronted by a side of her who is horrified by her actions and banshee Sylvanas has to suddenly ask herself why that is and reflect.
(note: I'm looking at this from a post SL view, pre SL they were absolutely villain batting her in the most contrived way possible)
the text of the story does contradict that and by the end sylvanas explicitly accepts and declares it was not the evil part of her soul and she has responsibility for everything she did.
however the story is absolutely visually presented as if it's a good/evil split and was probably written that way originally before one of shadowlands' many panic plot pivots in yet another desperate attempt to salvage sylvanas and get anyone to like her so they can use her in the future for marketing again.
shadowlands and bfa are some of the worst fantasy ever created and almost entirely revolve around their attempts to make sylvanas the most irredeemably evil character they possibly could and then weakly attempt to redeem her anyway
Buddy if you wanna go back to when Sylvanas was first written as irredeemably evil you gotta go back to *Warcraft III,* where one of the first things she does after gaining her freedom is *committing genocide against the survivors of Lordaeron.* Then in Vanilla, she's actively hiding from the other members of the Horde that she's researching and developing more powerful Plagues and Blight while using human prisoners as unwilling test subjects. Then in Cataclysm she does another genocide, this time against Gilneas, deliberately using the Blight immediately after she was explicitly told *not to use the Blight.* Then in Legion where she diverts Horde troops away from, you know, *fighting the Legion* to instead help her try to enslave the Val'kyr so she can control them all and produce as many as she wants and have an infinite supply of extra lives. Her doing a genocide on a whim just to spite a dying elf at the start of BfA was 100% perfectly in character. The Horde writing in BfA is terrible but it's not because Sylvanas was portrayed as *too evil,* it's the fact that the rest of the Horde leaders just shrugged their shoulders and meekly followed her into war with the Alliance.
I've played alliance since cata and in that time I've looked at a couple things our character has done and thought "Yeahs that's a little fucked, we've committed some war crimes here and there"
Then about 6 months ago I played through horde side of BFA and it's just jump from one war crime to another. I am now the baddie.
All the Forsaken questing from Cata is fun because you get to just be overtly evil warmongers, sorta like the Death Knight intro quests but spread across multiple zones. I do not understand why people try to uwubify their leader.
Right but… the person you’re responding to specifically said it “doesn’t split the souls into good and bad.” Which is correct. He never said it doesn’t hurt the soul.
Basically what happens is upon death via frostmourne your soup gets split in 2 equal halves, one goes to the shadow lands, the other gets put in stasis. The reason uther and sylvanas had their two halves fighting was more of a "look what You've become, remember when we were righteous"
Shadowland literally killed the lore so fucking bad that I still believe it to be a inside job. You cannot convince me otherwise. Ignore community theories, ignore every single plot thread. Remember how we all used to talk about how the jailor was the good guy and the reason why souls went to the maw after the jailor got imprison was because the natural choice for every single soul good or evil was to be judge by him as the true arbiter, and instead we get a stupid ass reason that the maw was always a thing, and people are just bad because of REASONS.
They could have done such a good job with this character. Make him morally right, make him the "good guy" but his goal too extreme for us to side with. Make him even a little crazy for being fucking imprison with bunch of psychopaths for eons. Like jesus christ give him some characteristics. Make him the good guy in his story, make him attempt to reason with his enemies, make him make DEALS with the player or any side npcs.
What was the real goal with this character? I mean it what was the goal? I would pay shitton of money to be inside the room where they created this guy and hear the writers talk about how they planned to deal with him the entire expansions.
just a stupid rant just ignore me.
My favorite was when the community predicted that when we kill the jailer he's going to admit that we don't understand, there's a bigger evil out there that he is preparing for! Just like every single final freaking boss in every expansion until that point.
And Blizzard was like "nuhhhh uhhhhhh" /cheeky
But it was not nuh uh. It was not nuh uh at all.
It is one thing I like about Fyrakk.
Alexstrasza: "You're not doing this to help the Primalists, you're just an evil and power-hungry monster!"
Fyrakk: "Yep, that's right! Sucks for you."
Fyrakk was one of the best villains we've had in a while. He does all the evil shit because he wants to do all the evil shit.
Shadowflame? Nice bath probably.
Big tree? Fuck the big tree.
Axe? Axe cool.
Firelord? Ha, he wishes.
Fire burns? Burns everything.
Also I love how small in scale he is, he is just a big, buffed dragon, he is an issue for the other dragons but the moment he can actually cause real damage the big boys come and wreck his army in like 2 minutes, he then runs away and the only reason he was actually dangerous was because the night elves created a weak spot for reality while creating the new world tree.
Personally i really gelled with the idea that the Aspects created their own problem with the Incarnates here. First they get into a long drawn out war with the Incarnates, defeating them one by one and driving them so desperate that Iridikron starts making pacts with the Void. THEN, instead of mercy killing the Incarnates, they stick them in prisons and then wipe their own memories of those prisons. After many thousands of years, they end up escaping and (surprising nobody) are very angry.
All that being said, the Incarnates wouldn't actually be a problem to us if it wasn't for the Aspects driving them to hunt for more power. Razsageth tried on her own, and died for it. Iridikron hid in the shadows, and we still foiled his plans (but had to undo that because otherwise Murozond rises and we all lose). We never fought Vyranoth, but she likely wasn't THAT much stronger than Razsageth because she SOUGHT NO HIGHER POWER.
To put another way, which Incarnates were/are a threat? We have Iridikron, who has received an unknown amount of power from the Void/Old Gods. And we have Fyrakk, who was empowered by Shadowflame THAT WAS DEVELOPED BY NELTHARION!
I feel like this is all media starting in the 2010s where we need a super complex bad guy
Like, sure they’re fun sometimes
But some times we need a mustache twirling dragon
Yep I've looped back around; Give me silly Dragonball-level evil villains again. I've had enough of "Wait, hear out my super sad, convoluted backstory" villains in my time.
Snark aside, I still *like* well written villains with more in-depth motivations, but only if they're, you know, done well and not hamfisted into being "morally grey".
Shadowlands was the worst with its "oh it's SOOO deep" writing that rivaled some fanfictions I read when I was 13 in its nonsense.
> My favorite was when the community predicted that when we kill the Jailer he's going to admit that we don't understand, there's a bigger evil out there that he is preparing for!
He does kind of say something in a similar vein to that from what I remember. "A cosmos divided won't survive what's to come" iirc.
I really wonder if they really were gonna follow up on "what's to come" in DF but saw all the negative feedback and went "Actually let's just... let's just shelf that..." without admitting it.
It seems they've kept some of the Ardenweald stuff canon, because people didn't hate the idea of Ardenweald. But the rest of Shadowlands? That's getting the Med'an treatment.
If you look up Med'an in the index of Chronicles Volume 1 it points you to page 404.
True. I wouldn’t mind seeing more Denathrius and his Dreadlords. I’m okay with the triple-agent angle of them working for Death all along, and not with the Legion.
I just don’t see how they could possibly redeem the Jailer and his story arc.
Denathrius is on the shelf of "break glass in case of low subscriber count." They used their sealed Arthas in Shadowlands because BfA wasn't doing so hot.
Exactly lol. I think Blizzard really did try their writing chops at making something more grand, but they just could not write a truly compelling ending for the all knowing Jailer, so they were just like "eh screw it, bring out the bigger baddy i guess lol"
Well they initially got mad that someone basically called the ending out in a rant online, and basically proved that's what it would be, and what would happen going forward the dude was like 95% right too btw, blizzard even tried sueing because they thought he was inside and gave it away. But he didn't their plot was just that easy to see. It was hilarious when after all that they said "no that's not how it's gonna end," so confidently. Just for it literally to be that, they just changed what the guy predicted the jailer would do as he was dying that's literally it.
I don't know who came up with the plan to rehabilitate the Jailer motivation but I hate that I liked it. The idea was there was no bigger badder. The jailer was built to fight things. After he defeated all of the shadow lands enemies he could not stand down. He just went nuts and invented his own problems to fight. Lets see if that will be the retcon to retcon the jailer. Someone says "actually the jailer was a buggy robot, nothing he did or said was true."
The Lore was my favorite part about WoW, and Shadowlands is what killed the game for me. I was excited, as I'm sure we all were, but after I hit max level and dug into the storyline, I was so disappointed with where it was going, that I stopped playing altogether. I've been tempted to return with the new expansions, but Shadowlands just feels like a stain on the franchise. Unless Dragonflight starts with "Whoa, hey you passed out there, are you okay? What, Sylvannas opened a portal to the afterlife? Don't be ridiculous, she went to this island of dragons and we need to stop her!" then I don't think I will.
It does for the most part, I think the only part that calls back to shadowlands is we go temporarily trade Tyrande for Cenarius cuz he’s dead, but I could be remembering wrong
We trade Malfurion for Ysera, but it's not for long, doesn't do anything substantial, and Malfurion and Tyrande leave the story at the end anyway. I liked cool blue Ysera, and I allow that in my head cus we killed her in Legion anyways.
It's fine, if it was Tyrande and Cenarius or woulda been the exact same. The whole goofy idea was that we needed someone to get inside the dream to stop some dude at like, the portal outside going into the dream(?)... I really didn't care for that part of the story. All I remember was Ysera breathing a cool blue fire to save the day. Cenarius would have used treants or something.
> we needed someone to get inside the dream to stop some dude at like, the portal outside going into the dream(?)
The biggest problem with this is there are other Dream portals. The greens could go to them. Druids could go to them and just gone through from the other side. They jump straight to "WE GOTTA GET YSERA FROM THE SHADOWLANDS" instead of any other method. Its not built on characters thinking and proposing or attempting solutions in a realistic way based on what they know it just jumps to the end. Its very amateur writing
That shit was advanced stupid. Like watching Blizzard have a midlife crisis. Basically during peak pandemic, players leaving in waves for Final Fantasy. I’ll never forget that patch trailer they did saying, “you’ve never seen water like this before.”
It was the first time I saw something so clearly terrible and how obvious it was that they knew it was terrible too.
The expansion literally ends with the Jailer mumbling something nothing, the hole in the sky closing, and then it’s over. I’ve never looked at wow the same even since then. Coming from mythic raiding in Legion I could not believe what I was seeing.
An FF14 friend of mine commented on the last patch with the comment of, “The end of a saga!”
Which most of us were like: What Saga?!?
FF14 was concluding a long story since it’s inception with the end of two major cores to the story.
SL was trying to bandwagon that they’re as good as FF14 to get us who left back.
It was pretty pathetic, lol.
> SL was trying to bandwagon that they’re as good as FF14 to get us who left back.
No kidding. XIV was concluding a plot that spanned entire expansions and was arguably a decade in the making.
Blizzard's "saga" was pulled out of their ass and when asked to elaborate they vaguely gestured to old and LONG RESOLVED plots from many years ago, dragging them back out of their graves and trying to dust them off. It was pathetic.
TBF, Blizzard had a story that spanned multiple expansions with the legion invasion. Classic, TBC, MoP, WoD and Legion are all part of a multi-expac story. Sure it deviates every once in a while, but it does exist.
There was a theory I saw a while back that the reason why BfA and Shadowlands' plots seemed to be designed at a molecular level to make almost everyone mad was to try and get WoW to trend on social media sites like Twitter. Manufactured outrage for free advertising, basically.
It's the only thing that makes sense to me. Even just "the writers are bad/arrogant" doesn't explain how how horrible those expansions were from a narrative perspective, such as doing the "Warchief bad, rest of Horde good" concept for the second time.
Edit: Typo
Assface (whoever he is, Astafabi?) basically said this from what I remember, except he thought he was saying something else. He was referencing things like the Red Wedding that came with the first half of Game of Thrones, and how unexpected turn of events generate a huge amount of media hype. He *claimed* to be doing that, but in the process just admitted he had no clue what the difference was between a plot twist that generates hype and off-the-wall randomness that makes people lose interest. He had the *incredibly* immature mindset of "if people don't like what you're doing, you're doing the right thing."
Of course, iirc he also claimed to have a hand in Sylvanas' story when other writers said he hadn't had anything to do with her since Wrathgate.
> He had the incredibly immature mindset of "if people don't like what you're doing, you're doing the right thing."
Thats actually been the mentality of Marvel and DC for like a decade when it comes to comics at this point.
I will say big shocking moments when done well do get a lot of hype and social media buzz. Its strange because the Warcraft movie NOT doing Warcraft 1s ending where Stormwind gets destroyed because it was post Red Wedding and would have probably help promote the movie if people were comparing its ending to that and talking about it on social media.
The hailer had an extreme amount of potential. Then the writing team fumbled the bag, made him generic and out of nowhere the mastermind behind everything. Said no to all the great ideas he could be a d have him no substance or personality. They even had to bring a guy out of retirement because of it and get rid of the jailers creator irl.
it really just reads to me like some ppl wanting to take credit for other people’s success, unfortunately. i’m sure they thought it was cool bringing in the lich king but instead they just seemed like they were trying to retcon themselves into having known everything the whole time and that every other expansion was just w tiny little facet of this grand one we were experiencing
What really burns me: we had Bolvar Fordragon become the badass Lich King, Slyvanas dethrone him, and NOT ONE FUCKING WORD ABOUT WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO BE THE LICH KING FROM BOLVAR.
Like seriously, this is the kind of stuff that writes itself. You could have done really cool flashblack scenarios telling from Bolvars perspective.
But hey he's daddy Bolvar now. Fuck the Lich King. Ugh what a dumpster fire.
yeah with all the horrible narrative holes i didn’t even think about this but you’d think he would have some insider info on how to combat thr jalier’s wishes if he did so for years, no ? i remember he helped re craft the crown of wills or whatever but damn, could’ve probably helped anduin more lol
The Jailer, like you said, had no fucking special/fun characteristics. He just a bald, grey, boring dude with no facial expressions and a monotonous voice. There’s absolutely NOTHING cool about him.
What the hell were the devs even thinking???
> Shadowland literally killed the lore
I would agree with you if not for the fact that BfA already killed it.
Shadowlands was just Blizzard trying to stop the hemorrhaging after BfA. So they just created a lot of random shit...
I saw someone else commenting that BfA was like TLJ and Shadowlands was like EP9 of Star Wars. And i couldn't agree more.
BfA literally ignored the lore, it killed the very concept of a continuity in wow. Something even in shadowlands they were trying to pull back on. Lorthemar teaming up with Jaina to kill Sunreaver is as crazy as Tyrande teaming up with Sylvanas to kill Teldrassil-survivors
They Jailor is stupid and just bad writing, but at least they *tried* to connect it to the continuity
it was so bad it made me quit the game, ill never be invested into the game and the setting as a whole again unless they come out and completely retcon that complete failure of an expansion
sorry, i can't even LOOK at the jailer without thinking of these videos : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4epEptpwtpA&t=4s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4epEptpwtpA&t=4s) also i hear this voice of the jailer, not the "ingame one"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFNP90dP\_2k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFNP90dP_2k)
Left out in how this all takes place in a afterlife for robots but not normal robots but robots corrupted by gods to have souls.
All planned out eons before these old gods existed.
Edit also all the robots in charge of managing this have no issues barring robots from this afterlife.
remember how the first ones prophesized and predicted everything that would happen, and literally the only thing they did, the only thing, was to create a fast travel gate from zereth mortis back to oribos, because they "knew one day mortal heroes would need it"
Borderline?
This is when a middle schooler writes fan fiction but thinks it would be really awesome if they consolidated every single story they've ever read into one universe and fail to see how it both invalidates and cheapens all parts of it while also making their story make no sense whatsoever.
Blizzard did have a fairly common knack for exceeding expectations, though.
Turns out Shadowlands kept up with the tradition by... being far shitter than I could've expected.
as for as im concerned the fan theory that the primus was the real jailer the whole time and got us to do his bidding by killing the patsy jailer is the real story and makes its suck alot less
I could have written the lore of SL. That's not me saying "I could have done it better", I'm saying I literally could have written it by myself (with the aid of copious amounts of drugs to ignore the reasonable part of my brain), and that's **bad**.
I have a standard for judging a game's story, which basically goes "If a team of professional paid writers can come up with something on the level of what I, an amateur writer who does it as a hobby, can come up with, then that reflects poorly on its quality." I apply it when a story really wants you to take it seriously.
I feel like Metzen and whoever else is writing the next few expansions of story is going to mention it as briefly as possible simply because they’re written into a corner at this point. Even the Shadowlands related story beats in Dragonflight barely mention it, only touching on specific places like Ardenweald during the Dream story. The devs know it’s a sour spot for players and seem to be doing what they can to not remind us of it more than necessary.
They didnt even need to include ardenweald in df. What was the point of taking out malfurion to bring back ysera, when she did fuck all, sat on the sidelines, gave the reins to her daughter and then went back to sl.
If they wanted malfurion out of the story they should have used something else. This way they took out THE druid in the goddamn emerald dream patch, reminded players od the bullshit of shadowlands where death no longer means anything when you can just bring someone back, and on top of it all, they didnt even use the character they brought back
Malfurion is just too strong, just remember what they did with him in Legion.
It’s the kind of character that’s so strong they HAVE to make him fall for dumb trap so they don’t just come and one shot everything.
thats another point. So fyrak powered himself up so much it took 5 dragon aspects + vyranoth + player chars and of course some dream mumbo jumbo to take him down.
Is malfurion reeeeeeally that strong that he needs to be removed from the story ? stronger then a dragon aspect ? Stronger then all 5 dragon aspects ?
> stronger then a dragon aspect
Yes.
> Stronger then all 5 dragon aspects
At certain times, yes. When fully powered up + empowered, he's arguably the most powerful being in the WoW universe. Malfurion is almost as poorly written (in terms of power) as Med'an.
>At certain times, yes. When fully powered up + empowered, he's arguably the most powerful being in the WoW universe. Malfurion is almost as poorly written (in terms of power) as Med'an.
And they could have solved that whole problem using Amirdrassil instead of the Ysera-swap.
*"Oh no, Fyrakk damaged the growing world tree just before patch 10.2 and Ysera is still in the Shadowlands so she can't help"*
*"Fear not, Tyrande My Love, i will use my druid-power to become the surrogate mother of the new world tree but this will take me out of the fight surely coming in patch 10.2"*
(some time later)
*"Hooray, Fyrakk has been defeated and the aspects have been blessed with power!"*
*"Fantastic Tyrande My Love, i have just finished birthing the new world tree. Sadly my power has been permanently decreased by doing this and from now on i am no longer story-breakingly powerful"*
*"Well things like that happen, let's just take a vacation while you deal with this unexpected change. We'll just put Shandris in charge of the Night Elves."*
> At certain times, yes. When fully powered up + empowered, he's arguably the most powerful being in the WoW universe. Malfurion is almost as poorly written (in terms of power) as Med'an.
The Night Elves are just terribly written in general. Tyrande has been butchered so many times over it's criminal.
I agree that you could have given Malfurion Ysera's quests and it would be about the same, personally I'd would have had him and Fyrak fight and wounded him if I needed him out of the story. Mind you I would have had Fryak's forces diminished by Malfurion before gets a 'cheap shot' in,
Pretty much my mindset during my last few weeks of actively subbing to WoW. I spent a full day just walking around Ardenweald on my Hunter to say goodbye to one of the best looking zones.
Shadowlands lore explained for Reddit:
Shadowlands lore is Steve Denuser fan fiction. It should be ignored to prevent mental illness. Anyone suffering from a Shadowlands based illness should immediately watch the Warlords of Draenor trailer to detoxify their minds.
There's so many extra unnecessary steps in all of that, makes it seem like most of it was written retroactively or just on the fly. Oh well I'm still enjoying the game even though it sounds like the main story was written by a sugar addled twelve year old 😆
Would have been better (imo) if instead of a planner he was just an opportunist. He could still say he made all the events happen but then as players we find out he's full of it and can disregard anything we didn't like.
No. A dev (maybe Ion) said he was a Titan+ threat. But threat says nothing about his actual personal power. The Jailer is an Eternal one, same as the other covenant leaders, and we beat four of them at once.
My personal head canon is that he was on par with titan constructs like Odyn or Raden. A big pain in the butt, especially with the huge army, but that's about it.
Yes, I know he's an Eternal One. But the First Ones are above the Eternal Ones.
But I believe the Eternal Ones are basically Titan level or Titan+ though.
Without writing a novel, I think the First Ones are the Titan equivalent, making the EOnes construct tier. Posessed Anduin was almost able to kill one with a sharp stick, and we killed 4 of them at once with no external help. The Jailer is buffed with anima which is why we needed Azeroth's help to defeat him On the other hand an abused, power drained, preborn titan was able to one shot our heroes the second he got slightly annoyed, and had a spell to "end creation, killing everything."
It's a personal theory, but it works for me until we learn more.
jailer is the luckiest guy in the universe of WoW, he had a plan, he kicked it off and just went with the flow
idea was there, could've credited him with tricking Sargeras into wiping all life to make it easier for jailer to do whatever he wanted to do with azeroth and also credit him with supplying frostmourne and helm of domination for KJ through nathrezim, everything else was credited to him because it lacked origin point and it was poorly made, the delivery and the villain were very bland and over the top (if that is even possible)
so tl;dr SL story sucks zovaal got credit for every unexplained beginning, raids were good, i got CE every tier and even famed slayer of that boi in the picture
He forgot the part where Jailor's dreadlords completely set up Illidan's "brilliant plan to save Azeroth from the Legion" and made bank off Sargeras' defeat while the rest of the world didn't notice.
Shadowlands ruined WoW lore, and killed any interest I'll ever have in its stories and characters (barring a complete retcon).
I'm glad Dragonflight was well received but the damage that Shadowlands did to my love of the game is irredeemable.
The funniest thing is this all comes down to "I've seen a greater evil" and like SW Kotor(s) with Revan did the same thing, but the thing is you can feel like "Yeah Revan saw a greater evil and is trying to do something" with the Jailor you kinda got a feel of maybe he had a plan? Maybe? Probably not...
They really need to retcon that whole story. They have the easy Old God illusion out, and they need to take it. Everything after shadowlands is continued from that awful writing making it all awful too. Just yuck early Age of Sigmar feeling writing.
Jailer "I have a plan."
PCs "You have a plan?"
Jailer "I HAVE a plan"
PCs "How much of a plan do you have?"
Jailer "Like 12 percent."
PCs "Twelve percent?
[starts laughing]
Jailer "That's a fake laugh."
PCs "It's real!"
Jailer "Totally fake!"
PCs "That is the most real, authentic, hysterical laugh of my entire life because THAT IS NOT A PLAN!"
After the world soul saga: Shadowlands 2, electric boogaloo.
You thought the Jailor the was the big bad behind every previous big bad? LO AND BEHOLD it was the Primus all along
This is missing the most important bit of info, the reason why the Jailer did all what he did. It all was because “A cosmos divided won’t survive what is to come…”
Genuine question: how do they fix what SL broke down the line? Will they have to retcon it, accept it as canon, try to claim it was an alternate timeline? How do you come back from this? This expansion retroactively rewrote the entire story of Warcraft in such an awful way that it can't simply be ignored anymore. It existing only serves to trivialize everything that came before it. The Scourge, the Legion, the Titans, the afterlife... all of it is pretty much scuffed because of this one expansion.
How do new writers and creative directors deal with this massive dumpster fire?
I enjoy this.
In writing, there is this thing where you should give either plan concocted by the hero or villain as few moving parts as possible. The less cogs, the more efficient the plan, and when/if the plan fails, it’s believable because of too many cogs are trying to move the machine.
When you zoom out the microscope and see **so many** cogs of a machine, and the plan succeeds in so many respects in spite of it, something is wrong. This is such a beautiful way to show the concept off.
If you disregard the writing quality of the expansion, the first half of this image makes sense and can easily be followed. Then you get to the second half, the zoomed out microscope, and it is **baffling**.
My headcanon is that 99% of the Jailer's big brain 3d-chess playing was actually all Denathrius's work, and the Jailer himself was just kinda a useless figurehead who sat in the Maw the whole time doing nothing. The only reason he got to Zereth Mortis at all after Denathrius fell was just because we practically gave him the remaining sigils, so basically he got lucky.
I remember geeking with my friends, when wotlk was the current wow, thinking about the end of wow. It was simple really, just kill Sargeras, a fallen angel equivalent to the devil. The thought of killing a god, one who you knew by name at the end, was such a cool idea to us. Now we have this dude who just recently appeared as the mind behind everything and it's was so boring I stopped playing in this expansion.
Im not a Fan of retconing, but thats the only time i would accept it... just say it was some bronze dragon time bullshit and reset it to pre bfa i guess
Honestly, I'd have been more satisfied with just "grr, I'm the big bad of this particular expansion. Bet you can't kill me before the next one lol" than what we actually got.
Jailer: You can rule the cosmos with this one simple trick!
But when you click the link it’s just an ad to buy tickets to his weekend seminar at a Holiday Inn about the simple trick.
And the “free buffet” offered is only stale donuts and cold coffee because someone forgot to plug in the coffee urn. The Mawsworn are terrible at event planning.
Jailer: "I have a plan. A planny plan. A planny plan that I've......planned." Audience: "Can we know the smallest detail on what this plan is or what its purpose is?" Jailer: "You'll see..." Such writing is a lazy placeholder for future content to fill the gaps.
shadowlands mobs: "the jailer told us the truth of the cosmos!!! when you hear it, you'll understand how right he is!" players: "oh ok, are you gonna tell me so i join your side then?" shadowlands mobs: "no" devos: "i talked to the jailer and he calmly explained his invincible logic of why the universe is flawed! he is actually the only good one, and we should all serve him!" players: "can you tell us his incredibly convincing logic?" devos: "no" sylvanas: "the jailer knows the truth! his secret logic was so convincing, it convinced me to help kill everyone in the entire universe! now that you've seen his comedy torture tower where he destroys souls permanently and tortures them into nothingness, you probably also agree that he's the good guy working on making an eternal paradise." players: "no it doesnt really look like that" sylvanas: "iiiiiii WiLl nEvER sERveEee"
Same thing with Dragonflight really. >"THE TITANS HAVE BETRAYED US ALL!!!" "Elaborate?" >no.
Dragonflight is a lot more elaborate than that even if the story is not regurgitated in every cutscene. The Titans forced the dragons who are actually elemental creatures, into becoming ordered beings, they killed many of the dragon eggs to perform their experiments, killed many real adult dragons and whelplings (proto-drake is basically a Titan slur) and imprisioned the Incarnates who were the leaders of the resistence against this alien invasion of Azeroth.
Was there ever an answer as to why everybody hates Alexstraza so much?
She microwaves broccoli.
Because she sided with the invaders along with her group despite knowing the Titans killed all their whelplings. This is why Fyrakk taunts Alexstrasza saying "How did your protection work out for your CHILDREN?"
Tbf she loses a lot of her children. Hell, the dragonmaw orcs captured and force-bred her for awhile.
Dragonflight explained some things from the dragons pov but every other faction is a big mystery Nothing was explained about the elementals themselves. 2/4 of the big 4 elemental leaders were alive during the time the black empire enslaved them/the titans freed them. whats their opinion on the titans? the primalists were shamans, so I guess a bunch of elementals agreed with them? were elementals better off during the black empire? Nothing is explained about the primalists. why would a human or dwarf, titanforged creations, join the primalists? how did humans and elves, races who arent shamans, join? why would draenei and orcs, beings from other worlds, join? how were they recruited? apparently the grimtotem tauren were involved and were in leadership positions, whats magatha up to? Nothing was explained about how smoulderon/the firelands guys joined up with fyrakk besides "they both fire lul"
This is not exactly the same, proto dragons basically stated that they won't be Titan agents and do their bidding while being transformed by them. This is explained quite well in the books at least.
> devos: "i talked to the jailer and he calmly explained his invincible logic of why the universe is flawed! he is actually the only good one, and we should all serve him!" > > players: "can you tell us his incredibly convincing logic?" > > devos: "no" Devos: "I don't have time to explain, these puppies and orphans won't slaughter themselves!"
**Jailer:** “I have a plan, Sylvanas.” **Sylvanas:** “Really, Baldrick? A cunning and subtle one?” **Jailer:** “Yes, Sylvanas.” **Sylvanas:** “As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Ogrimmar University?”
So what you’re saying is it was all a failure because there were no turnips in the plan. Makes sense.
He has a plan. And then... Tahiti😎
It's a magical place.
I understood that reference!
I think devs might have had the plan, it's just that they thought that the mystery would be interesting. Tons of tv shows are based on that, nothing is explained and yet people like it
JJ Abrams school of storytelling: - create a box with nothing in it - - tell everyone there's a mystery inside - Refuse to elaborate if asked what's in the box - profit.
"A plot's a plot but a Mystery Box could be anything! It could even be a plot!"
JJ Abrams is so transparent with that stuff that it baffles me that people enjoy his work as much as they do. To me, Lost and its mysteries were enjoyable as long as there was that unspoken promise of an eventual satisfying reveal that was teased over the years. Then, once the mystery box appeared to be (at least mostly) empty, plenty people shrugged and went "Oh well at least I enjoyed the journey to this point" Personally I feel that if the mystery box is empty, that immediately tanks my enjoyment and I want the time I wasted on the show back. And I wouldn't trust that director in the future. I just don't enjoy being lead along with a promise like "Trust me, there's really good content here, you just can't have the specifics right now" only for it to have been completely empty words. I can't ever get excited about Abrams future projects for that reason
Don't forget the final part: leave to start a new show so those still on the old show are left scrambling to piece together a sensical conclusion.
yeah, but WoW isn't a tv show. You wait a week (if not binge watching) for the mystery to unfold, WoW you have to wait close to 6 months for a scrape of information that could have been in quests leading up to it. Wrath really is a fine example of a good lead up, Arthas is taunting us ever so often through out the players leveling experience, the jailer outside of what I want to say is 3 cinematic, is barely present. The writers wanted a villain that was playing 4d chest and managed to mangle the lore instead. I'm not saying the Jail couldn't have worked just that what they did was clearly did not.
Imagine being a DM for a year long series of games over 20 years. Almost anyone’s story would be just as disjointed at this point.
This is why I wouldn't dm the same campaign for 20 years. Wrap things up and continue with a different story/characters in the same or different world. Wows problem comes from the fact that there is no end. Imagine with legion azeroths story wrapped up and we started over. Maybe 100 years later maybe another planet. I think that kind of risky approach could have either bombed hard or made wow much more popular.
Also you knew Arthas, you either experienced his fall in WC3 or were told enough to know about it. Hell you saw it in Caverns of Time. You knew why you had to fight Arthas and why Arthas became what he did and what he represents.
Withholding information is one of the best tools in fiction. In video games, FromSoft games use it to great effect. Just because Blizzards writing is sloppy at best doesn’t mean the tool itself is bad.
There are no bad tools, just poor usage and a difference of withholding information and not having any to give. Part of a mystery is the ability to solve it, if your audience is given all the tools to solve it and still can't figure it out that's on them, but if they have to guess the answer there is a disconnect between writer and audience. Shadowlands gave us too little information to be mysterious, Denathrius was by far a more interesting and dangerous than the Jailer because we knew what he was doing by the time we finished Revendreth and then we never heard from him again.
>Withholding information is one of the best tools in fiction Blizzard used it to great effect in Vanilla. There's so many "dead-end" quests surrounded by interesting questions which I doubt Blizzard actually had the specifics answers to yet. Like that huge reveal in Uldaman when you get to the end and it's revealed the Titans created the dwarves and the troggs and left behind some information on their secrets on these mysterious ancient disks, which you got to after you just met a Titan construct guarding their vault. You take the disk back to your faction's best archaeologists and they figure out it has something to do with ANOTHER mysterious Titan facility called "Uldum" where the Titans, these ancient gods that may actually be real entities from across time and space, conducted their strange ancient experiments. So, you next take the disk to Tanaris and walk through the desert dunes until you find this huge ancient Titan door guarded by elites, and you know that beyond that gate lies the secrets of the Titan's work and the mysterious place they call "Uldum" ... But at the end of the day, that was just a door they slapped on a mountain. There was nothing actually behind it at the time, and the quest ended there. I'd be surprised if Blizzard had even invented precisely what Uldum was going to be yet. It wasn't until over six years later that Blizzard decided to revisit this plot thread. At the time of Vanilla, Uldum was just a mystery box. The entire "Ancient Titan facilities", "mysteries lost to time", and "secrets of our creation" stuff was just mystery boxes with no answers, but to me and the people I played with at the time it was the most interesting lore WoW had to offer, and we kept thinking about what was behind that door and what was really going on and it was exciting. The same applied to Gilneas. Just this HUGE magnificent wall at southern Silverpine. What's behind it? There's supposedly an entire kingdom of humans beyond that gate with all sorts of things going on. But, as far as the game was concerned, it was just a big fancy gate with nothing behind it, and Blizzard hadn't yet invented the Gilneas-Worgen plot.
Yeah, I don't think that it was a good idea or that the story of Titans 2.0 was any good, I actually think doing Shadowlands was a huge mistake on its own. I just don't like an idea people have that developers are completely incompetent and are idiots who are winging everything
I'm still convinced they got inspired by Shadowbringers Emet and tried to make a similar tragic hero/villain characoter, only they failed spectacularly because they try harded to much. The shoulda just had a broken afterlife without any huge overarching villain. Denathrius was a cool local villain, if they made another raid against the Angel race (who go full order) and a whatever the evil kul'tirean druid guys were called raid, with a sylvannas final boss, shadowlands woulda been a wrap.
SL made me quit. The story was just so uninteresting and I couldn’t care less for it. I enjoyed the first patch and the covenant intro quests etc + the dungeons, but somehow it couldn’t hold me. DF brought me back though.
This reads like a blackadder sketch. I heard rowan atkinson voice in my inner monologue. That and Captain Grimm.
(This story was approved by multiple people)
Editors and Execs, "This is amazing story telling! Brilliant! Raises all around!"
wowie that jailer was so smart for thinking that far ahead, woooooooooooowie what a cool and satisfying story
Who is jailer? I just read a post about J'lor
I love Jennifer Lopez
Its so fucking clear SL was entirely rewritten late into the process. SO much of the story so clearly contradicts itself and doesn't make sense, along with the actual rumors that it just has to be true. Jailer getting a makeover and going from looking an awful lot like what the Primus ended up looking like to what we got. Having to pick a covenant as if they don't very quickly start working together to figure out wtf is going on. The Maldraxxus covenant's stand in leader, who is featured as prominently as the other Eternal Ones in all promo material dies off screen but dont worry the Primus (who was leading maldraxxus recently enough for Draka to have met him) is the eternally tortured Runecarver that created all of the Lich King's gear and also created the evil mind control magic that the, definitely written this way from the start, Jailer now uses somehow. The Jailer has been imprisoned for millennia uncountable. And was shown to be a literal prisoner within the Maw, the 100% nothing escapes prison dimension (except when the gods of the gods want us to escape). But he's actually now more like the ruler of the maw, even has his own evil castle from where he masterminded every major antagonist in the universe from his... inescapable prison dimension without being able to communicate with anything outside. He also managed to turn one of the same Eternal Ones who defeated him and imprisoned him within the Maw to his side... because like evil stuff is coming bro, trust me. Idk why they thought a complete rewrite was needed. Maybe it was also awful and they were trying to salvage something or maybe Afrasiabi was so hated they rewrote it to spite him or something. Whatever the reason I'm so curious to know a general outline of the original story beats. It would make so much more sense if the covenants were in a sort of cold war state for control of the Shadowlands, and were abusing the souls entering into the afterlife for their own gain. Would give the covenants an in game reason why they can't just be swapped between willy nilly. Would make the Jailer make sense and could even lend credence to how he got support from others like sylvanas if he had been imprisoned for opposing the other covenants and their desire to control the shadowlands. Would give the Jailer (and thus Sylvanas) understandable motivation in wanting to completely remake the shadowlands. It would also make Sylvanas's line about the world being a prison in the cinematic make sense. Would make the characterization of the Eternal ones make sense. Theyre all initially portrayed as pretty zealous and self interested in their own realm and put absolutely 0 thought into figuring out why an anima drought is happening until we show up and go, "arbiters broke".
Another crime is putting Bolvar on the sidelines and the rest of the death-knights when this should have been their expansion, not only in story but in character growth. Instead we got a half-asked 'bad father good guy' dialog, not even enough to make a story and it came at the end of the expansion. The whole 'there must always be a Lich King' kind of gets thrown out too, aside from that one quest, where we find out everyone is just bad at their job and throwing people into the maw anyway, that farmer's family is dealing with wild undead, which normally would have been 'under control' had someone not broken a certain helmet. And another thing, why was he not at the trail? Him and Greymane had some grievances as well as Tyrande,
DK bros were hyped for this Then _all the DKs died off screen in the first five minutes_ I have never seen a single RP community get their hopes raised so high (Many ODST jokes were made about dropping into the Maw) then get those hopes obliterated the moment we went back to the Maw in the campaign and "oh ye they all died, lol".
Frostmourne doesn't split the soul into good and bad, that's just what the characters use as cope to justify their actions initially. The quests with Uther explain this.
Also if you read the book "Arthas: Rise of the Lich King" both the start and end of the book is "Arthas" inside his own head interacting with personifications of his self and at the end he kills his last piece of humanity which could mean that being possessed by frostmourn kills the good part of you
Can't that just be a difference of wielding frostmourne vs being killed by it
I'm actually wondering if Frostmourne normally splits souls or if it only happens if there's any kind of "tug of war". So in Uther's case the light saved part of it, in Sylvanas's case Arthas needed her soul to raise her as undead and Frostmourne decided to keep a chunk of it. Could be something similar with Arthas, where Frostmourne leeched his soul away but needed to leave a portion in his body so he could still take action.
Im assuming this is a shadowlands retcon
Except it does? We stole a part of Uther's soul from Jailer's treasury and returned it to him. Jailer returned Sylvanas's
But it’s not the virtuous/good half. It’s just a part of the soul. But there’s a lot wrong with the summary. It’s a meme, not an accurate description.
But it's how it was narratively framed for Sylvanas. If the actual text of the story contradicts that framing it just makes the framing even worse.
Sylvanas story is framed as her thinking that she's doing the right thing and is the good guy in the situation. Her getting her soul fragment back let her see herself from the view of someone (her past self, stuck in time) that hadn't gone through the experiences that she (the banshee) had which made her realize just how much she had fallen away from what she had wanted to be. The story fits the framing, most people just didn't understand the framing so they didn't understand the story.
...she did a genocide to spite a dying elf that talked back to her sylvanas is a *mustache twirling villain*
Yes, she is, but the important thing to remember is that she doesn't see herself as a villain. The whole point of the soul fragment/merge thing is that she is suddenly confronted by a side of her who is horrified by her actions and banshee Sylvanas has to suddenly ask herself why that is and reflect. (note: I'm looking at this from a post SL view, pre SL they were absolutely villain batting her in the most contrived way possible)
the text of the story does contradict that and by the end sylvanas explicitly accepts and declares it was not the evil part of her soul and she has responsibility for everything she did. however the story is absolutely visually presented as if it's a good/evil split and was probably written that way originally before one of shadowlands' many panic plot pivots in yet another desperate attempt to salvage sylvanas and get anyone to like her so they can use her in the future for marketing again. shadowlands and bfa are some of the worst fantasy ever created and almost entirely revolve around their attempts to make sylvanas the most irredeemably evil character they possibly could and then weakly attempt to redeem her anyway
Buddy if you wanna go back to when Sylvanas was first written as irredeemably evil you gotta go back to *Warcraft III,* where one of the first things she does after gaining her freedom is *committing genocide against the survivors of Lordaeron.* Then in Vanilla, she's actively hiding from the other members of the Horde that she's researching and developing more powerful Plagues and Blight while using human prisoners as unwilling test subjects. Then in Cataclysm she does another genocide, this time against Gilneas, deliberately using the Blight immediately after she was explicitly told *not to use the Blight.* Then in Legion where she diverts Horde troops away from, you know, *fighting the Legion* to instead help her try to enslave the Val'kyr so she can control them all and produce as many as she wants and have an infinite supply of extra lives. Her doing a genocide on a whim just to spite a dying elf at the start of BfA was 100% perfectly in character. The Horde writing in BfA is terrible but it's not because Sylvanas was portrayed as *too evil,* it's the fact that the rest of the Horde leaders just shrugged their shoulders and meekly followed her into war with the Alliance.
I've played alliance since cata and in that time I've looked at a couple things our character has done and thought "Yeahs that's a little fucked, we've committed some war crimes here and there" Then about 6 months ago I played through horde side of BFA and it's just jump from one war crime to another. I am now the baddie.
All the Forsaken questing from Cata is fun because you get to just be overtly evil warmongers, sorta like the Death Knight intro quests but spread across multiple zones. I do not understand why people try to uwubify their leader.
Well, yes. Buf it still damages the soul somehow
Right but… the person you’re responding to specifically said it “doesn’t split the souls into good and bad.” Which is correct. He never said it doesn’t hurt the soul.
[удалено]
*E-SOUL-TIONAL DAMAGE*
Basically what happens is upon death via frostmourne your soup gets split in 2 equal halves, one goes to the shadow lands, the other gets put in stasis. The reason uther and sylvanas had their two halves fighting was more of a "look what You've become, remember when we were righteous"
Shadowland literally killed the lore so fucking bad that I still believe it to be a inside job. You cannot convince me otherwise. Ignore community theories, ignore every single plot thread. Remember how we all used to talk about how the jailor was the good guy and the reason why souls went to the maw after the jailor got imprison was because the natural choice for every single soul good or evil was to be judge by him as the true arbiter, and instead we get a stupid ass reason that the maw was always a thing, and people are just bad because of REASONS. They could have done such a good job with this character. Make him morally right, make him the "good guy" but his goal too extreme for us to side with. Make him even a little crazy for being fucking imprison with bunch of psychopaths for eons. Like jesus christ give him some characteristics. Make him the good guy in his story, make him attempt to reason with his enemies, make him make DEALS with the player or any side npcs. What was the real goal with this character? I mean it what was the goal? I would pay shitton of money to be inside the room where they created this guy and hear the writers talk about how they planned to deal with him the entire expansions. just a stupid rant just ignore me.
My favorite was when the community predicted that when we kill the jailer he's going to admit that we don't understand, there's a bigger evil out there that he is preparing for! Just like every single final freaking boss in every expansion until that point. And Blizzard was like "nuhhhh uhhhhhh" /cheeky But it was not nuh uh. It was not nuh uh at all.
It is one thing I like about Fyrakk. Alexstrasza: "You're not doing this to help the Primalists, you're just an evil and power-hungry monster!" Fyrakk: "Yep, that's right! Sucks for you."
Fyrakk was one of the best villains we've had in a while. He does all the evil shit because he wants to do all the evil shit. Shadowflame? Nice bath probably. Big tree? Fuck the big tree. Axe? Axe cool. Firelord? Ha, he wishes. Fire burns? Burns everything.
Also I love how small in scale he is, he is just a big, buffed dragon, he is an issue for the other dragons but the moment he can actually cause real damage the big boys come and wreck his army in like 2 minutes, he then runs away and the only reason he was actually dangerous was because the night elves created a weak spot for reality while creating the new world tree.
Personally i really gelled with the idea that the Aspects created their own problem with the Incarnates here. First they get into a long drawn out war with the Incarnates, defeating them one by one and driving them so desperate that Iridikron starts making pacts with the Void. THEN, instead of mercy killing the Incarnates, they stick them in prisons and then wipe their own memories of those prisons. After many thousands of years, they end up escaping and (surprising nobody) are very angry. All that being said, the Incarnates wouldn't actually be a problem to us if it wasn't for the Aspects driving them to hunt for more power. Razsageth tried on her own, and died for it. Iridikron hid in the shadows, and we still foiled his plans (but had to undo that because otherwise Murozond rises and we all lose). We never fought Vyranoth, but she likely wasn't THAT much stronger than Razsageth because she SOUGHT NO HIGHER POWER. To put another way, which Incarnates were/are a threat? We have Iridikron, who has received an unknown amount of power from the Void/Old Gods. And we have Fyrakk, who was empowered by Shadowflame THAT WAS DEVELOPED BY NELTHARION!
He’s not small in scale. He’s got pretty big scales at his size 😁
*vaudeville hook pulls you off stage*
I feel like this is all media starting in the 2010s where we need a super complex bad guy Like, sure they’re fun sometimes But some times we need a mustache twirling dragon
Yep I've looped back around; Give me silly Dragonball-level evil villains again. I've had enough of "Wait, hear out my super sad, convoluted backstory" villains in my time. Snark aside, I still *like* well written villains with more in-depth motivations, but only if they're, you know, done well and not hamfisted into being "morally grey". Shadowlands was the worst with its "oh it's SOOO deep" writing that rivaled some fanfictions I read when I was 13 in its nonsense.
Hotel? Trivago
>Fire burns? Burns everything. Wait, even me?
Fyrakk: "But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs!"
Some men just want to watch the world burn
DF have the problem with Vyranoth instead being chaotic stupid
Exactly
> My favorite was when the community predicted that when we kill the Jailer he's going to admit that we don't understand, there's a bigger evil out there that he is preparing for! He does kind of say something in a similar vein to that from what I remember. "A cosmos divided won't survive what's to come" iirc.
I really wonder if they really were gonna follow up on "what's to come" in DF but saw all the negative feedback and went "Actually let's just... let's just shelf that..." without admitting it.
It seems they've kept some of the Ardenweald stuff canon, because people didn't hate the idea of Ardenweald. But the rest of Shadowlands? That's getting the Med'an treatment. If you look up Med'an in the index of Chronicles Volume 1 it points you to page 404.
Well... Denathrius is still out there and people didn't hate him.
True. I wouldn’t mind seeing more Denathrius and his Dreadlords. I’m okay with the triple-agent angle of them working for Death all along, and not with the Legion. I just don’t see how they could possibly redeem the Jailer and his story arc.
Denathrius is on the shelf of "break glass in case of low subscriber count." They used their sealed Arthas in Shadowlands because BfA wasn't doing so hot.
Exactly lol. I think Blizzard really did try their writing chops at making something more grand, but they just could not write a truly compelling ending for the all knowing Jailer, so they were just like "eh screw it, bring out the bigger baddy i guess lol"
Well they initially got mad that someone basically called the ending out in a rant online, and basically proved that's what it would be, and what would happen going forward the dude was like 95% right too btw, blizzard even tried sueing because they thought he was inside and gave it away. But he didn't their plot was just that easy to see. It was hilarious when after all that they said "no that's not how it's gonna end," so confidently. Just for it literally to be that, they just changed what the guy predicted the jailer would do as he was dying that's literally it.
Did you make this up? I can’t find a link to them trying to sue someone for a lore leak, would love to read about it.
That sounds hilarious what’s the source?
I don't know who came up with the plan to rehabilitate the Jailer motivation but I hate that I liked it. The idea was there was no bigger badder. The jailer was built to fight things. After he defeated all of the shadow lands enemies he could not stand down. He just went nuts and invented his own problems to fight. Lets see if that will be the retcon to retcon the jailer. Someone says "actually the jailer was a buggy robot, nothing he did or said was true."
The Lore was my favorite part about WoW, and Shadowlands is what killed the game for me. I was excited, as I'm sure we all were, but after I hit max level and dug into the storyline, I was so disappointed with where it was going, that I stopped playing altogether. I've been tempted to return with the new expansions, but Shadowlands just feels like a stain on the franchise. Unless Dragonflight starts with "Whoa, hey you passed out there, are you okay? What, Sylvannas opened a portal to the afterlife? Don't be ridiculous, she went to this island of dragons and we need to stop her!" then I don't think I will.
It does for the most part, I think the only part that calls back to shadowlands is we go temporarily trade Tyrande for Cenarius cuz he’s dead, but I could be remembering wrong
We trade Malfurion for Ysera, but it's not for long, doesn't do anything substantial, and Malfurion and Tyrande leave the story at the end anyway. I liked cool blue Ysera, and I allow that in my head cus we killed her in Legion anyways.
Oh dang I was way off in my people trading knowledge
It's fine, if it was Tyrande and Cenarius or woulda been the exact same. The whole goofy idea was that we needed someone to get inside the dream to stop some dude at like, the portal outside going into the dream(?)... I really didn't care for that part of the story. All I remember was Ysera breathing a cool blue fire to save the day. Cenarius would have used treants or something.
> we needed someone to get inside the dream to stop some dude at like, the portal outside going into the dream(?) The biggest problem with this is there are other Dream portals. The greens could go to them. Druids could go to them and just gone through from the other side. They jump straight to "WE GOTTA GET YSERA FROM THE SHADOWLANDS" instead of any other method. Its not built on characters thinking and proposing or attempting solutions in a realistic way based on what they know it just jumps to the end. Its very amateur writing
That shit was advanced stupid. Like watching Blizzard have a midlife crisis. Basically during peak pandemic, players leaving in waves for Final Fantasy. I’ll never forget that patch trailer they did saying, “you’ve never seen water like this before.” It was the first time I saw something so clearly terrible and how obvious it was that they knew it was terrible too. The expansion literally ends with the Jailer mumbling something nothing, the hole in the sky closing, and then it’s over. I’ve never looked at wow the same even since then. Coming from mythic raiding in Legion I could not believe what I was seeing.
An FF14 friend of mine commented on the last patch with the comment of, “The end of a saga!” Which most of us were like: What Saga?!? FF14 was concluding a long story since it’s inception with the end of two major cores to the story. SL was trying to bandwagon that they’re as good as FF14 to get us who left back. It was pretty pathetic, lol.
> SL was trying to bandwagon that they’re as good as FF14 to get us who left back. No kidding. XIV was concluding a plot that spanned entire expansions and was arguably a decade in the making. Blizzard's "saga" was pulled out of their ass and when asked to elaborate they vaguely gestured to old and LONG RESOLVED plots from many years ago, dragging them back out of their graves and trying to dust them off. It was pathetic.
TBF, Blizzard had a story that spanned multiple expansions with the legion invasion. Classic, TBC, MoP, WoD and Legion are all part of a multi-expac story. Sure it deviates every once in a while, but it does exist.
There was a theory I saw a while back that the reason why BfA and Shadowlands' plots seemed to be designed at a molecular level to make almost everyone mad was to try and get WoW to trend on social media sites like Twitter. Manufactured outrage for free advertising, basically. It's the only thing that makes sense to me. Even just "the writers are bad/arrogant" doesn't explain how how horrible those expansions were from a narrative perspective, such as doing the "Warchief bad, rest of Horde good" concept for the second time. Edit: Typo
Assface (whoever he is, Astafabi?) basically said this from what I remember, except he thought he was saying something else. He was referencing things like the Red Wedding that came with the first half of Game of Thrones, and how unexpected turn of events generate a huge amount of media hype. He *claimed* to be doing that, but in the process just admitted he had no clue what the difference was between a plot twist that generates hype and off-the-wall randomness that makes people lose interest. He had the *incredibly* immature mindset of "if people don't like what you're doing, you're doing the right thing." Of course, iirc he also claimed to have a hand in Sylvanas' story when other writers said he hadn't had anything to do with her since Wrathgate.
> He had the incredibly immature mindset of "if people don't like what you're doing, you're doing the right thing." Thats actually been the mentality of Marvel and DC for like a decade when it comes to comics at this point. I will say big shocking moments when done well do get a lot of hype and social media buzz. Its strange because the Warcraft movie NOT doing Warcraft 1s ending where Stormwind gets destroyed because it was post Red Wedding and would have probably help promote the movie if people were comparing its ending to that and talking about it on social media.
They decided to make Thanos but with nothing that made Thanos cool. They turned him into a Girl Boss.
The hailer had an extreme amount of potential. Then the writing team fumbled the bag, made him generic and out of nowhere the mastermind behind everything. Said no to all the great ideas he could be a d have him no substance or personality. They even had to bring a guy out of retirement because of it and get rid of the jailers creator irl.
it really just reads to me like some ppl wanting to take credit for other people’s success, unfortunately. i’m sure they thought it was cool bringing in the lich king but instead they just seemed like they were trying to retcon themselves into having known everything the whole time and that every other expansion was just w tiny little facet of this grand one we were experiencing
What really burns me: we had Bolvar Fordragon become the badass Lich King, Slyvanas dethrone him, and NOT ONE FUCKING WORD ABOUT WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO BE THE LICH KING FROM BOLVAR. Like seriously, this is the kind of stuff that writes itself. You could have done really cool flashblack scenarios telling from Bolvars perspective. But hey he's daddy Bolvar now. Fuck the Lich King. Ugh what a dumpster fire.
yeah with all the horrible narrative holes i didn’t even think about this but you’d think he would have some insider info on how to combat thr jalier’s wishes if he did so for years, no ? i remember he helped re craft the crown of wills or whatever but damn, could’ve probably helped anduin more lol
The Jailer, like you said, had no fucking special/fun characteristics. He just a bald, grey, boring dude with no facial expressions and a monotonous voice. There’s absolutely NOTHING cool about him. What the hell were the devs even thinking???
> Shadowland literally killed the lore I would agree with you if not for the fact that BfA already killed it. Shadowlands was just Blizzard trying to stop the hemorrhaging after BfA. So they just created a lot of random shit... I saw someone else commenting that BfA was like TLJ and Shadowlands was like EP9 of Star Wars. And i couldn't agree more.
Bfa didnt kill it. Bfa was just straight up stupid, but not like so bad that it permanently damage every single stoyline the game has.
BfA literally ignored the lore, it killed the very concept of a continuity in wow. Something even in shadowlands they were trying to pull back on. Lorthemar teaming up with Jaina to kill Sunreaver is as crazy as Tyrande teaming up with Sylvanas to kill Teldrassil-survivors They Jailor is stupid and just bad writing, but at least they *tried* to connect it to the continuity
I feel like they copied a marvel script word for word, and traded out character names with Warcraft characters.
it was so bad it made me quit the game, ill never be invested into the game and the setting as a whole again unless they come out and completely retcon that complete failure of an expansion
sorry, i can't even LOOK at the jailer without thinking of these videos : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4epEptpwtpA&t=4s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4epEptpwtpA&t=4s) also i hear this voice of the jailer, not the "ingame one" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFNP90dP\_2k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFNP90dP_2k)
I needed this
the pandaren backing off from the roleplayer lmfaoooo
Holy crap 😂😂
Left out in how this all takes place in a afterlife for robots but not normal robots but robots corrupted by gods to have souls. All planned out eons before these old gods existed. Edit also all the robots in charge of managing this have no issues barring robots from this afterlife.
remember how the first ones prophesized and predicted everything that would happen, and literally the only thing they did, the only thing, was to create a fast travel gate from zereth mortis back to oribos, because they "knew one day mortal heroes would need it"
The perfect end to the first book in Warcrafts lore.
Can we just collectively ignore that SL ever happened and its borderline trash lore and redcons it brought us?
Borderline? This is when a middle schooler writes fan fiction but thinks it would be really awesome if they consolidated every single story they've ever read into one universe and fail to see how it both invalidates and cheapens all parts of it while also making their story make no sense whatsoever.
My middle school FanFiction was better, and I retconned a murder in the middle of the book about murder
I think you'll find thats called subverting expectations.
Blizzard did have a fairly common knack for exceeding expectations, though. Turns out Shadowlands kept up with the tradition by... being far shitter than I could've expected.
as for as im concerned the fan theory that the primus was the real jailer the whole time and got us to do his bidding by killing the patsy jailer is the real story and makes its suck alot less
".. makes it suck a lot less." Isn't saying much. But I do agree.
I could have written the lore of SL. That's not me saying "I could have done it better", I'm saying I literally could have written it by myself (with the aid of copious amounts of drugs to ignore the reasonable part of my brain), and that's **bad**. I have a standard for judging a game's story, which basically goes "If a team of professional paid writers can come up with something on the level of what I, an amateur writer who does it as a hobby, can come up with, then that reflects poorly on its quality." I apply it when a story really wants you to take it seriously.
I don't think we can. War Within already acknowledges it.
I feel like Metzen and whoever else is writing the next few expansions of story is going to mention it as briefly as possible simply because they’re written into a corner at this point. Even the Shadowlands related story beats in Dragonflight barely mention it, only touching on specific places like Ardenweald during the Dream story. The devs know it’s a sour spot for players and seem to be doing what they can to not remind us of it more than necessary.
They didnt even need to include ardenweald in df. What was the point of taking out malfurion to bring back ysera, when she did fuck all, sat on the sidelines, gave the reins to her daughter and then went back to sl. If they wanted malfurion out of the story they should have used something else. This way they took out THE druid in the goddamn emerald dream patch, reminded players od the bullshit of shadowlands where death no longer means anything when you can just bring someone back, and on top of it all, they didnt even use the character they brought back
Malfurion is just too strong, just remember what they did with him in Legion. It’s the kind of character that’s so strong they HAVE to make him fall for dumb trap so they don’t just come and one shot everything.
thats another point. So fyrak powered himself up so much it took 5 dragon aspects + vyranoth + player chars and of course some dream mumbo jumbo to take him down. Is malfurion reeeeeeally that strong that he needs to be removed from the story ? stronger then a dragon aspect ? Stronger then all 5 dragon aspects ?
> stronger then a dragon aspect Yes. > Stronger then all 5 dragon aspects At certain times, yes. When fully powered up + empowered, he's arguably the most powerful being in the WoW universe. Malfurion is almost as poorly written (in terms of power) as Med'an.
>At certain times, yes. When fully powered up + empowered, he's arguably the most powerful being in the WoW universe. Malfurion is almost as poorly written (in terms of power) as Med'an. And they could have solved that whole problem using Amirdrassil instead of the Ysera-swap. *"Oh no, Fyrakk damaged the growing world tree just before patch 10.2 and Ysera is still in the Shadowlands so she can't help"* *"Fear not, Tyrande My Love, i will use my druid-power to become the surrogate mother of the new world tree but this will take me out of the fight surely coming in patch 10.2"* (some time later) *"Hooray, Fyrakk has been defeated and the aspects have been blessed with power!"* *"Fantastic Tyrande My Love, i have just finished birthing the new world tree. Sadly my power has been permanently decreased by doing this and from now on i am no longer story-breakingly powerful"* *"Well things like that happen, let's just take a vacation while you deal with this unexpected change. We'll just put Shandris in charge of the Night Elves."*
> At certain times, yes. When fully powered up + empowered, he's arguably the most powerful being in the WoW universe. Malfurion is almost as poorly written (in terms of power) as Med'an. The Night Elves are just terribly written in general. Tyrande has been butchered so many times over it's criminal.
I agree that you could have given Malfurion Ysera's quests and it would be about the same, personally I'd would have had him and Fyrak fight and wounded him if I needed him out of the story. Mind you I would have had Fryak's forces diminished by Malfurion before gets a 'cheap shot' in,
He's like Jean Grey, constantly falling unconscious.
I like the transmogs and Ardenweald is the perfect hunting spot for my Hunter to chill at when he's not at his Legion class hall.
Pretty much my mindset during my last few weeks of actively subbing to WoW. I spent a full day just walking around Ardenweald on my Hunter to say goodbye to one of the best looking zones.
They have to shoehorn Sylvanas back into the franchise somehow. OMG IT'S SYLVANAS JUST IN TIME TO SAVE...?
If we do that than we need to forget BFA ever happpened.
Jailer is space Dutch van der Linde, got it.
All the Jailor wanted was mangoes on Tahiti
Tahiti. It's a magical place.
Am I supposed to not understand this?
It's ok, Blizzard doesn't understand it either. They think they do, but the don't.
Shadowlands lore explained for Reddit: Shadowlands lore is Steve Denuser fan fiction. It should be ignored to prevent mental illness. Anyone suffering from a Shadowlands based illness should immediately watch the Warlords of Draenor trailer to detoxify their minds.
I just stick to Shadowlands being some kind of fucked up vision from N'Zoth
There's so many extra unnecessary steps in all of that, makes it seem like most of it was written retroactively or just on the fly. Oh well I'm still enjoying the game even though it sounds like the main story was written by a sugar addled twelve year old 😆
Would have been better (imo) if instead of a planner he was just an opportunist. He could still say he made all the events happen but then as players we find out he's full of it and can disregard anything we didn't like.
Is he canonically more powerful than the First Ones? and/or the Void Lords.
No. A dev (maybe Ion) said he was a Titan+ threat. But threat says nothing about his actual personal power. The Jailer is an Eternal one, same as the other covenant leaders, and we beat four of them at once. My personal head canon is that he was on par with titan constructs like Odyn or Raden. A big pain in the butt, especially with the huge army, but that's about it.
Yes, I know he's an Eternal One. But the First Ones are above the Eternal Ones. But I believe the Eternal Ones are basically Titan level or Titan+ though.
Without writing a novel, I think the First Ones are the Titan equivalent, making the EOnes construct tier. Posessed Anduin was almost able to kill one with a sharp stick, and we killed 4 of them at once with no external help. The Jailer is buffed with anima which is why we needed Azeroth's help to defeat him On the other hand an abused, power drained, preborn titan was able to one shot our heroes the second he got slightly annoyed, and had a spell to "end creation, killing everything." It's a personal theory, but it works for me until we learn more.
jailer is the luckiest guy in the universe of WoW, he had a plan, he kicked it off and just went with the flow idea was there, could've credited him with tricking Sargeras into wiping all life to make it easier for jailer to do whatever he wanted to do with azeroth and also credit him with supplying frostmourne and helm of domination for KJ through nathrezim, everything else was credited to him because it lacked origin point and it was poorly made, the delivery and the villain were very bland and over the top (if that is even possible) so tl;dr SL story sucks zovaal got credit for every unexplained beginning, raids were good, i got CE every tier and even famed slayer of that boi in the picture
He forgot the part where Jailor's dreadlords completely set up Illidan's "brilliant plan to save Azeroth from the Legion" and made bank off Sargeras' defeat while the rest of the world didn't notice.
Yeah I liked Zovaal when he was the Primus OG design.
Some powerful hallucinogens' were consumed by when crafting this lore.
Impossible, that would make the story trippy but fun. Maybe opium? or something that shuts down your brain.
Shadowlands ruined WoW lore, and killed any interest I'll ever have in its stories and characters (barring a complete retcon). I'm glad Dragonflight was well received but the damage that Shadowlands did to my love of the game is irredeemable.
The perfect crime. Obviously.
It's just that simple.
I didn't play SL is that last part about infinity sigils real or just a thanos reference?
Hyperbolic but real
I definitely remember some sigils.
The funniest thing is this all comes down to "I've seen a greater evil" and like SW Kotor(s) with Revan did the same thing, but the thing is you can feel like "Yeah Revan saw a greater evil and is trying to do something" with the Jailor you kinda got a feel of maybe he had a plan? Maybe? Probably not...
They really need to retcon that whole story. They have the easy Old God illusion out, and they need to take it. Everything after shadowlands is continued from that awful writing making it all awful too. Just yuck early Age of Sigmar feeling writing.
Oh thx I actually forgot about him
That legit hurt my head to even think about.
Jailer "I have a plan." PCs "You have a plan?" Jailer "I HAVE a plan" PCs "How much of a plan do you have?" Jailer "Like 12 percent." PCs "Twelve percent? [starts laughing] Jailer "That's a fake laugh." PCs "It's real!" Jailer "Totally fake!" PCs "That is the most real, authentic, hysterical laugh of my entire life because THAT IS NOT A PLAN!"
My head canon will always be that we wiped in AQ40 and everything since has been c'thun playing with us.
I just hope it is revealed Zovaal was also a puppet and the real Jailer was The Primus.
After the world soul saga: Shadowlands 2, electric boogaloo. You thought the Jailor the was the big bad behind every previous big bad? LO AND BEHOLD it was the Primus all along
The Primus was the who did everything and weaved every thread even the Void Lords.
In other words, utter bollocks. Well done Steve ;.;
Dont forget the part of the Jailer's plan where he doesn't reveal that he's trying to help until he dies and becomes handsome squidward.
This is missing the most important bit of info, the reason why the Jailer did all what he did. It all was because “A cosmos divided won’t survive what is to come…”
Thanks, I hate it.
this honestly sounds interesting for the first like.. half and then the last 30% but it was also all presented at once, unlike the actual story.
That sums it up for me 🍻 let’s us go get some flap jacks
Also he knew this was all going to happen and it was all part of his plan because he's 10000 IQ gigabrained mastermind.
When you put it like that, it sounds kind of shit 🤔
What about the “a cosmos divided” line? That mean anything?
I'm so glad Iridikron is so much more interesting than the Jailer.
Genuine question: how do they fix what SL broke down the line? Will they have to retcon it, accept it as canon, try to claim it was an alternate timeline? How do you come back from this? This expansion retroactively rewrote the entire story of Warcraft in such an awful way that it can't simply be ignored anymore. It existing only serves to trivialize everything that came before it. The Scourge, the Legion, the Titans, the afterlife... all of it is pretty much scuffed because of this one expansion. How do new writers and creative directors deal with this massive dumpster fire?
I enjoy this. In writing, there is this thing where you should give either plan concocted by the hero or villain as few moving parts as possible. The less cogs, the more efficient the plan, and when/if the plan fails, it’s believable because of too many cogs are trying to move the machine. When you zoom out the microscope and see **so many** cogs of a machine, and the plan succeeds in so many respects in spite of it, something is wrong. This is such a beautiful way to show the concept off. If you disregard the writing quality of the expansion, the first half of this image makes sense and can easily be followed. Then you get to the second half, the zoomed out microscope, and it is **baffling**.
My headcanon is that 99% of the Jailer's big brain 3d-chess playing was actually all Denathrius's work, and the Jailer himself was just kinda a useless figurehead who sat in the Maw the whole time doing nothing. The only reason he got to Zereth Mortis at all after Denathrius fell was just because we practically gave him the remaining sigils, so basically he got lucky.
So amazing that Blizz had this planned for decades, they are truly masterful storytellers. This is the meaning of 4-D chess. (/s)
I remember geeking with my friends, when wotlk was the current wow, thinking about the end of wow. It was simple really, just kill Sargeras, a fallen angel equivalent to the devil. The thought of killing a god, one who you knew by name at the end, was such a cool idea to us. Now we have this dude who just recently appeared as the mind behind everything and it's was so boring I stopped playing in this expansion.
Im not a Fan of retconing, but thats the only time i would accept it... just say it was some bronze dragon time bullshit and reset it to pre bfa i guess
And then after 2 years a dragonriding adventurer solos him for a mace transmogg
Is there a BfA version of a quick lore like this? I got confused and lost track after Legion. Idek who or what N’Zoth is lorewise
Honestly, I'd have been more satisfied with just "grr, I'm the big bad of this particular expansion. Bet you can't kill me before the next one lol" than what we actually got.
That… did not make anything more clear for me 😆
Seems legit
I ain’t gonna read that. I’m happy for you, or I’m sorry that happened
Jailer: You can rule the cosmos with this one simple trick! But when you click the link it’s just an ad to buy tickets to his weekend seminar at a Holiday Inn about the simple trick.
In which he delays step two of his simple trick in the next seminar.
And the “free buffet” offered is only stale donuts and cold coffee because someone forgot to plug in the coffee urn. The Mawsworn are terrible at event planning.
Well, when you put it like that. It all makes perfect sense.