Elune *SPOILERS*

There’s absolutely no way that the Night Elves continue worshipping Elune, right?

At this point, I really don’t care about the Lore. Lost interest

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Why wouldn’t they?

Upon knowing they were facing certain death, Elune tried to make all of them skip their reckoning and have them dumped into her sisters lap.

She literally tried to have them all skip on any hindrance and go straight to heaven.

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Burning alive is a very painful way to go.

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And what does that have to do with Elune?

I mean, she did in fact put them to sleep to avoid them feeling getting burnt to death, but that aside i honestly don’t see how does any of that relate to Elune.

She didn’t burn the tree. She didn’t send them to the Maw.

In fact, it was thanks to her that:

  1. Those that died, didn’t suffer as much because of the flames (she put many to sleep or numbed them until they perished).
  2. Fully intended to have them sent straight to their preferred afterlife (their equivalent for Heaven).

Like, really, what should Night elves blame Elune for, exactly?

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…no, Elune killed them, expecting enough of them to be sorted to Ardenweald to be of help afterwards. She didn’t bypass the usual judgement systems. If life itself isn’t supposed to be meaningless, choosing not to save them is kind of a bad thing, you know?

She…didn’t. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.

In the wake of tragedy (Teldrassil)…”

“…I sent forth the cascade of souls to sustain YOU (Winter Queen)”

When noticing what happened in Teldrassil, she acted in consequence. She didn’t outright kill them.
And she indeed tried to have them sent straight to Ardenweald bypassing whatever judgement stood in their way.

What makes you think she had the power to prevent them from dying?

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But…

…is not…

But I guess it’s more open to interpretation than I thought. I thought it was a clear case of:
Winter Queen needed power → Tree was set on fire → Dead Night Elves usually go to Ardenweald → Letting them die is sending Queen power.

Your version is…
Winter Queen needed power → Night Elves were dead and there was nothing Elune could have done to stop it → Elune collected their souls and explicitly sent them to Ardenweald → Elune didn’t check if any arrived.

Do I have that about right?

Okay, I guess we might see about that later.

If what we saw in the WoT is all she could do, she is pretty irrelevant anyways, isn’t she? She did nothing more than to lessen the pain of her priestesses. Any loa could do that much. Indeed, the Loa did that much more than that for Zandalar in BfA. And she was hyped as the one real goddess of Azeroth. So yeah, her being powerful enough is the assumption I made that led me to think my interpretation makes more sense than yours. But I guess it is indeed an unproven one.

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Don’t think that’s the case given that, if i’m not mistaken, there are NEs souls in other covenants. Isn’t one of the Venthyr a former Night warrior/Elune chosen?

More or less.

I’d say it went more along the lines of:

Winter Queen needed aid with the drought → Elune saw that Night Elves were dying and there was nothing she could do to stop it → Elune decided to channel their souls into Ardenweald → Elune didn’t know the system was broken and all ended in the Maw.

Top garbage story, that i grant you. But still, far from what is being argued around here.

Or maybe we are to consider that a god works in misterious way, and being tethered by the mortality of her subjects isn’t something that she would do.

After all, if the future of the entire afterlife was at risk, maybe the lives of a few Night elves was an acceptable prize to pay.
A fortuitous occurrence that, given the situation at hand with her sister, she may have been willing to “accept” (if only as the lesser of two evils).

On one hand she may have had the chance to save their lives, and on the other, she could use said circumstance to help Ardenweald.

And all the above, hinges on the assumption that she indeed could’ve saved them either way.

I’d say that having the power to tip the afterlife balance either way is a tad above zapping your subjects enemies with magic.
I don’t see as weird to have a literal God be above mortal quarrels.

And no one said that all the tree’s souls were expected to go to Ardenweald. Just that it was supposed to be the power boost the WQ needed.

Sure, have it your way, the differences seem irrelevant enough to me.

Well, most gods of WoW don’t, so that would still make her comparatively useless in my eyes.

That’s my interpretation, yes. An acceptable prize to her. That they payed. It might be noble to sacrifice yourself for a cause, but sacrificing others is an entierely different matter that has its moral implications. And if it was a sacrifice, at best we can attribute it to the big picture view of the divine. But that just means that she doesn’t have the Nelves’ back, just “a plan”. And in a world where there are much more tangible gods walking around, worshipping that seems like a wasted investment.

I’ll take the enemy-zapping over whatever grand plan that was that was any time. Zapping a few catapults could have done a world of good here for loads of “her” people. And “sending them” to Ardenweald certainly wasn’t done for their sake, but for cosmic mumbo-jumbo. Which might be okay, if they were volunteers, which Elune might have arranged as well, but they certainly were not.

I think this was rather spelled out.

When Elune speaks of the wake of Teldrassil, she quite specifically says that she sent forth the cascade of souls to Ardenweald (or to be more specific, to sustain the Winter Queen).

Not as some collateral effect of letting them die, but as an active effort made with the souls once they were all dead.

I’d say it marks the difference between Elune not caring about their death, and Elune acknowledging their tragedy but taking it for the greater good.

And its not as if she is condemning them to an eternal suffering. Bear in mind, that she expected them to end directly in their heaven.

Well, we can compare the results of it.

How successful were Rezan and the rest in said role, while defending Dazar’Alor?

How about Cenarius or X’era? (Assuming that you are taking them as examples of “gods” that are more involved with their subjects).

Yes. And even if just 50% of the nelf souls from Teldrassil went to Ardenweald, I would still be fine with calling those thousands a cascade.

They fought off Mythrax and were dropping tanks from the sky and such in BoDA. So yeah, that certainly beats “making their deaths less painful”, and “supporting Tyrande with her anger issues afterwards” in my books.

She didn’t say “a” cascade. She said THE cascade.

She tried to move ALL the souls involved.

And empowering her people to take back their lands.

And all those other times when she actively intervened in Tyrandes favour.

But in all, I honestly don’t see the big deal in all of this.
Regardless of how poorly Blizzard sold us on it, the issue that affected the Shadowlands was a very serious one.
And this didn’t portray Elune as some cold female dog willing to let them all die for the sake of some greater goal.
The cinematic cares to highlight how affected she was, and how tragic she considered said events to be.

Still, she tried to ease the way for those that died.

In comparison with the rest of deities, I’d say that Elune behaved about as benevolent as we’d expect any god to be.

Want to talk about the Loa? Several demand ritual sacrifices or eternal servitude.

Which changes nothing at all. The cascade is a cascade. And it’s still one, no matter if 100% or 10% hit the target, as long as there is a lot coming.

It did for me. If you stand by to let your children die, I don’t care if you called them children, it doesn’t make you any less cold.

I just think that what we see in story right now, clearly represents how things is in blizzard.
We see alot of bad character do some bad story written by some bad writters.

That cutscene alone shows how bad Steve Danuser and his team at their job. He cares only about Sylvanas, and anything else for him is secondary and not worth good ingame explanation and dedicated storytelling.

His main goal is to subvert your expectations like WoW is some edgy teenager TV show from CW. How this cutscene brings closure for NElfs in game and NElf players? Right, it doesn’t. But i’m sure, that we will see more Sylvanas and maybe Nathanos on the way, because we all missed them, and Steve will be happy to oblige.

I’m sure he also is very busy duing MCU like plotline with Jailer, but Steve, thing is MCU like it or not, spend decade of explaining things to people and showing up stakes if the Infinity saga. Here in WoW we see how vilain that we don’t know much about, collecting things we know little about, to do some stuff we know little about.
Taking inspirations from other media sources isn’t that bad, if you have talent to do it right. but you @wowwriters do not have such talent.
I have seen better stories that people made in RP on AD, then last 5 years of WoW.

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It changes the interpretation about whether she expected them to end up in Ardenweald as some collateral effect of having a lot of them dying, and acknowledging that she was actively trying to channel all (not most, not many) their souls to Ardenweald.

Its the difference between “Meh, given many will die, I guess the majority will end up in Ardenweald”, and “Given they are dying, I’m going to funnel all of them into Ardenweald”

I honestly think there is a line that differentiates letting someone die, and not being able to stop it from happening. And then trying to shield them from the worst of it (by sending you directly to heaven and shielding you from the pain of dying).

As for the “But she didn’t have a thunder drop from the sky to smite their enemies” well…that’s probably because that wasn’t the sort of story Blizzard wanted to tell.

If we were to have such direct and literal Deus Ex Machina, many stories wouldn’t have worked the same way.

Still, Elune’s aid was manifested repeatedly through other means. Chief amongst them, the ritual and powers that granted the Night elf army the boost required to claim back Darkshore.

We can agree on that much. Doesn’t change that the story they want to tell has implications about Elunde’s character, though.

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This is all symptomatic of Blizzards inability to tell a decent story.

I am an unashamed Night Elf fan and am disappointed in the whole arc since Teldrassil. I had absolutely no issue with Sylvanas burning the tree, because she is a spiteful cow. I have absolutely no issue with Elune not intervening on behalf of the Night Elves because actions should have consequences. It’s disappointing that references to her putting the last few Night Elves to sleep so they passed peacefully were limited to the short story Elegy.

Where I take issue and, I believe Blizzard fall down is they introduce something powerful and then neuter it completely. The Night Warrior -Elunes vengeance incarnate. It sounded great. Tyrande achieved the square root of nothing with it. She took out Nathanos and soloed a few mobs in Torghast while whining about ‘muh vengeance’. At the crucial moment, when she might ACTUALLY do something, Elune took her toys away and put her in time out.

The story would have read pretty much the same if Tyrande was running around in her own right screaming for Sylvanas’ head. Lets remember she is supposedly pretty strong in her own right. It was essentially a meaningless diversion and ruined the lore surrounding it. There was no supreme power to display, Elune might as well have said no at the start.

Elune is even worse. For years, we’ve heard about the Goddess of the Night Elves. When we finally hear from her, its like pulling the screen back in the Wizard of Oz and finding there was no power it was all smoke and mirrors. Honestly, the world needs some sense of mystery. There are plenty of ways of framing her non intervention at Teldrassil that allow the mystery to continue.

This is WORLD of Warcraft, not UNIVERSE of Warcraft, the more cosmic forces they introduce, the more it dilutes the story that they are already struggling to communicate in game.

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I just don’t understand how this fallacy keeps on popping up…

Using said power to boost your army and get a few kickass moments that NO OTHER race had during this war, is a big deal.

Saving the afterlife with said power, is a big deal.

And either is far from achieving “nothing”.

I’d be a ton more sympathetic with these stances, as i’d understand that moods are high and we’d all want a good dose of “feel good” moment against the other faction that sates our tribalism.
But this is coming at a point where nobody else had this treatment.

Where Blizzard, made the specific attempt at compensating ONLY this race.

Where they even had to throw both the neutral “Heroic theme” that saves the universe AND keep on insisting on unbalanced power-levels such as Tyrande razing entire Horde settlements, a 8v1 ratio with the NEs alone withstanding SEVERAL Horde racial armies, Malfurion soloing scores of Horde soldiers, and quests that keep piling up and up in order to appeal to the audience in a way that has it root for the “Oh so important NE issues”.

I’m sorry, but even if i understand how people may feel this was underwhelming, reading how certain people keep on digging while the story is spinned to make their favourites yet again into the saviours of the universe, gets quite jarring.

How do you think she used the power to boost her army? Are you referring to the Terror of Darkshore cinematic? I seem to remember Malfurion doing a lot of the work. He’s not some level one n00b. Also, if I recall correctly we’re talking about the Night Elves, on their home turf at Night when they arguably have the advantage.

How did Tyrande save the afterlife with the Night Warriors power? Unless I missed something, she spent most of the Shadowlands up until now chasing around after Sylvanas.

With the possible exception of going toe to toe with Sylvanas, there is nothing that she did that could not have been done on her own merit. The power up was completely unnecessary beyond giving Night Elf players a cosmetic option.

I don’t want to see her as the ‘saviour of the universe’ to be honest, the more unwieldy powers that get introduced into the lore the less they mean because in order to have meaningful conflict going forward, we need to find an even bigger foe.

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