Good Riddance (9.2.5 Spoilers)

Lore Story
41

But that whole part about Pelagos having compassion in his judgements is rubbish.

Sorry, but I’m not giving Blizzard a free pass here.

They could have chosen any storyline they wanted, they chose this one, so the flaws are their own to deal with.

And although Pelegos is presented as a benevolent Arbiter, then he is not presented as an all-loving and all-compassionate God.

Revendreth is still there.

You can’t say that Pelegos will allow people to choose their own afterlife whilst ignoring the fact that Revendreth is a place for sinners to be absolved of their sins.

Maldraxxus is still there.

That place needs able soldiers from specific souls to serve in its army and help protect the Shadowlands. That’s why Draka ends up there and not wherever Durotan went.

The story point of the new testament - the point that sweetens the whole deal of the Human afterlife - is that Jesus died for our sins.
Everyone gets into Paradise. God forgives all. God loves all.

That is not the afterlife that Pelegos and the Shadowlands presents.

What does the compassion of Pelegos amount to? Revendreth and Maldraxxus still needs souls and there are still souls of evil criminals and fine warriors coming to the Shadowlands. Is Pelegos just going to send them off to Bastion because they want to go there and he’s compassionate?

It’s crap story. If Blizzard wanted to go the whole route of us seeing that the Shadowlands was truly a messed-up afterlife and then subsequently fixing it so it resembles something akin to Paradise, then this sure as hell ain’t it.

It’s exactly the same as when we came. Pelegos may have words of compassion to offer, but Blizzard aren’t exactly explaining what that compassion amounts to in practice.

And he doesn’t come off as the all-loving and all-forgiving compassion of God, because then he should have forgiven Sylvanas of all she had done.

So it’s still a flawed and unjust afterlife.

1 Like
42

Is it?

Sorry, but I’m not giving Blizzard a free pass here.

Don’t think anyone cares about what we think. We’re just passengers in the backsit of the bus.

Revendreth is still there.

Revendreth is a democracy now, unlike the authoritarian place it used to be.

Maldraxxus is still there.

Maldraxxus got purged, all defectors are in the Maw, all the evil do-ers dead or captured and disarmed literally.

The real lesson was that death was just a shot, brief chapter in eternity, that forged who we are as essence. In that perception, some events pale as importance. Especially in the shadow of Gods, such as Elune who chose to let Teldrasill burn, even though it was a magically protected tree that survived many summers w/o catching fire.

It’s a marvelous story, well presented, and incredibly designed, but many will not understand, many will horde grudges, many don’t even grasp the concept of creation putting word to word, or creating animated complex environments.

Afterall … we don’t see it, but we are the ones actually flawed and unapreciative :slight_smile:

43

Got to strongly disagree on that one. The story would be passable, if they actually pulled off telling it, which they did not. Even if we disregard all the retcons, inconsistencies and stuff the way the story was told made no sense. The mortal cast save Tyrande and Shandris had bugger all to do(including Sylvanas), key plotpoints were either dropped randomly or pulled out of the writer’s rear end, in the left field and there were so many times they only started establishing things, after they had been resolved. The only thing the book did was make it abundantly clear that nobody can make this new stuff gel, with the established story of past decades.

Revendreth’s purpose is to help people seeking or needing redemption to resolve their issues and move on into a proper afterlife or stay and help others through the process, if they so choose. It has absolutely nothing to do with the political compass.

1 Like
44

The story telling is not excelent, on that we can agree. But overall it does not make it a bad story, it expanded the Warcraft universe far more than anything though it was possible, concluded some very ancient unaswered questions, such as:

  1. what the spirit healers were
  2. where undeath came from
  3. what are spirit echos
  4. what was the mysterious power behind the helm of domination and the LK armor.
  5. the origin of the dreadlords
  6. the origin of the scourge technologies and the plague
  7. the fate of the damned
  8. what aZeroth is

Revendreth’s purpose is to help people seeking or needing redemption to resolve their issues and move on into a proper afterlife or stay and help others through the process, if they so choose. It has absolutely nothing to do with the political compass.

You are correct this is what Revendreths purpouse is. But I was not talking about its purpouse, but about its leadership. The political compass was bad when Denathrius abused his role and perverted the purpouse by unjustly sending souls to the Maw, and starving his denizens. The political compass under the new leadership returns it to the purpouse that was mean to be.

45

In my opinion it is rubbish, yes.
I have read the various dissections of the story by different people in the community in the past weeks, and I still align my opinion with those who consider the story to be rubbish.

Oh, I was more alluding to the fact that it’s often easy to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt whenever something in the story is vague or unexplained. You can usually analyze the story to its own benefit by leaning into a desirable outcome or conclusion – even if the story doesn’t explicitly say one thing or another.

But in this case there’s too much that’s vague or unexplained in the Shadowlands, and I don’t think that makes for good story. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to leave it to the players to fill in the gaps either. Again, it’s just not good story.

First of all, how is it a democracy?
Secondly, how is its means and practice any less sadistic in nature than before we arrived?
Thirdly, why is absolution of sin still given only through suffering and pain?

Again, it doesn’t fit the narrative of wanting to portray the new Shadowlands as an afterlife of compassion.

Really? Where does it say that? It’s not something I recall hearing, which seems a bit weird, because that’s a pretty huge revelation.
How is The Shadowlands then going to defend itself when it has no influx of souls to join its army?

I must admit I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to say here.

As I see it, then we arrive in the Shadowlands, and the afterlife we’re presented with appears flawed. The moral compass is a bit out of order, so to speak.
We then go through a long journey of dealing with problems in the various realms, defeating The Jailer, and creating a new Arbiter, only for us to leave the Shadowlands almost as flawed as it was when we arrived. The moral compass is still out of order!

There’s no enlightenment gained here. There’s no moral teaching to it the way that any real-world religion conveys a message of love or peace or whatever.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the story cannot be deemed good when the overwhelming sentiment from the playerbase is that it’s not good.
It’s not a good story if only 1 out of 100 in the audience liked it. Then the story failed to be good for those it was meant to be good for.
Blizzard should tell a story that is appreciated by those who play WoW, and not just a few of those who play WoW.

1 Like
46

Grab a cup of hot chocolate, and enjoy this. Ponder. Than perhaps your mind will be more clear.

47

Don’t patronize me.

3 Likes
48

I showed you reason and kindness. Sorry to see you feel patronized.

Perhaps one day you might learn the elderly mean well, for they are no long due to leaving this world, and have nothing to gain from acting superior. Death … humbles us all dear stranger.

49

Majority of those points have either been already known for the most part, retconned over the established origins or worthless trivia, with no relevance to the actual story.

You were responding to a commenter questioning the compassion of sending someone to Revendreth, where the current leadership has little baring on pretty much anyone save the specific cases involved in Denathrius’s schemes like Kael’thas or the drought, unless they’ve already exercised self-determination to remain there and assist others through the process.

1 Like
50

World-building and storycraft are very different things, and you didn’t mention anything about the story here. The story isn’t the facts we experience, it’s how we experience them. If I tell you that the world of Frigndiggn has 20 moons, but only every second tuesday, you’ve now learned an interesting fact about the world I just invented. You just have no reason to care, because there is no story behind it.

The negativity here is mostly focussed on the story, it wasn’t half as strong in 9.0 when we went to the Shadowlands. And since the story didn’t work for many, many just don’t care about the supposed revelations you mentioned. If I don’t feel invested, the fact that spirit healers somehow come from Bastion isn’t any more interesting than Frignndiggn’s irregular moons.

Also, about half of your points are just your headcanon, and never really confirmed anywhere, so…

1 Like
51

You brushed off my reasoning by implying that I lacked understanding and simply needed to learn. That’s patronizing.

This is vague, no offense.

I’ll add a counter-example to one of my points about Revendreth and its means of penance through pain and suffering.

Disney:

Your penance is to do good – to do reparation. That leads to absolution. Pain and suffering does not. It’s meaningless. It doesn’t lead to a better world. That’s why we don’t get whipped in the church every Sunday when we confess our sins to the Priest. Instead we get told to go and do good things in life.

Blizzard’s message is…wrong. They say that if you’ve done bad things, then you get absolved of your crimes by enduring pain and suffering for eons until you become submissive.
That’s not very different from medieval times where people were tortured until they “confessed” their sins.

Hence why I said that the story fails, because we don’t actually correct the wrong we encounter on our journey in the Shadowlands. We leave the place as flawed as when we arrived.

1 Like
52

To be honest I’d direct the blame here on Blizzard’s inability to show us how the situation has improved rather than a wrong message or what have you. What happened overall is framed as a positive influence, altho it’s hardly visible outside Bastion to be frank.

This discussion kind of makes apparent that the story of Shadowlands would have benefitted much from grounding the story by focussing on the rebellion aspect of it. Uprising of the damned and all others, who felt screwed by the unfair, uncaring inflexible system that was. Rather than the Jailer mumbling taglines endlessly, about cosmic mumbo jumbo.

53

So, the ending wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

All in all, Blizzard dropped the ball on all aspects of this expac. The story-telling was so badly executed. They threw away a lot of decent concepts. This is what happens when the money-men have control of the game.

1 Like
54

I mean Tyrande was pretty forgiving with Ilidan. The guy which did a lot worse things.
Elves aren’t good people, they are full of hatred.

55

Here’s the thing, Pelegos already failed, sending Sylvanas to be the only one to rescue the souls is moronic. I mean yeah ok its her punishment but we are talking about the condemnation of innocent souls here, one would think that the priority would be to get them out of the maw as soon as possible. Hell send in the Kyrians ffs, this is essentially their fault.

Also as how I see it all the SL afterlives are hell:
Bastion- Abandon everything you were and become a taxi driver.
Maldraxxus- Become a undead and join the army
Ardenweald- Be surrounded by furies (honestly this is the worst one)
Revendread- Get the sin tortured out of you
The Maw- Get tortured

We know that there are other afterlives in the SL but we know next to nothing about them (the lava place in the Sylvanas book also sounds like hell btw). So my theory is that pretty much all of SL is hell where you spend some time and then get send to the Life realm (Emerald dream and other unknown beforelives???) which are paradises and then you get reincarnated. I know that only Ardenweild fits with this logic but the lore is a mess anyway so that is my headcannon for this.

56

That was pretty much the creature’s ideal natural habitat. The problem with it was that it separated the creature from it’s partner, for a theoretically individually more optimal afterlife.

57

No I meant that the place as a whole sounded like hell, I wasn’t talking about the creatures themselves. Also I have a hot take, I do not consider “when you die you will not be with your loved ones” as good motivation, I mean yeah it sucks but being an atheist myself and raised in a somewhat religious household it was my understanding that there is the possibility that if there is an afterlife people would not end up together ~50% of the time, soooo yeah…

58

It’s a compounding issue, where the individual aspects may not seem that big in isolation, but it really adds up, especially when you begin to account for the big issues like the Kyrians and the Maw.

PS.: Kind of a funny thing. Every soul is getting mentally tortured, until Sylvanas manages to free them from the Maw… Then again Tyrande always has been a galaxybrain, when on screen so it should not even be surprising, at this point lol

59

Is it though? She got to see the torture chambers of the afterlife and didn’t find them just at all. Then she saw the heavens of the afterlife and realized that it isn’t a place of perfect bliss either. The whole point of that chapter was to show her the meaninglessness of afterlife, and life in general.

60

Idk what you are talking about. We do not get to see her opinion if the afterlives she saw were considered good or bad on themselves (also she did not get to see all the afterlives and neither did we), it was very explicit in the book that the reason she considered the afterlife unfair is because she wouldn’t be put in the same place as her loved ones. What you are going on about is implying character motivation which you are free to do but is subjective.