Gul'dan Origin confusion

Lore Story
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Hey lore fans,

I have just started the warcraft books and I am already confused!

In ‘Rise of the Horde’ , Gul’dan is a competant shaman and apprentice to Ner’zul. However, (and forgive me for not rewatching before posting), I remember in the run up to WoD or Legion the Gul’dan cinematic had him ostrisized from his clan for being weak and deformed(?) and he comes back and takes his revenge using the fel.

So, what is his actual history? Was he the shady yet respected shaman, or the ‘cripple’ who took revenge on his clan?

Is it just that WoD is a totally different timeline so both are true? I thought the timelines diverged when Garosh convined them to not drink the demons blood?

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Thanks!

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Hello!

Firstly… yes, the timelines are different. It’s not just Garrosh that wasn’t born, it’s other stuff, like quite notably, Ner’zhul’s wife still being alive.

But in the case of Gul’dan they just decided to change the backstory, or at least add to it. What you saw in the cinematic seems to be canon in our universe, going by the Chronicles books. Gul’dan was mistreated, almost killed, went into the desert, found demon powers and destroyed his village. Then he went to Ner’zhul and his Shadowmoon, claimed that the village was destroyed by ogres, and posed as a shaman. And from that point it should be pretty much as it was in the novel, I guess.

Like it or not, retcons aren’t uncommon in WoW, and I guess they felt that they needed to go all in to make sure that everyone watching understood that Gul’dan was really bad news. So they tuned the comicbook villainy up.

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Hi Wimbert,

Thanks for the reply. The fact that there has been retcons, and the whole WoD timeline kinda puts me off wanting to read the books.

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To be fair, the word was created over 25 years ago, and when Warcraft started out, it was really just a heavily Warhammer-inspired RTS game. From a company with the motto “Gameplay first”. The lore grew wildly and without much control, and it’s not that surprising that a trim was necessary here and there to make anything but a mess of weeds out of it. This is not, and never was, a well-constructed world, and if you like its lore, you kinda have to like the chaos around it.

…But you’d not be the only one whose limits were stretched beyond breaking by introducing dimensional travel and later travel to an interdimensional afterlife…

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I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but that’s a great way to put it.

What’s the easiest way to rationalize this? Can we argue that there’s an element of unreliable narrator in canon lore sources like the novels and chronicle books, such as we find in the Elder Scrolls?

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I’m thinking of starting to read books and specifically these seem interesting to me. They cover a lot of stories and events chronologically without stretching, which I like a lot. But do they have any point now after BfA and especially SL mess?

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I don’t think so. Unreliable narrators leave some wiggling room for truth and the conflict about it, but WoW really isn’t that sophisticated. They don’t give us two perspectives on events and let the characters of their world disagree about it, they just don’t have the same version of the story now than they did back then, and sadly, there is litte uncertainty to bef found between characters. If something is added to the lore, suddenly everybody and their murloc knows about it. Doesn’t matter that Titans, cosmic forces and all of that stuff were supposedly a mystery for tens of thousands of years, as soon as we get the Chronicles, everyone starts referring to it. That’s not an unreliable narrator, that’s just a continuity problem.

I think the reason why we liked, or like, the world of Warcraft is much easier: It’s good at being cool. The Rule of Cool isn’t exactly high art, but if it works, it worked, and there were plenty of awesome moments in Warcraft. That they could deliver them in pretty much any genre they liked without stressing too much about continuity meant that for most people there was some awesomeness to connect to. No matter your favourite race or faction, there was a pathos about it, that’s easy to like and cheer for.

Now, that comes with a problem… Do the people of 2023 cheer for the same stuff that we cheered for 20 years earlier? Is a defiant jerk that resists mind control to kill a demon with an axe still as cool for today’s youth as it was for some of us? I’m not sure, but I do think Blizzard tried to shift focus here, which made its structural flaws more visible for the people it didn’t cater to (as much) anymore. But Dragonflight seems to be pretty well recieved, so if they continue delivering cool moments for te crowd that likes it, maybe that’s good enough.

Depends on what you’re looking for. For the stuff that happened throughout the Warcraft games, I think it’s a fine summary that the devs will use as a reference, whenever they look up the lore. Where it fails to hold up today is pretty much everything cosmic. As soon as it talks about gods of one kind or another, their motivations, and the forces behind them, you’re clearly in a realm that they’re still planning out, and can’t rely on anything. Which is why they straight-out told us that the books are from a titan-friendly pov, with all the biases that come with it.

So… if you care about what happened to the mortal races during the games, it’s probably still the best you’ll get.
If you want to learn about the cosmic powers, Naaru, Titans, Sargeras’ motivations, the Black Empire, the Shadowlands, and all of these half-formed concepts, it’s pretty useless.
If you want a guide to build RP around, you’re out of luck anyways.

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Thank you. From this I can conclude that volume 1 and 2 still make sense, while 3 no longer has much, considering that it more or less covers the frozen throne, wotlk, etc.

Yeah but they said that later. At the beginning, when they were selling them, they said that these were definitive stories and final stories and not from this or that pov.

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