So in this universe, if you die, you don’t actually have to die, because you can be resurrected back to perfect health. Or you can be raised as an undead, but then regain your mind, so you’re a corpse but you’re basically still alive.
But if you manage to die for real real somehow, you go to an afterlife where you… continue to live…
But you can also die there. Again.
Even if you’re spirit of the afterlife and you were never a mortal you can still die.
Reincarnation also exists for certain souls.
I don’t get it. Why should I care about someone dying when they can go back and forth between life and the afterlife or just evade death all together?
And don’t say game mechanics =/ how things actually work because I’m not talking about player deaths and rezzes, all these things have happened to story characters
Just remember the Shadowlands as a whole was an after thought they came up with because they “ran out of other stories to do, so we came up with something new”.
Players and heroes resurrecting is definitely a gameplay device and not part of the lore.
As for the Shadowlands… Shadowlands was a plane of existence, just like the Emerald Dream, not a world unto itself. Unless we accept the idea that they are actually infinite and that therefore what we found is the Shadowland and when we’re dead on Azeroth is also the Shadowlands because Shadowlands is a plane existence wherein some things only exist there, but other things exist everywhere, which is kindda similar to the Nether or the Dream actually, so that’s OK.
The lore does describe what happens if you die the Shadowlands: You turn to anima and disappear forever. The anima then gives rise to new or more powerful souls.
When my alt does one of the many quests around the world where you have to release souls, I feel quite sad as I might be sending them straight to the Maw
This is true, and usually I have no problem with it - willing suspension of disbelief, and all that - but Shadowlands introduces SO many contrafictions and inconsistencies and mischaracterisations and general niggles that I sometimes feel like making a thread about them. Which is pretty extreme for me.
I guess that depends how long it took to resurrect the subject and what kind of magic was used. Regular resurrection is usually done through holy/light/nature magic, while the undead/zombies are a result of Lich King’s necromantic magic.
But I assume the regular resurrection can only be done on someone who died recently and you can’t just dig someone up and get them their body back to it’s former healthy self. At that point you’d have to use necromancy.
The Shadowlands story and how it actually works did such a poor job of explaining itself it feels like a bad fanfic turned into an expansion. I prefer to ignore most of it and only cherry pick the parts that make sense within the rest of the story.
How I assume it works is that the souls of the living go in the Shadowlands, then get sorted into their proper afterlives and perform some sort of function there, essentially forever. But if they manage to inside the Shadowlands, it’s the actual end and they cease to exist altogether. Similar to how demons can only really die inside the Twisting Nether, except unlike mortal, demons seems to have the ability to come back to the mortal realm.
As for the word “mortal”, it seems to be thrown around willy-nilly for any sort of a character that is born outside the “mortal realm”, meaning you can’t kill them in any conventional way.
So for example anyone born on Azeroth would be a mortal, while anything else like old gods, the titan keepers, titans themselves, or even any regular demon, would be not be considered a mortal, because you can’t just kill them as easily as poking them with a pointy stick just like you would a mortal.
As far as I understand, evading death altogether is not a thing in the lore. Even those that die and go to the Shadowlands can’t go back to the regular living realm. We as player, as well as some other lore character, can only do that because we went there alive.
Resurrection isn’t even that common in the lore except for necromantic resurrections such as the death knights and the undead. When characters die in the lore, they tend to stay dead.
Shadowlands utterly ruined the concept of death and the afterlife within the games universe for me. I just can’t get on with the idea of an entire culture made out of Meccano running the show, when my character snuffs it.
And they wasted the chance to show it in creature death animations… and to allow powerful entities to reform over time, thus allowing the sentients to avoid true death.
If you think about it seriously, you notice that Shadowlands has changed death to make it into something even scarier. Probably is just an unintentional consequence of how Shadowlands works, and the game does not emphasize much on that, but in Shadowlands, we have seen how easy it is for a dead soul to die again, and this time death means the total annihilation of the soul. End of existence. No way back. The ones who die in Shadowlands cease to exist. That means the afterlife is no longer eternal heaven or hell. If you check human religions, you will find that almost any religion has any type of afterlife that is not general. There are religions with an endless circle of reincarnations and religions with eternal afterlives, good or bad, but in most of human history, that has been few religions that conceive the possibility that a soul could be annihilated. Not even the religion and mythologies that have histories about punishment against the worst people, like Christianity in Hell or Greek Mythology in Tartarus, show the end of their existence as punishment. Meanwhile, in Shadowlands, a soul could be annihilated not only by extreme punishment, but it can also be annihilated only for having doubts or even by accident.
A bit like the timey wimey techno babble in Dr. Who, it’s fudged to fit the story. It works however is needed to make the story work.
But here are some of the fudges they use to justify some of it.
We (the players) are some kind of hero that have been deemed worthy of being allowed to be resurrected. Normal people aren’t this worth (not even the King, Varian) is so worthy.
Undead, whether Forsaken or Death Knights or similar have been raised by Death Magic, one of the forces in the WoW universe, like Fel, Arcane or Elemental forces (I don’t know exactly how this works, maybe the companion books have some explanations for this?)
Those not worthy enough for resurrection like we the players end up in The Shadowlands where they go through various processes as we’ve seen in this expansion. We can die here and I think what is happening is that in Shadowlands we are now made of Anima (those who are dead, we the Maw Walker are in The Shadowland but not dead). When we die in Shadowlands our anima is destroyed somehow.
This is my limitied understanding of death in wow.
It seems really messy at a first glance but does make some sense if you consider mortals to be more like death elementals or natives of the Shadowlands.
Let me elaborate. When traditional elementals (Fire, Air, Water, Earth) die in the material plane, they are sent to their respective realm (i.e the firelands etc). This is true for all beings tied to a specific realms. Like demons, who go to the Twisting Nether, or Wild Gods who end up in the Emerald Dream (which is potentially in the “lifelands”).
So how do you kill any being who is strongly connected to a specific realm? You have to kill them in that realm. I.e Demons can only be killed in the Twisting Nether. Ragnaros could only be killed in the Firelands. Etc.
Mortals, who we have now established as actual beings of Death. End up in the Shadowlands once killed in the material plane, and can only truely be killed in the Shadowlands. The “afterlife” is not so much the afterlife as their real “ture” life. The time spent in the material plane is more like a really convoluted gestation period.
Now how does ressurection and necromancy work? Well that’s when you just have to shrug your shoulders and try to not think about it too hard or else it all breaks down.
