The US forums and reddit are abuzz with discussions as people who apparently played 11.2.7 patch on PTR have found out how the story goes. So… it looks like Blizzard are retconning Shadowlands. The direction appears to be: Shadowlands isn’t true death and true afterlife. Instead, it’s a complicated machinery created by the Titans to capture souls. This probably sets the plot for the The Last Titan expansion which has been advertised as a cosmic conspiracy about the titans’ true intentions. So it most probably will be : the titans aren’t good, they’ve orchestrated even death blah blah…
An interesting consequence will be : those who die in the “ordered Shadowlands” don’t truly die - their souls go to the true afterlife, which is mysterious as it ought to be.
So where do we get that info from? Apparently it seems that Arator is going to the Maw with the help of Ve’nari and he has the following conversation with Sylvanas:
Arator: I expected the Maw to be… alien. Unknowable. But these structures are…
Sylvanas: Familiar? I agree. I have seen past the veil of true death, Arator. There is more to the Shadowlands than it seems.
Arator: Why are you doing this Sylvanas?
Sylvanas: Isn’t it obvious? It is my penance. But more than that… it is my purpose.
Arator: From what I’ve been told, half of the souls here would rather slay you than be granted peace.
Sylvanas: You misunderstand. I do not grant them peace. I merely offer them a way forward. An offer which you have delayed me from making for long enough. Let’s get to work, nephew.
Then, after the questline, Sylvanas tells us:
But as I told him, now is not the time for me to return to the world of the living.
You have noticed, have you not? The Maw. The Shadowlands. All of it. The question that has plagued me since the Jailer’s demise.
I know the truth of death better then most. This? It is too convenient. Too ordered.
I have made many foes on the path that brought me here. Most of them once called me an ally.
I do not regret the choices I made, nor do I bear ill will towards those who met me with their fangs bared.
But know this: I cannot stop now. I MUST NOT stop now, or all I have done will have been for naught.
Return to Azeroth. Fight the battles ahead of you. One day our paths will cross again.
lmao so like i’ve been thinking for years now, vindication, it was way to damn ordered and i swear the first ones are just the titans, which is why the machinery broke when a titan soul went to oribos.
actually no. We knew since the firt Chronicles Book that the Shadowlands existed the moment the first mortal soul died. This Titan did everything retcon is somethin no one but diehard titan fanboys asked for.
Soo… They are retconning the retconns to the retconns? While I despite what Shadowlands (as a realm not expansion) turned out to be, such crude fanservice and complete disregard to their own lore makes caring for this fictional world harder. Next we will learn that we never left Nyalotha and everything past BfA was lucid dream granted by Nzoth?
Honestly, as messy as this possible retcon is it’s probably for the best. From a world building perspective the lore would do better to retain that element of mysticism when comes to stuff like what lies in the great beyond.
It never sat right with me that we as the mortal races got to intrude so casually into the afterlife. Not saying you can’t explore elements of it but, to just outright going there for a whole expansion and it being like any other place in some ways felt off. Though that could be because it was so structured and artificial as to what the PTR story is hinting at too.
In some ways it lacked a religious/faith element that you would think would go hand in hand with the afterlife. Part of that being you’re not really supposed to know what lies beyond the veil. Instead what we got was robots running everything like the matrix.
I absolutely agree with you.
One of the reasons I stopped playing retail after Shadowlands until late-TWW is that I just couldn’t invest in the story. There are no longer any mysteries. And with Shadowlands and the afterlife - every religion is wrong, every god is a robot.
Now, with the narrative that this isn’t true death - instead the Titans ordered Shadowlands, part of the mystery returns. But I still think they should rather not touch it further - we shouldn’t go freely to Shadowlands all the time. And it still constantly happens, as late as the K’Aresh patch.
Actually revealeing what happens after death was the best thing they could have done. Finally those savages Orcs and Tauren vermin no longer hold a candle with their fake religions and can be ignored in the greater lore for good. Shamanism is just made up bogus and was exposed as such.
Ayeah, and the same is true about the paladins too… There’s no becoming one with the light. Instead you go to Bastion where you get a memory replacement.
YES! Shadowlands timewalking is what made my day today (read about it on mmo-champion). Shadowalnds is my favotite expansion, only matched by TWW and I’ll be more then happy to explore it fully (as I had to quit for real life reasons) this time. Cheers!
Well, the Chronicles-books have since had their “Definitive source of the lore”-status revoked when Blizz admitted that they’re written from a particular perspective, so they’re not objective nor 100% true.
I agree that the “This one guy/these people are behind everything!”-routine is an incredibly cheap plot device though.
I personally don’t care too much about the titans.
What I care is having back the mystery. The beauty of religions and faiths in the Warcraft universe. Something that was written off in an incredibly stupid way - “every religion is wrong, every god is a robot”.
In this sense, the plot twist “Shadowlands isn’t actually true death, just a machinery” works for me… Even though a lot has been ruined… for example, the Spirit Healers/Kyrian stuff.
It’s a step in the right direction, I suppose, though only partially.
For me, the real core issue is the lack of consistent aesthetics and tone for certain playable races. They were introduced as one thing, well-liked by those who gravitated towards them…only to have the rug pulled out from under them and thrown in a completely different direction. Or just ignored altogether.
We were already on our way to a soft retcon, by just ignoring all the problematic aspects of the Shadowlands and just not talking about them. That might have worked. This, on the other hand, would put the Shadowlands story into the center of attention again. Instead of getting away from it, we’d be reopening all the problems it brought up, with barely a change. How different is “creatures with divine powers created/ordered a place where souls will be for eternity after death, and where everyone who died on Azeroth went for millenia” really from “this is actually the afterlife”? It isn’t. We’re just adding some after-afterlife, as if that solves any of the worldbuilding problems we get when we put the Shadowlands in the spotlight.
I … struggle to find the right words in regard to this news.
Personally, I find the notion troublesome that just because you don’t enjoy certain aspects of a world or narrative, that it should be written off. Because from what I’m reading that is the suggestion from some here in the thread. “I dislike and disagree with [ x ], therefore [ x ] should be completely removed”.
To disagree with a narrative decision and wish that it went in another direction is, in my opinion, something else entirely by comparison. The Shadowlands-expansion happened, it had perhaps both good and bad elements. Move on, build around it, learn from it if necessary.
Yet I don’t read this development as being a retcon, really.
It feels like we’re doing additions instead, similar to how the First Ones were introduced to be a bigger entity behind the Titans. We’re seeing a narrative expanding, not retconned. But sure, they’re seemingly using that to possibly make the impact of the Shadowlands smaller.
I suppose I’m rather seeking to soften the blow for potential readers being like: “Oh, yeah! Finally, they’ll completely disown the Shadowlands ever having happened!”
The Maw is a amalgamation of random lands that Jailer sloppily cobbled together. How could possibly be any order there? And anyone really think this is about Titans? Blizzard simply wants to bring back their favorite toy. The writers’ obsession with Sylvanas has reached a new level. They didn’t have to add her in Dragonflight and TWW, yet she appeared there. In Forsaken heritage and now in 11.2.7. Now she’ll surely appear in Midnight to save the people she previously wanted to send to Hell, and in The Last Titan, she’ll be one of the central figures revealing the conspiracy of titans.
Ironic, considering that they struggle to ever hold certain characters accountable for even the most grotesque of atrocities, but god-like beings that are actually beyond mortal morality are condemned to be chastised.
Fantasy as a whole seems to have fallen off the edge of a cliff in terms of nuance and depth though.
