They say Sylvanas serves Death. What does that mean, though?

Lore Story
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Since they first drew that silly little picture of magic types in the Chronicles, Blizzard has moved further and further to establish some kind of cosmic struggle between Light and Void, Life and Death, and Order and Chaos for dominance. And the Chronicles give the player some insight into their basic goals:

Light and Void: They make up everything in the universe, and want to get rid of anything that belongs to the other - destroying the universe in the process.
Life: That’s an easy one: Thrive and grow, grow, grow.
Order: Seems to care most about creating sustainable systems, going by the Titans’ activities.
Chaos: Might not really have a goal per se, but its forces have been taken over by Sargeras, who has the expressed goal to destroy everything that could be corrupted.

So much so good. But for Death? I can’t really say.

  • Does Death want to kill everything? In that case its goals would line up pretty well with Sargeras’. Just kill 'em all!
  • Does Death want to maximise the number of deaths in the long term? In that case it would be interested in a sustainable (and quick-moving) cycle of creation and destruction and would oppose what “upsets the balance”.
  • Does Death want to replace life, by exchanging every living thing with an undead thing? Is undeath something positive for it? In that case it wouldn’t really be about killing as many as possible, but rather about raising as many as possible, wouldn’t it?

We got some relatively clear positions from Bwonsamdi and the Lich King: There needs to be some kind of balance in the use of death, and Sylvanas is endagering it. Also, Bwonsamdi is against raising undead in general, though he is ok with it under controlled conditions (as in: controlled by him).

Sylvanas on the other hand seems to have set about killing as many things as possible, raising them whenever she feels like it, and seems to quite certain that “in the end, all will serve death”.

So… how does that fit together? My feeling is that Death (like Life) is quite simple “minded”, and just likes things withering and dying. Just like the Primals on Draenor were so single-minded in their pursuit of growth and life, that they would have killed the planet sooner or later wothout intervention, Death doesn’t really look ahead, and just likes what it likes. I have no idea how undeath would play into that, though.
If I’m right with this one, “serving Death” would be quite open to personal interpretation, and it would make sense that different Death entities have greatly differing positions.

What do you think about that? What does Death want? Is Sylvanas serving that goal? Or is she just doing what she wants while invoking the name of death? How does undeath fit into this?

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It means she wants everyone dead because she’s lost hope and no longer clings to life. That’s also what Death wants. Unsurprisingly, Death wants everyone to die…

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So… she joined Team Sargeras? How does her fighting the Legion fit into that?

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If Sargeras wins she turns into a pile of dust. It really isn’t rocket science.

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You just said she no longer clings to life, so… it might not be rocket science, but that argument is either too hard or too stupid for me to grasp.

Do you mean she wants everyone undead, and not just dead? In that case I might see a glimpse of sense here.

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Duh. That’s what she literally says in Before the Storm (a book that came out more than one year ago). She is a crazy fool who wants to zombify the world.

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So… your position is, that Death wants to zombify everything? You could have said so, you know? But I guess making your point is harder than making the quib. So Bwonsamdi and the Lich King are working against Death?

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Because being undead and being dead are basically the same thing, so much so that an undead army is just called “army of the dead”. You don’t need to make that distinction.

Also, allow me to correct myself. We’ve known what Sylvanas wanted since before Cataclysm began, not Before the Storm. She wants a meatshield against hell.

Also Bwonsamdi and the Lich King raise literal legions of undead.

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Ok, I’ve seen enough to be sure you haven’t read much past the headline, so I’ll leave it at that.

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I just told you what she wants. It’s what she wanted since Cataclysm. Sylvanas serves Death because Death wants to zombify everything, which means Sylvanas has an unlimited meatshield against hell.

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As so often, I think you’re way overinterpreting.

I don’t think for one moment that Sylvanas is some sort of grand representative of a cosmic force. More likely, she’s just on her usual power trip.
“All will serve me, in the end” -> Serve Death = Serve me. The “I am become death!” schtick.

It’s simple and cringey, so it fits right in.

As for the forces, I doubt, or rather, would hope they don’t have any deeper motivation than to grow their own influence. “Death” just happens to be reliant on Life to grow as well and Sylvanas is explicitly not in it for “Death”.

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From the hints we have so far something is threatening even “Death” for now in a passive way.

They want to push this 1v1v1 the three main forces being Death, Light and Void. Whichever wins completely destroys the other two.

If the void wins everything gets corrupted and the consequences are that nothing dies anymore and light is eliminated.

If light wins (the best example being lightforged both AU and MU) they will live practically forever and “convert” everything to the Light. So nothing dies and nothing gets corrupted anymore.

So with those two forces gaining ground Death loses terrain. So that entity that controls Death has to intervene to keep both of them in check.

That’s how I feel about the three forces that have a majority. We’ll see how Death is going to act in the future and how he/she/it wants to gain more influence. It seems that death is no longer the passive one just waiting for things to happen naturally. But we’ll have to see who controls death per say first.

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Quite possibly, yeah. I myself am not a fan of any of that cosmic stuff and would prefer if it was an implicit part of the world’s backround, rather than an explicit part that actually drives the story.

But I do feel that since they started defining that stuff they did start to make an effort to disentangle it in the world as well, so I’m not really sure if the simple explanation is the right one in this case. I mean…whatever it is, it will likely be stupid, but things can be complicated and stupid. :man_shrugging:

And since many people seem to take the struggle between Light, Void and yes, Death quite seriously, I found it worth adressing at least. Case in point…Dudas.

So… you feel that Death is here as a balancing force that is mostly there to keep the “big ones” from their harmful victories?

That sounds surprisingly benign, and kind of fits the talk of balance we had this addon with Bwon, Bolvar and the Tauren heritage. I don’t really think Sylvanas fits into that very well, though, considering she actively weakened the mortal forces that weren’t sworn to the Light (and in some cases quite hostile to it), and actively helped to revive an Old God.

But I guess we’ll see. Death, and to some degree Life, Order and Chaos as well, could be interesting as antagonists to the Light and the Void, in the long term, I guess.

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I still don’t understand one point. Why the people who got resurrected as undead change too much that they aren’t the same person they used to be. For example, if i got killed in a battle for my nation and got resurrected again. I’ll try my best to save as many as possible from being killed or injured, you got what i mean?
In warcraft universe it’s literally the opposite. Someone get resurrected then he goes out in rampage and might even change his loyalty without hesitating.
I’m really not able to understand the logic of undead here. My question in short is, why there aren’t good undeads who want to protect the living and not let them suffer the same fate they faced?

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There are those “good” undead, it’s just that the majority of them serve neutral factions. You know, those factions who weren’t led by a psycho.

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If next addon will be about death realm, than it will be a lot of psychology of our real life.
It will be very hard for writers team. but very interesting. Perhaps digging in to death psychology we will change our minds about revenge hunger.

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From what we’ve seen both Sylvanas and Bwonsamdi have this mission to gather souls. So maybe this god of death gains power by keeping souls under his control.

Now why they don’t work together even though they seem to have the same mission it’s something to be seen.

Maybe Helya wants to dethrone the current God of death and both have these champions as Sylvanas and Bwonsamdi racing on who gets the upper hand and help those that empowered them to control the Underworld. Or maybe this god of death is testing both of them to see which one is worthy to become the representative of Death in our world.

They have a lot of death plots they can go with and make it interesting without going full retard with Grim Reaper wants to kill everything just because.

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I think you missed one thing. Sylvanas election was rigged and there is some big Death Entity behind her. Shr might be willing or unwitting pawn in here.

But she deffinietly is not the powerhouse that some of her fans claims for her to be.

I think it would be hilarious if said death entity would treat her very badly once she served her use.

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Okay but that is Sylvanas reason to be “Bad”
What about the others? They don’t say anything about that entity. In fact, no other undead beings mention anything like the hell sylvanas experienced upon suiciding in Icrecrown. Now speaking about it, she did felt that Arthas was there, so maybe that hell was because of the saronite?
But that doesn’t matter at the moment. I can understand why there might be a couple of bad undead but in-game they are like the majority ( Not speaking of Scourge, i am speaking of free-well undeads )
I hope i made myself clear.

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I agree with that.
If Death is the next expansion we will fight the one(?) Death entity that disrupts the balance by actively kilning us. The balance is that Death entities wait for us to die and generally they don’t interfere with the realms of living, not enouth to disrupt that balance.
‘Six seats at the high table, six mouths that hunger. One will consume all others. -The veil wanes’ might refer to that.
About Sylvanas I have written what i think is going on, since i haven’t convinced anyone i grieve for her and waiting.

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