Time travel in WoW apparently has 2 periods of story telling.
1: from Classic to WoD
2: From WoD to now
In period 1 in Classic and TBC, whatever you did to the timeline affected your reality . It was your own time line . I remember the dragons in Caverns of Time warning us that “Worlds would collapse and change and we would not even know in the morning” , because a changes to past , changed the current and the future .
It was the reason we fought the Infinite . Because they wanted to change our reality and potentially erase the hero .
When we defended Medivh . It was out Medvih , not some random bozo clone .
Now after WoD :
We have endless and parallel time lines . We jump trough them like nothing and whatever we do in them stays there and affects no one , but the people there . In fact I am not sure if it affects even them , or it creates a new parallel realities where they are affected and one where they are not .
If we go by this logic :
1: Why do we even care about “stopping” the Infinite ? Surely somewhere out there someone stopped them so whatever , just ask Nozdormu to port you there and have fun .
2: Why do the Infinite care about Nozdormu anyway ? Surely there are infinite Nozdormu’s out there and countless Murozonds . Why do they care about turning this one , instead of finding one that wants to be Murzond .
And here a possible answer :
Perhaps the real question that could put everything in order is :
Is Nozdormu singular entity trough all timelines ?
If there is no copy of him I would understand them wanting to change him . On the other side if he is a singular entity , than it stems to reason that all this time paradox , multiple reality bs is originating from him .
The solution to fixing this mess would be to kill Nozdormu , right ? Or whoever gave him time powers (Tyr?)
So what do you guys/girls think . Why would the “hero” care for the Timelines from a story perspective ?
Heck why would anyone care for them apart from getting fat loots and getting rich .
Frankly, they haven’t established a reason. The “one true timeline” we are protecting is just a timeline the Titans chose to have protected for undisclosed reasons. And with all the shade they have thrown on Titan motivations over the years, we have every reason to be sceptical if their plans are the best ones for mortals. It’s even stranger when we remember that Nozdormu turning into Murozond is actually part of the timeline he is supposedly protecting, and our more personal, emotional motivation to be involves is supposed to be to stop just that.
I mean, stopping incursions from other timelines, and keeping super weapons from the past away from the present makes sense, but that’s about it.
The rest is a mess. As is to be expected, since doing time travel and dimensional travel right in an open-ended story is extremely hard, and the WoW writing team isn’t up to that level of difficulty. They are once again punching above their weight, and we can only hope that all of this gets shoved away once again, as soon as we stop focussing on the Bronze’s.
What does that even mean, though? I mean, the devs gave us this baffling explanation for the Legion (yes, the Burning Legion is supposedly a singular force through all the multiverse, without doubles of characters, even though it was formed by characters from a specific universe), and I wouldn’t put it past them to allow the same thing for Noz, but I’d actually understand what is happening less instead of more.
Do you know /have you watched the Steins;Gate anime . Without going into too much explanation , it is about a guy that invents a time machine and tries to change the past. This creates parallel realities and he is looking for the one true timeline . It sounds similar to WoW and who knows , they might have even been inspired by it ,as the changes to how WoW perceives time travel is around the time the cartoon was created .
In there the author coins the idea , that it is in fact the act of creating the time machine , which creates and sets off these parallel realties . So logically if it is the creation of the time machine that led to the paradox , than the prevention of the creation of the time machine will resolve the paradox .
If you put Nozdormu as the “first time machine” , you can now understand why I asked if he is singular . The time machine in the above anime can also be viewed as “singular” because everything stems from it .
If you go by this logic you can make a case that the whole time travel in WoW is a perversion of Natural law to achieve a certain set outcome .
This actually fits pretty well with the whole Primalists stuff and shady titans .(Razagesh says hello)
It can also explain why the burning legion is “not affected” . Because it is not part of this paradox as they live in a separate dimension .
So yea in short , if Nozdormu is “the first time machine” , than the whole of Azeroth current and all those parallel realities are basically one big bubble of illusions created by time magic . It actually would explain why the things we kill from those time portals turn to “time dust” as they are basically that , just fake time stuff .
I think such a line of thought would give great possibility to reset the world , set the lore straight and explore different stories or even advance the story in an unexpected way . ( Basically blame it on Nozdormu and the titans )
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But I doubt the writers actually thought it all the way trough like that at all . It feels more like a scenario of "We have no clue what’s going on either , so we just slapped some random explanation we heard on TV , to give it some “sense” and look cool " .
Nope, sorry, I haven’t. And I’m not sure I understand your exlanation. Is the idea that a world where time travel exists is unavoidably paradoxical, but we don’t have to worry about it in the narrative, because it won’t affect the world-building once it is removed? I think I’m missing something here, since it kinda makes the time travel story sound pointless.
The existence of a time travel device/character somehow creates worlds, that aren’t really real, but have real impacts? We can steal the Dragon Soul from another timeline and blast our Deathwing with it, but that doesn’t make it really real? The only actual timeline somehow just includes the unreal parts as if they were real? And for some reason the Burning Legion and things from the Nether are excluded from being copied? What exactly makes any of this work?
And even more importantly… why wouldn’t any Dev even try to explain it? For another pretty young example, when we ask them stuff about alternate character versions in Shadowlands, they don’t just say that there is only one real version of the soul and the rest aren’t, they tell us that the Shadowlands Draka includes elements from all her multiversial versions.
I don’t really understand the time travel explanations you are trying to give yet, but I am pretty sure they don’t fit what the Devs are saying. Now, it might well be that the Devs don’t really understand what their writers are telling them. But since they are the ones implementing the world, their misunderstandings are canon.
So I fear I’ll have to agree with your last sentence.
It is a little hard to explain as the concept is basically borrowed from quantum mechanics , but …
Yes . A world is paradoxical when a time travel device exists in it .
And yes it is both real and fake .
Perhaps a good analogy would be imagining a stream of water as your “time line” . This stream flows forward in it’s way and that is what the true time line is .
Now at some point someone decides to add an obstacle in the middle of that stream and effectively split it . That obstacle is your time machine and it creates “alternate” time lines .
While the object exists the alternative timelines are real . You can cross and borrow from each stream as you please , but in the end it is the object that actually creates these streams . Without it , the water (time) would merge back into a single true stream and take it’s original course .
Why it does not affect the demons is that they are basically part of a different stream altogether (different dimension/universe) . It may cross with Azeroth’s one , but overall it’s source and flow is different and the object which splits the stream (creating alternate timelines) is not present in it .
My idea is that basically an entity( the titans) created this “stream” , because it suits their needs , but it is real only while the object that is splitting the stream is there . In effect it is not natural and can be considered fake . This is the case with all other “parallel” timelines , which are further aggravated by additional objects placed in them , which are offshoots of the original time machine effect .
Like that murlock Azeroth which was created because a stupid mob ported a murlock in the past and effectively placed one more block on the stream .
What it seems we are doing this patch is removing “some” of these blocks to “fix” the timelines as too many splits in the water current inadvertently lead to some streams merging again (hence portals appearing)
Hence removing Nozdormu (or the titan that created him) as they are the original blockage on the stream , would allow for the one true timeline to reform and give possibility of different stories .
But yea I doubt any of this is though out and we are going by the “cool factor” . I kinda liked the original idea from TBC where the stream was one . It is much more simple to grasp .
Also about the dragon soul . I don’t think we borrowed it from a different timeline . We borrowed it from our timeline’s past . After we were done with it , it returned back where it belonged as not to change the present . It is an example of the from Classic to WoD time travel explanation , which was a singular time line .
Ok, I don’t think we’ll get much farther along here, but just not to let you hang here in your speculation…
Thanks for the attempt, but that one is not gonna help me, either. Maybe because I’m too negative on the concept in general, but well, it is what it is… But to explain my instant hangup with this one: Dividing the water stream divides the mass. Stuff that would have been in the main stream isn’t there anymore, it’s in the other stream. That’s in no way parallel to creating whole new universes of stuff and people that aren’t taken away from the original universe. It’s not division, it’s creation. And when we are talking about creating infinite universes… well, pretty much any limits and rules one makes up will be arbitrary. And you can have arbitrary elements within a good story, sure, but you can’t really structure a good story around them.
Since a lot of them were just creatures that got corrupted by Fel, including the Legion’s very founder, that’s just moving the question one step further for me, I fear. Sargeras, all the Eredar, the Legion’s Dreadlords, the Satryrn, etc. were very much part of our time stream and not external forces.
Division and Creation do not need to be opposite . They can be the different and the same . Division can be creation , in the essence that you create two of the same on smaller scale . An idea like this was explored in an old movie with Jet Lee , where he went around killing his “alternate” selves to regain their energy and become godlike . In this case you do not lose mass as you described it .
Also regarding the arbitrary rules . I think every story needs arbitrary rules . What can and cannot be done . Infinite worlds is in fact removing any arbitrary rules and that is the major pitfall of most parallel worlds stories .As infinite means endless and endless means all possibilities , all rules go out of the window . If you can resurrect , heal and change any character all the time , this voids all character progression . Death is meaningless . Learning is meaningless . Growth and experience … all meaningless . Id say rules are a must in any story .
Regarding the demons being from Azeroth . Yea … got nothing there . You are correct . It could have worked if they are from a different dimension like Hell or something , but in the current setting they should have been affected too .