Man having played so many games with convoluted plot lines, I normally love this stuff but I really have no desire to look into all this. If two Draka or Durotan or Gul'dan or Sylvanas or whoever shows up, cool. I'll figure it out in game, but the developers sound like they don't even understand what they created on this one lol. Not knocking for anyone into this and not in any way saying I dislike shadowlands. I'm hyped for the expansion, just personally rather let the game speak for itself.
Yeah it's the main timeline, but at this point it seems like it doesn't metter if you are from the main, or an alternate "what if" universe version, as the interview states, even the main one is just a thread: "There is a thread that is the Draka from Draenor we visited in the Warlords of Draenor. There is another thread that is Draka on Azeroth as we know her… And there are many other threads that could be other realities that we never peered into. But all of those threads at some time come together to make that rope."Personaly I think this whole stuff is nonsense BS, but it's canon for the time being.Oh and for the whole Legion stuff. They are in AU draenor, an they still go through the whole Draenei hunting, orc corrupting stuff, even tho it is just an alternate time line, wich should not matter to them...So yeah this again is nonsense BS in the story. God I live time travel, AU stuff!
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Yeah... alternate universes arent really connected. It took how much power to get the mag’har? Couldn’t they have just made it so your soul goes to whatever universe’s shadowlands you die in? If there are doubles, they will look the same physically but who you are is what you experience in life. More or less like twins.The rope thing was a nice way to explain it, but try thinking of souls as data. Have you ever tried to merge files into one, and have massive conflict errors? It doesn’t work. You have to prune and delete information until you can hit the puzzle hard enough to make the pieces fit. At that point why even have souls that remember their past lives if you are destroying their experiences. Imagine for a second that arthas in one universe was never corrupted. He travlled to icecrown citadel and destroyed the frozen throne. The undead became inactive and he saves the world. Upon returning to Tirisfal Glades his father seeing his son’s acheivements, steps down and allows Arthas to become king early. He marries Jaina, and rules for a long life to die and have his “thread” rejoined with this universe’s Arthas. Do they both get reset and pulled somehow from the Maw? Or does the good Arthas get threaded into the bad Arthas rope, and shoved down into the Maw?The way the explained it all has too many holes, and the gaps are way too big in the lore for even a rope to get you across.
I don’t mind this at all, and In a way it almost makes AU stuff a little more graspable. I think it’s important for people to remember that WoD was an ALTERNATE universe - not a parallel one. I like the idea that the AU is what “could” have happened ; but at the end of the day, it was the same Durotan, the same Velen - just if things and decisions went differently.Although the decisions they made In life brought them down different potential timelines and paths - that all ended in the same place ; The shadowlands. It honestly doesn’t seem as retconned as some are making it out to be.
can't they just say that the AU have no souls? They already said that it is just a pocket dimension and that only draenor exists (i.e. there wasn't an AU azeroth).
"Alternate universes? Spaceships? Time travel? You fell off that horse pretty hard, soldier. Get up, we have to raze Stratholme."
all this talk about thrall reuniting with his parents. But... what about his sister from an alternate reality sitting right there in Org?
I'm really, REALLY trying to understand and logic everything out, but how Blizzard wrote the AU Draenor means that nothing functions, especially with how they've decided the Shadowlands works.Let's list what we know for a fact in the order we learned it: The Garrosh Hellscream that was Warchief was a prideful stubborn bastard.Garrosh Hellscream died on AU Draenor.Garrosh Hellscream (the one we know) was one of the worst out of all the possible timelines; and that our universe is basically super unlucky in regards to him.The Shadowlands are infinite and cover all alternate universes- THIS IS THE STICKING point.Garrosh Hellscream shows up in Revendreth when we go there.Each universe's version of a soul is like a single strand, which in the Shadowlands get (we assume naturally) woven together to form a single rope.I'd say #$%^ the idea that souls from all universes go to the main (our) Shadowlands- only souls that interact with the main universe actually get to go to the Shadowlands when they die. Duplicates don't automatically weave into one- They'd have to first meet, which is very unlikely given the number of realms and how many souls are converted into pure anima rather than maintaining individuality in the afterlives. They'd also have to either agree to merge or have one consume the other- unlikely because by staying independent they likely wouldn't want to 'die' again, plus the ability to change ones' appearance means they probably wouldn't know anyway. So the Draka we adventure with in Maldraxxus is our Draka/Thrall's mother, because she remembers her actions in life. The AU Draka 1. Isn't dead yet (though will die eventually and time is meaningless) and 2. Will have such a different life experience that she most likely won't go to Maldraxxus but to one of the idyllic hunting grounds type afterlives to be converted into pure anima. There are no other Draka souls, because the main universe has only interacted with 2- the one native soul, and the one that interacted with our universe when Garrosh and Kairozdormu created the bridge binding AU Draenor to us.This I believe resolves the issues with Alternate Draenor without creating infinite versions of every soul ever (thus ruining any stakes). All of the characters we interacted with can show up in the Shadowlands without the logical problems of whether they're MU or AU. So for the most part there won't be duplicates, as different life experiences warrants different afterlives. They would need to be a character with a specific personality/history/character arc that also appeared on AU Draenor when we visited and with roughly the same experiences. Only ones I can think of are Gul'dan, Velen, Durotan, and maybe Grommash. And the latter two might be too different and our Velen still lives, so really it's just that there will be a double Gul'dan boss raid fight in 9.3 or something.
Thinking about it, the rope analogy seems to have bad implications for all the mag’har npcs and playable characters. Since they’re all from AU Draenor their deeds are irrelevant as their souls will merge with a main universe “rope” and be judged by that.And then what about Geya'rah? If she’s supposed to be AU Thrall then she’s destined to just merge with him? Or if she’s like a potential AU sister for Thrall, who doesn’t exist in the main universe, what happens to her soul?
I think another important thing to mention is that Maldraxxus seems to be the afterlife for people who valued strength (of any kind) and died with a major unfulfilled desire. Draka was killed trying to save her baby Go'el (Thrall), Morgraine was killed by his own son corrupting the Ashbringer and leaving the blade in an undead infested Stratholme, and Vashj cried out her failure to Illidan in her final moments.
This is interesting. It's canonical that OUR version of Garrosh is just about the worst version of Garrosh that exists in all timelines. Does that mean that in the rope that forms Garrosh Hellscream, only one or two tiny strands are actually evil, and the rest are honorable, peaceful, wise leaders? What is Garrosh's rope made of? Is it a series of conflicts between these different threads that keep him from finding redemption in Revendreth? That allows him to be a rechargeable battery of anima? Interesting stuff.
In all seriousness this made me sad to read. This guy is in charge of all lore and he doesn't seem to understand any of it. He's contradicting things left and right, and just the way he tried to explain what he did makes very very little sense. This was not a good interview for him. I'm not sure if he just didn't have his thoughts together or what, but man... I'd really like to see more effort. It makes me honestly a little depressed to see guys in his position who seem to care less than the fans.
A really neat author I read from introduced a character that split his soul into 100 fragments so that when he re-formed himself he would have lived 100x the amount of experiences. If any fragment died before reuniting it was a portion of the soul lost.Maybe that is what will happen in the shadowlands, all versions of a person are connected loosely by that association, but the individuals need to want to re-form in order to become a whole "rope" again. This makes it possible for different versions of one character to be in different areas of the shadowlands.Those that die in the shadowlands have just run out of safety nets. Their soul has lost the energy to stay stable on that plane of existence and it falls into the twisting nether, since they are not creatures of chaos/fel like demons, their souls would be unable to withstand the external forces and be basically shredded by the energies of chaos.
Instead of rope, they could have explained in like light going through a prism, where it can get refracted into other colors. The timelines are the myriad colors, but if you refocus the light away from a prism, the rainbow disappears. So it would be removing the effects of the prism (dagger) and the other timeways fade away and don't affect the main one any longer.
So if some Drakas are dead already, but they are not dead in other realities, does this mean, if this Draka gets to Shadowlands she will find herself as dead spirit of another Draka? Or does this characters never meet each other and exist in "another" shadowlands with another "Arbiter" and Sire Denathrius and others? And maybe this Shadowlands doesn't suffer from soul crisis like we do? So what's the point of saving Shadowlands, if another Shadowlands may not have such brave heroes as Azeroth have, and Shadowlands is still doomed, but in another reality, does this mean there's no point in save this version of Shadowlands, as they are all "connected" as well as alternative universes of all Warcraft?