Lorekeeper lore Q&A steve danuser

[WaltherLeopold]

Perhaps the alternate timelines don’t generate permanent souls (threads) until they’re connected to the main timeline; they’re possibilities, nor realities until made “real” by intersecting with the “actual” timeline.

Kyroz solidified MU Draenor when he meddled with it - and thus do we have repercussions from it in the main timeline/universe.

I believe Blizzard once said something about the alternate timelines just fading away if not touched on - the denizens just vanishing with that potential reality. I can’t imagine there are full-fledged souls constantly winking into and out of existence - which is how the timeways seem to work.

But the Infinite Dragonflight has meddled with an infinite amount of timelines, much like how Kairoz did. Kairoz also like, just pulled shit out of a veritable bag of timeline tricks during the trial of Garrosh.

Honestly it's easier and better for my own sanity to just think that blizzard writers are incompetent and we're never gonna have cogent storytelling again. People who defend this writing, because there are a few on this forum who thinks the current writers are good and the negativity is overblown should really get going to read some actual decent literature and worldbuilding and see how much it contrasts with this garbage

[Villager720]

But the Infinite Dragonflight has meddled with an infinite amount of timelines, much like how Kairoz did. Kairoz also like, just pulled shit out of a veritable bag of timeline tricks during the trial of Garrosh.

Honestly it's easier and better for my own sanity to just think that blizzard writers are incompetent and we're never gonna have cogent storytelling again. People who defend this writing, because there are a few on this forum who thinks the current writers are good and the negativity is overblown should really get going to read some actual decent literature and worldbuilding and see how much it contrasts with this garbage

Good point about the infinites. I don’t have a rebuttal.
I obviously don’t have answers, I’m just prone to hoping they’ve bothered to think these things through.

Naive; yes.

Who could have predicted alternate timelines and time travel wasn’t a great thing to add to a story?!

[Piamonte]

Perhaps the alternate timelines don’t generate permanent souls (threads) until they’re connected to the main timeline; they’re possibilities, nor realities until made “real” by intersecting with the “actual” timeline.

Kyroz solidified MU Draenor when he meddled with it - and thus do we have repercussions from it in the main timeline/universe.

I believe Blizzard once said something about the alternate timelines just fading away if not touched on - the denizens just vanishing with that potential reality. I can’t imagine there are full-fledged souls constantly winking into and out of existence - which is how the timeways seem to work.

(All this is in reference to many AU Garrys not being bad yet him ending up in Revendreth - even though he wasn’t bad in most possibilities, that’s still all they were - possibilities. Possibilities glimpsed by the bronze dragonflight. They’re not “real” so those “threads” don’t feed into the real Garrosh’ “rope”.)

yes the confirmed a time ago that alternate timelines just fade away after a while.

Is hard to make sense of the whole alternate realities with shadowlands in mind though.

[Jastall]

Why do they still try to make sense of the AUs? They don't make any sense at all from the onset, just say they are "bad" timelines that don't have Shadowlands and only people from the main timeline end up there, bang, job done and we can all pretend WoD never existed which is the only treatment that xpack deserves. His explanation only made things more confusing.

Also only being able to kill all the cosmic beings in their own dimensions is stupid and reeks of an excuse to reuse stuff like X'era or the Old Gods whenever they feel like it.

[Accendor]

"There is no afterlife beyond Shadowlands. That’s why stakes are real in these battles, in these conflicts. The threat the Jailer poses to the Shadowlands and the other realms beyond it is very real and it has high stakes."

Yeah, and because the Shadowlands exits now, the stakes for Battles on regular Azeroth are... not so high.

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"If you look at that rope more closely, you can see there are different threads that make up the rope. There are different twines that pull together, and you can pull off one of these threads if you want. But it’s still a rope, and each of those threads you can think of as one of the realities of the character, one of the streams of time… 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. And remember also that, as you’ll see, that there are many characters in the Shadowlands when they refer to time, they usually say that time is not a construct of Death. Time and Death are not related. Death is about eternity, not linear time. The manner in which these threads come together, that can take a very long time from mortal perceptions. Those threads can be separated for a time, but sooner or later, they do combine to make one rope that is that character. You can think of it as the threads of that rope, all the individual threads, are just waiting. And over time, they will come together but they can exist as separate entities for a time. That still doesn’t change the fact that they are part of one rope."

So if that is the case, why is Garrosh being tortured? For all we know the Garrosh in our universe is the by far worst incantation across all dimensions. In other universes he is regarded as a hero, who formed the most powerful horde ever and actually made peace with the Alliance.
If the incantation in the Shadowlands is the sum of all his versions across all dimensions and times, by all means, he should not be there.

[Xilurm]

the best part of this is confirmation that thrall and draka will be reunited. that's going to be...phenomenal.

We're probably going to get like 2 mins interaction of them before shit goes down and:

- One of them dies.
- They say they need some time alone to catch up without us seeing any of that and proceed to move on from the whole thing.

[TheFirstOnes]

"The threat the Jailer poses to the Shadowlands and the other realms beyond it is very real and it has high stakes."

So, does that mean, if the Jailer wins, literally fucking everything (Not just creation) would get fucked in all manners and all forms? Huh...

Kinda OP, but whatever.

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Then again, the Jailer is called "The Enemy of All", and we haven't even faced Warcraft's Outer Gods yet, so...I mean...

[Kathranis]

Which doesn't make sense since we see garrosh as sinner yet we "know" that many AU garroshes were saints.

Its just yet another "don't count dem blades of grass".

He's basically saying that all the different versions of a soul will eventually be unified. Which probably means that given enough time, the Garrosh imprisoned in Revendreth will be redeemed and reunited with the souls of his other selves in a final afterlife.

[Jastall]

He's basically saying that all the different versions of a soul will eventually be unified. Which probably means that given enough time, the Garrosh imprisoned in Revendreth will be redeemed and reunited with the souls of his other selves in a final afterlife.

But the Garroshes that are saints aren't, well, Garrosh. He's characterized by his single-minded zeal, furious anger and willingness to do anything to see his vision through no matter how repulsive. Having him merge (even if metaphorically) with versions of him that did everything right diminishes what writing he got previously and makes him another character if you ask me.

It's like if they had dead Velens become an edgy anti-hero in the afterlife because, well, MU Velen's a saint but not dead yet and others were not saints so every character would trend towards a grey morass. Or maybe some Arthas's were decent dudes so he gotsa be redeemed guys. I really don't like the implications of this, but like many such snippets it'll probably get ignored as Blizzard moves on anyway.

[Kathranis]

Isn't there basically infinite timelines, so why does Draka in Shadowlands begin her "story" after she dies in MU timeline, surely there is a timeline out there where she trips and falls, one where she dies in childbirth, one where she gets a peanut allergy and dies etcetera

The way he describes it, the Shadowlands are essentially disconnected from the flow of time and all of the different versions of an individual are connected by the threads of fate and end up in the same place eventually.

I mean, technically it should mean that we could witness some weird stuff like encountering the souls of individuals who haven't even died in our own time period yet, but practically it means that they can just sidestep any of the time stuff and say "'when' is a concept that doesn't matter in the Shadowlands."

[HitRefresh]

Blizzard is try-harding too much to create new lore for shadowlands and a lot of the stuff they churned out is convoluted (and sometimes contradictory) gibberish.

I will wait and see but so far much of the shadowlands story seems like desperate fan-fiction.

This whole expansion is kind of the epitome of WoW writing.

[Kathranis]

But the Garroshes that are saints aren't, well, Garrosh. He's characterized by his single-minded zeal, furious anger and willingness to do anything to see his vision through no matter how repulsive. Having him merge (even if metaphorically) with versions of him that did everything right diminishes what writing he got previously and makes him another character if you ask me.

I don't really see that. It just means that in the grand cosmic scale, which may take tens or hundreds of thousands of years, all of the various versions of Garrosh are given their due punishment or reward, and in the end will be unified into a single soul that represents the totality of all the deeds he performed in all timelines, and by that point he will probably be a denizen of the Shadowlands who has completely forgotten his mortal life.

[WaltherLeopold]

The way he describes it, the Shadowlands are essentially disconnected from the flow of time and all of the different versions of an individual are connected by the threads of fate and end up in the same place eventually.

I mean, technically it should mean that we could witness some weird stuff like encountering the souls of individuals who haven't even died in our own time period yet, but practically it means that they can just sidestep any of the time stuff and say "'when' is a concept that doesn't matter in the Shadowlands."

Sure, but do you see my point though, like let's say that Varian became a clerical man in his youth in an alternate timeline and died from a fall, before our Varian, should that not mean that when our Varian is put into the Shadowlands, there will be a massive conflict of personalities, wherein maybe the AU Varian would be a Kyrian, our Varian would be more fit for Maldraxxus, which one takes precedence, how does any of this actually work?

Some people said that alternate timelines ""fade"" when...? I mean, we have two entire dragonflights dedicated to the concept of time and how it is infinite and how there, might be a true canonical timeline, but if time is a constant and always aligned with ours, how would the infinite dragonflight even exist or how could they even hope to impact the timeline by doing shit?

And yet, beside all this you apparently have an infinite legion that is not bound by time and is a constant in the entire multiverse and its all just retarded and blizzard writers are overpaid hacks.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

That's the problem with the current WoW writing team and Danuser especially. They have quite a few ego problems and feel like they can do better in every way than those who came before them. So they try to make up stuff out of nowhere without using previously established lore as a support,and it often ends up in quite a mess

This is how wow has worked since tbc they have always been making up stuff out of nowhere without using any established lore to support it. Just look at the narru ethereal’S the birds and so on and so on.

[Veldoranz]

If I worked on WoW's creative development team, I would constantly be pushing to come up with a lore justification for eliminating every timeline that is not the main timeline. Time travel always opens up a nuclear can of worms when it comes to clean storytelling. It's my absolute least favorite aspect of WoW's lore, and I wish it could be done away with. Too many "what if" scenarios.

[Kathranis]

there will be a massive conflict of personalities, wherein maybe the AU Varian would be a Kyrian, our Varian would be more fit for Maldraxxus, which one takes precedence, how does any of this actually work?

They would both individually move on from those realms of the Shadowlands when they had completed their work their and were ready to move on to another afterlife, eventually twining together in one ultimate fate, perhaps countless millennia after the process began. And in that long process his soul may be, either momentarily or eternally, reunited with other souls whose fates were interwoven with his.

At least, that's essentially how Danuser describes it.

He paints a picture that much more closely resembles an Eastern cosmological system involving karma and reincarnation, which makes sense with what we've seen in the expansion. After life the soul ascends to one of many realms where it carries out duties or suffers punishment or pleasure and then, given enough time, it may move on to another realm and experience a new afterlife.

Basically the afterlife is an eternal process, assuming something doesn't happen to destroy an individual's soul, which isn't supposed to happen.

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This is how wow has worked since tbc they have always been making up stuff out of nowhere without using any established lore to support it. Just look at the narru ethereal’S the birds and so on and so on.

Since when was BC the first time they made stuff up out of nowhere?

Do you think Kalimdor and the War of the Ancients and the Burning Legion were things back in WC1 or WC2? Because they weren't.

Night elves, tauren, quilboar, nerubians, etc. were just as much made up with no previous lore to support it.

[Houle]

ahaha its so dumb
"the stakes are real now" good job you hack, now every battle on azeroth itself will be completely meaningless. great fckn job. thats why you should NEVER touch a potential "afterlife" in fanatsy stories like warcraft
also, great, theyve just given themselves the possibility to reuse countless characters and threats again and again bc "we didnt kill them in their home plane". cant wait to have entire expansions filled with characters we already killed. it was kinda annoying in legion, and now it's literally anyone that isnt a normal creature
no one can justify this as good writing. this is just being too lazy to create new characters, and a way to reuse as many old ones as possible

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Since when was BC the first time they made stuff up out of nowhere?

Do you think Kalimdor and the War of the Ancients and the Burning Legion were things back in WC1 or WC2? Because they weren't.

Night elves, tauren, quilboar, nerubians, etc. were just as much made up with no previous lore to support it.

BC is just the first time i know for sure as my memory of warcraft 3 is hazy and 1-2 non existent.

[TheFirstOnes]

BC is just the first time i know for sure as my memory of warcraft 3 is hazy and 1-2 non existent.

Warcraft 3 introduced us to a lot of new things, such as Arthas' Death Knights, the Eredar, the Twisting Nether, and even things such as the Old Gods (With the Forgotten One). Warcraft 2 also introduced us to Oil and all, something WC1 didn't have at all.

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ahaha its so dumb
"the stakes are real now" good job you hack, now every battle on azeroth itself will be completely meaningless. great fckn job. thats why you should NEVER touch a potential "afterlife" in fanatsy stories like warcraft
also, great, theyve just given themselves the possibility to reuse countless characters and threats again and again bc "we didnt kill them in their home plane". cant wait to have entire expansions filled with characters we already killed. it was kinda annoying in legion, and now it's literally anyone that isnt a normal creature
no one can justify this as good writing. this is just being too lazy to create new characters, and a way to reuse as many old ones as possible

The stakes haven't meant shit in WoW since Classic, tbh. If you can still click on that "Enter World" button. Chances are, everything's still fine.

[Nnyco]

Then I don't get how titans play in all this. Are they from Orderlands? If so, then how come they have to hatch from the mortal universe's planets?

Makes me think that titans are the equal of old gods. A parasite placed by some "order-lord" to have a force in the mortal plane.