[Spoilers] Elune talks!!! We finally hear/interact with Elune directly.

[Dhrizzle]

What is the purpose of a god of not to intervene in the mortal life of their worshippers? Especially if they have little/no say in what afterlife they go to?

How often do gods in fantasy settings show up personally to stop wars between mortals? If that is what you expect why weren't you upset about the lack of Elune in previous expansions?

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Whether or not anyone has doubts that it is Elune's fault that the Kaldorei souls are in the jaws?
Well here Elune herself says it.

That isn't under debate, it's just some people are daft enough to think Elune somehow orchestrated the attack on Teldrassil when it looks more like she sent their souls to Ardenweald instead of keeping them on Azeroth as wisps. They are condemned because Elune didn't know the Jailer was intercepting those souls.

[Dhrizzle]

She 100% let them die by not empowering her "favored children" during the War of the Thorns. She was apparently aware enough of everything happening to the Night Elves to "ease their pain", but just couldn't be bothered giving Night Warrior powers to the defenders of Ashenvale, Darkshore, and Teldrassil. No, no .. they had to do some silly ritual first because "oh, Night Warrior powers are potentially deadly", which doesn't stack up when those defenders are already being slaughtered left and right anyway. All it does is prove that Elune really couldn't give a damn about saving the Night Elves.

Another nail in the coffin of this idiotic narrative that the Night Elves have been given.

If you think it's idiotic how did you feel during all the other conflicts? Have you spent every expansion cursing Elune for not randomly giving any endangered NElf extra special super powers to smite their enemies?

[Th3Scourge]

They don't need to fire him. Just step down as the lead narrative dev/designer. He is too much into cliff hangers and cosmic wars

For the love of god remove him from his position. I miss when this story was just simple dumb shit with badass characters like Grom etc. Fuck this lore is shit

[Dhrizzle]

How silly of mortals to not account for information that they don't have.



*horrified fan screams*



So, TLDR, the narratives of the mortal races of Azeroth stopped mattering because they're now just extra's in a soap opera about deities.

Fun premise, but they could've made a new IP instead of ruining Warcraft for it.

Wasn't that the premises since WoW launched and we found out we were all just kicking about on a Titan planet?

[Pheraz]

For the love of god remove him from his position. I miss when this story was just simple dumb shit with badass characters like Grom etc. Fuck this lore is shit

I agree. I just do not agree to request a dev/designer to be fired
I completely agree that the lore is super bad and also ultra annoyingly too much part of the world experience.

[Toppy]

They don't need to fire him. Just step down as the lead narrative dev/designer. He is too much into cliff hangers and cosmic wars

Decent chance Golden would take his place.

You really want more Anduin being the be all end all king Sue with his buddy Baine the prince lover?

Dansaur certainly isnt that great. But we're kinda in a position that if he's gone, we wont be getting anything better.

[Dhrizzle]

For the love of god remove him from his position. I miss when this story was just simple dumb shit with badass characters like Grom etc. Fuck this lore is shit

You mean simple dumb shit like the world being crafted by giant stone and metal people who built robots that were cursed to turn into humans, dwarfs and gnomes. Meanwhile orcs invaded because demons infiltrated their magic mountain (which was really a space ship with an angel wind-chime thing) and persuaded them to become genocidal maniacs as part of an interstellar space war?

[RangerDaz]

Damn the lore of warcraft is getting soo embarrassing.

WTF Elune lets her protected race burn by Sylvanas command by choice so they can fuel her sister's realm?

Can lore become more stupid than this???

Oh wait, i forgot to mention she magically knew about the drought but somehow missed that all souls were going to the maw... /facepalm

[sighy]

Do you mean to say that a deity who is powerful enough to protect against Archimonde, an immortal and skyscraper-sized demon of incredible magical power and talent, is somehow not powerful enough to protect against a bunch of mortal soldiers? And while we're at that, the Dark Moon during the Battle for Darkshore doesn't just empower Tyrande, but also everyone fighting with her. To say nothing of the various blessings and Elune-related artefacts that appear throughout WoW.

The problem isn't that Elune is oblivious, or even that she's being humanized (as bad as that is). It's that her power level, like anything in Warcraft, is wildly inconsistent both in scale and use because Elune herself only serves as a plot device McGuffin for [insert anything that features a Night Elf]. That's how we ended up with a deity whose motivations and actions are insane and inconsistent come this latest cutscene: she's the peak personification of the shitty writing that Night Elves have received.

Elune has been used so much as a Deus Ex machina that she is bloody Ichigo Kurosaki of cosmic alignments. Titans used her tears(and realm?) to shape the world and her moonwells are semi-arcane, she is the progenitor of the Naaru and has been speculated by Velen to exhibit traits similar to one and now she is some sort of Life Eternal thing bound to the Winter Queen. So we end up with Chaos as the only Cosmic force she isn't somehow related to... yet. (Altho we did have to fight the ghosts, in Tomb of Sargeras lol)

That said inconsistent gigawank of certain characters/powerplayers is one of the reasons i despise Knaak books and putting Elune on a pedastal like they did was only ever going to backfire.

[Dhrizzle]

Damn the lore of warcraft is getting soo embarrassing.

WTF Elune lets her protected race burn by Sylvanas command by choice so they can fuel her sister's realm?

Can lore become more stupid than this???

Oh wait, i forgot to mention she magically knew about the drought but somehow missed that all souls were going to the maw... /facepalm

Elune has "let" Night Elves slaughtered countless times in the past, Warcraft lore and games are filled with conflicts where she does not intercede on a massive scale. It seems she is unable to act on such a scale or as a deity does not see it being her place to do so.

The video says Elune heard the cries and felt the pain of the Everqueen, it doesn't mean she was given a comprehensive picture of the exact circumstances.

[8bithamster]

I love how delusional the anti lore crowd is.. "OMG ELUNE KILLED THEM ALL".. she clearly states "In the wake of the tragedy" as in after the burning. But hey, let's ignore things a character says, because headcanon is more important bruv!

[Dhrizzle]

What other conflicts? The only other time we've seen conflict in the Night Elven homeland during WoW has been in Cataclysm, and it involved a whole bunch of stuff about Elune, Wild Gods, the Emerald Dream, etc etc. Other conflicts haven't been Night Elf centric, and if they were an existential threat (such as Legion), they didn't focus on Night Elven homeland, or exclusively Night Elven content, choosing other (previously unheard of) zones instead so there was nothing to show in the traditional Night Elven lands.

War of the Thorns was the first large scale existential threat to Night Elves set in Ashenvale/Darkshore/Teldrassil since Cataclysm, and suddenly Elune is nowhere to be found until after the fact, Malfurion's powers are greatly diminished, and the traditional forest defenders are inexplicably incompetent at noticing intruders. It's contrived as all heck.

The War of the Ancients and the Sundering, the War of the Shifting Sands, the Third War (in which Cennarius was killed,) the War of the Shifting Sands redux, Undead Invasion - Naxx edition, Undead Invasion - Arthas is back, the Cataclysm, Horde-Alliance War - Panda edition, Burning Legion Invasion...

Lots of Elves dying in those wars, why did you not expect Elune to squish Azshara as soon as she started talking to Sargeras, kill all the orcs in Ashenvale then punch out Archimonde, flatten Ahn-Qiraj, incinerate the hordes of Scourge, slap down Deathwing, squish Garrosh and swat the Legion ships from the sky? Why is her inaction only an issue in Horde-Alliance war - boat edition?

[sighy]

Hold on .. is that canon?

Unfortunately. It's early on in the Xe'ra core Illidan propaganda questline. Velen states that only a direct relative of Xe'ra can unlock the core, which takes us to Exodar thing and once that fails Khadgar says he read in one of Medivh's tomes that Elune could have made Xe'ra meaning that the Tears of Elune could unlock the core... which they did.

[Biomega]

So, TLDR, the narratives of the mortal races of Azeroth stopped mattering because they're now just extra's in a soap opera about deities.

Fun premise, but they could've made a new IP instead of ruining Warcraft for it.

I mean, I agree that the lore of SL is pretty piss poor, but I'm trying to explain it from internal consistency - not judging the overall quality of where they're taking the story.

What they're writing does, at least in this case, not seem that inconsistent within the framework they've set out. How much dramatic value that framework has is a different question, really.

[Lolites]

the kind of situation you'd 100% expect Elune to be active towards the protection of her "favored children" as she has been in the past

she HASNT, not ingame not in any other lore, she protected FEW individuals, never shitloads of people...
if you want to ignore books and all other lore bcs it doesnt support your narrow view fine, but Dhrizzle is right and you are wrong, simple as that...
throughout whole nelf history Elune helped like 5 people, despite wars and other shit, but somehow this one single war where she didnt help LIKE IN EVERY WAR BEFORE, is different, bcs you decided so...

[Nerovar]

Elune not acting on a mass scale is the only part of this nonsense that doesn't fuck with her lore too much as that would open the can of worms of why she didn't act in the much bigger wars the night elves were a part in. She still acted in the WC3 sense since her followers were still able to attack me with spells while I was chopping down 8 of them for pre-BFA World Quests.

Elune not acting is fine and good but this cinematic basically implies that she could have acted but instead chose not to because she wanted her children to be fertilizer for her sister, not knowing they'd all be flushed down the toilet instead. She can't claim "sending the cascade of souls" as her action without allowing them to die, since passing over into the Shadowlands seems to be the natural procedure unless this is somehow tied into the stupid Legion retcon about Night Elves turning into wisps but that should be easy enough to check. Are there any Night Elf NPCs in the Shadowlands that got there prior to the Burning of Teldrassil?

This then begs the question why Elune didn't intervene in other previous stages of Night Elf history that have been similarly disastrous.

[Dhrizzle]

So I'm guessing you didn't really pay attention to ..

• .. during WoW
• .. in active expansion zones
• .. during existential threats
• .. in the night elven homeland in and around Teldrassil (and Nordrassil)
• .. Cataclysm already covered

Cool, cool.

You know, the kind of situation you'd 100% expect Elune to be active towards the protection of her "favored children" as she has been in the past, even if it was just protecting them from harm rather than literal combat. Elune is far from as passive as she's made out to be .. just extremely inconsistent because she's become little more than just a plot device.

Why would you expect Elune's powers to be tied to WoW or active expansions, is there a lore friendly reason for that?

Are you saying the War of the Ancients and Sundering, War of the Shifting Sands, Archimonde attacking Nordrassil and Fourth Legion War weren't existential threats, or didn't include Elven homeland? Remember at the time of the war against the Qiraji NElf homelands stretched right down through Gerald's and Val Sharah is in the Broken Isles at the heart of last Legion war, and of course Archimonde attacking Nordrassil took place at Nordrassil, where was Elune then?

You didn't cover Cataclysm, why didn't Elune show up to stop Deathwing before he bust out of the planet to kill so many?

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Elune not acting is fine and good but this cinematic basically implies that she could have acted but instead chose not to because she wanted her children to be fertilizer for her sister, not knowing they'd all be flushed down the toilet instead. She can't claim "sending the cascade of souls" as her action without allowing them to die, since passing over into the Shadowlands seems to be the natural procedure unless this is somehow tied into the stupid Legion retcon about Night Elves turning into wisps but that should be easy enough to check. Are there any Night Elf NPCs in the Shadowlands that got there prior to the Burning of Teldrassil?

This then begs the question why Elune didn't intervene in other previous stages of Night Elf history that have been similarly disastrous.

I think you're coming to a faulty conclusion from the video, it certainly didn't seem to me that Elune's godly duty is to intervene in mortal wars. This is backed up by her lack of action in previous conflicts.

It's long been established that dead Night Elves hang about as wisps, our NElf characters even have a wisp ghost for corpse runs.

[Super Dickmann]

Elune not acting is fine and good but this cinematic basically implies that she could have acted but instead chose not to because she wanted her children to be fertilizer for her sister, not knowing they'd all be flushed down the toilet instead. She can't claim "sending the cascade of souls" as her action without allowing them to die, since passing over into the Shadowlands seems to be the natural procedure unless this is somehow tied into the stupid Legion retcon about Night Elves turning into wisps but that should be easy enough to check. Are there any Night Elf NPCs in the Shadowlands that got there prior to the Burning of Teldrassil?

This then begs the question why Elune didn't intervene in other previous stages of Night Elf history that have been similarly disastrous.

There's been so many retcons regarding wisps I legit don't know the one you mean, but I rewatched it so I can better argue about this bullshit on internet forums. The implication as I see it from the way it's phrased ("In the wake of tragedy I sent a cascade of souls") is that Elune didn't so much allow Teldrassil as take advantage of those people dying anyway in order to fed-ex them to Ardenweald so they can help her sister out with the drought. This is in line with her only involving herself in minimal ways throughout much bigger conflicts like the War of the Ancients, Shifting Sands, etc. etc. and with her actions in the material world either being individual (bubbling Tyrande, saving that one satyr) or done through vessels (her priestesses, the Night Warrior).

She has also shown the ability to do this before and has reason to believe it'll work, since what she does with the Teldrassil night elves is the same she does successfully with Ysera. I.e give her peace in her moment of death and then mail her directly to Ardenweald, skipping the Arbiter. She soothed the night elves being torched in her temple and then tried to do the same thing to do her sister a solid after the Winter Queen complained on twitter that she was undergoing a drought. But because unlike at the time of Ysera's death the Arbiter was broken, those souls didn't go to Ardenweald but to the Maw. The 'sent forth' bit is regarding Elune skipping the selection step in order to do her sister a solid.

The plot is obtuse and poorly told in an out of sequence way across 4 years of real time by different writers, but that part of it does internally cohere. The problem is it coheres only in the sense of being the familial drama of a pair of deities, one of which was presented in a totally different way prior to this expansion. It also only works if everyone involved is either egotistical, stupid or both. If you wrack your head you can get that the idea is that the Winter Queen didn't specify the source of the drought to Elune in her PM asking for help as she didn't know it herself and when Elune seemingly didn't respond she got upset and so the two didn't communicate from there on out. Hence also why the Winter Queen is pissed about Ysera. She sees that her sister is willing to mail her 'pet' there, but not answer her pleas when the Winter Queen and her realm need help. The Winter Queen giving of herself to restore Ysera is her doing something that she thinks her sister didn't care to do when she left her high and dry. She learns in this cinematic that that isn't the case, hence the two reconciling. Likewise Elune maneuvers Tyrande into a position where Elune can help her sister after failing to do so earlier.

The very fact that the human tragedy of Teldrassil's destruction, the political fallout of it and Tyrande's whole character arc amounts to one goddess refusing to do a follow-up call to another is bad for reasons I don't think I need to elaborate.

[Nerovar]

She has also shown the ability to do this before and has reason to believe it'll work, since what she does with the Teldrassil night elves is the same she does successfully with Ysera. I.e give her peace in her moment of death and then mail her directly to Ardenweald, skipping the Arbiter. She soothed the night elves being torched in her temple and then tried to do the same thing to do her sister a solid after the Winter Queen complained on twitter that she was undergoing a drought. But because unlike at the time of Ysera's death the Arbiter was broken, those souls didn't go to Ardenweald but to the Maw. The 'sent forth' bit is regarding Elune skipping the selection step in order to do her sister a solid.

Here's the thing: if she has the power to circumvent the Arbiter, then she likely also has knowledge of the Arbiter and can peer into the Shadowlands. If that's the case then why doesn't she see that the souls are all going into the Maw instead of being judged by the Arbiter? Furthermore, if the souls are going into the Maw because of the Arbiter being disabled and Elune circumvents the Arbiter to begin with to overwrite the destination, then why are the Night Elves still landing in the Maw?

This is where I think this can only possibly tie into the Legion retcon about all Night Elves turning into wisps at the point of their death (which is retarded for different reasons) and that Elune merely switched off this procedure to send them into the Shadowlands instead (hence me asking about Night Elf NPCs in the Shadowlands that got there prior to BfA).

The plot is obtuse and poorly told in an out of sequence way across 4 years of real time by different writers, but that part of it does internally cohere. The problem is it coheres only in the sense of being the familial drama of a pair of deities, one of which was presented in a totally different way prior to this expansion. It also only works if everyone involved is either egotistical, stupid or both. If you wrack your head you can get that the idea is that the Winter Queen didn't specify the source of the drought to Elune in her PM asking for help as she didn't know it herself and when Elune seemingly didn't respond she got upset and so the two didn't communicate from there on out. Hence also why the Winter Queen is pissed about Ysera. She sees that her sister is willing to mail her 'pet' there, but not answer her pleas when the Winter Queen and her realm need help. The Winter Queen giving of herself to restore Ysera is her doing something that she thinks her sister didn't care to do when she left her high and dry. She learns in this cinematic that that isn't the case, hence the two reconciling. Likewise Elune maneuvers Tyrande into a position where Elune can help her sister after failing to do so earlier.

The very fact that the human tragedy of Teldrassil's destruction, the political fallout of it and Tyrande's whole character arc amounts to one goddess refusing to do a follow-up call to another is bad for reasons I don't think I need to elaborate.

It's just the way the Warcraft lore team try to write "intelligent" characters. Just make everyone interacting with Sylvanas or the Jailer even more stupid than them.

It's also especially funny that Tyrande's Night Warrior arc basically boils down to becoming an avatar of Elune's vengeance in order to rectify a crime that Elune herself willingly exploited only to then take away that vengeance-fuled power when she was close to actually achieving her goal.

It's long been established that dead Night Elves hang about as wisps, our NElf characters even have a wisp ghost for corpse runs.

It's really only been established as a fact in Legion. Prior to that, Night Elf ghosts (sometimes illuminated by a beam of moonlight) appeared all the time to talk to us (and not just cursed ones) and either passed on into the Emerald Dream in some cases (Druids) or presumably went to Elune. Wisps were seen as mostly inanimate objects or creatures that are only there to serve the Night Elves. The idea that Wisps were deceased Night Elves was always presented as a rumor likely from the view of an outsider who's not part of Night Elf society (the now decanonized RPG books originally confirmed this and described it as a rumor among human scholars that is met with mockery from the Night Elves).
It just also doesn't make any sense given how they were treated by the Night Elves. Cata still got it kinda right by telling us that just like dryads are the daughters of Cenarius, wisps are the children of Aessina the Mother Wisp.

This is a case of a writer misunderstanding the spirit of the original story.

[Sondrelk]

The very fact that the human tragedy of Teldrassil's destruction, the political fallout of it and Tyrande's whole character arc amounts to one goddess refusing to do a follow-up call to another is bad for reasons I don't think I need to elaborate.

It's a symptom of the underlying problem of the plot of BfA seemingly being hastily rewritten to make Sylvanas less evil now that she is getting a redemption arc.

In BfA there was no question. Sylvanas was evil for burning down Teldrassil, and Elune had a reason to not interven despite seemingly being able to. Directly interfering on a large scale might not be something she would do, or even be capable of doing. But A Good War seems to all but state that if Elune wanted she could have stopped Sylvanas.

Now if the implications are properly understood then I guess we are left to assume that Elune did not see the gravity of the situation and decided to just let the Nelves die because she figured that directly intervening in a mortal war was pointless when she would get souls sent to Ardenweald out of it anyways, saving Ardenweald which in turn would save the Shadowlands. Not realizing that the conflict was directly linked to the drought in Ardenweald.


In the end this entire plot will hinge on Sylvanas and her redemption. The cancerous tumor in the middle of this entire thing.
If she gets redeemed then the entire business with Teldrassil comes across like the most inane shock tactic. It would have meant absolutely nothing and at best being an opportunity to give Nelves a better capital, and at worst a horrible double down on shitting on the Nelves.

From the beginning of BfA (or even Legion depending) the entire story with Sylvnaas seems to be one giant face turn after another. Constantly changing whether she is an antihero, a horrible monster or a confused and scared victim. There is no consistent throughline to Sylvanas. Her sociopatching tendencies in burning Teldrassil clashes horribly with her supposed antihero tendencies. Her sometimes care for her people clashes disastrouly with her killing her own people in Before the Storm. And her supposed intelligence is put in blinding contrast to her sheer stupidity at not realizing the Jailer is evil.


I can only assume that when the writers talked about planning expansions at least 2 years ahead they only meant in the most broad terms possible. Sylvanas was going to be an antagonist in 9.0, so we should have her be a complete monster in the beginning of BfA.