I giggled.
"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. "
Danuser is even wrong with the very content of his own story. Countless NPCs do talk about Time, centuries, millenia, eons.
Time do affect the SL, it is fact - if not in durations, at least as causality, sequencing.
Souls arrive from mortal planes at a certain point, at a certain rate, at a certain order, at a certain time - to begin with.
So the whole stuff of pretending that the Plane of Death is "chemically pure Death" with NO room for any Order is bullshit.
Look, the Kyrians are just the incarnation of Order, they even provide full Arcane (Order) skills!
On the other hand Sylvarden's link with Nature (thus Life) is already stated. Venthyrs are full of Shadow magic.
Each realm of SL is ordered and tainted with other energies than Death. The In-Between is what this ocean of souls should look like without Order nor Time.
So I'd explain the 4 (or 6) playable realms as enclaves of order into the ocean of shapeless souls. Somehow the inconsistencies of the writers would be fixed this way - but would they?!
Yet that keeps some other plot holes that seem bigged to me than OP' ones.
- Maldraxxus. How can there even be actual FLESH and BONES, and poisons and so on, in a plane of SOULS?
- Nathreza. [SPOILERS] In a book in Revendreth, we learn the Master created the agents of death that are clearly the Dreadlords. So nathrezim are now retconned as creatures of Denathrius and Death, not born in the Twisting Nether as we were told. Fine, I found it fits quite well to this race after all. But now how can they justify the homeworld Nathreza in Legion's lore? (I have my headcanon about it but I bet they just don't even have an explanation to offer.)
- Shadowlands as seen in Chronicles. I guess these damn books are not relevant any more regarding Retail Canon lol.
But Shadowlands were a mirror of the Emerald Dream, both a reflect of Mortal Plane, Decay-side of the Elements bound to The Undead while the ED was Spirit-side bound to the Wild Gods. Not the "plane of Death".
- Shadowlands as seen in WotLK. You know that Salanar's quest as a new DK. Does not resemble nowadays' Shadowlands at all, does it? Obviously, it was a realm of actual Shadows (like the flavor of the old Shadow Priest spec (RIP) before all that silly retcon about the Void and the Old Gods as minions aside from the Death).
- Shadow Realm as seen in BC and WoD. Remember, the realm of the Veiled Arakkoa: Terokk in BC and Anzu in WoD. Same problem, but okay, a slightly different name.
- Why naming it Shadowlands in the first place? if it has nothing to do with the Shadow aka (as for now) the Void?!
In Classic universe, it made sense because Shadow was encompassing Void, Death and even Fel.
But Retail's Chronicles-driven stuff wrecked that and separated all three in original cosmic forces. Full messed-up.
How do you create Death Knights in general?
When the four horsemen were created, had they already moved on to the Shadowlands? Was Nazgrim in Maldraxxus and did the player character rip him out of there? It's a weird concept in general when you have something like the Shadowlands.
Like what if you are already a Kyrian and have ascended. Can someone pull your soul back into your corpse?
How did Uther appear at his tomb?
They aren't back to being a clean slate, the only memories that are removed are those that cause emotional connections to their previous life, as well as traumatic memories. So they would still remember their skills and their mindset would still be as it was in life, just supported by their afterlife experiences, instead of life ones. As the Archon says and Devos herself doesn't deny, they still remembers the lessons, even if she doesn't remember who taught them, a rather superfluous quality.
People who say that they are the sum of their memories don't understand how wrong they are. When memories are recalled they aren't like a film reel that objectively portrays what happened, they are an interpretation of a play, played by new actors every time with a new director interpreting the script. And when they are committed back to memory, instead of putting the original script back, there's a writer in the audience who transcribes the play he saw, and that writing becomes the script for the next time the play is staged. Even for people with eidetic memory it's the same, it's just that their writer meticulously writes down every detail in the script, which is then reproduced over and over through different reconstructions.
In other words, memories of the past life are pointless if they don't do anything, and are actively harmful to the kyrian duties if they ever cloud their judgement.
The machine of death was broken, some time after Ursoc's death in the Emerald Nightmare, according to interviews from Blizzard. The death knights do not seem to remember their time in the Shadowlands, at least not very clearly. And you are forgetting that thousands of worlds have already been destroyed by the cosmic conflict anyway. Azeroth is likely one of the very few surviving ones left in existence.
Just did the Kleia soulbinding quest... and omg is she an idiot...
How do they not know, how do we not tell them that Ben isn't going to some other realm but the maw??
When I was doing the quest, I just kept thinking "Why am I not bringing up what's about to happen to this man?" Moreover, why are the Kyrian not, you know, putting them somewhere that's not the Maw? They're ferrying the souls to Oribos, the Arbiter is broken, why not move them somewhere else?
Sylvanas didn't even win the popular vote, she was elected by an indirect election of representatives. #NotMyWarchief
Because their whole reason for existence is to ferry souls into the Shadowlands, nothing else, and they've never done anything else.
They do not have the omniscience of the Arbiter. They don't know where a soul belongs. When they bypassed the Arbiter to put Arthas into the Maw, look how that turned out. The souls have to go somewhere.
I'm not suggesting they deliver them to any of the realms of death for permanent residence, but you would assume it would be possible for temporary holdings to be established until the problem is resolved. It's also a little strange that the Kyrians, who are intelligent and show self motivation in Bastion, would simply deliver souls directly to Zovaal rather than taking some initiative. It essentially means that the Kyrians, regardless of affiliation, are complicit with the Jailer's plans.
Sylvanas didn't even win the popular vote, she was elected by an indirect election of representatives. #NotMyWarchief
I think part of the problem is that they don't have any holding place for souls awaiting judgment, so there is no "somewhere else" to move them. They also seem to have an issue with dedication to rigid hierachies, which likely goes all the way up to Kyrestia. The Arbiter's helpers in Oribos show similar tendencies.
I just did Torghast and got Meatball as a follower, when did he die in BFA? @_@
Meatball dies every time in the Brawler’s Guild when he turns into a pile of meat. A...meat ball if you will.
Seriously though, who knows? He apparently became a guard for the arena so it could have been at any time since then.
- - - Updated - - -
All souls got sent to the Maw after the machine broke (minus the Trolls that Bwonsamdi has been able to collect before going beyond his reach).
The most difficult thing to do is accept that there is nothing wrong with things you don't like and accept that people can like things you don't.
Possibly. There are souls cruising around that don’t have the same appearance. All of the Kyrian, Maldraxxi, and Rivendreth have had souls that appear to have their original shapes (Kyrian even being able to take the shape they want after death). Keep in mind, that the Maw is filled with countless souls at this point. There very well could be many that have their original appearance and we haven’t encountered them yet. There are even specific Shadowlands races we encounter in Torghast which would lead us to believe it’s possible for souls already dead to still go there. Uther’s and Draka’s cinematics show us the original shape can be retained after death.
None of them look completely identical to their living form, though. Uther became a winged smurf, Draka is decidedly more pale and might be less than fully fleshed below her armour, and all those souls in Bastion are just semi-transparent blueish spectres. Meatball just looks the same he always does right down to colours and low-res model.