The Queue: The Only Thing They Fear Is The Tarragrue

I mean, look at the guy.

This is the Queue. I’m listening to the Doom Eternal soundtrack and writing said Queue, and now we’ll go and do questions and suchlike.

Well, there would be literally no limit to how much real money they would throw at tokens to get gold for AH epics, feasts, flasks, etc. Otherwise, it would be the same as the space race — three obscenely wealthy egomaniacs wasting a lot of time and money on a genital size proxy contest while the world steadily inches towards climate apocalypse.

I guess it might be kind of amusing watching Richard Branson offering tens of millions of dollars to top WoW players just to beat Jeff Bezos to Sylvanas.

I recommend the 197 episodes of Lore Watch, a podcast where I and people who are actually qualified talk about World of Warcraft lore, including stuff that happened in Legion, Battle for Azeroth and of course Shadowlands.

After that, there are various options — for example, there’s always the Lore articles here at the site. The various Chronicle books don’t cover the current game but there are a lot of really involved cinematics you can watch such as this compilation of all Legion cinematics, which helps fill in some gaps. The Harbingers series from Legion and the Warbringers series from Battle also are really useful, as is the Afterlives series for Shadowlands. You can find all the short lore films going all the way back to Mists here, and all the Afterlives short films here.

There’s also the Scrolls of Lore forums if you want to start digging deeper into lore discussions. There are some cool radio plays like the A Thousand Years Of War series starring Turalyon and Alleria, and for you coming out of Warlords of Draenor the audio drama The Tomb of Sargeras explains how we got from the end of that expansion to the beginning of Legion. And of course novels like Before the Storm and Shadows Rising explain a lot as well.

That will hopefully be enough to get you started. Feel free to come back and ask more questions if anything comes to mind.

My theory is that the entire Shadowlands was used by the First Ones to collect Anima and then use that Anima to shape and coalesce a kind of reality — consider it an ordering of the cosmos, the moment when all the various forces (Light, Void, Fel, Arcane, Life and Death) were brought together in a coherent cosmological way. Think of this Shadowland as one, unified whole, with Oribos at its heart.

Oribos would essentially be the ‘lock’ of the system, and the chosen of the First Ones, likely Zovaal himself, originally held the keys. But he decided to do something — perhaps he found fault with existence itself and chose to annihilate it, thinking he could remake it as a better creation devoid of the influence of the First Ones. Perhaps every cosmic force has a similar set of beings to the Eternal Ones — maybe the Titans that are wandering around trying to order our universe are born from the Arcane realm, thrown into our reality by beings of transcendent Order just as the Old Gods are hurled into our reality by the Void Lords.  Perhaps all of this is the design of the First Ones, and Zovaal sought to usurp their creation and use it to annihilate the very thing it had been used to make.

The other Eternal Ones stopped him, but in the process he shattered the Shadowland, and they were forced to chain him to the ruined remains of that First One realm, while Oribos became a city floating in the In-Between. The Arbiter was created from Zovaal’s prime key, and did the work he aband0ned in his mad quest to unmake a universe.

That’s my theory, anyway.

He’s super ultra mega extreme dead, which means he went to the Undershadowlands, where everything that dies in the Shadowlands goes. It’s turtles all the way down.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. I’ll see y’all next week.