The Queue: A day that will live in infamy

I gotta tell you, if you happen to have been born on the 30th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day? People will think it’s the height of hilarity to use that line from FDR’s speech to describe it. I heard that line so many times growing up it’s practically engraved on my brain.

Anyway, it’s my Birthday so expect a Queue where I go off in random directions. Yes, I know that’s pretty much every Queue I write.

That header was made by Rades, and I think about him frequently whenever I see it.

The legacy of tanking back in Vanilla means my answer will always be Trinket! because I ended up using Blackhand’s Breadth in freaking Naxxramas 40 because 2% crit was godly for threat production, which was always something I needed as DPS climbed and climbed and climbed but threat remained static. I was wandering around in Tier 2 and I was a lot harder to kill than I had been, but I didn’t generate that much more threat, and that only got worse as we made our way through that raid.

So yeah, I will always say trinkets, because throughout the next 20 or so years, I always, always needed a trinket for something and often ended up having to do things like that. Grim Toll in a tank gearset build? It was more likely than you’d think.

I grew up bowhunting — my first bow was a 50 pound pull recurve that my dad produced out of the ether and which I later learned was not the kind of bow you should be giving to a ten year old. Later bows included a very nice compound with a 75 pound peak draw (I wish I remembered who made that thing, it was like a friend) and a beefier one my father again somehow produced out of the ether — frankly I think he may have built the thing out of the spare parts for several other bows.

I loved archery as a kid, and it was one of my main pastimes on the farm when we were living there. but to be honest I never really loved hunting very much. I was a decent shot, but not good enough at 14 to hit the animal with anything like the precision to kill it quickly and I often had to, well, track the blood and finish the dying animal off. I think I only managed that twice before I was basically done with hunting, and kept my archery use strictly to targets from then on.

But yeah, reading your comment made me flash back to all those times I hit myself on the inside of my forearm with the bowstring learning how to shoot, and it was a very wistful feeling.

Based on how this expansion is going to come out in like a year that it felt at BlizzCon? No, I don’t think so. I mean, if I’m wrong great, but I definitely think we’re not likely to see that.

What we know/can surmise about Elune is extremely thin on the ground at present. Some of the highlights:

• Elune created the Wildkin (aka WoW‘s version of Owlbears) to protect sacred places and that’s why they’re also known as Moonkin.
• Elune rarely intervenes in the world of mortals, but it’s not unheard of — she seems to cleanse a Satyr named Arvus Illwhisper, which hints at just how powerful she is because the Satyr curse was created by Sargeras himself.
• The Crumbling Ceremonial Vestments indicate that at one time, Trolls worshipped Elune alongside several of the Loa.
• The Temple of Elune (now also known as the Tomb of Sargeras) supports the idea that Elune had a relationship of some kind to the Titans, an idea also supported by the presence of Eonar’s spirit on Elunaria in Legion and the book in the Emerald Dream you mentioned. We still don’t know exactly what that relationship was/is — the Dragonflight lore book implies that Elune and Eonar were bound by love in some fashion, and I admit I took it to mean they were in love, but that’s not necessarily the case.

• Elune has an aspect called the Night Warrior, who serves the role of a psychopomp of sorts — the Night Warrior takes the souls of the dead and sets them as stars in the night sky
• The Night Warrior is also powerful enough to endow a mortal being with the strength to apparently kill an Old God, but that same power will almost always kill the wielder.
• Elune is considered the ‘sister’ of the Winter Queen by both that entity and the Primus, who describes her as the opposite and complimentary being in the realm of Life.
• The fact that the Tear of Elune we use as one of the four Pillars of Creation in Legion is capable of restoring a Naaru Prime like X’era, who was said to only be possible for one of the Prime’s Naaru kin, implies that Khadgar may be correct in stating that he believes Elune may have created the Naaru.
• Aman’thul apparently doesn’t share Eonar’s respect for/love towards Elune, as he ripped her gift of the first World Tree out of the planet in a fit of pique according to that Dragonflight book.

So, while I can’t directly answer you about whether or not Elune is a true deity (we don’t even know what that means in the Warcraft setting — is a Wild God a true deity? Is a Titan? Were the First Ones deities?) I can say that Elune clearly at the very least rivals Aman’thul and Sargeras in power, and likely exceeds them significantly. That doesn’t mean they’re her servants or are subservient to her, but it does imply that she may be on a different level of existence to them — potentially she is to the Naaru what the Void Lords are to the Old Gods, having created them as agents to work directly in our reality because she can’t or won’t because she fears what her power might lead to.

I mean, one of her servants — and a mortal being, no less — killed an Old God using only a fraction of her power. Thiernax did what Aman’thul ould not, and Elune could break the power Sargeras used to curse a Night Elf into a Satyr without even actually being there herself.

So anyway, it’s my birthday, and yes I know it will live in infamy.

Take care everybody.