Hello, and welcome to Lore Watch, a roundtable free-form discussion about lore in World Warcraft, and maybe sometime, eventually, someday, in the far future, we'll get to some other games as well. But not today. I'm Anne Stichney, one of two lore-focused writers from Blizzard Watch, and I've got both of my beautiful, amazing co-hosts with me today. First up, of course, we've got the other lore columnist from Blizzard Watch, Matt Rossi.
Hey, Rossi, what's up? Joe has to be the beautiful one. No, you're both beautiful. You're both beautiful.
I'm from Human Essence. I'm looking at my face, so I guess you're talking about myself or something, because you're definitely not talking about my face. Second, because he already piped up, we've got our shaman expert and also our lore expert as well, Joe Perez. Say hi, Joe.
Well, hello there, everybody. Man, Dave Coste, I favorite my tweet about being a panda. My week is mid. Yeah, we owe him a hug for Mr.
Pandaria. Oh, yeah, we totally do. Because that was, I loved that expansion. So, moving on.
This week, we're going to kind of, we're taking a slightly different tag, but we're kind of bouncing off of what we were talking about last week, because as I was thinking about what we were talking about last week, it kind of, I had some theories come up and just some wild, you know, as I do, the thing where, you know, you get an idea and then it kind of springboards into something else and springboards into something else, and then suddenly you're looking at something and going, wait, wait, wait, did this mean something completely different? So, last week we were talking about evolution, right? Evolution about Azeroth's creatures and things like that, and we were talking about trolls. And one of the things that stuck with me was when Rossi was talking about trolls and how trolls are, they evolve like crazy.
They adapt like crazy. There's a million different kinds of troll tribes, just depending on where they are regionally speaking. And you could even argue that the night elves themselves were the trolls' natural evolution as a response to exposure to arcane magic, which wasn't something that the trolls had necessarily dealt with in that kind of magnitude before. So, what I want to talk about is the idea of Titan defenses versus Azeroth defenses, because there's two separate things going on here.
The Titan systems, obviously, we've seen them before. They're all over Azeroth. We ran inside a bunch of them when we were in Northern, but there are systems in place that have come supposedly from Azeroth as well. One of them, I've got Wolfheart in front of me here.
One of them is the Ancient, and there's, in chapter one of Wolfheart, it says, the dragons have been empowered by the Titans, but Azeroth itself gave rise to spirits of demigods, creatures eternal in nature yet capable of ultimate sacrifice. And, of course, they're talking about the Ancients there. Ancients like Goldrin, Malorn, all the ones that we run into when we're up in Hidal. So, I kind of want to talk about that a little bit.
Okay. And I'm wondering what you guys' thoughts are on that as far as, like... Well, one thing I was thinking about, one of the things they talked about was when the night elves appeared, like, however they got there. The night elves took out the trolls in record time.
It took them almost no time at all to completely destroy the troll empires, both of them. They took out the Gurubashi and the Amani. They basically pushed them back to, like, you go live in this little part of the world, and you go live in this little part of the world. And I'm going to blow the world up and split you up even further.
That was, you know, a couple thousand years after. I'm talking about when they were coming up. And they did it through arcane magic, which they were ridiculously good at. And think about that, because it's not like the old gods are shy about using whatever comes to hand.
No. But the old gods forces did not have anything like the mastery of magic necessary to beat the trolls. Because the Akir tried it for millennia and couldn't pull it off. And the night elves pulled it off in, like, a couple hundred years.
They kind of waltzed right in. Now, is it because that arcane magic in the world of eternity came from the titans? I don't know that, but I know this much. They specifically mention, back when the Warcraft was like, you remember that thing, right?
Yeah. Back in the, I was reading the old archived versions of it the other day, and they specifically pointed out that it was the night elves' mastery of arcane magic, that they couldn't adapt to it. They couldn't figure out, how are they doing this? How are they setting us on fire?
They're freezing us, they're calling lightning down. I don't understand. And there's, the idea that the trolls are, if you talk about the trolls as being inherently morphic, if they change in response to an environment, and the night elves are the trolls multiplied by arcane magic. The thing about the Wall of Eternity is, we're still not 100% sure who made it.
Like, we think the titans did, it seems to be the titans, but we're still not 100% sure. All we know for sure about the Wall of Eternity is, like, it pulls in the essence of the Twisting Nether and purifies it. It's like, when it comes out of the Wall of Eternity, there's no fel, there's no shadow, and there's no light either. It's pure magic.
So it's a giant Brita filter, is what you're saying here. For magic, yeah. If you think about that, like, why would the titans do that? Like, what's their endgame?
And how does it compare, like, we were talking about titan defenses before, we talked about the animal before, and I'll come back to it, but what is the whole purpose of all this shaping? What are they doing? See, I think if we do that, we would have, like, the whole story. Yeah, and that's the thing, is, like, you're talking about defense systems, and you're talking about Azeroth making the ancients, like, Azeroth itself created them, empowered them?
They kind of gave birth to them, that's what's applied. What if they're just Azeroth? They are Azeroth? Yeah, because Azeroth itself doesn't have to be, like, a, it doesn't have to be a single continuous being.
It can be distributed, for lack of a better word. I don't use computing terms here, because, you know, we live in a modern society. But we know that the Emerald Dream exists as kind of a backup copy of Azeroth, right? The aspects are all nature-oriented.
They're all tied in, like, Cenarius and Malorn all tie into the Emerald Dream, right? Cenarius didn't tie into the Emerald Dream originally. He was kind of brought there and shown everything by Ysera, because Ysera kind of adopted him. Yeah, but the thing is that all of them seem to have a relationship to it.
Kind of, yeah. Because when you go to Hydro, and you, I can't remember the name of the giant turtle that you help. Tortos? Oh, Tortos.
Yeah, it is Tortos, isn't it? It is Tortos. I thought Tortos was the one that was in the Thunder. Oh, no, Tortos is the, yeah, the Thunder.
You know the one I'm talking about, though, the giant turtle they try to replace with Nemesis? Yeah, Tortola. Tortola, yeah. And they try to replace, they talk about how he basically swims in the waters of the Emerald Dream, blah, blah.
The thing I'm thinking about is that Azeroth seems to have its own, for lack of a better word, its own existence that transcends, it doesn't have a self. It has aspects. Like, they're called aspects, you know? Well, the dragon aspects are.
Yeah, the dragon aspects. The dragon aspects come from the whole concept of they were empowered by the Titans to protect Azeroth. Azeroth and the Ysera that showed the Emerald Dream two scenarios. So it's like the Titan aspects exist kind of as like a kind of maintenance system, but then Azeroth itself actually has its own operation.
It runs itself. It's self-sustaining. If you want to talk about it in terms of, like, computers and things like that, though, it's like the Ysera program was set in place by the Titans and decided to incorporate Scenarius and Malorn, like, decided to keep it, the programming, you know? See, for me, if we're talking about it in terms of computers, it's like a dual booting between two OSes, right?
Like, it's two operating systems that exist side by side. Yeah. They each have a purpose, but they can each be aware or made aware of each other through an intermediary or a boot sector, right? Like, there can be a bootstrap loader that does that.
And in a way, that's what the dragon aspects kind of were. They were kind of like that interface between what the Titan operating system was, what their MO was, and what the natural order of Azeroth was, because they were acutely aware of it, right? There's another thing to be sick about, too, in that subject. The dragon aspects aren't Titan creations as such.
No, they're at a bridge point. Their aspect nature comes from the Titans. But the proto-drakes existed, and they were here, and they were at least semi-intelligent. I mean, if you read, I know Anne's read it.
I'm sure Joe's read it, too. When you read, you know, the Dawn of the Aspects book, it's right there. They thought and felt and did and talked, you know? And they were primitive, sure, but...
Yeah, they were primitive, but, you know, I mean, full control sometimes. Yeah. I almost kind of, I'm wondering if we should be looking at it as a computer or looking at it as, like, an organism, because if we had it like an organism, like Azeroth as an organism, then things like the ancients and whatnot would be kind of like the white blood cells. They're sort of there to, like, protect and that kind of thing.
And the aspects almost act like a vaccine or something. They would kind of genetically modify and introduce it into the system. Yeah, I keep trying to come up with a better analogy for it, and I keep failing because I'm trying to, like, force it a little bit. But what I'm thinking about here is if you think of Azeroth as an offspring, a child, the child grows, its mind develops.
Our minds aren't, we present our minds as a single, unified, coherent self, but we know that that's not necessarily an accurate view of how we really think. There's not one eye. There's hundreds of thousands of thought processes going on in your head at any given second. If you look at the aspects as, for lack of a word, they're what the mind is being taught.
They are, your parents teach you things. The aspects serve that role. If you think of the Titans as the parents of Azeroth, the aspects are stuff you're taught. They are things that you learn directly from the people that raised you.
The ancients are things you create. They're the things you look at the world and you come up with ideas for it, for lack of a word. You incorporate your life experience and make things. Again, I want to say defense system, but that's not a mechanical thing.
I'm trying to be organic here. But I'm trying to think about the mind. The mind generates... Like a reactionary instinct.
Yeah, if you experience trauma, your mind has ways to cope with it. It comes up with ways to incorporate the trauma and become stronger or isolate it, wall it off, repress it. These are kind of like if you're a kid and you get bowled over by a dog that doesn't know what it's doing or whatever, and suddenly you have a phobia of dogs and you just kind of avoid them. Or, in some cases, the same kid could learn, instead, how to deal with dogs from them.
And that's what the ancients and the ones in Pandaria, whose name is the moment I'm not getting, but they're technically still... The August Celestials. Yeah, the August Celestials are basically still ancients. They're just ancients under a different name.
And they seem like you've got compassion and hope. And these are all things you want to have in response to the world. But they have to still fight for that. Like when Neo-Zao was dealing with the Mogu, he lost.
The Mogu beat Neo-Zao. And in that day, all his strength was for nothing. All his fortitude. Now, he isn't really strength.
But, you know, all his endurance didn't avail him. He didn't win. These are the ancients and the August Celestials. They're stuff Azeroth needs to cope with the universe, but they're not invincible.
We saw that in the War of... You're not saying the War of Eternity, but the original ancient... The War of the Ancients, yeah. The Ancients, some of the Ancients died.
And some of them were corrupted. Look at Goldrin. We talked about Goldrin last time. Goldrin got fell-tainted.
You know, your desire to protect yourself can turn into a bad thing. You can become overprotective or manic or, you know, you can be hurt. And it's like Azeroth's... But they don't die permanently either.
I mean, because Cenarius really died. What I find, like, really interesting about that whole aspect of it is that it seems similar to what happens when we kill a demon. We kill a demon, it goes back to the Twisting Nether, and then it can theoretically come back again. You kill an ancient, and it goes to somewhere.
We don't know where. But we can bring it back again. So is this Azeroth's version of a demon, or...? Well, I mean, we know this about demons.
For instance, the demons that come from blood sacrifice were created by the Titans. They weren't created by the Burning Legion or Sargeras, and they didn't preexist. They were straight-up made by Titans to hunt down people who used blood sacrifice. We learn that in the warlock experience, the green fire quests.
Originally, those demons that come when you make blood sacrifice were hunting it. And when Sargeras went rogue, he turned some of them. So that technique is known by the Titans. The Titans know that method of replication, for lack of a better word.
That means to keep going. So it's quite possible they built it into Azeroth. Like, just built it in. Because again, while these are separate things, they're not part of each other, at the same time, the Titans made Azeroth.
So everything Azeroth is, and the Emerald Dream's a huge part of what Azeroth is, kind of an interesting thing, because I've always thought of it not as a living organic creature. I've always thought of it in the terms of computer space. Basically based on the way that the Titans ordered and also used and integrated technology into the creation of Azeroth. Look at those giant engines that we have at each of these points throughout Azeroth.
They're there. They're present. They had a purpose. They were there for some reason.
You know, we're talking about replication. Look at the engine that we find in the Mr. Pandaria expansion, where it still is capable of generating life. It is still capable of generating a new body.
This technology is part of the world as a whole, right? So I don't think, I think that it's kind of one of those things where, I think how I phrase this, it's not a wholly organic thing anymore. And I don't think that any world that the Titans touch becomes or remains a completely organic thing in. So at least that's the way I'm looking at it, right?
And that's the way that the things that I'm seeing are happening. And I'm thinking, when we're talking about the aspects before, the dragon aspects, they were sort of that integration point or that bridge point. They were the gap filler. They were what was there to make sure that the organic materials that they crafted or that they perused around or pushed around worked well with the technology that they implemented into maintaining that world.
And I think that right now, what makes Azeroth Azeroth is the fact that there's a balance point between the two. And I think that's kind of one of the most interesting things to me about when we start talking about Titan Tech, is that I don't think one could possibly exist without the other anymore at this point. See, I think actually the whole point is that that's exactly what they want to have happen, is that one will exist without the other. I see all the old Titan bases.
There's a reason they're all deserted. I see all the engine of Nalak Shah in Pandaria or the engine of the Makers in Northrend, both of which could still create the Creation Forge in Northrend, which is fine. Both could still create new bodies. And Loken used the Creation Forge in Northrend to create wholly inorganic, Vrykul and dwarves that would never succumb to the curse of flesh, which is interesting because if you go to Uldamon, and I always bring it back to Uldamon because I feel like people don't run Uldamon anymore, they don't see it.
But there's so much there. There's a lot there. When you go to Uldamon and you get to the discs on Uldamon, and the, I won't remember his name, is he the avatar in Uldamon? Because he shows up again in Ulduar.
I don't remember. It's like a projection. It's the avatars in Northrend. Whatever the Uldamon thing, it's the same thing in both places.
He shows up and he basically gives you a speech about exactly what the earthen are and why they existed and how they became the various things they became, how they turned into dwarves and troggs. And one of the things he talks about is that Azeroth was unusual in that usually they use a synthetic matrix to create servitors to help shape worlds. On Azeroth, they used a matrix that incorporated the rocky materials of the world. And that's unique to Azeroth that they did this.
He makes a point of it, but this is not usually what they do. They usually use biomatter. They don't usually use inorganic materials. Why did they use inorganic materials in Azeroth?
He never specifically says. Well, and we kind of, if we want to tie it back to that passage in Wolfhardt, there's a sentence before that says, From the dawn of its reshaping by the mysterious titans, Azeroth had been guarded by beings who were tied to the world as no other creatures could be. That implies that the aspects weren't actually birthed by Azeroth until the titans had reshaped the world. Like it was a response mechanism to them doing whatever it was they were doing.
And that may be why they didn't use the organic matter, because Azeroth was doing something different. Yeah, and it's really interesting to me because it implies something about the curse of flesh, which is that we told over and over again the curse of flesh is caused by the old gods. The old gods used it to better assimilate the beings that the titans had created. Why do they need them to be flesh to assimilate them?
They command and control elementals with ease. Elementals are made out of things like rock and fire and water and air. Every time I read that passage in the Halls of Splatining part, no, it's Halls of Stone, right? Yeah, it's Halls of Stone.
You go to Halls of Stone and you do the... The Tribunal of Ages. Yeah, every time I read it, I keep thinking to myself, something is going on here. I keep remembering, Loken has been in control of these systems for millennia, and Loken is in the hands of Yogg-Saron.
And Loken engineered the war that allowed him to put the vast majority of giants and vrykul and iron dwarves in suspended animation. He caused that war so that he could put the titans' defensive systems on shutdown. That's all stated in the Tribunal of Ages, that Loken is behind everything. It has been for a very long time.
Why did he need to do that? Was it just to release Yogg-Saron? Because he doesn't make any move to release Yogg-Saron for thousands of years. And keep in mind this, too.
Loken is the one who called Algalon. I mean, deliberately, he knew what was going to happen. Well, he didn't call Algalon. It was his death.
His death was that response. He set up his own death. what was his endgame? Was this his last bit of resistance?
Was he saying, Yogg-Saron's been cropped to me for thousands of years but I can come up with an endgame? I can make them kill me. I've got that one last for Ra. Yeah, and I don't know, was that Yogg-Saron wanting that to happen because if they re-originate the planet he might get out?
Or was that Loken wanting it because if they re-originate the planet it will finally kill the old gods? That I've never known and never been able to figure out with that. That's all your outside system in operation. That's an interesting thought though, that that was his last effort to rid the world of this thing that had been corrupting him for millennia.
And you want to talk, Joe's talking about the machine systems versus organic systems and the points of integration. Azeroth, right there, the Watchers are definitely the machine part, right? And the Aspects are almost like a program that they initiated to monitor the situation, right? If we think of all the organic life on Azeroth as the code that they're running then the Aspects become what we want to call them, like Watcher demons, they become monitoring systems.
But Azeroth itself actually has a completely different, for lack of a word, antivirus system that it runs and that's the Ancients. Well, and what I find interesting though is those Ancients weren't spawned until the Titan showed up and started messing with things. Like that was Azeroth's response to, oh hey, there's somebody here doing something to this planet, we better do something about it. Here, let's have some giant animal gods.
Which then begs the question of why they waited until then. Right, when the old gods were there. Yeah, I was going to say the old gods were waging this titanic war against each other over the entire planet. Why did they wait until the Titans came?
Oh, oh, oh, wait a minute. Maybe they didn't wait because before the coming of the Titans, Azeroth had no consciousness because it was nothing but boiling chaos. You can't have consciousness without order. So Azeroth exists, there's old gods all over the surface of it, constant elemental combat.
Titans show up and they order it and reorganize it and that makes a consciousness and they weren't necessarily even trying to. It creates the unreal dream. That's the consciousness. Yeah.
That's the dream. And then once you do that, it's like we have kids. Using the kid metaphor. When you have a kid, you think of the kid as your kid.
But then when it comes and the kid isn't your kid anymore, it's whoever it is. It's still, you know, it's obviously still your child but its identity is set. It's something else. It's evolved.
Yeah, it becomes its own person. Can Azeroth do that? Because it wasn't like when you kill Lishan and oh god, I can't remember the name of the little black dragon? My god, what's wrong with that kid?
Rathion, thank you. Oh my god. But when Rathion eats Lishan's heart, the thing he says that we must create the final titan. What if that's, you know, I think you've even said this before, that titans might be born in this fashion, haven't you?
Yeah, I have. I kind of implied that Azeroth was like maybe, oh god, that was so long ago. It was one of my tinfoil hats from years and years and years ago where I was talking about that whole creation story and how it says, you know, in the beginning titans created Azeroth, and I'm like, well, what's another word for creating? What about procreation?
What if Azeroth is like a titan egg or something? Well, I mean, we don't even know. I mean, it's very possible that in order to create a titan, you need a world to be created first and the world gives it a place to be. I don't know.
I know that Azeroth definitely, I don't want to say does things for itself, but it almost feels like Azeroth rather than the old gods is what created the curse of flesh or used it because it's like all these titan creations became organic, became part of Azeroth. What Rathion says, what Rathion says in that moment, right? He eats the heart and he goes into this weird trance and he says, oh, I see them. A million, million worlds glittering in their perfection, but one above all the others.
Oh, and then he does that whole weird beacon of light speaking in strange, his voice is not his voice and he says, we have fallen. We must rebuild the final titan. Do not forget. We must rebuild it.
And then after that too, like right after that, it immediately cuts off. He says, I don't remember any of it. None of them remember the irony. Yeah.
Yeah. What was he saying? What was he talking? If we knew what he was talking about, we would seriously, oh, this is why I hope Rathion shows up in Legion.
I really hope he shows up because there's so many points there that just they weren't touched and I have a feeling we're going to see him figure something out here. We're going to figure out something fairly substantial here in regards to how Azeroth came to be. I hope. I want to know how they connect to the big pillar in Deep Home.
Yeah. And I want to know, like, was that the same kind of thing but for the elemental plane of Earth? Well, they've changed planes until after they imprisoned the elementals though, so I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with it, maybe not.
However, let's go ahead and bump this forward a little bit here because we also kind of, when we're looking at Azeroth and we're looking at Azeroth in this aspect, we also have to kind of look at Draenor because Draenor was touched by the Titans and I think Kossak, if I remember right, Kossak said in one of the BlizzCon panels, he said that pretty much every planet out there has been touched by the Titans in some way. So if we look at Draenor, Draenor paints a really different kind of picture because there is Titan tech and there's evidence of Titan tech all over the place but the defense mechanisms aren't quite there or maybe they are and that's the primals and the breakers. You know, Draenor doesn't feel like it has defense mechanisms in the slightest because it doesn't feel like the kind of planet that needs them. Draenor feels like a planet you get sent to.
I don't know how to put this. It's like, Azeroth, Azeroth's got a lot going on and it certainly is a bad planet to invade as we've proved on multiple occasions. Azeroth needs protecting more than Draenor needs protecting for some reason. It feels like Draenor is almost like a place I don't want to say it's a skunk works but you know what I mean?
On Azeroth we have places like Un'Goro and Sholazar and the Dinosaur Island there the Dinosaur Giants and it feels like all of Draenor is that or was the whole planet is a place to test out ideas. What if we made gigantic plant things? It's sort of like developer island. Seriously, we talked about this once in terms of Draenor not having an Emerald Dream because Draenor is its own Emerald Dream.
Yeah. Rather than having separate layers Azeroth has a separate elemental plane for every element like fire one, water one, earth one. It's got the Emerald Dream where it's like they took all of that where it's all separated out and stratified and organized on Azeroth and they just jammed it all together like Play-Doh on Draenor. Well maybe it's just a testament to the fact that it's like a survivalist dream, right?
Like for lack of a better analogy it is the toughest planet that we have seen, right? Obviously it's the only planet we've seen so far but still it's still the toughest planet that we've seen. It adapts. Its people adapt in such a way that I don't think the vast majority of the natives of Azeroth were capable of doing because if there was more than just trolls back on our side over there, I mean look at the orcs look at all the other native indigenous races for until the planet blew up in our timeline they were there, they were going strong.
Instead of Nydal being affected by any kind of arcane magic or anything like that we've got the ogres who kind of found these stones that were presumably titan stones, titan relics and learned how to use them and manipulate them with such proficiency that they pretty much ruled Draenor for a while. The Korean Empire was huge. And it might still be in parts of it, who knows. What got me about Draenor is this and a friend of mine was actually talking about this one time we were raiding and he made this comment and I've always remembered it.
It's like, do you realize that orcs are the gnomes of Draenor? Yeah. They're the smallest, smartest ones on the whole planet. They're the little tiny ones and it's like, when we got to Draenor what did we find evidence of?
There were once giants that Draenor are so big that their bodies make perfectly good cities. Yeah. You could make a city out of that Grom's body. The Magonron, who are enormous who are so big that they look down on Grom are not even close to that big.
So that always amazes me about Draenor. It's like, this is a planet where life started out really big. Huge. And you've got the breakers wandering around and you've got the primals and the primals have those mammoth, they look like the centaur mammoth people.
They're four-legged monster things. The genosaur, yeah. And they're enormous and they're just only big enough to take out a Magonron which is, again, not even the biggest that they ever were. No, and they date back to the Age of Colossals.
Yeah. And the Age of Colossals is there's a lot of big things roaming all over Draenor. The thing that I find kind of interesting about this though is that the primals and the breakers seem to have their own predetermined thing that they're trying to do so the primals are trying to obviously create plant life and just make the whole planet into this overgrown, lush jungle. All these little creatures like the orcs and any of the organic creatures really they're just, they're fertilizer.
It's walking, talking fertilizer to these guys. And then you've got the breakers and the breakers, their whole thing, their whole MO is that they want to just terraform the planet into dirt and rocks. So it's like these two aspects of shaping are at odds. I just, this just hit me in the face.
Okay, go ahead. Alright, so there's no separate elemental plane. The elementals can just run loose on Draenor any way they want to. There are beings that are running loose chaotically trying to force plant life.
There are beings running around trying to chaotically strip everything down to rock and stone. Arakowa on our Draenor. Yeah, which implies they're there on this Draenor. This is a pre-shaping world.
This is a pre-Azeroth was shaped. The Titans set it up then came back later and shaped it and found that they got infested by old gods so they did the whole thing. This is a pre-shaping world. This is a world still in the process of formation by Titan standards.
So they basically came, set things up on it, left, and they didn't get a chance to come back to actually organize it. This world is still in the oven. Interesting. And here we are, messing with it.
That's a terrible idea. What's interesting though is like the primals, the primals are actually, they're actively seeking out intelligent than you would think that they are. The primals are made out of rock in a lot of places, right? At least the Magneran are.
No, that's the breakers. The primals are the plant guys. The primals are the plant guys. I was going to say this, the rock dudes, the breakers, they feel an awful lot like, their set purpose is just to render everything down.
It feels like they should be fighting the primals, they should go ahead of the primals. Do you know what I mean? They should go ahead and the primals come in after. Almost like their order of operations was messed up.
Like somewhere the breakers got turned around and started working back against the primals when it seems like they should have, killing the land the primals should have been cultivating. But then they should both have stopped. This is my problem. I've never stopped.
I think both of them are still going but they should have stopped. But it's like the Rius effect, right? It's the Rius effect. It's the constant cycle of breaking down and rebirth.
Okay, I have a question and bear with me here because this is kind of like an out-of-the-box question. You said that maybe Draenor hasn't been revisited yet. Like it's still in the process of baking. What if it's not in the process of baking but the titans haven't come back?
There's a reason the titans haven't come back. Like they were supposed to come back at some point. It didn't get a chance to come back and that's when everything went haywire. Yeah, because maybe it got to the completion point.
In other words, it went ding. The oven dinged in. Oh, there's a timer. Oh, crap.
But nobody came to check the meatloaf and now it's just like this kind of blackened bus sitting there burning. That sort of ties back into the whole Rathion thing too because if we're talking about the idea of, oh no, they've forgotten. You have a couple possibilities, right? What if, you know, because we don't know where the titans are.
We don't know what's happened to them. What if something's happened that they can't or they've forgotten about certain projects or they've forgotten about the existence of so many things? Algalon, when you said that. Algalon says, I've seen a million, million worlds bathed in the maker's flames.
So that implies that Algalon has been in operation. Is he the only observer they have? And if not, do they have like hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of them? What do they do?
If Algalon's currently still hanging around Azeroth trying to figure us out, that implies that he's the only observer they got and a whole lot of stuff isn't getting observed. Well, maybe, or unless it goes back to the whole Loken thing too where he was the prime designate of Azeroth, right? What if they have a prime designate for each of the planets that is supposed to check in with Algalon? Just like, you know, worlds bathed in the maker's flames, their denizens fading without so much as a whimper.
Entire planetary systems born and raised in the time that it takes your mortal hearts to beat once. Yet all throughout, my own heart devoid of emotion, of empathy. I have felt nothing, a million, million lives wasted. Had they all held within them your tenacity?
Had they all loved life as you do? Perhaps it is your imperfections, that which brings you free will that allows you to persevere against all cosmically calculated odds. You prevail where the Titan's own perfect creations have failed. Yeah, and does he mean himself in that?
He's talking about us, us adventurers that are there. When he says when the Titan's own perfect creations, is he the Titan's own perfect creation? We don't know that they re-originate every failure. What if Draenor is just abandoned?
What if they started it, they got to a certain point and said, this is not doing what we want. Yeah, this isn't what we want. We put a little too much pepper on this one, let's move on to the next one. And left to their own devices, their creations, they didn't separate them out, they didn't create a stratified order.
Maybe that's why Azeroth has stratified order, because when they tried a planet where everything just existed together and you got Draenor, where even the planets are just trying to constantly make you mulch. We can't raise this, this isn't going to do what we want because it's too busy trying to kill everything on it. See, and we're running up against what is essentially the biggest problem with this discussion is that we only know two worlds, technically three, if you want to count past and present or alternate past anymore. Theoretically, I've actually seen one other because we did go to that demon planet to fight that one Manoroth-looking dude when we were doing Talador.
Yeah, but that was like a pocket dimension type thing. That's a whole other thing. Also, we know enough of Argus to know certain things about it and we know we're about to see a prison planet that was created by the Titans solely to hold monstrous and demonic things. Yeah.
What I'm saying is, so the planet that houses the demons, if that was created solely as a prison, that kind of operates outside of our normal, our discussion as far as this goes. Argus, we do know more about that than we have in the past several years just because of the different story arcs of the Drenai, which is great and I absolutely love it, but I still want to know more. We know so precious little about that planet's reorganization and because that planet is essentially no longer there or at least no longer accessible to us in any meaningful way, we kind of lack the information as far as were the same system set up. Was everything that happened there was that a failure of the Titans?
Was it something that was caused by, you know, their own miscalculations or was it to say they said, you know what, this is going to blow up, we don't want anything to do with it, we're done, move on to the next one. You know what's interesting about Argus too is 25,000 years ago when Sargeras came to Argus, they were on the cusp of their fifth or sixth big civilization. Yeah. They actually, that planet had had like at least 30,000 years of society before he showed up, which means it seems like in terms of creation purposes, Argus is way older than Azeroth.
And he worked pretty well. And I wrote a crazy, I wrote a really crazy K.Y.L. way back in the day where I actually postulated that Argus was Azeroth in the future. I remember that one.
It was great, Bendy. Because, you know, you've got the Mogu, what if the Mogu and the Trolls into Brad and they ended up as the ancestors of the Draenei. But my point was only that we don't, like what, the fact that the crystal was on Argus, the crystal that became all the Akamai crystals, the one that they used to summon the Nauru in the first place was already there. The Nauru had already been in touch with them.
It was a holy relic of their people and they had no idea how they got there. Like long, long ago, somewhere along the line. Nauru visited these guys, left the crystal, and then just kind of deserted them. And they didn't even know that it would call Nauru.
They just knew it was holy. Yeah. Like, this is a holy relic of our people. That's all they got.
So, like, we were talking about Titans and Aspects and Ancients, and we haven't really touched on the Nauru or the Void Beings because that's, like, way outside the wheelhouse of Azeroth, but, like... Is it, though? We don't know. Like, has Azeroth...
Before the coming of the Drenai, have Azeroth ever seen the Nauru? I mean, I don't... Well... Yeah, I know.
We could talk about that, but seriously, have they? Like, where does all this light come from? And the thing is... Isn't that fascinating here?
You know? Okay, we talk about the animal crystal. We talk about the crystal was set on the planet and he was just a holy relic, right? But it implies that, yes, the Nauru were there.
They contacted them at one point and finally left, right? They had to have contacted them so long ago that a race as long-lived as the Drenai are had time to forget them. Yeah, or had their culture ruined. I'm sorry, Joe.
No, it's fine. I was like, what if... You know, just kind of the same thought of, like, your mind-bending theory and that the linkage between worlds that was the Dark Portal isn't actually a linkage between worlds but is bending through time, space, and dimensions. So it was always a time portal so it didn't matter that he changed it to time, space, and dimensions.
Exactly. So it was always a time portal. What if... That implies that when Draenor got blown up in...
That actually wasn't our timeline. That wasn't our timeline. And we've talked about that where the multiverse exists, right? Where all these planets exist.
What if there is only one universe that we know of but it doesn't have all these planets? What if it's just the multiverse layered upon each other throughout instances of time and space? And what if Draenor, like I said, what if Draenor is the pre-baked version of Azeroth and that's why it was so... Because we see these evidence on Azeroth too of these creatures that were so big.
You know, there's stories about them if you do any of the dwarf archaeology stuff even back in the days of Plastic WoW where they talk about all these creatures that existed, these titans of the world that existed so long ago that they're just starting to uncover them. Okay, okay, okay, wait. We're going to talk about brain-bending stuff here, right? Okay, let's go back to the Emerald Dream for a second.
The Emerald Dream... What the Emerald Dream is... You know, people call it a backup copy of Azeroth and that's not exactly... I mean, it's apt but it's not quite what it is.
It's a backup copy of Azeroth, yes. But it's also... It's kind of like a data record of everything the titans were doing when they were experimenting on the world and organizing the world. So there's several different layers to it and there are sections that are like completely unfinished.
It is developer island, essentially. There are sections in there where it was like you could see a titan had said, I want to put a mountain right here. No, I thought I don't want to put a mountain there but we'll just preserve it here so we know that I had looked at that change and I don't want to actually make it, right? That's what the Emerald Dream is.
It has a bunch of different layers and things like that. It's kind of incomprehensibly multifaceted in that fashion. So if we go by this whole theory that Draenor is Azeroth, what if we fold that in with Argus is Azeroth? What if we fold that in to the universe itself is this multilayered entity and it's the same planet.
It's the same planet. All of the planets are the same. One version of Azeroth ended up into a prison world. One version of Azeroth ended up as Draenor.
One version of Azeroth ended up evolving into Argus and then getting... The titans aren't traveling through the universe. They're traveling through different planes of reality and affecting this one world and in our particular reality something is happening that hasn't happened before in any of these other versions of reality. And then you look at what is given to you to ensure the sanctity of time.
One true timeline. One true timeline. Because one true timeline ends up with that Azeroth, that reality. This world, which is the world we're from and I wrote this, I did this one a long time ago.
I know, right? And it all ties in. If this Azeroth is the progenitor Azeroth, the one that they need to come into existence, that would explain why they can't re-originate it lightly. That's why they go through all the trouble of coming up with another way to deal with the old gods.
And the old gods are always there because they exist in every reality. And that's why we've seen C'Thun on Draenor and Outland. And the Great Legion is the same across all realities because it's one planet. It's one planet.
When he's talking about seeing entire worlds raised in the time it takes your mortal heart to beat once, because it is the same place. Over and over and over again. Of course he's seen it happen in the time it takes your mortal heart to beat once because it's happening right now. It is always happening.
Oh my god. And what if the well of eternity isn't necessarily like a depository that's tied all back? He's an anchor point. Not only if it's an anchor point, what if it's the Sliders theory?
What if that's their entry point between worlds? What if every world has that point? Because they open the portal and it's more than a gateway. It's the engine.
It's how the multiverse is spun off. It's the engine that powers this whole thing. And you just mentioned it before at the beginning of the show and I let it slip. The engines that they built everywhere on Azeroth.
Why does it need them? Because they're what generates the power. Oh my god. You're looking at the engine.
We must rebuild the final Titan. They've all forgotten. They've forgotten that it's the same thing? No.
They've forgotten how to run the bloody thing. Oh. They built this edifice and nobody knows how to make it work. Because it's destroyed the bell of eternity?
Well, no. Partially possibly because of that. But it's like a standard template machine, right? Like there's this whole theory in current day metaphysics that there's what we call SDCs, standard template instructions that have existed throughout time and that technology is sort of cyclical, right?
Steam engine's common at steam engine time. Right, exactly. And then they're forgotten about and they're rediscovered and they're forgotten about and they're rediscovered and so on and so forth. There's certain things that exist because their form and function suit the place where they are created.
Exactly. What if that's what it was? Yeah. If you want to make a multiverse you need an Azeroth to be at the heart of it, to run this.
There needs to be one. But it's so long ago that they've forgotten or for that matter, you know, what was the thing that Ratham says? There's one above all. They're shining in their perfection but one above all.
One above all others. It's not just a template. It's not just a portal. It's not just a gateway.
It's not just an engine. It's all those things and that means that it is the multiverse. If you want to have... The Titans could not destroy the planet to get rid of the old gods because if they did so it would eliminate the multiverse itself.
Which also gives us a really good point of why the Legion is so focused because this is why Azeroth is weak as opposed to every other world we visited. We talked about that we were the linchpin and we didn't figure out why. What if this is why? Azeroth is a keystone.
There's like a keystone for the entire multiverse. Oh my god. Okay, so we should probably, you know... Stop.
No, no, we should probably... Stop before everything dies. ...mention to our listeners while we're very excited about this theory. It is in fact a theory.
Oh yeah. Please, please, please. This is not official lore. We're just puzzling things out.
We are wearing our tinfoil hat to pull back here. You're seeing how tinfoil hat theories kind of come into play here. This is the kind of thinking that we do in our heads when we're coming up with these things. This is what used to be That said, if anybody from Blizzard is having the list and wants to use this as a story, I mean, we're here.
I mean, I'm just throwing it out there. I'm pretty sure that they have this story all wrapped up in their heads somewhere because I think that when we see Chronicle, World of Warcraft Chronicle, the first volume comes out next year and it covers everything from creation to the first war, beginning of the first war, I think. Something like that. You mentioned it before.
It's had an in-depth look at all of that and I have a feeling that that's going to clear up a lot of these questions. It'll only create more. And it'll probably invalidate everything we talked about today but that's okay. That's the beauty of tinfoil hats.
They're never true until they are. They're never going to actually confirm the new Elune one, I'm telling you. No, the Elune one, they went as far as they could with it without actually confirming it either way but the thing is, Elune could be a Nauru because the Nauru would be an ever-present force, right? On every world of multiverse.
It's just baffling to me. Now, what did Sargeras see then? Did he see that this was kind of like a pointless process? What drove him mad?
Was it that they could never create the one true perfect whatever? The interesting thing about Sargeras is we keep assuming that he's gone mad. What if he's the good guy and all this? I don't think he's a good guy.
No, I think this might actually be, he might be a necessary part of the process because remember, the Titans made those demons in the first place. Yeah. The ones that hunt down Sargeras? He's the cleanup crew?
No, more along the lines of you can't have, you can't have order without chaos. You can't, like, certain processes require painful things. Like, in order to perform surgery, you slice people open. In order to, you know, be a gardener, you trim leaves off of plants.
Destruction is an inherent part of the creative process. Look at the breakers and the primals. Their destruction is part of the creative process. They might be broken and how they're doing it.
The process may have gone awry. But when the process goes awry, maybe you need somebody, maybe, like, that's the thing. He took up the most unpleasant duty imaginable. Because think about it, Algalon didn't even seem to realize that they all loved life as we do.
No. And once he realized it, it broke him. Algalon's busted. He is not doing his job.
He's just hanging around watching us. He's observing because he wants to, because we're an anomaly. We weren't supposed to happen and he's not sure, he hasn't got anything in his programming that tells him how to process this. So he's trying, he's like a VI, trying to, or an AI, you know, trying to figure out, trying to process all of this and make sense out.
No, imagine you are the, you are the champion of the Pantheon. You are the guy that defends from all outside forces. And you understand that in order to create this one perfect, absolutely flawless Azeroth, you have to kill trillions of thinking, feeling people. They all have to come and die.
Maybe it does push him over the edge. Maybe he accepts it. Maybe he's like, all right, we need somebody to prune and we need somebody to push back against you. And that's going to be me.
I have to do it. No one else can. That's the thing, is we have no earthly conception of what the heck is going on in Sargeras' mind that he thinks what he's doing is cost effective. What is the Legion doing?
And if it's doing so in this multidimensional way where you can't kill them, how do they ever lose? Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. How do they ever lose?
But they did. They've lost on Azeroth, what, twice now? I'm just imagining the Pantheon pulling a Vincent Price and turning Sargeras into the universe's Edward Scissorhands. Yeah.
And he just sort of accepted it. He had to. Now he's having down worlds because he had to. Yeah, someone's about to do this.
It is part of the process that leads to the perfect world. And we don't even know that Azeroth is that world, but Azeroth might be a necessary step on the way. It's a linchpin. And Sargeras has turned on that, like he's fixated on Azeroth.
And if Azeroth is like the key to the multiverse, then maybe he's trying to pull Elokan and thinking, okay, I hate my job more than anything in the world if I get rid of this one thing. If I get rid of this one thing, everything falls apart and I don't have to do what I do anymore. Or maybe, here's the thing, the Titans might finally think we've got it down, but the only way to know if you've got it down is to test it to its limit. And what better limit tester than an unstoppable army of demons led by the greatest warrior in existence?
Sargeras is the stress test. You have to put the damn... Who knows how many times that this has happened? If we assume that time and space are bendable and the multiverse exists around this linchpin, who knows how many times this guy's done this?
And maybe he's disappointed when he wins. One thing I'm very, very sure about all of this though, in this whole global cosmic whatever is going on, we as adventurers of Azeroth are impossibly puny. Yeah. We're so tiny.
And yet very annoying. And yet we've done so much despite the fact that we are so, so tiny. Think of it this way, you know, when you get a fever, that's caused by things you can't even see. Yeah.
And it still makes me stay in bed for a week. Yeah. It's like, oh, I just want to get up but I can't even walk. Meanwhile, cut to, inside my digestive system, a small rate of microbes.
Take his esophagus. You've got to hold aggro until we cause the explosion. Then he'll be knocked back and prone, and we can climb up into the sinuses. Oh man, I missed out on my bonus roll.
For weeks. Rossi, Rossi, selfish. Well, I think we should probably start wrapping it up here because despite ourselves, it has been, this seemed like a very short hour, honestly. I'm not sure what we'll talk about how that affects everything else and I'm pretty sure it'll be entertaining.
I'm kind of so dying for Nightborne. I want to know what's up with those guys. Right? I just want everything.
Like, everything. I'd like to know more about that whole pillars of creation thing because I'm really fascinated by that concept. But, so yeah, next time we come to you guys it's going to be two weeks and it'll be right after BlizzCon. Let's see.
Final thoughts. Let's just get some final thoughts here. Joe, what do you think? I don't know.
I'm pretty pleased with myself right now. I like the idea of there being like a whole Sliders-esque thing going on here with Leightons. Rossi, what do you think? I just, you know, I want, at some point I want to know how the Naaru got that crystal onto that planet.
I mean, it's just crazy. Do the Naaru predate all civilization on Argus? How old are they? What are they?
I mean, they have that whole dark life cycle thing. What are they? Where are they from? This is something I want to know.
I, um, let's see. My final thought. This explains a lot about the Timeless Isle. It's slipping in and out of reality and possibly slipping in and out of different versions of the world we're on which is an interesting concept in and of itself.
And it's got a portal to Draenor on it. Yeah. That's pretty weird. Yeah.
That's why I'm like, so it slips to Draenor at some point, huh? So is Draenor Azra. Anyway, it just kind of reinforces all of that brain-bending stuff we just talked about. So, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up here.