Well, a tweet from Alex Afrasiabi just dropped a big ol' bombshell regarding the lore of Warcraft:
" Archimonde is a demon whose demon soul is anchored to the Nether. The Nether transcends all realities. That is all."
In other words, if I interpret this correctly - the Archimonde that we are fighting in Hellfire Citadel is the Archimonde - the very same one that was defeated at the end of the Third War.
This has massive implications for the lore of the Burning Legion and the nature of this alternate Draenor. I'm also, frankly, not sure it entirely makes sense - but let's see if we can figure out a way that it will!
We've known since WCIII (which is when the Legion was introduced if I recall correctly) that demons - at least the most powerful ones - tend not to actually enter the physical world when they appear. Instead, the demons we face when defending our homeworlds are really a sort of Avatar - the demon's soul remains within the Twisting Nether, and what we are seeing is really a kind of physical projection. Thus, when we kill a demon, what we're really doing is shattering the construct that they've been using to fight us, forcing them to build a new one. Essentially, the demons have been using drone warfare against us - you can blow up the drone, but the pilot is sitting comfortably within the twisting nether. It's still a victory, just as it would be victory to shoot down a multi-million-dollar aircraft, but the mind behind it doesn't suffer any longterm injury.
Notably, this also seems to be the way that Elementals work. We killed Ragnaros in Molten Core, but his true essence remained in the Firelands. We were only able to destroy him for good by entering his realm.
This raises an interesting question: Have we actually managed to kill a demon? Like, ever?
In Felwood during the Third War, Illidan was leading Night Elf forces to oppose the Legion's advance, but the dreadlord Tichondrius kept coming back. Arthas then appeared to him and suggested that he use the Skull of Gul'dan to become a demon himself, which we're told allowed him to permanently kill the dreadlord.
So far, this has seemed permanent. But another event, earlier in WCIII, seemed pretty permanent too. Arthas, immediately after getting Frostmourne, used the cursed sword to kill Mal'ganis - and given that Frostmourne's whole deal was that anyone killed by it would have their soul drawn into the sword, you'd think that Mal'ganis would be gone for good (or at least until the shattering of Frostmourne at the end of Wrath of the Lich King.) Yet we see Mal'ganis in Northrend, definitely before Arthas' death, as the dreadlord has possessed the corpse of the Scarlet Crusade's Grand Admiral, bringing about the Scarlet Onslaught.
It's here that I do have to sit back and remember that sometimes, Blizzard just fumbles the lore a bit. I'm glad they did when it comes to the history of the Eredar, as they gave us one of my favorite playable races, but it happens.
The point is, these demons are apparently the same ones - Archimonde, Kil'jaeden, Mannoroth. I'd also guess this applies to Titans as well, given that there's probably just the one Sargeras.
This does make the stakes a bit higher. Yes, there's an infintie multiverse, but the Legion is capable of being a threat across its entirety. It means that, maybe, a defeat of the Legion on Draenor B will actually help us on Azeroth A.
But it's also a bit confusing. First off: when are Draenor B's Archimonde & Co from? Let's say we didn't actually travel through time, but Draenor B just kind of started 35 years later, and we've been running along parallel, but misaligned timelines. That means that Kil'jaeden, Archimonde, and Mannoroth would remember all of our past interactions with them. It means that when we meet Archimonde in Tanaan Jungle, he should remember us as those time-travelers who helped defeat him at Mount Hyjal. It means the Mannoroth who died in the opening cinematic also remembers Grom killing him during the Third War, and probably has a pretty frustrating flashback when he sees the big ol' orc flying through the air with Gorehowl about to go into his head.
If we have time-traveled for real, then they wouldn't remember these things happening, but it would also mean that there's two versions of events going on in their heads at once - one in which a shriveled Horde is fending off an attack on Tanaan Jungle, and another in which everything's going according to plan and their Horde is invading Stormwind as we speak.
But either way, the demons are currently dealing with many different realities at once. How? Well, if you think about it, it's not that hard. If they can create one demon avatar, why not two? Why not a dozen? Why not one for every single universe. Each avatar of Archimonde is being controlled by the same demonic mind (which is a hell of a multitasker,) but expressing the demon's will in multiple universes.
This is a real trade-off kind of revelation. On one hand, we haven't really gotten any in-game hints that these demons already know us, but it also suggests that the multiple universes are fundamentally connected, and that our efforts on Draenor might not just be irrelevant when we get home.
(Now as an afterthought - consider that a lot of these demons, if not all of them, were once mortals. Archimonde was presumably physiologically the same as the modern Draenei before he became a demon. Are there mortal Archimondes out there who declined Sargeras' gift? Or was Archimonde's first task to go around and wipe out every other version of himself, like Jet Li in "The One?")
(Second postscript: Afrasiabi explicitly said that the Old Gods are a different sort of thing, and so this presumably does not apply to them.)
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