For a very long time, Sargeras was the big bad of the Warcraft universe. His goal was to burn the universe to charcoal with demonic fire, and it's not hard to understand why we would want to fight such a guy.
But as we learned more about his motivations, Sargeras started to feel less like a pure evil and more of a seriously misguided extremist. Sargeras encountered the Old Gods and was so disgusted that he was willing to enlist the second-most-evil things he had ever encountered and team up with them. Sure, he took a very "we burned the village down in order to save it" approach to his mission, but one gets the sense that he truly believed that he was trying to accomplish the lesser of two evils.
So what's interesting is that there are hints now that even the Void and the Old Gods have their own oddly reasonable motivations.
The Void and its ilk are the Lovecraftian faction in the Warcraft cosmos - all unknowable and unbelievably ancient - a power that one should avoid meddling with as it is so much larger than us that we could never really harness it without succumbing to it.
We've actually gotten a little more clarification on the Void versus the Light and how there are actually some ways in which one could see them as less obviously good versus evil.
The names suggest that they represent existence and non-existence. And in a way, both are necessary for there to be anything of meaning. If every single space is filled with light, then it's just one undifferentiated mass - not much different than a perfect vacuous void.
Yet in truth, what they really represent is fate versus fatelessness. The Light is all about a single truth and ignores all other possibilities while the Void believes that there is no fundamental difference between truth or lies - that all things are true, and nothing is.
Despite its name, the Void is not about ending all things. It's actually about creating a whole lot of new things - just that those things, comprising all possibilities, include every nightmarish thing you could possibly imagine.
But then there's death.
Death embodies the downfall of life and the concept of universal entropic decay.
If you've ever heard about the concept in physics called the Heat Death of the Universe, this might ring a bell. Essentially (and I am by no means a physicist who could really get into the nuances here,) physical law seems to say that over time, entropy increases. A process that creates entropy will happen more easily than one that reduces it (or maybe it's that you can't reduce entropy in one area without creating more than what you reduced in another area.) Entropy is basically the number of states a system can be in - higher entropy means more potential states.
While that would seem to be freeing and very Void-friendly, what it actually means is that the universe is moving every forward toward a state in which things are done doing anything.
Consider the idea that things have energy stored within them. You lift something from the ground, and you are imbuing it with the energy to fall back down. Entropic decay is (again, not a physicist here) the idea that, whatever route it takes to get there, everything has finally fallen to its ultimate resting point. All the things that could have happened have happened, and the only energy you have left is random, meaningless bouncing against each other - aka heat.
Death, in the Warcraft cosmos, is ultimately a force that leads toward this kind of stasis. Nothing really lives and nothing really dies. A world conquered by death is one in which the same undead creatures wander the same unchanging landscape for eternity. It's actually a lot like the era before the Age of Fire in the Dark Souls cosmos.
It's something that came up when we were fighting the Scourge - you could have asked what Arthas' end goals were, but the fact is that the Scourge doesn't really want to accomplish anything except ensure that it endures. If Arthas had won, his plan was presumably to rule over a dead and unchanging Azeroth for the rest of time.
And you know what? Doesn't that sound a lot like what Sylvanas is shooting for? The Forsaken were once dynamic - they had the goal of revenge against Arthas but also the goal of restoring themselves to true life. There has been very little progress made on the latter and the former was accomplished ten years ago.
The Desolate Council decided that if they couldn't return to life, maybe it was all right to simply let themselves die off over time and allow the living to reclaim Lordaeron - they might not live to see Lordaeron restored, but as living humans, they hadn't expected to live forever anyway.
But Sylvanas - notably after being raised by the Val'kyr, whose motivations are very mysterious - instead shifted her mission from revenge and restoration to perpetuating the Forsaken. No longer lamenting her cursed state, she now envisions herself and her people continuing to exist in their undead state forever - and if the only way to secure that future is converting all of humanity (and maybe the rest of the living as well) to undead, she's ok with it. And that, my friends, sounds pretty much like the Lich King.
The Void does not want stagnancy - they want every opportunity for new truths to form.
But Death seeks stability through stagnation.
And now, the Light kind of does too.
In Before the Storm, we saw Anduin and Alonsus Faol channel the light to raise Calia Menethil (sister to Arthas and arguably the rightful Queen of Lordaeron) as a kind of light-bound undead.
Historically, the Light has abhorred undeath. Paladins were the main opponents to the Scourge, and it was a miracle of the Light that freed Tirion to destroy Frostmourne before Arthas could raise us as his champions of death.
And yet, the Light and Death are two forces that do kind of aim for similar things. The Light wants order and truth - a single truth - and to see all living things connected to it. In the Light, we are One - something Maraad says as he dies, somehow using his own Divine Shield to protect Y'rel (who then becomes a much more zealous advocate of the Light 30 years down the road.) The Light immortalizes people - look at how Turalyon has basically not aged in his thousand-year time warp.
The Light seeks for things to remain, stalwart and unchanging. And Death seeks to end change as well.
And now we have a light-based undead Calia Menethil.
Now, is either side really wrong? There is horror to both the Void's nightmarish chaos but also Light and Death's unyielding permanence.
I feel more confident every day that N'zoth will be Battle for Azeroth's final boss. But I'm also feeling much more confident that his defeat will cause even bigger problems for us.
Basically, expect Death to play a big role in the expansion that comes next (which, hey! Should be announced this year!)
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