When we defeated Arthas at the top of Icecrown Citadel, thanks to a literal miracle that freed Tirion Fordring from icy captivity and allowed the Ashbringer to shatter Frostmourne (I really would have liked to see some special thing happen if a Frost Death Knight and a Retribution Paladin were near one another during Legion,) Arthas died. But the spirit of his father Terenas, long trapped within the blade, and now seemingly free, told us that without a Lich King, the Scourge would run rampant and cover the world in death. So, though Tirion was initially willing to carry that burden, instead the Red-dragonfire-scorched Bolvar Fordragon (weirdly fitting surname there) took on the role instead.
Bolvar has acted subtly since then. Death Knight (and Fire Mages, briefly) saw him during Legion, and we met him again on a fact finding mission about Vol'jin during BFA. As far as we can tell, Bolvar has kept the promise to reign in the Scourge, confining them to Northrend. They certainly aren't waging their old zombie apocalypse war that they had previously been doing.
But there are some questions that remain.
Why, exactly, does there always have to be a Lich King?
Arthas was running it as a unified military operation. Are we to believe that the Scourge as a disorganized horde would be a greater danger? In other words: how was Arthas making the Scourge less of a threat?
Admittedly, by installing a Lich King who wanted to keep a hold on the Scourge, we might have just gotten a serious upgrade. Maybe Arthas was the worst scenario, but that no Lich King would be almost as bad, and by putting Bolvar in charge, we downgraded the threat significantly.
More recent sources have suggested that there was an element of Arthas that had "greater good" intentions - the Scourge was a way to unite the peoples of Azeroth to fight off the Burning Legion.
In fact, I've long suspected that Death Magic in Warcraft is a bit of a trump card against a lot of other evils. The Scourge seemed unaffected by Saronite even when the entire fortress-complex of Icecrown was made of the stuff. If the undead are immune to the whispers of the Old Gods, that's a pretty freaking big deal. Indeed, we even do a quest for a N'raqi in Icecrown to kill his Ymirjar captor, where a bunch of undead Val'kyr are forcing captured humanoids to mine Saronite, unaffected by the whispers while the miners are going insane.
Given that there is encrypted dialogue for the Lich King and Darion Mograine, and new textures suggesting allied races might be able to become Death Knights, it seems possible that the Lich King is at least going to play some role in something in 8.3.
Ironically, the very fact that it's encrypted has gotten a lot of people buzzing over whether it's a strong hint for the next expansion.
Of course, if it remains encrypted until the patch goes live, that means we're actually going to know what the next expansion will be before we actually hear this stuff.
The Scourge are my favorite Warcraft villains. There's something about their aesthetic, and the horror of seeing former heroes become villains, that works very well within the Warcraft story structure. I do wonder a bit whether Blizzard realized how long WoW would last when they decided to have us defeat them in the second expansion. On the other hand, Wrath of the Lich King was in a lot of ways a high water mark for the game (I think Legion finally unseated it as the best expansion, but I still look fondly on Wrath.) Unlike Illidan in Burning Crusade, they made sure that Arthas would get due screen time and be built up as a compelling villain for the expansion, and I think they did that better than they had ever done before or have since. But Wrath came out eleven years ago, and I could imagine that that's long enough for them to feel like they could revisit the Scourge, or at least the undead as a major threat.
So I'm still feeling Shadowlands, basically.
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