D&D is a foundational game for the way fantasy RPGs work, and even if its mechanical significance is less important than it once was (except at high tiers of play,) perhaps the most enduring contribution to pop culture is the notion of character alignment.
Most interestingly, D&D suggests not just the ordinary Western concept of Good versus Evil, but also the perpendicular struggle between Law and Chaos.
Traditionally, in Western culture (as well as plenty of other cultures,) the two are generally conflated, respectively, in part due to the way that systems of authority tend to define themselves as good compared to that which opposes them. Of course, the existence of tyranny, oppression, and authoritarianism all give us some clear examples where law and good can be in opposition with one another. (There is, admittedly, a more nuanced discussion to have about how a lot of totalitarian regimes are evil in part due to their incompetence as actual governors and administrators, but that's a whole other post in a different blog.)
D&D builds its multiverse around the idea of these forces in opposition with one another. In its greater, multiversal lore, the biggest conflict in existence is the Blood War, an endless conflict between the Lawful Evil Devils, who make their home in the Nine Hells, and the Chaotic Evil Demons, who are from The Abyss. The Blood War's consequences are complicated - on one hand, it's good to have these two massive forces of primordial evil focused on one another rather than on everyone else, but their conflict also spills out into other places (including the Prime Material Plane, where players are generally from) and getting swept up in it is a great way to get killed. (The recent adventure book, Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus, is kicked off when the city of Elturel is dragged down out of the Material Plane and into the first layer of the Nine Hells as a sort of byproduct of the fighting going on down there.)
Given that you don't tend to fight them as much, the good versions of the Lawful and Chaotic side of things are less fleshed out, but given that they're Good, there's no equivalent conflict - indeed, Lawful Good Angels are known to serve gods of any Good alignment, despite their difference in nature.
Warcraft, like any Western RPG (actually, like any RPG; I mean, Final Fantasy has Bahamut) takes a lot of inspiration from D&D. But its multiverse of primordial powers is a little different.
For one, there's fewer things to keep track of - in D&D, for example, Devils and Demons are just the two most prominent types of Fiends. There are also the neutral evil Yugoloths, who work as mercenaries in the Blood War, and there are seven evil Outer Planes beyond the Nine Hells and the Abyss (including the Yugoloth home plane, Gehenna,) each with its own native fiendish inhabitants.
In Warcraft, all "fiends" are just demons. But there's also no particular cosmic force that is labeled as "good" or "evil."
The closest thing we've ever gotten to a map of the Warcraft multiverse is the one at the beginning of each volume of Chronicle. Here, we see Reality flanked by the Emerald Dream and the Shadowlands, surrounded by the four ordinary elements and two sort of meta-elements, Spirit and Decay. (This echoes the D&D multiverse, with its Prime Material Plane, Feywild, Shadowfell, and Elemental Planes.) But the six outer parts of the chart are cosmic forces, each associated with a type of magic and a type of being, each arranged across from its opposite. At the top, you have Light, Holy Magic, and the Naaru, and then rotating counter-clockwise, you find Life, Nature Magic, and the Wild Gods, then Order, Arcane Magic, and the Titans, followed by Void, Shadow Magic, and the Void Lords and Old Gods, followed by Death, Necromancy, and the Undead, and finally Disorder, with Fel Magic and Demons.
It's odd to see, especially given that the chart puts Light and Disorder next to one another. If you look at it as being aligned with the elements, it makes a bit more sense - both are near the element of Fire, which can be both the cleansing fire of the Light and the destructive flame of Fel.
But we've gotten into the weeds here. Let's examine the question: is the Burning Legion Lawful or Chaotic?
I'm going to argue it's Lawful. But that goes against the nature of Demons, doesn't it? How can the unifying coalition of demons in the Warcraft cosmos be a Lawful institution?
Demons were clearly, originally, agents of chaos. In the eons before the Legion, Sargeras was the paragon of the Pantheon - not its leader, but its champion. And he spent his time hunting down demons, eventually learning that they had to be imprisoned, rather than killed, as they could always respawn in the Twisting Nether. (Notably, this seems carried over from D&D - for most extraplanar entities, you can only truly kill it if you do so while it's on its home plane. I've always interpreted this as if a demon appearing in the material plane is sort of a remote-controlled body piloted by their demonic soul back in the Abyss/Twisting nether, though that's just the way I imagine it.) Demons caused chaos and destruction, and Sargeras locked them up.
But when Sargeras encountered the Old Gods, he was so horrified that he turned his old enemies into his weapon to fight them - though rather than fight them directly, he chose instead to deprive them of their "food" (i.e. us).
Sargeras is a being of order, who turned demons into his worshipping subjects.
But, you might argue, destroying the universe is ultimately a chaotic goal, isn't it?
Indeed, I've always struggled with the exact definition of a chaotic end goal. In D&D, demon lords crave destruction, and it's implied that, for example, if the demon lord Demogrogon were ever to succeed in his goal of wiping out the rest of existence, that his two heads would ultimately turn on one another and destroy themselves, leaving all of existence barren and empty. Likewise, the demon lord Orcus wants to turn every other thing in the multiverse undead in service to him, so he can rule eternally over an undead empire... which actually sounds kind of lawful to me. (The Scourge, I think, is unquestionably Lawful Evil, to the extent that in my homebrew D&D setting I basically had an Undead Angel conquer the devils and make the undead the primary Lawful Evil beings in that setting.)
The thing is, the Old Gods are such a clearer example of Chaotic Evil. Yes, they build empires, and one might think that any tyrannical regime would be lawful. But first, remember that parenthetical we said we weren't going to go into more of about how some tyranny arises from a disinterest in the actual efforts of governance? But also, every description of the Black Empire suggests it was meant to be in total chaos at all times. The Old Gods were allies of one another, yet still went to war constantly, presumably because the chaos of war and carnage pleased them.
When we get farther into Warcraft lore, we've actually started to get a sense that Light and Void are the more cosmic representatives of Law and Chaos, respectively. We hear in 1000 Years of War that the Void is all about infinite possibility - it believes that everything is true, and thus it inherently leads to madness, because fully incorporating the void into one's thoughts causes one to be unable to discern reality from fiction. In the void, there's no difference.
But we've also seen how the Light isn't always so nice - when X'era tried to force Illidan's transformation, we saw how a being like a Naaru could become zealous and imperious. It's telling that Velen, a holy man if ever there was one, seems to be on Illidan's side when he blasts X'era to bits in self-defense. The Light is a great source of power for good, but it isn't actually just plain good on its own.
There's another moment in 1000 Years of War (I can't quite recall when) in which a void-aligned being describes the Naaru and the Light as horrifying - that the Light would have everything locked into a sort of crystalline stasis, nothing ever changing.
It's some real food for thought after having spent most of our WoW-playing careers merely thinking of the Light as good. And indeed, we've seen more sympathetic portrayals of those using the power of the void with the introduction of the Void Elves (that being said, it's troubling that the Horrific Vision of Stormwind shows the Ren'dorei seemingly going particularly crazy in a N'zoth-controlled world, though that might just be out of loyalty to Alleria and Umbric).
I think that the whole Light versus Void thing ultimately comes down to the notion that with one and not the other, nothing really has meaning. Pure, unchanging light will leave no room for the disparity that gives things form. But endless, infinite void never lets anything persist to take on meaning. (Incidentally, this is also a major theme of the Dark Souls games.)
Then, what's interesting, is that Fel magic is supposed to be the result of Light and Void annihilating one another. It's when the two burn away into pure energy that can be harnessed for power. If that's what the Fel is, what then do we make of its opposite number, the Arcane? If I had to guess, Arcane magic is all about the careful balance and arrangement of Light and Void, keeping them in a stable and very mathematically-determined matrix. (I don't really have a theory on how Nature magic and Necromancy fit into this. Maybe for another post.)
So, where does that bring us on Sargeras and the Burning Legion?
I'll confess this got me deep in the weeds, and I don't know that I really have the most satisfying answer. But I will say that Sargeras is kind of trying to enact that most horrific version of the "light's triumph" that the void fears. Sargeras envisions a universe burned to a crisp, with nothing but charred ashes remaining. That is static, and seems to fly in the face of the Void. He's looking for a static solution, so I'm going to call that Lawful.
Now, a few directions I could take this if I had the energy to keep writing an already super-long post:
First: in Legion, it seems as if Sargeras isn't exactly going for the scorched-universe goal anymore, and seems to want Azeroth to survive, but be "purified" with fel fire, and rise as another Fel Titan like himself. Might he prefer his demonic empire over universal extinction?
Second: If the Burning Legion as an institution is broken following the events of Legion, might we then see Demons return to their chaotic nature?
Third: Alleria gets whispers in the Three Sisters comic that say Sylvanas serves the "True Enemy." Does the Void fear undeath more than the Light or the Titans? After all, the undead also represent a stagnant stasis that seems anathema to the Void (again, reminds me of Dark Souls.) What, then, do they think of Life?
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