The story of World of Warcraft is alternately frustrating and stirring, shallow and deep. I've often complained at how the lesson we keep being taught - that the people of Azeroth aren't so different, and can set aside those differences to defend it from true evils - keeps getting forgotten (and usually by the side that always seems to start these conflicts,) but at the same time, the depth of the world sometimes stuns me.
I've been on a bit of a quarantine-kick lately of watching YouTube videos about A Song of Ice and Fire (the books upon which Game of Thrones was based) and the massive lore buried deep within hints and seemingly tangential stories. For instance, do you know that there are five forts in eastern Essos that seem to serve the same purpose as the Wall, but guarding against a different dreary wasteland that probably has some unspeakable evil within it?
Well before the show came out, the creatives at Blizzard were clearly big fans of the fantasy series (which, to be fair, was already up there among the most popular fantasy books) given things like the final mission in The Frozen Throne expansion of Warcraft III, A Song of Frost and Flame, or really the whole vibe of the Scourge in general, with its frozen death knights raising armies of the dead.
Being a T-rated digital game, Warcraft can't go quite as dark as George R. R. Martin's opus, but it plays with similar themes leavened by a more optimistic attitude toward human(oid) heroes.
I think the world-building in Battle for Azeroth has been quite good - with the benefit of three zones a piece worth of leveling content, we get a decent amount of time to get to know the Kul Tiran and Zandalari cultures.
Looking at Kul Tiras specifically, we had previously seen them portrayed primarily as just standard-issue humans like those of Stormwind or (pre-Scourge) Lordaeron, but with a proud naval tradition, as befits an island nation.
BFA brought us two important new factors to their culture: the Tidesages and the Drust.
And both of these cultural elements bring with them some subtle hints at darker, or at least untold aspects of Kul Tiran culture.
First, let's talk about the Drust.
The only "living" Drust we see in BFA are Gorak Tul and Ulfar. The latter is a druid Thornspeaker, and we never see him shift out of his Bear form, but he does identify himself as a Drust. Given their importance to Kul Tiran history, it's odd that we don't see more representations of them in the land. But even if their aesthetic has a bit more of a Celtic/British vibe than Viking, it seems quite clear that they are a tribe of the Vrykul.
The first hint we got of this was that Gorak Tul uses a Vrykul wireframe skeleton - the roar/shout that he makes during one quest looks just like one of the Lich King's Ymirjar soldiers in the Wrathgate cinematic.
Now, skeleton doesn't necessarily mean relation. After all, the Mogu use Draenei skeletons and aren't related, and the Mantid and Saurok use Worgen skeletons. But it's a potential connection. Later, at I believe the last Blizzcon (maybe the previous one?) Blizzard confirmed that the Drust are Vrykul, so there you have it.
But it goes further:
Kul Tiran history at first looks rather ugly - the humans arrive from Gilneas and settle around Tiragarde Sound, drawing the ire of the indigenous Drust. Wars begin, which ultimately lead to the Drust getting wiped out. Even if the Kul Tirans claim they tried to coexist peacefully, that seems like it could very easily just be a self-serving national history. Were the Drust really so wicked to begin with, or were they driven to their dark death-magic out of desperation to retain their homeland? And are the Kul Tirans just colonialists who drove the local culture to extinction?
My sense is that this is partially true. Indeed, there are hints at the Kul Tirans having a less-than-upstanding culture in general (the Zandalari regularly speak of them as slavers, though aside from some orphan kids rounded up by the Ashvane company to process Azerite - something that the other Kul Tirans see as horrible - we don't really get any examples of this behavior.) Humans in Azeroth do have a history of conquering territory from others - the Trolls in places like Arathi and Stranglethorn are seen as dangerous savages by humans, but those lands were, in all likelihood, originally troll territory. So the notion that Kul Tiras was conquered by humans isn't that hard to believe. Indeed, despite retconning them to have English accents, it actually seems not that much unlike American history - settlers arrive in the hopes of just building a colony, but have violent confrontations with the indigenous people as they push to expand throughout the territory.
But what's hidden in plain sight is that the Drust aren't actually gone - indeed, they are thriving.
Some Kul Tirans are much taller and beefier than your standard humans. You have folks like Catherine or Flynn Fairwind who seem to have the normal human proportions as found in other human kingdoms, but Kul Tiras seems to have a lot of 8-foot-tall giants running around, which includes the playable allied race characters.
Why are they so big? Because they're part Drust.
Yes, it would seem that they think of the Drust as totally dying out, but my interpretation is that it's only the hardcore people like Gorak Tul, who hated the humans (maybe even harboring the old disdain for them as sufferers of the Curse of Flesh) and rejected any sort of racial mixing. Within Kul Tiran society, however, some Drust were friendly and intermarried with the humans - and given that Vrykul and Humans are basically the same species, it makes perfect sense that they'd be genetically compatible enough to mix together (I mean, this is a world where you can have a half-Orc/half-Draenei, and those are two people form different planets.)
This actually makes the Kul Tirans seem a lot better than they might otherwise - after all, it's not as if the Drust are gone. The Drust are just part of their heritage. Even Jaina might have some Drust ancestors. And perhaps those who did mingle with the humans chose to abandon their Drust identity in the face of the dark path the nationalists like Gorak Tul took.
But I promised Dark Secrets, and if this theory is right, that's actually more optimistic than what we're given at face value.
So we come to the Tidesages.
Rather than worshipping the Holy Light, the Kul Tirans have a faith based on the Sea. This allows them to have Shamans among their ranks, despite this tradition not having anything to do with other shamanic traditions on Azeroth (to the extent that, when you meet a shaman in the quest to unlock Kul Tirans as a playable race, she has no idea what you're talking about when you mention the term.)
The Tidesages - which seem to be some combination of Priests and Shamans - worship a goddess of sorts called the Tidemother. Her whispers can be heard from the depths, and her blessings allow Kul Tiran ships to be the unsinkable dreadnaughts that they are.
And I'm about 95% sure that the Tidemother is Azshara.
I think it's sometimes easy to forget how utterly, profoundly ancient some of the living characters in World of Warcraft are. If you play a Draenei, you could be well over 25,000 years old (and if the Lightforged have been under the same degree of time dilation as Turalyon and Alleria but for the entire exile, your Lightforged Draenei could be a million years old.) Azshara was transformed into the first Naga 10,000 years ago, which is a number we toss out pretty easily, but that is an utterly massive amount of time. For perspective, in the real world, human history goes back about 5000 years. So this is a being who has been in her current form for all of that times two.
Given the eventual confrontation with N'zoth, BFA has had elements of cosmic horror (often called Lovecraftian horror, given the most famous author of the genre) threaded throughout. The Old Gods are very clearly inspired by Lovecraft, with names like C'thun sounding like Cthulhu, Yog-Saron sounding like Yog-Sothoth, and N'zoth possibly alluding to Azathoth or Nyarlathotep.
One of the major tropes of Lovecraft's fiction is the discovery that something familiar is, in fact, alien. In the Shadow Over Innsmouth, the narrator finds that the squalid down on the coast of Massachusetts (my home state!) is actually the realm of half-human hybrids who have been mating with creepy Deep Ones, who themselves worship an underwater deity. While the physical threat of the Innsmouth mobs is the main horror throughout much of the story, the stinger (spoilers for a super-old, classic horror story) is that the narrator discovers that he is, in fact, descended from people from Innsmouth, and that his own transformation into one of these creepy fish-men is likely to occur soon.
Another, much more recent example of such a trope is from Magic: the Gathering. In the Zendikar setting, the merfolk (one of Magic's common humanoid races in many settings) worship three deities - Kosi, Emeria, and Ula, who are depicted in classic humanoid, anthropomorphic forms. Eventually, it's revealed, however, that they are really the Eldrazi Titans Kozilek, Emrakul, and Ulamog, which are basically world-destroying eldritch abominations, and that the Merfolk religion is all based on a lie.
So it would be fitting for an expansion with N'zoth as its final boss to reveal this truth. We get plenty of Lovecraftian references in the story of Stormsong Valley, with the Ilithid-like K'thir rising from the depths and the horrible thing in the depths of the Shrine of the Storm, as well as Lord Stormsong's transformation. (Also the extended Darkest Dungeon-inspired quest chain for the strange nobleman elsewhere on the island with the Shrine.)
Most damningly, when assaulting the Shrine of the Storm (in the quests leading up to the dungeon,) we're forced to deactivate the Tidemother's Wrath, Pride, and Radiance. Elsewhere in game, starting in the Eye of Azshara dungeon, then in another quest chain on the other side of Stormsong Valley, and finally in the Eternal Palace raid, we fight... Azshara's Wrath, Pride, and Radiance.
So it seems very likely that Azshara has been shaping Kul Tiran culture for thousands of years.
The only hiccup I have with this theory of mine is why, exactly, she is doing so. Yes, the Shrine of the Storm is easily overwhelmed by her eldritch whispers, and obviously we can see in the Crucible of Storms that some massive part of N'zoth's physical body is actually under that same island (hey, have we checked on that since defeating him in Ny'alotha? Is his body still there?) so it seems like Azshara could be using the Tidesages to have a foothold in Kul Tiras.
But it's not like every Tidesage went evil - just... a lot of them. The organization itself doesn't seem to be entirely villainous - just the corruption of Lord Stormsong (who, himself, I suspect is more of a villain than an instigator.)
It's possible that Azshara allowed this tradition to develop as a kind of sleeper cell to serve N'zoth - clearly, the two of them made their move in this expansion.
But the ultimate purpose of the Tidesages is possibly tied up with the fate of Azshara. We free her in Ny'alotha, where she helps us in defeating N'zoth. I know a lot of people are convinced that N'zoth somehow won despite our apparent victory in the raid, but narratively, I also feel like Azshara must now at the very least be done with any feigned allegiance to him.
What's her goal now? And did she pull a trigger that can't be pulled again with Lord Stormsong? Or are the Tidesages now a convenient set of agents she has not just in Kul Tiras, but in the Alliance as a whole?
What I find interesting is that neither of these two theories, despite being - I think - pretty clearly true, are really remarked upon explicitly in the course of BFA. Is this just something for those of us paying attention can feel clever for having noticed? Or is it a potential narrative hook they might pull later on?
In the case of the Drust, I think the story just sort of resolves itself - it explains why there are so many super-burly Kul Tirans and also gives us the closest thing to playable Vrykul we're likely to get. For the Tidesages, it's all deeply (no pun intended) tied to what they do with Azshara.
That, in itself, is a big question, given that we've really gotten the obvious from her - as the final boss of a raid in Nazjatar.
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