Well, I guess I'm testing the waters here. I'm still very upset about the situation at Blizzard. I think it's a totally valid response if people want to just stop caring about the Warcraft cosmos. That being said, the victims of this toxic culture were themselves some of the people building this exciting fictional universe and game that we all care so passionately about. I mean, if these revelations had been about whatever studio made the annual FIFA games, (and given how prevalent these problems within corporate culture are, who knows?) I'd be disgusted, but not heartbroken in the way I've been about Blizzard.
We really don't know exactly who was engaging in these behaviors, and who witnessed them, and who had the ability to stop them and chose not to. Luckily, there's an investigation into those very questions. It's definitely a weird situation given that WoW is not some finished product that we purchased and now own, but is instead a subscription service that means we're sending money to the company on a regular basis, which makes it hard to separate the art from the artist (I can take Rosemary's Baby out from the library on DVD and watch it without worrying that any cent of mine is going to its sexual criminal director, for example.)
So, I'm going to test how I feel writing about the lore of a game that means a lot to me, but whose leading creators might have been really horrendous people, or possibly cowards unwilling to rock their boat in order to get rid of the people poisoning their workplace.
Hell of a caveat, but let's try this.
When World of Warcraft: Chronicle first came out, we got perhaps the most intriguing reveal on the first pages: a chart outlining the Warcraft cosmos, with its six primary forces: Light, Disorder, Death, Shadow/Void, Order, and Life. Given how the story had unfolded (and especially given the revelations of why Sargeras had formed the Burning Legion that we got in that book,) it made some sense to see Light on the top and Void on the bottom, seeming to act as the primary dichotomy, while the others: Life/Death and Order/Disorder were sort of "lesser conflicts."
But the placement of them was a bit surprising, particularly where we found Disorder and Order. Disorder, with its affiliated Fel magic and demons, was on the upper half of the chart, standing between Light and Death. Disorder being next to Light seemed really odd, seeing as how that put it closer to Light than Order, with its associated Titans. Light had always been a potent weapon against demons, such as how a handful of paladin abilities could harm demons (as well as Undead.) Indeed, in the text of that book and what we've seen in-game, the Titans seem to be happy to use the Holy Light in combating the void, which seems strange if they're "closer" to the void than to the light.
Now, when looking at the six elements - the usual air, fire, water, and earth, along with Spirit and Decay - the fact that Fire seemed to sit closest to both Light and Disorder actually made sense - there's the sacred, light-giving flame of the Holy Light, and the corrupting, consuming flame of the Fel. But it still seemed odd to me.
That was when I first had a thought: that we're actually looking at a flattened version of a three-dimensional orrery. (An orrery is a kind of model of various orbiting objects like a 3D model of the Solar System with the sun at its center and the planets capable of spinning around it.) If we thought of the six "Primal Forces" as I like to think of them as being the corners of an eight-sided die rather than in this vaguely oval-like shape, that would mean that each dichotomy is equally important, and that this projection of it is simply favoring Light and the Void. (In fact, when I look at a d8, I often find myself taken in by an illusion that the die is "taller" than it is wide, which isn't actually the case. Also, just thinking about this, I realized that a d6 has eight corners and a d8 only has 6, which feels like it should be incorrect and tells you I wasn't a math major.)
Evidence of this theory grew with the release of Grimoire of the Shadowlands. This book is explicitly written by a Broker, and has his subjective ideas about reality written into it. When he presents a cosmology chart, it is quite different: it shows Death and Life as the top and bottom (respectively) of the chart, and also alters the order of the primal forces. Where the Chronicles chart goes, clockwise from the top: Light, Disorder, Death, Void, Order, Life, the Grimoire chart goes Death, Light, Disorder, Life, Shadow, Order.
So, some forces that are neighbors on the Chronicle chart are no longer. Notably, though, the six elements are in the same sequence, just flipped from clockwise to counter-clockwise.
This difference in the sequence of the primal forces seems very strange, but, as a great new video (with a similar ambivalence about writing about WoW stuff) by Taliesin & Evitel demonstrates, using a 3D-modeling program, that these might, in fact, be showing the same thing - just from a different perspective.
Literally, if you place the six primal forces to make the six corners of a regular octahedron, you can just move the camera around and you'll get both versions of the chart.
And I think this is kind of a brilliant metaphor about perspective - one's literal perspective can shift to see these are actually the same chart, but also, you can think about how a Broker's perspective on the nature of the cosmos is very different. T&E point out that the Grimoire chart shows a number of symbols and imagery in the different primal forces that correspond to different parts of the Shadowlands - Death is given the much more benevolent image of the Arbiter and Oribos, but also Order has a symbol associated with the Brokers, Life has images of Ardenweald. While the Shadowlands are certainly concerned with Death, we've seen lot of evidence to suggest that it's not really a realm entirely of death. Indeed, on the Chronicles chart, we see the Shadowlands and the Emerald Dream as being just beyond our reality, and not firmly tied to Death and Life as we might expect. (Similarly, Spirit and Decay, which also seem like they ought to be associated with Life and Death, respectively, aren't one and the same. Useful information for Shamans and Monks!)
To return to T&E, they also made a video near the release of Shadowlands that pointed out that Oribos does some very interesting things with sight lines. It's a city of different perspectives, and those perspectives can really change the meaning of what you see.
The entire expansion has taken the over-conflict on Warcraft, between the Titans, the Void, and the Burning Legion, and has seemed to push that aside and abruptly make the Jailer into the cosmos' big bad all along. And while I tend to love everything associated with the Death force in Warcraft (which, to be fair, has more or less just been the Scourge up until now, though the Drust were also cool if a bit underdeveloped) it has had me feeling a little skeptical about this radical shift in the story.
But maybe the story is going for something else: we're in the Shadowlands. We're getting a new perspective. And for them, the Legion and the Void have always been an outside nuisance - the weird alien threat that occasionally barges in. But for them, the Jailer, not Sargeras or the Old Gods, has always been the true boogeyman.
What if that is true... for the Shadowlands, but not for the cosmos as a whole?
Indeed, what if the truth is that it's all a matter of perspective? Even if I was skeptical of the relative innocence of the Mag'har Orcs as Draenor-B caught up time-wise, and whether Y'rel had truly become a villain, but perhaps to the Mag'har, the Naaru really do represent the biggest threat. Hell, in Draenor's early history, the weird Evergrowth and Sporemounds that followed it were the biggest threat - beings that were almost certainly associated most with the primal force of Life. The Mogu were a big problem in Pandaria, despite being Titanforged beings of Order. And the Void Elves have shown us (along with the Aarakoa) that sometimes Shadow can be the good guys while light is evil.
For decades, the underlying message of Warcraft has been that in so many conflicts, neither side is totally evil or totally good. The constant regression into conflict between the Alliance and Horde is a tragedy told over and over across the Warcraft cosmos. And we need to seek out new perspectives in order to end those conflicts.
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