Titans and Eternals

The Shadowlands are weird.

Not since Mists of Pandaria have we traveled to a realm that is so separated from the established lore of World of Warcraft. I remember, back in 2012, having some concern that our Pandarian adventure would feel sort of free-floating and disconnected from the overall mythos of Warcraft, and yet as we went through that expansion, we discovered that many of the creatures and peoples there that seemed so new and unique were actually tied into some of the fundamental lore of the game - the Sha were revealed as the sort of toxic radiation left over from an Old God's death, and the Mogu were revealed to be just as obsessed with reversing the Curse of Flesh as the Vrykul had been in Northrend - though they were much better at it.

Through our experiences with Old Gods, the Void, the Light, the Naaru, the demons of the Burning Legion, and actually, finally (albeit briefly) meeting the Titans themselves, we've managed to explore some of the great powers of the Warcraft cosmos.

I often refer to the cosmic chart that begins each volume of Chronicle, and in retrospect it's sort of hilarious that the Shadowlands are a tiny little sphere opposite the Emerald Dream. While I think there's potential to really expand upon the Dream, in terms of what we're seeing in this expansion, the Shadowlands are like a whole other multiverse unto themselves - more akin to the Outer Planes in D&D than what I'd assumed it was, which was Warcraft's version of the Shadowfell.

It had always bugged me that the Scourge was explained away as simply the creation of the Burning Legion, and so it's actually quite exciting to see that it's more like the Legion stole (or perhaps bargained for?) magic from the Maw to create the Lich King and thus the Scourge.

We do have a few other solid connections to the material world - for example, the Val'kyr we first encountered as members of the Scourge were, in fact, sort of copied from Odyn's use of them. But even that was a sort of copy - Odyn learned how to create the Val'kyr by dealing with an entity of the Shadowlands and thus cribbing the notion of the Kyrians - basically making valkyries from the recipe for angels.

But one thing that we learn when we journey to the Shadowlands is that the various realms thereof are ruled over by Eternals - beings who have existed since the creation of the Shadowlands and ruled over its realms.

The Jailer (ok, Blizzard seems to be inconsistent with whether it's Jailer or Jailor) is one of these beings, and we find that his name is actually Zovaal (there's a prominent part of the Maw called Zovaal's Cauldron, and some dialogue has confirmed this to be the Jailer's name) and that he was imprisoned in the Maw after he sought to conquer the Shadowlands for himself.

But this puts the Arbiter, as well as other eternals like the Primus, the Archon, Sire Denathrius, and the Winter Queen as members of a sort of pantheon of death.

And how interesting it is that this pantheon also had one that fell to darkness.

Naturally, there's a pretty grand tradition in fantasy to have some kind of evil rebel from amongst the most powerful entities. In Christian tradition, the Devil is such a figure, once a great archangel whose pride and ambition grew into contempt for the natural and good order of the cosmos. Arguably, Loki is in a similar camp, as someone who was once the brethren of the good gods, but who transformed into a horrible monster.

Falls to corruption are a pretty common theme throughout Warcraft. Sargeras has been, for most of its existence, the biggest bad guy, and very similarly, he went from the paragon of the Pantheon to its greatest enemy. Granted, Sargeras' evil, while born of his own choices and conclusions, is still a reaction to a more unfathomable darkness - the Void.

Zovaal/The Jailer's motivations for turning on his brethren are something we know far less about. For one thing, we hear about how the Eternals have ruled the Shadowlands since its creation, but we don't really know where that creation falls on the timeline of the Warcraft cosmos.

Numbers and sequence of events are things we don't really tend to get - for example, we know that the War of the Ancients was fought about 10,000 years ago, and that some of our characters might have been around that far back. We also know that the Draenei left Argus 25,000 years ago (though that might have been retconned to be only 13,000 - personally I prefer the notion that my Death Knight is over twice as old as Malfurion) but we have no idea what the dates are on, say, the creation of the Night Elf Empire, the rise of the Titans, or the wars between the Trolls and the Aqir.

We're given to understand that the sort of Big Bang of the Warcraft cosmos happened when pockets of darkness began to appear within what was once the uniform totality of the Light, and those pockets became the Void. And then, the matrix of light and void essentially allowed for meaningful existence to occur, with physical reality forming.

The Titans, for all their godly nature, seem to fundamentally be of the material world. But one imagines also that the Shadowlands, as a realm of death, would need for things to first be alive.

I think you could go deep into ideas about souls and "living" entities' eternal nature outside of life and death, and so perhaps there's some other way to look at it (you could imagine an "afterlife" actually being the eternal location of souls, and that life is just an expedition out of such a realm) but my sense is that the Shadowlands in the Warcraft cosmos is really a place for the dead, with only some of its realms having the macabre vibe that such a place would suggest.

We don't really know why the Titans exist, or even how, exactly, a planet transforms into one of these godlike entities (do we all die when Azeroth awakens? Or does she leave the planet as an empty shell, but intact and still possessed with the sustenance of life? Or do we literally find ourselves crawling along the surface of a giant, planet-sized lady?)

And so, we also have to wonder a bit about the Shadowlands - did they just come into existence as soon as there were mortal souls that needed to go somewhere after death? Or were they created intentionally? And where did the Eternals come from? How similar are they to the Titans?

As the expansion begins, the plot hinges primarily on the immediate problems - you're trying to get the Alliance and Horde leaders out of the Maw, expose the traitors amidst the Shadowlands realms, and explore the Maw with your seemingly unique (apart from other players) ability to traverse it.

But I do think that before we actually fight the Jailer, as we seem likely to do by the end of this (unless Sylvanas is the final boss and they keep the Jailer around for future conflicts) we need to figure out what he is, exactly, and how he's connected to the rest of the cosmos.

A couple notes: first, it's implied that the Jailer's forces within the Maw are utterly vast - rivaling the Burning Legion in numbers. Additionally, during the Maldraxxus Afterlives short, some people noticed that Draka struck what looked like a Burning Legion outpost - one that perhaps even Illidan and his Demon Hunters had also hit during the Illidan Harbingers short.

We know that the Maldraxxi have the task of fighitng the Shadowlands' enemies, but the implication I had always assumed was that they only played defense, fighting foes within the Shadowlands themselves. This seems to imply that they are sometimes sent to the mortal realm.

We know the Legion has done some infiltration of the Shadowlands in the past, as Kil'jaeden got Frostmourne and the Armor of Domination from there. But even if the Legion is in total disarray since the end of their eponymous expansion, I'm very eager to explore whatever interactions they had with the Shadowlands.

Given that Draka died before the Lich King was even a thing, I wonder if that missions had anything to do with the House of Eyes trying to discover what the Legion's interests in the Shadowlands were.