World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is the upcoming expansion for the long-running fantasy MMORPG, and Blizzard is releasing a series of animated tie-ins to the game, called Shadowlands Afterlives, in the run up to the expansion’s launch.
The first installment, Shadowlands Afterlives: Bastion, aired today at Gamescom 2020, leading many fans to ask who the characters involved were and how they will tie into World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.
Uther the Lightbringer is one of the most important characters in the Warcraft series. Despite this, he has made a very limited appearance in World of Warcraft, being killed by Arthas in Warcraft 3 on the Death Knights’ journey to become the Lich King. Uther the Lightbringer had originally been an extremely accomplished and zealous Paladin and served as the mentor to prince Arthas Menethil all the way up to the Culling of Stratholme featured in Warcraft 3 and Wrath of the Lich King’s Caverns of Time instance.
After the Culling, Arthas eventually slew his former master. It was established at this time that people killed by the Lich King’s iconic runeblade Frostmourne had their souls trapped in the unholy weapon. This included Arthas’ own father, the former king of Lordaeron, as well as Uther, both of whom appear in Wrath of the Lich King as ghosts during the final raid.
Shadowlands Afterlives, however, establishes that at the moment of death, worthy souls in Azeroth ascend to Bastion in the Shadowlands. However, because Uther was at once deemed worthy and was slain by Frostmourne, part of his soul was trapped in the blade while the other part went to the Shadowlands but was unable to fully ascend, as shown in the Bastion animated short.
This is a huge amount of information for fans of the Warcraft lore, not only revealing that the cosmology of World of Warcraft as understood was completely different to previous assumptions, but also providing a completely new perspective on old events in the Warcraft lore. At the end of the animated short, Uther reclaims Arthas’ soul at the point of his death, and the “darkness” Arthas claims he saw in Wrath of the Lich King is revealed to be the reaching hand of one of the beings come to claim and punish him.
This first animated short makes it likely that the Shadowlands Afterlives shorts will explain some of the characters WoW players can expect to meet in the Shadowlands by tying them back into key moments in Warcraft lore from the other side of the life-death binary. By creating an entirely new plane of reality, Blizzard risks it next expansion feeling like yet another addition to an already crowded universe.
By establishing that the Shadowlands have always existed and by giving them meaning by tying the Shadowlands into key lore events, Blizzard likely hopes to introduce a huge new place for players to explore without retconning too much in the game’s backstory. It is likely that Shadowlands Afterlives will continue to avoid retconning by simply explaining another perspective of the some of the same story moments in World of Warcraft’s history with characters players already knew shown in a new light on their journeys after death.
World of Warcraft is available now on PC, with the Shadowlands expansion launching on October 27, 2020.
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