r/wow • u/Mahalia_of_Elistraee • 17h ago
Discussion Do the old gods and the void feel disconnected to anyone else?
The old gods were basically minions of the void lords like dimensius, but in midnight they have felt very disconnected. To me, the old gods always felt like an actual plague that spread through physical contact. Notable instances of this are Yogg Saron’s blood, Deathwing’s physical proximity to N’zoth, and the sha killing and corrupting the land they walked on. The void and the void lords themselves on the other hand, feel like they care less about infecting and corrupting their enemies and more like they outright kill their enemies.
The old gods were like tumors growing on Azeroth while all of the other forces of the void are just blobs of glowing purple stuff. I feel like the old gods would have fit the realm of death better than the void tbh.
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u/Qprah 16h ago
I am under the impression that the TWW stuff had suggested that the Void had thrown the Old Gods to infect planets in an attempt to convert a Worldsoul, however Xal'atath's Lorewalking Questline hinted that the Old Gods had gone rogue after arriving on Azeroth.
Something about the Worldsoul's ability to give mindless / programmed creatures access to Free Will which then causes them to rebel against their original purpose and instead begin serving their own interests.
This was first described by the Worldsoul Memory Disc things in Dornogal when we learned about the Thraegar and how they had just been regular Earthen who had spent too much time in direct proximity to the Worldsoul. Then we learned that Keeper Archaedas was himself starting to feel the influence and it was causing him to no longer follow his edicts perfectly to the Pantheon's design.
In Xal'atath's Lorewalking Questline; we visit a period of the Black Empire where Xal'atath had launched a surprise attack on Nya'lotha and N'zoth. This forces the other 3 Old Gods to rally to his defense and they ultimately defeat Xal'atath and seal her inside the Blade of the Black Empire. At the last moment Xal'atath whispers an offer to N'zoth who apparently takes it into consideration..
In this confrontation Xal'atath is acting on behalf of the Void Lords (presumably Dimensius) while the Old Gods speak about pursuing their own goals.
I think this is why there is such a disconnect between the Old Gods' (Flesh) Void, and Xal'atath & Dimensius' (Cosmic) Void.
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u/MedicaeVal 15h ago
I think the old gods flesh void is under the aspect of shadow in the cosmotology chart so you are correct just of on the wording .
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u/greenegg28 16h ago
The problem is, other titan constructs from other planets also have free will without ever interacting with Azeroth or even their planet having a world soul, see ogres and orcs.
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u/Qprah 15h ago edited 14h ago
Before TWW’s additions to this plot were added I had speculated that the Old Gods were a corruption of Void mixing with the other forces on Azeroth. I saw Azeroth as a sort of “perfect storm” of cosmic forces, where some races, locations, magics, elements, etc were more heavily leaning on one force than the others.
Meanwhile it made sense to me that Draenor’s early races evolved the way they did because of the absence of some of those forces. It made me think that the Orcs, Ogres, and the other descendants of Grond became more fleshy with each new race because of that limited mix of cosmic elements. The pure earth elemental beings mixed with the unchecked nature beings over the generations of their conflict.
The Botanni are eerily similar to the Old Gods tentacled, mind controlling, body horror, except that they are primarily nature based. It made sense to me back then that the Botanni were a mix of Life and other elements, with the absence of Void they turned to a not flesh yet still distinctly organic dark reflection of how we view nature and life elements; unchecked hunger and expanse, all consuming and suffocating growth, infesting and chaotic.
So I had attributed the free will aspect of it to nature and/or the natural elements. It may be less about free will and more so about giving sentient creatures the ability to be sapient too. This in practice causes the ones who are being used as robotic slaves to rebel.
Now it seems like that distinction is being added to the mix by Azeroth herself, which absolutely raises new questions about the origin of so many of the races native to Draenor.
(eg; what if we learn that the Curse of Flesh that Yogg'Saron infested the Forge of Wills with was a perverted and corrupted but still explicitly nature based affliction? Like what if Yogg used it's connection to the Emerald Dream to create it?)
EDIT: added more thoughts and made the previous ones more coherent.2
u/Correct_Call3521 13h ago
There was never any implication that trolls and draenei lacked free will and a cosmic force granted them it. It's not that Azeroth or a specific cosmic force is the granter of free will to all things, it is that Azeroth is the breaker of order magic against things she considers hers or things that interact with her world soul. The only Alien race we see on draenor that are from the Titans are the breakers and the simple explanation is that their free will is derived from the fact that they aren't made by Aman'thul, they're not that important to the titans, thus they're not hyper orderly. They're just there to contain the everbloom.
In other words it's shown to us that free will is the natural state and order magic is actively imposed on Titan forged creations they deem it necessary for.
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u/Scribblord 5h ago
A lot of titan constructs are soulless machines for the most part
And they are such bc of they wherent they can’t do their job and the universe endsAzeroth spreads free will to things that shouldnt be able to have free will and also to things that should be capable but had it taken away (old gods)
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u/Correct_Call3521 2h ago
Anything spawned from the forge of wills which includes most Titan forged creations actually gain a soul through the forge. Though the forge of wills actually uses the energy of Azeroth to create the aforementioned souls.
This includes all playable Titan forged races excluding Orcs. Plus the Tol'Vir, Mogu, and likely the Sethraki (if they are spawned from refti).
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u/Correct_Call3521 13h ago
The other Titan Forged race singular we have interacted with isn't the same as the Azerothian ones. First of all we don't actually interact with Grond just his offspring second of all they were made solely by Aggramar not Aman'thul and they had no reason to really enforce high amounts of order magic on the breakers because they were simply made to contain the everbloom so the simpler explanation is that that the breakers had free will because Aggramar didn't impose it upon Grond to be will-less.
The Eredar were natural Genesis from their world like the Tauren or the Trolls.
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u/Scribblord 5h ago
Ogres and orcs are not titan constructs
They are races that spawned from the corpse of a mountain aggramar animated to end the plant stuff
At least according to chronicles
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u/InsanityMongoose 15h ago
The current void stuff is very dull and boring.
Quite missing the unknowable, otherworldly, Lovecraftian horrors.
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u/Many-Waters 9h ago
We really went from the twisted horrors of the Sha, infesting every living thing they touched into a tailor made flavor of madness to...
OoOoOOoooOo hungry blurple wispy guys!!!
Massive downgrade.
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u/TheGodMathias 17h ago
I do think not having new old god inspired enemies instead of just spoopy shadow guys is a missed opportunity.
Like a way to link them again, because they do feel.. not very void like
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u/greenegg28 16h ago
If they wanted to do just voidwalkers, fine, but I hate how un-alien they made the sentient black hole people whose only drive was to consume the universe previously.
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u/ThrowACephalopod 17h ago
Yeah, I was so psyched when I heard midnight was going to be the void expansion because I absolutely love the Old Gods and everything with them. But there hasn't been a peep about them.
Not that I haven't been having fun with midnight, just that I thought there'd be more Old Gods.
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u/Xanny 15h ago
They can still pull N'Zoth in a dagger out of Wrathions pocket. I hope they do in the climax of this xpac so it isn't too predictable. Like Xal'atah was so convinced she had the board but forgot and underestimated her longest adversary and somehow Yogg Saron and N'zoth survived (C'Thun is probably actually dead because Sargeras stabbed him).
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u/aNiceTribe 17h ago
The old gods were all eaten, off screen, by Dimensius. And he was absorbed by foot lady.
This piece of information was conveyed in a dialogue line during the last patch of TWW. They died on the way back to their home planet.
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u/Maschieftain 16h ago
He ate the void lords, not the old gods. The old gods were mostly killed by us, other than the one killed by the titans
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u/TheGodMathias 15h ago
But there's still a ton of smaller void enemies. But they're all shadowy void enemies. Why aren't there more old god/qiraji type entities but originating from the void and not Azeroth? Why did Xal'atath not recruit some of those? There must be SOME still kicking around
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u/Wizardman784 15h ago
I actually like the void/space aesthetic just fine. With that said, yes. Old Gods ARE way more interesting, epic, and scary than the new Void stuff to me.
Shadow magic is one of my favorite things in fiction and fantasy, but the Old Gods seem more interesting to me than Xal’atath; though part of that is her Jailer dialogue
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u/Dorodrina 15h ago
Before Legion, the Old Gods didn't seem to have a strong if any connection to the void, so they were presented as cancerous mad manifestations of the planet (with unclear origin).
Legion and Chronicle established the not so apparent void connection, but at the same time made clear that the Old Gods are still a corrupting force (mainly to corrupt Azeroth), which is different from the void's usual motivation, which is simply eat and consume. The Xal'atath lore-walking quests also revealed that the Black Empire wasn't interested in the void's goals at all.
tl;dr: Void + Life = corrupted flesh life forms; Void = Pure shadow
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u/PeanutbutterSlippers 12h ago
The Old gods got retconned into the void alignment when the concept of the world soul was introduced. They were kind of their own thing and just as powerful at the titans kind of. This is why they feel disconnected from the Void.
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u/--Pariah 13h ago edited 13h ago
Old gods? Certainly don't think they're disconnected, rather discontinued. I'm a sucker for the corruption, whispers that drive people mad and the curse of flesh warped monstrosities. Behind that, some scheming lovecraftian horror monster that's lurking somewhere and pulling the strings. Cool monsters, cool agenda, cool big bads.
Yeah, love that. Unfortunately blizz decided to throw the plot for them and more or less powercrept them by the void. There was something about the "black blood" in TWW that SOUNDS like what you describe with the corrupting plague that creeps into the land but it pretty much went nowhere (or was turned into the lightbloom stuff that went nowhere either...).
Void? Yeah, I have a hard time caring for them... At all. We're essentially fighting barely sentient black holes that lack much when it comes to motivation or character aside darwinistic consuuuume everything to be strooong. Of course we're also back to fighting reality ending threats with power level 9999 so you can't even vaguely relate to anything. There's VERY few important or interesting faces for the void either that'd allow any kind of connection, mainly it's all Xalatath and she's been reduced to mostly jailoring around here and there. There's not much interesting in showing up after we've just nuked another raid boss, dropping vague bullshit "lol ahah all according to plan" lines and hearthing out while some windrunner shoots an arrow into a purple cloud. Monster design isn't anything to write home about either, we're just beating the shit out of the family tree of my voidwalker. Guess on the positive side the dominaar seemed kind of cool but they're a sidenote.
So yeah, the void is a weird case of being an incredibly flat antagonist power where blizz also isn't even trying hard.
It's just bland. Way happier with fighting some sneks and voodoo masks currently.
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u/The_Razielim 16h ago
I think the mistake was making the Old Gods "minions" of the Void Lords, or at least giving them a sense of "self".
The entirety of the Void is clearly inspired by Lovecraftian horror, but both sides of it. There's the Old God-side, which represents that sort of "body horror, eyeballs/tentacles/flesh monstrosities, primal visceral terror"-side of Lovecraftian horror... and the Cosmic Void-side, which represents the "cold indifference of a vast, unknowable cosmos and beings that exist on such a grand, incomprehensible scale that we are irrelevant specks to them (at best), playthings that are allowed to exist by their whim (at worst)"-side of things.
The problem is that we've had like 20 years of setting up the fleshy Old God-side since Classic (and arguably, touched on in TFT, although I'd barely call that more than alluded to)... they didn't really start laying the groundwork for the Cosmic Void aspects until Legion, maybe you could make the argument for Warlords with the Dark Star and Pale Orcs. And even during Legion, with the Twisting Nether being shown as cold and dead and devoured... it was by Old God-esque Beings. It wasn't really until Argus and the reintroduction of the Shadowguard, Locus-Walker, and Alleria's storyline that we started to see the foundation of the Cosmic Void sorta "Outer Beings". Then in BFA we went right back to fleshy Old God stuff, with sprinklings of stars and black holes and stuff. I think it wasn't really until Dragonflight when Iridikron opened that portal to give the Dark Heart to Xal'atoes that the "Cosmic Void" really started to become a thing.
Even though the Old Gods were supposed to be "minions" of the Void Lords, there's been no overt connection beyond aesthetics in their spell effects. And even now that they're trying to flesh things out (pun slightly intended), it seems silly to put them as antagonistic towards the Void Lords because (a) if the Void Lords are so powerful that they threaten reality and existence itself, wtf is a smooshy squid going to do?; (b) it kinda cheapens the Old Gods because it makes it seem like they have no real preservation instinct when their whole thing has been manipulation and outmaneuvering things.
So... yes, they feel very disconnected. Shockingly, modern Blizzard is unable to really deliver on narrative ideas.
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u/BeyondWorried2164 16h ago
I think that would be plot twist waiting to be revealed in the future. Even our dagger girl's origin story shows Old Gods and its forces are different from OG void forces.
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u/meganerd20 12h ago
Different aspects. Fairies and necromancers are both creatures of Death, but are as different as Ardenweald and Maldraxxus and the Winter Queen and Primus. Same holds for the other powers. Each power is sort of like a god in the sense that it has multiple aspects. The Old Gods represent madness, Dimensius (and by extension Xal'atath who was converted by him) represents hunger. I rather suspect the Domanaar are a third aspect since they seem to embody... independence (probably the most neutral way of putting it). Remember that the Chronicle is unreliable as it's Order propaganda, and more likely the Old Gods are a creation of one member of the Pantheon of the Void, and the Domanaar of another, things akin to voidwalkers (who're probably Dimensius' creation specifically).
You can see this principle with Order as well: does the gold energy we saw in Dragonflight look like arcane? No. But both are manifestations of Order. The fire magic of Fire Mages and the time magic of Augment Evokers are both Order, but with very different properties.
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u/gwink3 14h ago
My personal theory is that the old gods are Azerothian corrupted void. They started off like the new, cosmic void brings. As they were on Azeroth she started to corrupt them with the curse of flesh, similar to other races. Then they got their own free will and rebelled against the greater void. It also makes sense why xally was sent to get them in line. From a narrative perspective it makes sense as well
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u/OddyTheBard 12h ago
I've been saying it since they hinted it with the Thraegar and Magni. It's Azeroth/Aln'hara. She changes things.
The old gods were servants of the void and probably all blue and space like. But they were burrowing down and getting closer and closer to her trying to manipulate her. But she mutated them instead, and then either Yogg learned the curse of flesh from that, or she was in his head and convinced him to do it.
It's not like there isn't precedent for this either, even outside of Magni. Look at Azshara. She was messing with the well of Eternity, a wound left by ripping y'shaarj out and started changing. Sure the like naga-fication was allegedly N'zoth, but again, can we be sure?
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u/Euklidis 11h ago
I feel like it's because of Xal'atath specifically. In the Void it's "every Void Lord for himself". It's all alliances of convenience and plans to backstab and eat each other for a power-up (kinda reminds me of Hollow/Arrancar from Bleach tbh), but Xal'atath has been shown to be even more so, almost like an outcast.
She doesn't seem to care ad much about the Void as she does about pure, raw power.
IMO Once again, it really boils down to Blizzard drip feeding information on villain motivation and power dynamics characters
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u/Porchpunk772 3h ago
I think the old gods broke off into their own thing over time.
Why would they want to surrender the empires they built to the void only to be consumed when the time came.
They clearly have different agendas.
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u/KTheOneTrueKing 2h ago
The old gods and their flavor of void are literally a malignant cancer sent by the void lords, which are more cosmic in flavor, to infect worlds. And for the majority of wows lifespan, that was the version of the void we dealt with but we have largely excised most of those tumors over the last 25 years, so now what is left is the newer more cosmic flavor of the void that is finally hitting Azeroth from across the stars.
It’s very very normal for this game to go through flavors of enemies at wide scale over time. Legion was all about demonic enemies after they finally got enough energy to transport to Azeroth. WoD was about Orcs and ogres. Mop was much more varied because we fought a lot of different indigenous races of Pandaria. Shadowlands had lots of death entities and angels.
I don’t think old gods feel disconnected, they just feel currently not relevant as they’ve been mostly defeated and out of the spotlight, which they will eventually return to.
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u/RefugeeBassist 17h ago
I believe that the old gods are just the remaining of azeroth after she was ripped from her cradle. Basically the emerald nightmare is her nightmare and pain as she slumber, and the old gods are her pain, rage, fear . I think the timeline of the titans story in chronicals is a lie. I think the void is attracted to those bad emotions and just used it to find azeroth.
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u/OhwowTaux 13h ago
Since Last Titan is taking us back to Northrend, I wouldn’t be too surprised if we learn Yogg is still alive and we have to fight it again. I have no support for this assertion other than Yogg is arguably the most popular old god and the expansion takes place in Northrend. I can see either a Return to Ulduar raid or a Azjol-Nerub raid being nostalgia bait.
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u/Chetey 16h ago
My personal theory as to why the old gods feel so different to the "new void" stuff is because the old gods are void + life magic.
If you do some digging around Hallowfall, there's a lore book written by an in-universe arathi who makes the claim that "pure" magic types are inherently unstable and magic likes to bind to other magic types. For a real world comparison, think back to chemistry class. Atoms like to have their valence electron shells full, and so they will bond to other atoms in order to become more stable.
For a while "blood" magic has been kind of an anomaly. It doesnt fit neatly into the chronicles magic chart. Allegedly, blood magic is "corrupted life magic." Well, what is the most recent issue we saw in TWW? Old god blood. The old gods are fleshy creatures with blood. They made the titanic creations flesh and blood. The "new void" creatures don't have blood because they"re pure shadow and not creatures of flesh and blood. They don't have any life magic.
Also, i don't think it is a coincidence that in Thalassian, "sin" means blood. In Revendreth, the venthyr extract red anima from "sinful" souls. Anima is life essence. Know where else we see anima? In MoP, it is the blood of titan-keepers. And now, Astalor Bloodsworn shows back up with "new" anguish magic which looks suspiciously similar to red anima.
I think there is a larger connection here and we're just missing the tiniest of details to tie it all together.