The History of All Major Retcons in WoW Lore

in this video we'll be going over a lot of retcons from wow's history of course retconned being blizzard changing the lore of pre-established events retroactively making new information canon and since world of warcraft has so many minor retcons i'm obviously not going to be able to cover all of them but i will go over pretty much all the major ones throughout the history of the game starting up with vanilla wow and the many retcons changes recontextualizations and just expanding things that were only mentioned briefly in warcraft 3 thrall banned all warlocks from the horde but in vanilla wow they changed their mind and now the warlocks are kind of like the demon hunters where they're ok with them using their powers as long as they use those dark powers against their masters in warcraft 2 the ability to control magic from the elements and the twisty nether were both part of shamanism and gul'dan separated himself from being especially talented at channeling the cold and negative energies of the twisty nether this is why a lot of early orcs and lore who were clearly warlocks still retained their title of shaman and ner'zhul and goldan two of the most prolific warlocks and lore were considered shamans beforehand because there wasn't really a difference between them in the first place this was later retconned to have a more clear difference between them and shamans control a very specific subset of elements and have nothing to do with fel magic or the twisty nether speaking of the twisty nether originally the twisty nether was basically hell and warlocks would get their hell fire from the twisty nether and all mentions of hell were also mentions of the twisty nether basically the hell and twisty nether were synonymous with each other that's why there are warlock abilities like hellfire and a lot of characters have hell in their name like the famous hellscreams since orcs were tied pretty heavily to the twisty nether early on although it's not just the twisty nether that got changed there's also the existence of the holy light originally it was just references to real world religions namely christianity eventually they kind of recontextualized it to make it more about a philosophy where the holy light helps anyone who strongly believes in a cause although this cause doesn't always have to be good as seen by the fact that the scarlet crusade are very prolific light users now let's head over to the burning crusade expansion where we have one of the most controversial retcons in wow's history and that is the origin of the draenei originally the draenei were just used to refer to akama in his race and some of the lost ones that appeared in the swamp of sorrows and the eredar was a different race of demons that actually corrupted sargeras so the change was that the draenei were actually the eredar who split off from the other ones when they originally joined the legion and corrupted sargeras and then ran away to draenor where a subset of those ones became the broken ones so the draenei we knew in warcraft 3 were just the corrupted broken ones and the playable race ones were the original draenei the reason this caused a lot of controversy was because it was one of the first major retcons to the story and tied one of the playable races to one of the most evil races at the time the same people who ran the armies of the burning legion it was so bad that chris metzen the guy responsible for most of wow's lore wrote an apology post explaining why the retcon needed to be done which is not something that happens very frequently outside of the major retcon that was the draenei there are a couple of other minor ones that happened in tbc originally it was stated that all the blood elves followed kal'thas to outlands but it was later changed that some stayed behind and they were the ones who were worried about what happened to kael'thas and joined the horde to help them go out and find him in the outlands they also made illidan kel'thos and lady vash a lot more evil than they were at warcraft 3. although this was re-contextualized later on which i'll talk about when we get to that point in history and finally one minor retcon of a character there's a character known as mogor the ogre who was introduced in warcraft 2 and was an incredibly intelligent two-headed ogre clan leader which is unique by the fact that he has a singular personality instead of one split between the two heads and was responsible for some pretty smart decisions on his part in order to keep him and his people alive in the burning crusade he was turned into a bloodthirsty idiot running a fighting ring which is just a straight-up complete retcon of his character although seen as he was a minor character no one really noticed and players might recognize him more as the character who appears on the ogre magi card in hearthstone which is part of the base set and he was given another card which actually has his name on it and of course they both reference his stupid tbc version rather than his smarter warcraft 2 version in wrath of the lich king there weren't any major retcons other than them changing their mind about what happened with ner'zhul inside the hello domination which really gets changed again later on so it's not important to mention here there's also some lore given on how the frostborn was made which again is changed again later on but basically it was an artifact of the burning legion and controlled the dreadlords and it wasn't really meant to be that powerful compared to other artifacts and was made a lot stronger thanks to ner'zhul's influence on it they also changed the importance of the helm of domination previously the lich king's armor was basically just used in order to trap ner'zhul's soul and it was the frostmourne which was the big powerhouse of the whole lich king getup at the end of the expansion after the frostmourne is shattered they mentioned that the helmet domination is needed in order to keep the undead in check which wasn't really established in lore previously but makes sense in retrospect no one really disliked the hell of domination getting more importance there is also some indications that yogg-saron probably influenced a couple of major events in west history although it doesn't really count as a retcon and more of adding extra context to a situation that doesn't ultimately change anything same could be said about the hello domination changes as well in the cataclysm we get a lot more lore on the dragon aspects seen as the main boss is the corrupted dragon aspect being controlled by an old god in the war of the ancients novels crossus mentions the power level of the dragon aspects and greatly exaggerates how strong they are stating that all of the dragon aspects putting their power together they could easily defeat the old gods in cataclysm we get a more realistic viewpoint on their power they are strong but not old godstrong although they were basically created in order to stop the hour of twilight which was the prophecy of the old gods breaking free from their prisons and taking control so they were kind of used to stop the old gods just not in the way they were described previously in miss the pandaria we got a whole bunch of new lore it's probably one of the most significant lore expansions we've ever gotten as it added a whole bunch of context to old lore that happened alongside everything else and they had to find a way to explain why it hadn't really showed up before and they did an excellent job of explaining it the island was cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years one of the titan keepers took up resident there and built some powerful stuff there's a race of titan-created constructs that took over as well as a couple of races created by one of the dead old gods really the only major retcon we got from pre-established lore was that chen stormstout was no longer from pandaria itself and instead was from the wandering isle which makes a lot more sense seeing as pandiri was cut off from the rest of the world in warlords of draenor they retcon the skin color of blackrock orcs originally they had a different skin color from the years of living inside blackrock mountain without sunlight but the blackrock orcs shown on alternate draenor already seemed to have that skin color despite not living on azeroth yet and besides this one minor retcon wad is also when the first chronicle book came out right before legion which has probably the most amount of retcons than anything in warcraft 2 it was established that the spirits of the dead go to the twisty nether now there's a proper afterlife for different types of creatures the guardian aegwynn had parts of her personality retcon originally she was kind of arrogant so when she was given the powers of the guardian by the council of tirisfal she kept them for herself and prolonged her life so she didn't have to hand them over to a new guardian someday then she tricked a mage named iran into becoming the father of her son medivh which you wanted to be the new guardian the retcon basically states that she was just a confident girl who did actually know better than everyone else and wasn't super arrogant like her previous self and that she no longer tricked the father medivh into having a child and that she actually kind of fell in love with iran and wanted to have a kid together rather than just wanting to have a proper father for her son and not actually caring who the father was and besides a lot of more minor stuff there were three big retcons that were introduced with the chronicles namely the old gods the legion and the titans themselves in the war of the ancients books crosses states that the old gods if they teamed up together would be able to make even sargeras plead for the peace of death and of course goes on to say that the aspects are the most powerful creatures of all mortal planes and they're the only force capable of defeating the old gods obviously none of that was true come the cataclysm and we got a more realistic sense of the power of the old gods the old gods were given a proper origin basically their parasites and throughout the universe in order to corrupt world souls and planets and the reason they thrive on azeroth is because the planet itself also happens to be a titan which isn't really a retcon just new information and it introduces a boss for the old gods known as the voidlords so now we know for sure that the old gods are alien creatures and that there are others out there in the universe and they're not stronger than the titans but their bosses are probably stronger than the titans now let's go over the titans originally they were described as a metallic race with the leaders of their society being the pantheon filled with the titans that we know of today this was changed to just only be the pantheon and they're the only titans that exist and also they are a lot stronger than they were originally described although to be fair they were originally described as bringing order to millions of other planets so it's more of a downsizing of the amount of manpower that went into it where they still keep their accomplishments they were just done by a lot fewer people and because they changed the amount of titans the individual titans themselves grew much stronger and are currently some of the strongest things known in the warcraft universe as sargeras stated as the strongest of the titans was able to kill a whole planet full of old gods by himself by just cutting it in half and another titan was able to kill the strongest old god of azeroth by just plucking it out like a tick they were also changed to be all dead by the time warcraft starts with the only living titan being sargeras who controls the burning legion as previously we were led to believe the titans were still alive out there as algalon the observer even said he was going to send a message directly to the titans before he was stopped and they even added a piece of lore to raw den stating the reason he became depressed and was defeated by the mogu was because he founded the titans had died although in legion we find out the titans were killed by sargeras but he was able to capture their souls and use them as fuel well all but one of them anyway and the titans being dead the whole time was kind of a big reveal although the fact they came back almost immediately afterwards does a good job of letting them stay in the lore and finally the legion themselves this was another huge retcon originally sargeras was just a demon lord then he was changed as someone who was corrupted by the eredar and finally in chronicles they changed it again to finding some dreadlords who told him about the void and the void scared him so much he went about the universe trying to destroy everything so that he could snuff out any inkling of a void world being born into the universe as he knew eventually life would come back afterwards and he could probably watch over it so that no voidlords could be born like the planet he cut in half so it could be said they changed the origin of his corruption to the dreadlords rather than the eredar and instead he just went to the eredar afterwards and wanted them to lead his armies because it requires a lot of generals in order to run an army as big as the burning legion they still had sargeras be the one who killed the rest of the pantheon though although after the pantheon had visited azeroth and contained the old god corruption there so sargeras is still a villain but i think this retcon gives him better motivations personally and basically accomplishes the same thing with the legion as before where originally he wanted to destroy everything because he thought it was a natural order of the universe to destroy rather than to make things orderly although that's not it with the retcons before legion came out we also got the illidan novel which goes into detail and explains what happened in the burning crusade with illidan and kel'thos and akama basically everything that happened in the burning crusade still happened with a few minor things that didn't really retcon very much illidan was still a huge jerk to everyone enslaved a bunch of people used souls in order to power his machines and portals summoned the demons enslaved akama but he was doing all this because he was planning an attack on the burning legion he knew how powerful the burning legion was and how impossible it was to stop them although he was fanatically devoted to finding out a way to do it anyway and he actually had a lot of really good ideas he was even helped out by the naru zera when he was almost caught in argus trying to spy and kil'jaeden when he was trying to establish a link to the legion homeworld and part of the reason all of the events in the bernie crusade happened was because illidan just did not trust anyone but his demon hunters with his plans he thought everyone was a spy reporting back to kil'jaeden and in order for his plan to work needed basically a surprise attack since he knew he could never win in a frontal assault against the infinite army of the bernie legion and eventually his paranoia is what caused some of his allies to turn against him and it was what allowed kil'jaeden to actually convert kael'thas over to his side kel'thos originally went evil for almost no reason almost like they needed a villain in the burning crusade and just kind of ignored his character from warcraft 3. in the illidan novel and in chronicles we get a lot more context to this kel'thos desperately wanted a way to control his people's mana addiction after the destruction of the sunwell illidan had promised him a way to control his people's addiction and to an extent what he offered was working he taught them how to siphon energy from other creatures and to even store it in mana boxes for later use although kael'thas knew about the demon hunters and how he was training them with fel magic which was like 10 times more powerful than the tiny methods illidan was teaching them and directly asked him in order to teach him and his blood elves how to spell magic as well although illidan just told him no and would not discuss it further and this made kalthaz very suspicious of illidan on why he wouldn't trust him with the use of magic and kil'jaeden was able to exploit this weakness with him and agreed to teach him how to use fel magic and that illidan was secretly plotting against them that's why he wouldn't tell them how to use his powerful magic and kel'thos even though he was a mana addict at this time actually refused kil'jaeden at first before a few more events happened like a portion of his army defected in shattrath when they were trying to subjugate the city and illidan not doing anything about it when he told him which eventually led kel'thos to taking the deal with kil'jaeden begrudgingly and learning how to use film magic and he just absolutely fell in love with it the main reason illidan never taught anyone else felt magic was because it killed half the people he was teaching and akama just really wanted his temple back and was incredibly short-sighted about it illidan did actually tell him that he needed it in order to fight against the vernon legion and that he would give it back to him after the job was done although akama thought he was just given excuses in order to keep it forever because he thought defeating the burning legion wasn't possible and of course illidan didn't share any of his plans to akama further than that so akama just convinced himself that illidan was never going to give it back and he had to go behind illidan's back in order to try to get it for himself where he made some deals with mayev that eventually got him captured and his spirit enslaved so the illidan novels retcons were more of recontextualizations of events that already happened and don't actually change much other than the fact of the burning crusade it said that ilden did try to teach a couple of elves how to become demon hunters and there's even a quest involved with you trying to kill one of them which isn't really mentioned or brought up because it's kind of a minor change if anything the illidan novel does the best job of adding a whole bunch of retcons because all it does is give more context to events that already happened in order to change them in a way that fits with the new story they're trying to tell without invalidating everything that happened in the past ildid and kel'thus were still arrogant but at least they had better reasons than just becoming evil for no reason and now we finally make it over to legion where there's a handful of retcons as well originally the broken isles were supposed to have been submerged for ten thousand years and they weren't raised until the second war where goldan went out there to raise the broken isles this was instead changed to gul'dan only raising the broken shore which left the rest of the broken isles to have always been up which allows things like the existence of the high mountain tauren and suramar to happen speaking of suramar in the war of the ancients trilogy suramar is described as being completely destroyed by the legion and mainly only occupied by reanimated undead in legion we're told that suramar is fully intact because ten thousand years ago they created a gigantic dome over it which protected them and isolated them from the rest of the world at the time maiev was also made a very important character in legion which was done by softly retconing the events of the wolf heart novel in the book mayev orchestrated the murder of a whole bunch of elves that were trying to rejoin night elf society who also wanted to keep using arcane magic which was a big no-no at the time eventually she was just stopped and ran away after attempting to assassinate malfurion and her whereabouts were left to be dealt with at a later time in legion you're introduced to mayev well outside of demon hunter exclusive events by rescuing her from prison and her brother comes to her and they have one dialogue about the novel and just kind of brush it aside because they both agree dealing with the legion is more important because it was thanks to her brother's help that they were able to find out it was her doing all the murders in the book and he was trying to hunt her down which they just kind of brushed aside they don't completely say that it didn't happen they just heavily downplay it that was until bfa anyway in the events of the book shadows rising maiev is depicted amongst all of the other night elf leaders when thrall comes to visit alongside characters like malfurion and tyrande which is a pretty heavy indication that they just completely ignored what happened in wolfhart and in fact do rutcon whatever she did there goldon had his origins officially changed with chronicles 2 which came out during legion before he was an apprentice of ner'zhul and then ended up joining the burning legion betraying his master although chronicles 2 as well as gul'dan's heartbringers video before legion state that he was actually from an unnamed clan that he destroyed before later joining the shadowhand clan and then becoming the apprentice in ner'zhul where he had already been part of the legion before he ever met ner'zhul rather than learning about the legion from stuff that ner'zhul had done in chronicles 3 which also came out during legion they got a lot more retcons than what volume 2 had where volume 3 officially unofficially retconned medan out of the story as they have a humorous little note at the end of the book in the index where medan is listed as being on page 404 which is usually the code for a page that's not found on the internet medan is a character from a comic book series that blizzard produced and generally whenever blizzard creates outside source material.lore they try their best to add characters and events from those books into the game to signify that they did actually happen in lore and this does include their manga and comics although much of medan has always been missing and we got some hints that they were going to not include him when the legion rolled out and meryl felstorm was added to the game as a major character for the mage order hall campaign and his backstory completely left out any mention of medan this is significant because meryl fell storm was basically medan's surrogate father in the comic books and his story is heavily tied to madance they also gave a lot of accomplishments that madan did in the comics to garona who was supposed to be his mother and just kind of removed everything else he did as it was kind of ridiculous anyway and didn't really impact the plot that much so who is madan anyway well just think of anduin a young boy who wants peace and doesn't like violence but imagine if anduin had more powers than superman and there you go medan was half beige half shaman half druid and half paladin and also better than a full character of any of his classes he was also crowned the new guardian of tyra's fault and empowered with the abilities of basically all the classes instead of just a bunch of arcane mages like previous ones and of course wielded the powerful legendary weapon known as itis which was officially given to khadgar instead later on the only thing medan couldn't use was void in fel magic but i don't think that really mattered since he could use everything else and it didn't really have any counter medan was never a super well-liked character and if they ever needed a character like medan in the game for something they could just use anduin instead because he's basically a non-mary sue version of a dan anyway chronicles 3 also gave moria a lot of credit for a bunch of things that happened in classic wow she was the one responsible for planting rumors about ragnaros which caught the attention of the hydraxian waterlords which eventually got venturers sent into molten core to defeat ragnaros for her and cemented her place as the leader of the dark iron dwarves in addition to a few other things she did before these are just kind of things that happened and they just kind of retroactively gave moria credit for all of it volume 3 also gives a lot of context behind kel'thos and lady vash's actions when they joined illidan i already explained kel'thos during the illidan novel part and we got a lot of those motivations from outlined in volume 3. so i kind of talked about them a little bit earlier in the video than when they actually appeared chronologically for lady vash originally she said that she joined illidan because she remembered his powers from the war of the ancients and respected his demonic powers chronicles instead says that she specifically joined because the old gods told her to and also did not respect his power or the past at all kind of a minor change in my opinion but they did retroactively change your motivations which kind of make more sense than randomly helping illidan for no reason who had been imprisoned for ten thousand years overall chronicles 3 didn't have as many major retcons as the first volume and then in blizzcon later on we were told that the chronicles were told from one perspective they may not be 100 correct which is corporate speak for we can retcon some of the retcons if we want to later now let's head over to battle for azeroth and we'll talk about everyone's most hated retcons the motivations of sylvanas i will say most of the things people think are retcons about sylvanas's motivations are not and mostly come down to people just not following her story post wrath of the lich king but that doesn't mean there weren't retcons nonetheless one of the biggest ones happens in the before the storm novel which is a prequel book to bfa where sylvanas has an inner dialogue in the book where she states that she never wanted to be warchief regretted the fact that vol'jin had died of the broken shore and preferred to rule things from the shadows at the end of bfa and in parts of shadowlands they retconned her inner dialogues from the book stating that it was always her plan to become more chief it was the jailer and masala working together that got vol'jin killed and made him make sylvanus the new warchief which allowed them to cause a whole bunch of destruction and funnel souls into the maw in order to fuel whatever plan they have going on in the shadow lands and one other big retcon with bfa is the fact that the old gods are now dead in the past it used to be that all of the old gods we faced and raised were defeated but we kind of just defeated an avatar versions of themselves and then pushed them back bfa lord establishes that players did in fact kill those old gods but then goes on to say they don't experience death the same way as mortals so it still kind of leaves them up in the air basically their story is done for now until blizzard wants to use them again later this also brings up an inconsistency with the fact that the old gods cannot be killed otherwise it destroys the planet so one can assume another retcon in the future in order to explain that and finally we head over to the shadowlands immediately one of the retcons is the fact that spirit healers are actually kirian watchers and not the valkyrie as stated in the chronicle books there is another frost mormon helm of domination retcon with the shadowlands seeing as they play a very important part of the expansion instead of the weapons being forged by the nathrezim i.e the dreadlords they were created by the rune carver and then whoever was controlling the rune carver just gave them to the nathrezim who then used them for other purposes this isn't so much a retcon as a re-contextualization of the origins of the two items as before the origins weren't super important and it doesn't matter if the nathrezim specifically created them themselves if the rune forger was just forced to make them for them if anything it makes more sense that the items were not created by the nath regime considering how they retconned the helm again to make it even more powerful since it was able to be used to break open a gigantic portal to the shadowlands there's also some retcons involving uther they changed what his last words to arthas were as well as change the origin of the original soul as during the shadowbringer special it shows that uther was taken to bastion whereas in game his spirit shows up at a couple of locations this is pretty easily explained by just having different shards of his soul which is a pre-established thing and doesn't necessarily constitute a retcon but it does bring up the fact of what happens to the shards of his souls afterwards do they go back to the original soul and bastion given the memories of what they did and said or do they just disappear forever and finally the retcon is sylvanas going to hell originally after lich king was defeated sylvanas killed herself but was so spooked by what she saw in hell that she decided to find a way to help her forsaken people not share the same fate she had this was retconned that she went to the ma instead and it's presumably where she found the jailer and made her current pact which still ultimately kind of accomplishes the same thing currently they're in the middle of building the mystery of sylvanas's story up and up so we don't actually know how this situation will play out so it could still play out with the same motivations just done in a different way kind of like illidan alright and with that we reach the current timeline of wow which as of making this video was the beginning of shadowlands world of warcraft has a ton of retcons i basically only covered the major ones and a few minor ones that i personally liked but there is a whole bunch more minor stuff if you know of any super important retcon that i missed that should have been in the video i'd love to hear about them down in the comments as while i did spend a few days researching the video it's entirely possible that i still miss something really important anyway also if you liked the video make sure you check out the editor's channel the flying buttress he's currently going through and summarizing the book shadows rising and he does such a wonderful job with those videos and they definitely deserve more views on what they currently get [Music] you

Channel: hirumaredx

Views: 497,552

Keywords: Battle, For, Azeroth, World Of Warcraft (Video Game), hirumaredx, history, wow, worl, vanilla, bc, burning crusade, wrath, wrath of the lich king, linch king, Video Game (Industry), World Warcraft, facts, Warcraft (Fictional Universe), how did doom work before wrath, before cata, how it use to work, funny, 8.3, 2020

Id: nfgxobGV9Gk

Length: 27min 16sec (1636 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/latisullivan]

upvoting hopefully he reacts to it on stream so I can watch it on YouTube. I wanna know what he says