Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Lore, Know your Lore
Well, we touched upon it last week, so let"s just get right down to the trouble. Effectively, there are two Wars of the Ancients. Both happened 10,000 years ago, involved the night elves, the dragonflights, the Burning Legion, and the Sundering of the ancient continent of Kalimdor into three separate continents. They were not consecutive like the First and Second Wars were, but instead happened at exactly the same time with many of the same figures involved and with ultimately the same outcome. Yet they were different.
If we think of time not as a river or stream always flowing in one direction, it becomes easier to conceptualize what we"re discussing. Imagine time as a chessboard. Ordinarily, pieces are constrained in their ability to move on the board, and time as we understand it is the orderly, ruled progression of the pieces moving along the board. Then imagine that certain players have the ability to move against these rules, skipping whole squares or even going to places on the board that the rules indicate are no longer in use. They can even make moves on those squares that invalidate moves that have already happen and force them to be played again. We know this can happen; we"ve seen it in the various Caverns of Time, as the Bronze Dragonflight attempts heroically to prevent the Infinite Dragonflight from doing exactly this, with the help of great heroes.
The War of the Ancients suffers from a slightly different problem. In essence, through the actions of the Aspect of Time, three entities traveled to the War of the Ancients and interacted with it. An orc, a human and a dragon did violence to history in an attempt to save it, changing the history that had indeed led to themselves in the first place. It becomes impossible to discuss the War in a linear fashion, because it happened non-sequentially, recursive unto itself. How, then, are we to proceed?
Continue reading Know Your Lore: War of the Ancients, part 2 -- Time after time
Know Your Lore: War of the Ancients, part 2 -- Time after time originally appeared on WoW Insider on Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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