The Story of The Jailer aka Zovaal [Lore]

he was a former bad arbiter.

shadowlands is so bad man all they had to do was make some cool realms of death where you go and tie up loose ends with lore characters and not have that much effect on the overarching cosmology of warcraft but they couldnt help but botch it

we miss arthas.

Lame, super lame

Good God! ...It became a mobile game.

He is the big bad of all big bads having made everything happen in the universe up to this point. But come back next expansion when we'll introduce his boss. Ive read better stories in truck stop shitters.

Iridikron said those words "Is of no consequence" as well when making a statement about Deathwing's hidden underground laboratory Aberrus.

The jailer shows the true laziness and how creativity bankrupt the wow writers have become.

I dunno, i get the impression that Blizzard wanted to pull a Thanos with Zovaal, but instead he came off as predictable and boring. All he does is walking around talking about his plans coming to fruition.

I love that they made it so souls would go straight to hell whenever Arbiter goes on the fritz

The story of Shadowlands was such utter garbage. It was the worst, most incompetent ham-fisted retcon I've ever seen in media. All because they wanted to copy Endwalker and say "we've had this planned for over a decade honest".

Kinda sad how much this character flopped. He had good potential based on his background alone-

Man, they shouldve just made denathrius the main villain instead like intentionally making the jailer vague just to switch to denathrius

This is the worst lore I've watched among the big known game worlds. This was a horrible mistake from Blizzard, it's utter trash.

The Jailer seeing the Void Lords and going nuts is just Sargaras's retcon story but worse.

After all, nobody has a better story than Bran The Jailer.

Ruin all your best characters and storylines any% speedrun.

So if one of the themes of Legion was Illidan helping Velen realize that prophecies are fickle and our fates are our own, why did they retcon this?

Yeah this story was absolute garbage...They really fucked up with Shadowlands lol

The jailer did all this for the reason that he either learned about the threat of the Abyss that would swallow both the great beyond darkness and the Dark Lands, or he learned about another threat, but I think it was the Abyss.

Zovaal could not tell anyone about anything because he could know how they would react to this, and therefore he could try to solve everything quietly and on his own, secretly from everyone, until it no longer matters. But all the leaders of the Covenant found out what he was up to and eliminated him, which Zovaal knew from the very beginning.

In the case of Sargeras, he himself told everything to his brothers and sister, hoping for help and understanding, but did not receive it and then killed them all, and in the case of Zovaal, he knew that it was impossible to tell anyone, and yet the brothers and sisters revealed him and in in some sense, it was THEY who eliminated him, not HE them, as it was with Sargeras.

Zovaal as an Arbiter, after many ages of his duty, could understand that the best way to save all things from the all-consuming threat of the Void Lords would not be faith in living beings, in their intelligence and their potential (which they never use correctly) but submission all sentient beings to Zovaal's own will, in order to control their minds in order to control their bodies and thoughts, so that in the end they do what Zovaal needs to protect them all from oblivion from the Void Lords.

Zovaal could understand that to rely on mortals and believe in their potential - to educate them, to direct them in the right direction is simply pointless, not all mortals will understand why it is necessary to do this or something else, not everyone will want to follow the right paths and ways to achieve success in something, besides, many just want power, etc., so in a sense, the "divided space" really will not stand against the common threat.

That is why Zovaal wanted to subordinate all living life and souls to his will, not only to more successfully defeat the coming devouring of the abyss, but also to save the bodies and, most importantly, the souls of mortals in integrity, so that later they would again quietly exist, for Zovaal would return control over them to them. themselves after the threat is defeated

It would have been better if Kyrestia (if Kyrians in general) had given this humble choice of mental purification or no mental purification from the very beginning (though it is honestly a brave sacrifice for a purer purpose).
The scene of Uther and Devos would have gone like this: Uther already becoming Kyrian upon entering Bastion and while Devos graciously takes him under her wing for lessons in Loyalty (at the command of the Archon) the Jailer's forces attack and Devos remains gravely wounded. In her last moment she finds solace in Uther's devotion and encourages him to be true to himself, blissfully dissolving and becoming one with Bastion. After she disappears Thenios appears and wisely asks Uther if he is ready to honor her memory by fighting with loyalty, and Uther replies with strength and faith that he will fight with devotion.
This would have been much better I'm sure.

its not any worse than literally anything in warxraft lore. its not a story game

So Jailer aka Zovaal intent was for good at first. He wanted to give them free will.

the only thing good from Sl was the armor sets. and torghast was fun.
the story was absolutely atrocious

Great video @Nobbel!

Yeah this Jailer guy will probably be forgotten by the WoW playerbase. He could have been an interesting villain if they had fleshed him out more.

This entire expansion needs to be memory-holed.

Denathrius was the best thing about SL story. It's really sad Zoval didn't match up to him as a villain

As someone that took a break from the game a few years back and followed Nobbel to keep up with the Lore, the Shadowlands just messed up everything, everything is confusing and sounds like a bunch of BS because the new writers couldn't come up with anything decent. I wouldn't even bother coming back if I wanted to because everything just seems disconnected.

Do you know why the first ones divided up the cosmos? So that the light and void fought against one another. Life and death. Order against chaos? Alliance against horde? Have you ever thought about why the first ones made it so that horde cannot even learn the alliances languages? It's because the first ones knew that if we truly united with one another, we could overcome them. The first.... No they go by another name. Blizzard knew this.

what a mess

If blizzard declared to delete shadowlands from lore forever and jailer, I would not mind in fact Shadowlands was mockery of whole wow lore, those guys who approved the written lore directive should be fired to the ground destroying 20 years of build story in a single year...

Can they just add a cutscene where Sylvanas wakes up, it was all just a bad dream, and accepts that there must always be a Lichking? ^^

In other words, The Jailer and the Shadowlands plot had some really cool and interesting motivations behind it, but fell flat by counterintuitive behaviours which resolve nothing, conclusions which change nothing, and huge lore implications which were foreshadowed by nothing.

I actually like the motivation of the Jailer and the ideas behind his desire to reshape creation, but all this was told in completely contradictory and counterintuitive story beats and character writing. What a waste of potential.

I've never been enamoured by the lore of this game, but Shadowlands was just drivel.

Weird that this video isn't 15 years long if Blizzard have been planning it from the beginning. Huh.

It's so hard to care about something when it all just amounts to nothing in the end. A character shoe-horned in so nonchalantly, and then thrown away as if a mistake. I have to imagine there was a plan here, but they just... had no idea where to go with it. Sylvanas was always a schemer, always beholden to her own ideologies and I guess that made her a good pick for this nonsense, but in the end it just made you question why she did anything.

This is forever stuck as part of Warcraft lore and it simply makes it needlessly complicated and silly. Even if Dragonflight brings things people want back to Warcraft, it gives me great pain to think that the developers simply have no idea where to go anymore, and have fallen into the hell of making things up as they go.

I truly believe the jailer was meant to be the puppet he comes off as. Manipulated by The Primus via Denathrius. I honestly think The Primus is trying to form an army (us) to kill the first ones. The great threat the jailer was worried about will actually be The Primus' trump card which will be the reasoning he uses in trying to convince us to take out the first ones (while simultaneously making us powerful enough to where he'd fully believe we could). But HEY, that's just a theory...a GAME THEORY.

this expac was trash.

I'm amazed that someone who wrote the story for shadowlands and bfa actually got payed to do it....

Something tells me that Zovaal will be a future neutral allie.

Predict the future... Imho, i think it's not it.

There is the first possibility that the events in Warcraft (Universe) are cyclic in nature. That would explain the expectations of big events without having the ability of prediction (and missing this ability in anything less than major events).

The other possibility is that, well, all the "first ones" are actually robots programmed by the creators.

As such it's easy to "teach them" what will happen (with the current design) and also very easy to code their behavior and ofc feed them false information that would result in predictable events at certain thresholds.

I know it boils down to a "bot" but the general design of the universe is generally that, lots of bots, going through the predefined scripts without a choice, so it would be consistent with the theme/universe design.

But I think the important note is that Zovaal was programmed / designed to be just a stepping stone, for us, to prepare for "what is to come", which kind of ruins the whole thing.

Yes, it introduced us to the inner work-ins of the universe, we grew in power, we bla bla, but it failed at story-telling, had no real impact and what is worse, we feel captured by the apathy of the "creators design", to have a choice on something that matters (meaning that everything we do, is planned and expected to be done).

Considering it's Blizzard, aaaand everything that goes in the basket with that, feeling powerless no matter what you do or achieve or how much powerful you get, is maaaaybe not the best thing you should make your playerbase feel :)

<Edit> One additional thing, What is an MMO, if not a world/universe, filled with bots (scripted NPC) and predetermined/predefined scripted events, made to make the MC stronger/power fantasy/insert other goals. So Devs are the creators, we are the heroes...

what a shit story steve danuser tried to conjure from his shit brain

so did we just help the "good guys" kill zovaal, and now after we kill him we find out zovaal was trying to help us ? and it turns out that the others just wanna stop zovaal from helping us?

Zuvall's story summed up in less then 5 seconds: "Zuvall is the worst character/villain in the series"

wow... thanks I hate everything I heard today. Not for your lack of trying but... el generic doomsday villain is the main villain of the plot up till now... sure why not

Okay... Watching this just now, I've come to the realization that there's only really one way to even attempt to fix the Jailer's story. If we assume that 'The End' that Nozdormu saw, which made him turn to madness and want to establish a timeline in which Deathwing won and the Hour of Twilight came to pass, simply because it was a preferable outcome which would somehow prevent said end, is the same end that the Jailer predicted and wanted to stop, then maybe - just maybe - there could be a reveal that Murozond, at some point, also worked with the Jailer, and showed him the chain of events that would come to pass. Unless something like that happened, the Jailer's apparent omniscience makes absolutely no sense and totally ruins any chance for anyone to take the story seriously.

I'm not saying that it'd necessarily be good; I'm just saying that I just can't see any other possible way to solve the problem of the Jailer randomly being the single most powerful entity in the universe, while at the same time being dumb enough to do the Bond-villain routine 50 times over, when he could've just taken a free win. Clearly someone had to have shown him this outcome, and what better candidate that a mad Nozdormu, messing with the timelines, and the cosmos itself, as a desperate last resort against a truly unfathomable foe from beyond reality.

I'm a big WoW lore fan, I have all WoW related books, Chronicles, guides, novels, everything. I read them all. I've never been so disappointed with the villain like I'm with this dude. I just want to forget he ever existed, like I want to wake up in some quiet inn in Azeroth and realize that it was just a bad dream. I don't know if I'll ever recover from the devastation that is the destruction of my favorite character, Sylvanas.

This must be one of the worst stories ever written.

The jailer looks a lot like Damian from Divinity 2 (2012)