LoreMore and more often, heroes of Azeroth observed strange events. They would go to sleep and awake in what seemed to them parallel universes. Or they would recall disturbing dreams of life as another race, or a member of the hated opposing faction. Often there would be strange intrusions of what was only known as "IRL" into Azeroth - strange temporal anomalies that caused time to selectively speed up or slow down, imperious booming voices and murmurs, forces that would control heroes and compel them to mine fanatically for days or weeks on end. Forces that would even rip them from their very world, extinguished from existence, never to be spoken of again.
Meanwhile, mental and emotional disturbance, a perennial driving force in Azerothian evil, became increasingly pervasive. One by one the great Aspects fell to guilt complexes and psychosexual disorders. Malygos. Neltharion. In some cases, brother "kept it in the family" with sister, even compounding this fetish, contrary to nature, with extreme domination and using one's dead sibling as a means towards gratification. Besides merely dragons - former heroes such as Arthas found themselves unable to reconcile their "inner child" or unrequited romantic desires.
Theramore had particular problems - like many rural peoples who live near swamps, even the leaders of the community found themselves oppressed by Oedipus/Electra complexes and, driven by such complexes, sought unnatural relations with members of other races, even serially. Some of these races were not as...well endowed...as humans, proved "unsatisfactory" to this woman who will not be named, and, rejected in favor of men with bigger swords (e.g., Arthas), they sought to right this inadequacy by taking substances to grow themselves to unnatural sizes, only to wind up, like most victims of substance dependency, dead, repeatedly abused by others seeking to farm them for their most prized bling.
And from this "IRL" also came a hero. One who would teach the Azerothians how to overcome their inner demons so there would never be another wipefest of the sort seen in Serpentshrine Cavern. One who could, with words and scientific methodology, halt the rising death count of heroes who "had no lives" hurling themselves from elevators. One who could soothe the rift between brother and brother, so that never again would one be driven to ostracize himself from society, or take part in bizarre love quadrilaterals.
This hero's name was...Sigmund Freud. With his trademark cigar and riding a new mount, acquirable by all players - a flying sofa - he appeared one day in the world of Azeroth and trained legions of heroes in a highly effective method of healing. Just as Death Knights offered an alternative to warriors, rogues and paladins, broke the mold of melee classes, so too, the Psychoanalysts offered an alternative to the staid healing styles of Druids, Priests, and Shamans. And so, all Paladins were free to pursue their true calling - busting face.
New Hero Class: Psychoanalyst
Role: Healer, Superior Decurser, DispellerAdventurers of the new Hero Class, the Psychoanalysts, were instrumental in curing the Nightmare that had caused such trauma, such disorder, in the otherwise soporific Emerald Dream. It was through their intervention that the great Rift in the community was healed over, and universal fraternity amongst Azerothian heroes was restored.
Quote:
"he has all sorts of weird shit going on", and is a real problem"
And perhaps most significantly, they cured all the "weird shit" and "problems" that controlled the disturbed entity known as N'Zoth...with their magical incantations and murmurs, they resolved his inner conflict, ended the Nightmare. He ceased to be an inveterate misantrope, was no longer whimsically unpleasant.
Instead, he was reformed into a respected member of the Azerothian community once more, just as Eranikus had been, by cruder, corporal methods. Truly, curing the disturbed through such methods was an enormous advance over the savagery of previous expansions, where the mentally ill had their demons beaten out of them, more often than not resulting in their deaths.
Some said, "We can't have intrusions from the IRL in Azeroth!" And to this it was pointed out...already, the people of Azeroth had widened their minds to accept the reanimated dead, misanthropic former servants of the Lich King, the flexible and ubiquitous charm of sexy foxgirls and goatchicks, and other weird agents of the intrusion such as He Who Pitied Fools.
Yet it is rumored, the next expansion, might take the form of a counter-invasion against the invaders...to take the fight to their world...
To those who would doubt me - consider this - it is a logical progression of the story. A development that springs organically from issues current in Azeroth, that addresses various discontinuities in the World of Warcraft of today.
