Thoughts on the doomsday cultists

As short as the questline concerning the doomsday cults that have recently started appearing in Azeroth may be, it has given me quite a bit of food for philosophical thought (good thing, too; my reservoir was starting to run dry). If you haven't done said quests, I invite you to go to Ogrimmar or Stormwind and do the questline before you read this post, so I don't bore the people who have already done the questline with a summary of what goes down.

What struck me the most about these questlines was the irony in the situation: we as players know the cultists are right when they prophesize the "end of the world", for we know about the coming Cataclysm. Yet, as our avatars, we fight against them, trying to stifle their message and prevent it from spreading. It was an interesting experience for me, doing the questline, for that reason; if the cultists are technically right, how can I be ok with silencing them? The justification I came up with for myself was that their attitude about it was too pessimistic, and that if we are going to survive the Cataclysm, we can't take a "the worst will happen" attitude about it, and that's exactly what the doomsday cults were promoting. If my interpretation is correct, they seem to plan to die during the Cataclysm, but they are sugar coating that fact by saying they are "ascending to a higher plane of existence". Yeah, not the best message to be sending around.

Of course, my druid's reason for wanting to stop the cultists probably wasn't that complex. In the midst of earthquakes and elemental turmoil, these people were causing unrest, both by preaching the end of the world and by stealing citizens away into their ranks. Our characters just want to do what they consider right (unless you roleplay them as otherwise, that is), and keeping the peace is probably considered a good thing. Even though we as players know these cultists are right, with the way the game is set up, our characters can only fight against them. We, in spite of our foreknowledge, are the misled ones here, not the cultists.

There's a good reason for that, though, and a simple reason, too: our avatars are characters within the WoW universe. Just like the leaders we fight for, just like the enemies we fight against, they are limited in their knowledge of what is going on by what they have found out through their experiences. We may know the other faction is comprised of just as many good and bad people as our own, and that we have no reason to not cooperate with them, but our avatars don't; all they know about the opposite faction is their experiences in battle with them and what they have heard from their leaders. We may know that Drakaru is an agent of the scourge as we help him in Grizzly Hills, but our characters think he is an ally. Most significantly, we may know the Cataclysm is coming, but our avatars won't know until they see it, unless they're crazy enough to believe the doomsday cultists.

And in the end, this is Blizzard's game, so they decide how much our avatars know and what course of action they take in response to that knowledge. Just as we lack the power to influence how the plot changes, we lack the power to impart our own meta-knowledge to our avatar. We may know what we know, but they only know what Blizzard decides they can know, so they are the unwitting pawns of a larger plot being written for them. We can do nothing to alter this plot; all we can do is experience it, in spite of knowing what wrongs may be wrought as a result. In the end, all we can do is go with the flow, for WoW is an evolving story, ones whose plot points and conclusion are not ours to decide.