I have recently participated in a very serious, scholarly, and rigorous debate about the physical condition of Illidan Stormrage. A colleague recently proposed that Illidan has been doing crunches for 10,000 years in the Twisting Nether. I find this argument persuasive.
The evidence is visual, undeniable, and, frankly, distracting. No one arrives at that level of abdominal definition through ordinary means. Impossible. Not through diet. Not through discipline. Not even through havoc or vengeance alone. This is not a fitness outcome. This is infrastructure.
Demon hunters are, among other things, containment systems. They do not eliminate demonic power. They ingest it, bind it, and hold it in place through force of will. Every moment is maintenance. Every failure is catastrophic. Every day is core training day.
What we are seeing, then, is not aesthetic refinement. It is load-bearing structure. Those abs are doing something.
In World of Warcraft: Legion, we are given a clearer articulation of the demon hunter condition. The ingested demon is not metabolized, digested, and integrated into the demon hunter. It is present, active, pressing, very much alive. The demon hunter core work is not to destroy the demon, but to keep it from taking over. To live like this is to exist in a state of permanent contraction. Not tension as stress, but tension as requirement. As function. You do not relax. You hold.
It becomes tempting (inevitable, even?) to read the body as evidence of that labor. Not as spectacle, though the game certainly frames it that way. Not as fantasy excess. But the body as a visible trace of what it takes to carry something that does not belong to you and refuse to be remade by it. There is no off state for that. No rest day. There is only continuation. And the work shows.
So yes. 10,000 years of crunches. But not the kind you log, or complete, or finish (well, maybe just a little?). The kind you never stop doing.
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