What does HotS Want Me to Think About Kerrigan?

tl;dr: should I set my expectations for a redemptive character or a sadistic jerk?

Admittedly I’m not too far into the story (new player, that’s why) but I feel like I’m getting some mixed messages on what Kerrigan’s supposed to be. She had a bit of a rapport with Jim and couldn’t remember her time as the Queen of Blades, which combined with the Leviathan dialog that was like “I’ll answer for my crimes when Mengsk dies” made me think this was gonna be a redemption thing.

But now she’s attacking protoss semi-unprovoked (they would absolutely attack the Queen of Blades without hesitation, but she makes no attempt to deescalate or minimize casualties). She makes an absolutely cheap, bad-faith moral equivalence argument when the scientist lady points out she’s attacking colonists, and spends the next mission shooting down civilian transports.

I played through most of Diablo 3, so I’m aware Blizzard’s writing isn’t…good, but I want to know what they were shooting for. Do they want me to think she’s a decent-ish/redeemable person and play her as one? Or should I just lean into the murderous/hypocritical monster angle?

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HotS doesn’t know what it wants you to think about Kerrigan. It tries to have it both ways throughout the story, Kerrigan is simultaneously an unrepentant mass murderer and morally reformed anti-hero, and we are supposed to just roll with it I guess.
it doesn’t make sense, but thats HotS in a nutshell.

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Maybe it’s just her reverting to her mode of destroy all because she’s still afraid and trying to take note of her situations without the armada attacking her?

This point right here is, imo, why HotS has the weakest writing of the three expacs. It’s tonally dissonant af.

Like it’s possible to paint Kerrigan as transitioning from mass murderer to anti-hero. But since the missions are playable in any order and since she does faaar more murder than not, the attempt falls flat on its butt.

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The best excuse I can think of? The very last battle Kerrigan had before her infestation was against the protoss; she’s never seen them as anything but enemies in her entire life, so she had no peace incentive.

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The big issue with hots, I think, is how many rewrites it went through that all sort of crash together and create a very muddled picture of who kerrigan is intended to be. I think in the final product they’re going for a “doing what she has to, to kill mengsk, and not expecting mercy afterwards for the sins she’s doing in the process” but in other versions of the script she was more malicious, gleefully torturing zagara as “lessons” instead of having abathur upgrade her and even others I imagine were the opposite.

I think the tone sort of course corrects by the end, but it’s hard to really know what her arc was by that point. Even weirder is what we know of the canon order, which is char > zerus > kaldir > skygeirr/space > korhal and makes the whole thing kind of messier in general.

Obviously avoiding spoilers since you’re only a little way in, but I think by the end you get an idea of what they wanted you to think of her by the other character’s reactions to her. Going into lotv and the lotv prologue I think they do lean into what the fan’s perception of her was, though.

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This.

When nobody challenges her on her evil other than her victims, it becomes obvious what direction they were trying to go.

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They wanted redemption arc and they fu^ked up.

Yeesh people, just tell him.

Don’t defend HotS, it might not have the greatest lowpoints, but it has miserably low amount of good stuff.

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I don’t think they did though. Nothing about HotS actually indicates a redemption arc. Theres no deliberate effort to compensate for previous crimes, and indeed her past actions rarely come up at all in her thinking. She is very much dealing with problems here and now, and while she does try to have some standards, that’s not a redemption arc.

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Ahhh that multiple rewrites thing explains a lot. Thanks!

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