I said puppet as he did everything sylvanas commanded, even killing balnazar something forbidden… He didn’t wanted to… He was forced by her. If this was all part of a plan he wouldn’t hesitate as he did… And even thou you say it doesn’t magically travel across continents…which is ironic cause is warcraft (lol)… Arthas did know before them… This is some months after the legions fall… So there was definitely time to know… Faster than Arthas at least they could simply open a portal to kalimdor…, they were able to transport in a second to their homeland remember?
Kiljaeden was there… But by their statements we can tell they are directly under archimodes command… And they didn’t know…
Arthas was on Kalimdor… he fought illidan and told him about the skull of Gul’dan, he saw what happened there.
The 3 dreadlords were not, they were stationed at lordaeron. They may be cunning but they’re not mind readers or all knowing.
He hesitated because it was forbidden, he was considering the consequences, not because he was forced by her. He made his own decision, he chose to kill Balnazzar. Like I said, he could have fought back alongside Balnazzar at any moment, even then and they would have probably won because demons are extremely powerful. Garithos was already defeated beforehand and Sylvanas was just a mere banshee.
Story-wise, he didn’t betray Sylvanas for the purpose of showing how much influence and power she has at that point. She has loyalty from a demon known for betrayals, enough that she could command one to kill their own brethren. It’s completely story driven for the sake of bolstering Sylvanas, and in effect, showing the submissive will of Varimathras. At no point does Varimathras retain his autonomy under Sylvanas’ service, he is represented as a whipped dog who is openly betraying his brethren for the sake of his own life.
Everything he says supports this. He doesn’t openly threaten her after he submits himself to her. Even his statement that ‘You’re becoming more like one of us’ is exposition telling us, the audience, that Sylvanas has thrown away her morals for the sake of power. It’s not about Varimathras, it’s about Sylvanas.
What we’re shown here is Sylvanas ruling with fear and sheer will. Varimathras didn’t serve her under the guise of respect. His forces were obliterated and he begged for his life, and openly betrayed his brethren’s forces. I don’t know how this equates to him autonomously siding with the winning force when at that point, Sylvanas was only still growing in power and her army could not match the Dreadlords at that time.
Like I said, he could have betrayed her the moment he encountered his brothers… then stabbed her in the back. Sylvanas didn’t mind control him, he did it out of his own free will.
He saw her to have more potential than the others, probably because he was impressed by how she handled his army.
Thing both of you are forgetting is that when Sylvanas fights Varimathras… Varimathras is on his own… his brothers aren’t around to help him. If they wanted rid of her, they would have teamed up because Dreadlords never fight fair.
This is why Varimathras did what he did.
Why would he threaten her? That would completely blow his cover…
He did give Garithos a piece of his mind despite Sylvanas’ need for diplomacy…
This are only conjectures, what we are told in warcraft 3 has nothing to with what you said… This is almost recont on your side…
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Like I said, he could have betrayed her the moment he encountered his brothers… then stabbed her in the back. Sylvanas didn’t mind control him, he did it out of his own free will.
- “But I… It is forbidden for one of the [Nathrezim] to kill another! My defection was one thing, but this…”
He even questioned her order. He hesitated in killing Balnazzar. I don’t see this as free will at all.
I already brought that up… can you not read text?
He was merely considering the consequences of killing Balnazzar… the fact that he hesitated is proof that he wasn’t completely loyal to her, he didn’t expect to have to kill his own bretheren and was taken back by it. The fact that he hesitated and literally defied her at that one point is proof that he wasn’t afraid because if he was afraid, he would have killed Balnazzar immediately… he was more afraid of the repurcussions… but he then realized that he put all his chips on Sylvanas and wanted to convince her that he was loyal. It really is that simple.
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He said that in her presence, to her face, showing his shock, but he followed the order showing that he was he wasn’t above defying her. He didn’t make a stand at all, not because he was secretly being loyal or intentionally choosing to side with her, but because he was literally in no position to defy her knowing what she was capable of.
If you see him as openly defying her and retaining his deceptive behaviour, then… that is actually what WoW retconned it to be, considering it was later explained to be a feint and Balnazzar didn’t die. That was a WoW retcon. In WC3 however, the story was written in a way to show Sylvanas had power despite having uneasy alliances with demons.
We aren’t given any depth to Varimathras at all in the story. I understand that you are trying to explain Varimathras’ hidden motives, but none of that was shown in the story at all. Like Sylvos has said, you seem to be interpretting things differently from the same lore, but without anything to really back it up because we aren’t given any story from his own perspective. We would all have to make the same assumptions that he was doing things out of his free will, but that’s not how the story unfolded.
I mean it’s like trying to explain why Garithos was as racist as he was. I could say ‘oh well when he was tired of all the incompetance of the non-human races during his tenure in the Alliance’ but that would be implied since it is never explained. Those kind of assumptions definitely help fill in the blanks to motives, but they aren’t true lore.
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If you read my original post, you will clearly see that I stated that dreadlords are manipulative and cunning. They have been in control the whole time. There is no way a dreadlord would challenge anyone in a fight directly, not without a reason. Tichondrius was taken by surprise, he didn’t expect Illidan to come after him. Mal’ganis assumed that Frostmorne would bind Arthas’ will to the legion, he was unaware that ner’zhul decieved the Legion… then again, Mal’ganis was merely following orders, he had little choice regardless, he could have died at stratholme but he got away, he wanted to wait till Arthas got frostmorne. Heck all 3 dreadlords warp away when Arthas arrives to slay them.
Varimathras did expect Sylvanas to come after him, plus he was on his own, had he really wanted to kill her off, his brothers would have been there as well and believe me, Balnazzar was eager to get shut of her, he would have been the first to fight back against her if she refused to join.
But this was Varimathras’ plan, not Balnazzar’s.
It’s not facts, it’s logic, there’s a difference. Logically speaking Varimathras clearly wanted to join sylvanas, especially since Balnazzar claimed that he didn’t trust her and said “she will never side with us”. Varimathras knew this but he baited her anyways. You could say that he wanted to test her.
But in the context of Sylvanas’ story, we’re literally shown her being able to dominate a manipulative and cunning Dreadlord into complete and submissive loyalty. That’s the point of the story. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been written in the way we were told.
Throughout all of WoW, the only manipulative Dreadlord was Mal’ganis, and he only managed to get Arthas to Northrend. That is all. There is nothing to infer that he would let himself be ‘killed’ by Frostmourne only to return later because it’s explained that the Nathrezim created Frostmourne and he faked his death. You see what I’m getting at? It would be assumed knowledge. What we’re shown in TFT is he is manipulative, but overconfident, and the overconfidence was his downfall and he was killed by Arthas. And subsequently, every Dreadlord after that is shown to have that same weakness.
That is what the story was showing us, and it’s illustrated perfectly in Sylvanas’ campaign by her taking down all the remaining Dreadlord commanders by playing to their overconfidence.
If Varimathras really wanted an equal alliance with Sylvanas, he wouldn’t have waited for his forces to get decimated and beg for his life. That makes no sense. Especially after she denied an Alliance with the Nathrezim and he threatened her.
Detheroc manipulated Garithos’ army… what the hell are you talking about? Balnazzar also manipulated him beforehand as is mentioned in one of the battle dialogues.
The fact that Varimathras actually thought to beg for his life unlike Tichondrius/Mal’ganis proved that he had an agenda. Neither of them wanted to die… Varimathras was clearly manipulating Sylvanas, knowing that she was power hungry, he wanted to take advantage of that.
The plan was carefully assembled the moment Sylvanas left the meeting. Balnazzar claiming he didn’t trust her… but Varimathras claiming her hatred for arthas would ultimately serve their cause. He wasn’t stupid… he knew that Sylvanas was an easy pawn… he just had to convince her… and the best way to convince her is to make her a figurehead and make her think that she has total control because “she will never side with us” so he had to side with her instead.
Where are you getting this from?, I can debate with you about in game lore… But not if you are going to use sub context as a base… I can literally twist any sentence in a novel to make it look as I want…
If we take warcraft 3 only as it is… A story that finished with warcraft 3 the frozen throne… It was a side story meant to make sylvanas shine
… With wow not even in existance it wouldn’t make sense to add more into varimathras… This are all assumptions you are making…
I can’t argue you on that because you’re reading into something that wasn’t in the story, and I can’t argue your headcanon. You are clearly seeing something deeper that was not in the story.
Simply said, there’s nothing actually in the TFT campaign suggesting he was manipulating her because we do not see his perspective at all. We play the entire campaign as Sylvanas and see things from her POV. So everything you have here must be inferred.
Point is - you can’t say ‘this is the way it happened’ because it’s all based on assumption. You can’t prove that he didn’t beg for his life on the basis of purely being a coward either; because this is how things could have gone down. We don’t get his POV. So you can’t exactly argue that he wasn’t a coward; your explanation requires us to assume he was more manipulative than he was a coward and we don’t have anything to back that up considering every Dreadlord in TFT all fell due to their overconfidence. We have no reason to believe they are more manipulative than that.
Assuming more than that leads us to the WoW style retcon where ‘Yes, the dreadlords all faked their death! That’s how manipulative they really are! Wahaha!’. That’s not what happened in TFT and we should keep it that way, right?
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Agreed… This is all assumptions on your side… And there’s no way one can argue against that… All this is not in the story
Kel’thuzad: The Dreadlords cannot be trusted
Sylvanas trusted Varimathras…
Yeah, probably not a good idea.
If you trust a dreadlord, it can only end badly for you. Look at what happened with Arthas… yeah exactly.
It just makes sense that a dreadlord would be using her, the dialogue up until that point adds up and implies it.
Why would Varimathras team up with her from a narrative perspective? What purpose would it serve? There was clearly plans in the works.
The fact that WOW did it made it obvious but even if you don’t count WOW, it still makes logical sense because of how dreadlords are characterized, they are all backstabbers. A dreadlord swearing loyalty is obviously going to be a trap.
But she won in the end. She wasn’t betrayed at the end of TFT. As far as the story went, she completely dominated them.
It’s not an ambiguous ending… She made a Dreadlord kill their brethren. That’s as straight-forward as you can get.
Potential sequal maybe…? The story ended on a cliffhanger… it’s clearly that they were continuing the story, thing is that they made a MMO instead of a Warcraft 4…
I’ve seen enough narrative to know that there’s no way in hell that Varimathras wasn’t scheming something. Obeying orders is not what the dreadlords do. His quote even says “I’m always on the winning side” which kinda says a lot about his “loyalty” towards Sylvanas.
Then again, you’re assuming something that wasn’t in the story
We can’t say ‘Muradin didn’t die in RoC’ just because they happened to bring him back in WoW. If they showed him dying in WC3, and Arthas explicitly says ‘he’s dead’, then we have to assume he’s dead. Pointing out that Dwarves are hearty, stout folk who aren’t easily killed doesn’t change the story that we’re given.
Unconfirmed assumptions based on future possibilities are not lore.
Look I know you clearly worship Activision-Blizzard and absolutely adore World Of Warcraft’s terrible lore but here’s the thing that Warcraft had that World Of Warcraft did not: Subtlety.
You see, this is what is wrong with WOW, everything has to be explicitly told to us because of lore elitists who demand it.
The beauty of Warcraft 3 is that the story tells you only what each perspective wants you to hear. It doesn’t tell you everything. It doesn’t tell you that Arthas is a bad person, even when he kills everyone in stratholme, you’re still allowed to believe that he is a good person… but later on he burns his own men’s ships, separating them from their loved ones forever, possibly dooming them which kinda shows it… however you have to remember that by this point he’s almost about to claim frostmorne and the writers merely wanted to make it clear that Frostmornes corruption is not what made Arthas evil.
My argument is that Varimathras joining Sylvanas was a subtle scheme, he’s a dreadlord, not a slave… being a slave is a fate far worse than death for a being such as Varimathras and even if he was a slave to Sylvanas, Kil’jaeden would likely punish him for his betrayal and that would be a fate far worse than death.
However, Varimathras believed that Sylvanas would help him defeat arthas and claim the Lich King’s armies for himself which would be given Kil’jaeden after summoning him to Azeroth, he would have been forgiven for his trechary, rewarded with power and likely a promotion. He would have kept all the benefits for himself.
I’m pretty sure anyone would rather die than suffer Kil’jaeden’s wrath for “failure”.
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Where did this come from? Did you literally make up this explanation?
This information doesnt exist in TFT. Where is this from?
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