Are you suggesting that Xe’ra should have got a pass because Illidan was guilty of it too?
Two wrongs don’t make a right Thadeus.
It was wrong for Illidan to force Akama into servitude via his shade. It was wrong for Sylvanas to try and brainwash Derek into being a sleeper assassin and it was wrong for Xe’ra to try and infuse Illidan with the light against his will.
All 3 are wrong. You don’t get to pick and choose which scenario is “okay” just because you have a hard on for all things “light”.
13 Likes
More like if we can call SYLVANAS morally grey, Xe’ra doesn’t deserve the label of evil.
You missed my point. I was exposing a double standard, not trying to justify an action. Perhaps your zeal to criticize me blinded you.
3 Likes
The most reasonable thing would be an after-the-fact mission where the player would talk to Xe’ra and explain to her that it was wrong, even if it was done to a villain.
No, she deserves the label of morally gray. Which is interesting, given that since the start of Legion she’d been propped up as the ultimate paragon of goodness and wisdom. First by Velen, and then later Turalyon’s fanboi gushing.
I wonder what their reactions would have been if they knew she was weaving one excuse after another for the bad behaviors of the “Specialchild of Light and Shadow”.
No one is denying the double standard existed. It’s quite glaring, but I still think Illidan was right to defend against Xe’ra’s violations.
That would have been cute. Us tiny mortals trying to argue what’s right and what’s wrong against these cosmic entities born of the Light itself.
If it ever gets to the point where they decide to take control of Azeroth and Lightforge everything and everyone whether they want it or not, I’m sure the arguments of free will will do wonders against their “It’s for your own good” viewpoints.
I mean, if it ever gets to that point, we would just have a realm full of dead and looted cosmic entities and than we move on to our next target. 
Sylvanas poorly written? Say it aint so.
TBH trying to find any good in blizzard writing post Legion is like looking for a needle in a hay stack, except they secretly removed the needle back half way through BFA.
6 Likes
… i mean. It is worth noting no other Naaru seems to agree with Xe’ra on -anything- historically.
Despite her position, none of them seem to share her ideas. Most don’t believe in eradicating the void, they believe in stopping it from harming the universe. They accept their void state as an innate part of their existence, Xe’ra hid it. They wanted to kill Illidan for his insane crimes, she tried so hard to convince us he wasn’t living garbage.
I make that to point out the Naaru are not against this belief. Every other Naaru seems to believe what we ourselves would be arguing.
5 Likes
This is part of what made me laugh after the cinematic where X’era got exploded - I was expecting her to be the lead-in for Light villainy; A Prime Naaru, an authority by age and culture and raw power, ordering the others to follow her and her way of thinking, where our friendly Naaru are forced to either fall in line or become outcast rebels.
But then poof, there she went. And her hundreds of followers, those she guided for thousands of years, didn’t care.
Only one of them even lifted a finger over her obliteration, and he only did so for a few seconds before backing down and never bringing the issue up again. Everyone else just watched passively or agreed with the outcome as Velen told the player to get out the dustpan and scoop her into the furnace.
So, she’s not leading any villain Light faction anytime soon - no one in-universe seems to care about her or her ideals.
(Well, until they suddenly do and always have, especially when they didn’t!)
11 Likes
Possiblity that Xe’ra had them all Lightforged against their will the same way Illidan nearly was and they all secretly resented her for it. When Illidan fought back and vaporized her, alot of them saw it happen and were like, “Justice served.” No one ever opposed her because A) The protection she provided against the Legion forces and B) the Lightforging also granted an avenue of direct control over the subjects.
There’s still go to be some loyal followers though who would have been pissed over this happening like Turalyon was, just choosing to not raise too much of a fuss over it because the Legion was the more pressing issue at the time.
Also, I imagine there are other naaru who think and operate on the same thinking that Xe’ra does:
“Lightforge them all even if they claim they don’t want it. It’s for their own good.”
lol, the number of people who think a “what aboutism” is a valid argument to justify being a vile piece is rather impressive.
3 Likes
This is… Honestly not a bad theory and in fact probably is the easiest way to soft-retcon The Shadowlands being the ‘true afterlife’ its just another construct of the Titans really that organizes the souls of the dead all neat and tidy.
2 Likes
In Revendreth’s case it’s not even to organize Souls but instead Organize the Concept of Sin.
Remember? The Stonewright the first Soul to become a Venthyr became one in reaction to the Light attacking Revendreth for spying on it. Revendreth’s true Purpose was simply to become the Plane of Sin! Recognized Sin or Unrecognized Sin it didn’t matter the Titans or First Ones wanted a Plane to embody Sin!
Recognized Sin was to be glorified while Unrecognized Sin was to be thrown into the Endmire!
2 Likes
Easily the gravest sin in the setting, well above mass murder, demon worship, destroying planets, corpse defilement, and intergalactic genocide.
4 Likes
Sylvannas had one of those epitome moments after the death of Arthas.
Seeing no purpose in her life, she threw herself off of the top of Icecrown, her passage through true death and the Maw changed her outlook radically on her relationship to the Forsaken, along with the fallout from her attempt to secure immortality for her people in Legion She did not seek the Warchief position, but apparantly Vol’jinn was manipulated into naming her his successor.
The Banshee Queen was never a nice person. But she had the foundations of interesting character development, and that was pised all over by the BFA storyline.
My only personal issue with the Burning of Teldrassil, is that the subsequent story development was a tragic waste of a great opening act.
The closest analogue to it was the disaster of the original Marvel Civil War storyline. You’ve got an issue that divides the good guy community, Steve Roger with his Greatest Generation ideals, and Tony Stark looking at how metas are developing and shaping the world and reacting with abject horror with what he sees.
So you have the perfect set up for two groups of heroes going at each other for perfectly valid reasons on both sides. But then Marvel had Stark to recruit the scum of the Earth to enforce his platform and that threw any validity for his position over the gunwhales. You really going to side with the League of Evil over Steve Rogers?
Pretty much the same thing happened to Sylvannas and the Horde with BFA. And to add insult to injury for the Horde player was the absolutely lazy and moronic way that the diivision with the Horde itself was handled for the Horde player. Having slogged through the Horde campaign during that expansion, I totally uderstand the discontent that it generated.
4 Likes
I think you might have misunderstood what I was saying.
I am not saying she could not have been more interesting than she was. Whether or not they fully went down the Arthas 2.0 path.
Her path in WC3 was an awful lot like Arthas path. His homeland was ravaged by the Scourge, her homeland was ravaged by the Scourge. He was manipulated into doing terrible things, she was dominated into doing terrible things. He become obsessed with revenge, she become obsessed with revenge. He did terrible things in pursuit of revenge, she did terrible things in pursuit of revenge.
The framework was laid for her to be Arthas 2.0 in a cycle of abuse story all the way back in WC3. I am not saying Blizzard had to follow that path, they could have had her change directions. They could have taken any number of off ramps. But the foundation was there and she was on that path from the start.
So, when people act like it came out of nowhere and put all the blame on a single person, they are missing the forest for the trees.
I will leave each person to judge if it was a good story and/or if it was the correct choice to keep her on the Arthas 2.0 path. That is personal and subjective. I am not even commenting on my thoughts on the quality. I am only pointing out that her path was not a left turn inserted by a single person who people think hated her. It was the path she was on from the start.
1 Like
Can we stop pretending that all of this was just because of one disgusting sex pest? He’s an vile human being who deserves nothing good in his life. But he didn’t act alone when it comes to the writing. And NONE of the writers saw fit to course correct after he was removed before Shadowlands even released.
Danuser and all the others were more than happy to stay with that man’s course for the story and made every excuse under the sun for doing so. From keeping Sylvanas evil right up until the point that they were forced to either kill her off (never gonna happen) or turn her good out of nowhere with a pull out of their rear ends. To retconning Night Warrior so they could push a “Forgive your abusers or it will kill you” narrative. Can’t imagine why they would want to push that kind of story moral onto their player base. Certainly no motives behind that decision.
11 Likes
No one is pretending that “all of this” was on one person, but the decision to force Sylvanas onto that path was absolutely on that one person.
3 Likes
You give him far too much credit when the people who tried to push the narrative of it all being his idea (the other writers and their youtube CC shills) did absolutely nothing to try and fix the writing he supposedly forced on all of them.
1 Like
He was the Creative Director openly bragging about how much of a villain Sylvanas was and would be. We know this decision was not popular within the writing team, but they were not the Creative Director. Every ounce of evidence we are privy to suggests this was his doing. How they handled the aftermath of that decision does not change that he made that call.
11 Likes