Hello,
We knew when we started playing WoW that Arthas was going to be the big bad eventually. What we didn’t know was who came after that, and we speculated who we might see, and where we might go. Deathwing and Azshara are two juggernauts that eventually menaced Azeroth, drawing from characters established before we crossed the Dark Portal. Eventually, Blizzard’s going to have to create new characters to raise the stakes-- and they have. Garrosh Hellscream was a character borne in World of Warcraft’s era, as was the Thunder King. There are many examples, the most recent and significant of which is the Jailer, currently menacing us now in Shadowlands.
The character himself is fine. I like him, he’s interesting, that nipple scares me, and that’s just my reaction to the character. The method in which he was introduced, though, is destructive to a well-established character in Sylvanas Windrunner. The way in which the Jailer was implemented has tarnished much of character in my eyes, and having played an Undead Warrior for nearly my entire time with WoW, it resonates pretty closely with me.
I used to think Sylvanas was great. Now I think she’s awful. News of a novel dedicated to her makes me grimace because I think it’ll be just as poorly served as everything about her has been since Legion.
The way I see it, the character of Sylvanas can be broken down into three ‘eras’.
The WC3-Wrath Era:
We are introduced to her, are sympathetic with her death, are rooting for her victories, and understood her motive. She’s among those who have most keenly suffered from Arthas’ crimes. She wants to kill the Lich King. We also want to kill the Lich King. We already have a lot in common with her and she is compelling to many. This is a good era of Sylvanas, because whether or not everyone likes her, everyone pretty much understands her and her motives are clear.
The Cata-WoD Era:
Resolving a character’s motive and then giving them a new one that’s equally as compelling can be difficult. John Wick avenges his dog. Now what? Luke defeats the Emperor. Now what? Sylvanas sees the end of the Lich King. Now what? If a character is self-contained in a story that doesn’t continue on, you may not have to figure out what comes next, but in Warcraft, we did. Sylvanas adopts an interest in solidifying the Forsaken identity, legitimizing their place on Azeroth. Does it relate as well as our shared ire toward the Lich King? Probably not. What we got, though, wasn’t half-bad, and gave us something to look forward to. I know I did, even if she was relatively off-screen for MOP and WOD. Still, her motives are clear.
The Present Era:
This one began in Legion. Blizzard had begun adopting a method of linking one expansion into another with the end of MOP tying directly into the beginning of WOD, and although Sylvanas was absent for large parts of those, she is then swept up in this method of delivering the narrative. Once it picked her up in Legion, it didn’t and hasn’t let go of her, not for a moment. Even when she was no longer active after the events of Stormheim, her constant shrieking at us about Greymane’s towers reminded us she was present and waiting for the plot to continue. This is a controversial era because she is Warchief now, and it feels like it’s been taken away from Vol’jin after a victorious rebellion but then a lot of nothing while we’re galavanting in Draenor. We know we’re about to get a lot of Sylvanas-as-Warchief narrative when we never got any of that for Vol’jin. It didn’t feel good, it didn’t satisfy, and felt like a lost opportunity for what didn’t seem like a good reason, and wouldn’t for a very long time-- if it ever did. A popular era for some, and groanworth for others (me).
Problems with Present Sylvanas
The announcement of Battle for Azeroth comes with dramatic key art of Sylvanas standing before a burning Teldrassil, and we’re told to wait and see. Players are vindicated for calling it as they saw it when she did exactly what it looked like she was going to, but now we have her motives: Kill hope, destabilizing the Alliance by making them fight each other, conquer Kalimdor.
Killing hope is dramatic and transformative speech that makes ‘demoralize them’ sound more interesting, but the belief that it would make the Alliance descend into infighting is questionable. It’s not obvious that it’s a reasonable conclusion to make, or that Sylvanas has any reason to believe it’ll actually happen. When it doesn’t happen, it makes it look like she’s got it wrong-- generally not what is desired in a military leader, especially when she had no reason to get it wrong.
In BfA, we still don’t know anything about the Jailer. We don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing. We’re told to wait and see, and we’re told this an awful lot when it comes to this character, which are things we haven’t really been told about her before. We weren’t really told that about any other characters, either. We’re told that our uncertainty is intended, and split opinions on this character’s actions are what Blizzard wants us to have. Interesting, to say the least, but a dissonance that wasn’t really present with the first two 'era’s of the character.
I’m Just Pretending to be Stupid
Without knowing anything about the Jailer, Sylvanas looks incompetent. Revealing the Jailer, we learn everything she has done since Legion has been to increase the death count of everyone involved and give him more anima, more powerful, more potential to uproot the machinery of death. The problem is that the reveal demands that we change our understanding of Sylvanas from an incompetent character who objectively failed throughout the Fourth War into a character that is actually a mastermind doesn’t land if the set up is awful.
A more competent reveal of the unexpected could be in any number of murder mysteries, in which the true murderer was present all along but overlooked because of assumptions that were made about that character by the reader-- or assumptions about other characters that drew their attention from the guilty but more unassuming character. The breadcrumbs, usually, are there all along, and may leave you finding the way you draw you conclusions to be challenged.
The problem with the Jailer was that he’s never even in the room, on the train, in the manor, or where the story is relevant. Until the announcement of Shadowlands, his present was unfelt, not in the way of the unassuming but guilty character shared space with the other characters suspected of the murder. Apart from threadbare allusions about Odyn’s eye and that place the Val’kyr go, the Jailer was formless. Moreover, no one but people in Blizzard could have known how this amorphous blob of undefined darkness was somehow connected to Sylvanas.
The Damage to Sylvanas
Rooting the Jailer to Sylvanas has destroyed a lot of her character, and does so retroactively, which is awful since it’s destructive to the years we had with her without this knowledge. Players insisting that she truly did have the Horde’s best interests at heart are now wrong, and not only wrong, but foolish to have thought so. We now that the Jailer’s partners whispered into Vol’jin’s ear to name her Warchief, so every action she’s taken since then has been done in league with some dark specter we couldn’t have known about. We can still lay it all at her feet, but her motivations are almost entirely changed. Subjugating Helya wasn’t for the Forsaken like we thought-- it was for the Jailer. Waging war with the Alliance over the Broken isles wasn’t for the Horde, it was for the Jailer. Burning Teldrassil wasn’t to conquer Kalimdor, losing Lordaeron wasn’t a grave failure, courting the Zandalari wasn’t to empower the Horde’s naval standing against Kul Tiras, it was all for the Jailer. The players had every reason to believe these things were true-- until the Jailer was revealed.
But we know it goes further than that. We learned that Sylvanas made contact with the Jailer as far back as the events of Cataclysm. Her efforts in Silverpine Forest, the Plaguelands, and aiding in retaking Orgrimmar from Hellscream were not done for her people, the Horde, or for their future. It was for the Jailer and always has been.
Two Sylvies: Pre-Jailer and Post-Jailer
I detailed three eras of the character, but now there are only two. A time before the Jailer, and the time after the Jailer, and it has erased the Cata-WoD era of the character that adequately provided new motivation nearly as interesting as the original drive to kill Arthas. Her motives and behavior are all redefined under the new context of the Jailer, years of a character transformed in our understanding all for a character that has only been established for barely a year.
Why It’s Bad
Sylvanas is a hero to some, a villain to others. Redefining a character in this way has nothing to do with whether or not they are good or evil, and everything to do with misleading the audience. Even in the years before she was Warchief, we have to view the character and everything she did as being carried out for her ultimate vision in working with the Jailer.
When a story presents a character, good or evil, the intent is for the character to be understood. We’re learning that we never really understood the character, because there wasn’t anything that could have told us she was doing something so grand as ‘destroying the machine of death’. Any character that is this drastically redefined is ruined, since it’s destroying the understand we had of her without any reason to have thought otherwise. It’s only worsened by the fact that Sylvanas was a character created and written by other people in Blizzard, now adopted and redefined by whoever is at the helm now. It smacks not only as misleading the players, but disrespectful to the vision of other authors.
“Bet they didn’t see that coming,” they might think to themselves. Well, they’re right, because the clues never existed. That’s not cleverness, that’d bad writing.
The Jailer is a fine character. I like him. The method of introducing him, though, was awful, and has cored out and redefined anything we knew about her. It’s unfair to the character and those that wrote her to transmute her in such a way, because the players don’t even have the fun of being challenged for their own assumptions.
