It is basically Jaina & Aethas → old dangling plot thread → ongoing grievances with all dangling plot threads.
They had a ripe opportunity to actually remake the Warcraft universe into something they were able to handle, but that passed by. Now they’re stuck using characters with huge, unresolved issues that are almost impossible to resolve given the game’s faction framework. Which is all to say, this and most threads don’t surprise me.
I have been playing this game since I was very young- my main hobby, which is embarrassing to even write lmao. I think it always stood out to me that people tried so hard to interpret her saying the Forsaken were now her ‘bulwark against the infinite’ as something endearing. The connotation doesn’t scream the affection one has for their protectors or people. it screams of meat shield, especially in the context of when she comes to believe it.
Given the context of that short story she’s literally calling them her “Meatshield against her Afterlife”, and openly states her intent to use them. The Forsaken started out in that story as a tool for her use (Arrows in her Quiver). She abandoned them when done. Then when she got her afterlife scared into her, she found a new use for them. They thus also ended as tools. Like, its really sad tbh. The Forsaken really were one of her greatest victims.
I think a lot of people tried to argue this original concept for Legion’s development of her would have made her a good Warchief who cared. But like… if she didn’t care for her own people, what on earth was gonna make her learn to care for EVERYONE ELSE in one xpac, and not feel forced lmao?
People can grow and change, and be better people.
…just not in WoW.
I mean ideally a story where she confronts the trauma behind her death and raising and her own motives and what really drives her as a person, but I guess they’re giving that to Anduin instead.
Lmao wow cant even do flat character arcs.
Right? And the first thing the damned lady does is go off on a personal errand in Stormheim and then instantly betray the Horde PC. Which is absolutely in character for her in using other people, but like … c’mon? They killed Jin by trash mob for this? The guy who’s Troll regeneration was so potent that he survived having his throat slit with a blade designed to negate Troll regen? That doesn’t even get into the whole Ogmot the Mad crap in 7.3.5. As if the Laughing Shepherd could be anyone other than Sylvie, leading her blind sheep off a cliff. But no … it HAD to be Alleria or Jaina; rather than Sylvie pulling the same stunt she’d pulled half a dozen times before again.
I was just convinced it was something smart on a writing level like Yoggie pulling her strings through her Val’kyr and pushing her buttons with “her afterlife”. Rather than a weird bald puppet SUPER satan who was “just trying to stem off an even worse evil”. I wanted my Old God Proxy War leading to a Return of the Black Empire expac BLizz! Instead you wasted both Azshara AND N’zoth as secondary villains for Evil Nipples man!
It’s hard for me to want to give any in-universe POV for Sylvanas’s story. In the end, she was apparently being directed by a drunk who wanted to write a story by the seat of his pants while having stuff changed at the last minute, and kept his ideas private enough that nobody knew what he was planning, if he was even planning anything at all.
Sylvanas’s character was doomed to have an incoherent story from Legion onward because anybody taking over the project wouldn’t have a clue what the point was for.
I’m not willing to let the apparent “Lead Narrative Designer” for the last 5 years Danuser off the hook just because Afrasiabi was garbage too. After all, the only one who could have written in his own self insert as “The only man that even Dark Sylvie ever loved” was “I liked Season 8 of GoT” Steve.
A lot of it was certainly Sylvanas stans flailing to cope, but that “detached attachment” to these minions she’d rather sacrifice sensibly was quite in-character for everyone’s favorite amoral zombie dictator. I never thought this revelation signed the character’s death warrant as some people did. She, of all characters, really didn’t need to share the “all for my people” mentality that characterizes most of the other faction leaders.
Danuser making a joke about him and Nathanos both having goatees has gotta be Top 5 regrets, that got so out of control so quickly.
My issue always was after Edge of Night. She abandoned her tools once before when they ceased to be of sufficient use, just as she had with all her other tools before? What happens should she find another means to thwart her own afterlife, and they cease to be of use again? The Forsaken were her “mongrel race of rotten corpses” … their value was entirely contingent on their usefulness to a particular goal of hers.
No no no- he thought it was BRILLIANT lmao. The man threw it out there in the most egotistical, snobby ‘well I thought it was amazing’ style manner LMAO.
I don’t think she should die unless she does things that would get her killed.
Trying to fight Malfurion one on one though… lmao.
All else aside, I think it’s very odd to frame a character committing suicide as “how dare she abandon her people.” as if the headspace and internal issues that bring someone to that point are meaningless and she killed herself out of pettyness or something.
Well yeah, because she was committing suicide. And even after descending into Hell the Maw to be tortured, she still didn’t have the motivation to want to escape purely on that alone. But she was still offended at the vision of Garrosh wasting the forsaken to the point that they were starting to commit suicide too. And the key to her accepting the val’kyr’s deal was more than survival; Sylvanas needed to be needed.
It’s like a screwed up zombie version of It’s A Wonderful Life.
Would you not agree that, in a condition like hers- where she wasn’t even alive for all time time truly anyways, that it showed very little care for her people to have that as her end goal with nothing left behind for them? Like, she personally is a massive reason why they could never reconcile with the living. First action was to betray a human she knew nothing of and all his men after promising their capital city would be theirs again. She as a leader did nothing to stop the slaughter of living Lordaeronians in Hillsbrad literally just living their lives.
Im not dismissing mental health here but she doesn’t have something we can honestly compare very well to a realistic issue or condition or existence at all.
Trauma and suicidal depression. The fact that it’s tied into magical undeath instead of imbalanced brain chemicals is just the vehicle WoW uses to express that. Then you have the religious angle of “God hates you and wants you to suffer” made physical with the Light and I think her situation is easier to compare than it first appears.
Sylvanas is unloved, unwanted, and can no longer feel love herself. All she has is that accidental zombie support group, but not even that can always help. Nothing really can. So all you can really do sometimes is live purely off of spite.
That works in the short term but eventually it eats you from the inside out. That suddenly doesn’t make love a viable option again, though. Then when you’re left with that emptiness for long enough, you can hit this kind of chilling zen where you feel you’re seeing with absolute clarity, calmness, and the idea that now feels like the right time to throw yourself off of Icecrown.
It didn’t show a lot of care but it doesn’t seem like she ever really gave it much though because she was basically running off vengeance and trauma. Her actual earnest assessment of “what do the Forsaken mean to me now that I’m truly living?” starts after her suicide, and it doesn’t start off in a great place, but it’s far from the only line of dialogue she’s ever had or the only thing she’s ever said about them. She does, for example, view her failure in Stormheim as a failure to save the Forsaken from death.
It’s quite clear that Sylvanas cares a lot about what the Forsaken think of her and enjoys being among them, but she’s Sylvanas so she obviously displays that attachment in the most harmful, toxic, occasionally murderous way possible. Hey, I never said she was a good person - merely that Sylvanas viewing the Forsaken as practically useful to her does not preclude her from having an emotional attachment to them. It’s a way more complex relationship than that.
Eh, all anti-Forsaken sentiment in Vanilla WoW is pretty much just “holy crap kill that undead monster thing” with a side of “your mom is actually trapped in there if you murder her she’ll go to heaven”, there’s not a huge amount of blame for specific things the Forsaken did or have done. Sure, she didn’t make it better, but it’s not like everything was going great before she showed up and ruined it.
Not even gonna bother pointing out 2 things call yall never listen.