To everyone who is saying that it would be impossible for Anduin to get one up on her:
Sylvanas was the one who told Arthas about the keys to the elfgate of quel’thalas and where to find them pretty much. She’s only a master tactician when the story needs everyone to be dumb.
The blight is not even a deus ex if you look at what a deus ex really is. It’s something that inexplicably solves an unsolvable problem for the protagonist. The existence, creation, and reasons for creation of blight have been explained, and the Forsaken have been slinging it around for years now.
Everyone in universe knows about the existence of blight. The Alliance not planning for it at Undercity is a mistake on their end. You can call it bad writing if you want but it is what it is.
Jaina however is a deus ex at Undercity. The Alliance is defeated by Sylvanas’ pre-planned usage of blight. The battle is lost (unsolvable problem) and then Jaina arrived unbeknownst to anyone (inexplicable solution) to fix the unsolvable problem.
The Deus Ex nature of Jaina’s appearance at Undercity is probably the thing that annoys me most about Anduin’s lack of competence. Literally all they had to do to make him seem capable was have it planned out in advance that she would be called in to deal with the Blight. If Jaina and the Void Elves were pre-planned as part of the attack as opposed to last-second saves that come out of nowhere, I’d have absolutely no complaints about Anduin’s ability to lead. It would have even elevated Sylvanas’ sacrifice play in using the Blight while there were still Horde soldiers in the field to steal a march on Anduin’s preparations against it and outlined her ruthless cunning.
Exactly. Had Jaina been in the back lines as the Alliance’s answer in case Sylvanas deployed blight, that would be a good plan to deal with the blight.
I suspect Blizzard didn’t do that because they wanted the shock value of surprise Jaina, but that’s the kind of stuff that happens when you sacrifice story cohesion for cheap tension and thrills.
I’m not sure how useful Draenei technology is, actually. The Lightforged can apparently get their behinds kicked by three trolls doing voodoo.
i mean is not like they have learned from it.
so sadly it is highly possible that we will see moments like these repeat.
all this dumb war started because apparently the horde betrayed the alliance in broken shore when that makes 0 sense when it was so easy to just say “varian, we can’t hold much longer, get your troops out of there”. and it would have prevented this war.
but no, varian had to die in a heroic way to push anduin and this story.
Anduin survives to become an old man. You should probably get used to him.
Dragons were supposed to be so numerous they could blot out the sun in the same scene. Times can change.
For context:
Wasn’t the entire second raid of the expansion the Alliance putting one over on the Horde?
She is an almost textbook example of a deus ex machina, right down to descending from the heavens on magical wings (or in this case, a flying ghost ship).
In the end it backfired horribly because the Zandalari were only pushed further into the Horde’s arms so…
Anduin also had next to nothing to do with it (probably because it involved a sacrifice play, and he isn’t the type to indulge in such things). The closest thing he had to involvement was telling Tyrande mistakenly that Dazal’alor was too important an objective to diver forces to Darkshore over (he was wrong, it wasn’t. Sylvanas’ activities in Darkshore needed a counter, and weren’t even on his radar).
Not gonna lie - I’m hoping for a categorical failure for Anduin, both in the story and on an overall meta level as a character.
I’m of the opinion that the ultimate goal of BfA’s story is to try to set up Anduin as some super amazing king that everyone likes. To this end, I feel that they butchered and ruined a lot of other characters along the way to accommodate Anduin’s general character arc. So many other characters keep having to make bad decisions or perform inexplicable actions to further the plot; Anduin, however, not only hasn’t been made to do this but in quite a few ways benefits from these scenarios. Heck, he may even be getting a queen out of this expansion - we just happen to find Bolvar’s daughter, and wouldn’t you know she’s a plucky adventuring type who’d just happen to make a great queen.
So, no, I don’t want him somehow magically triumphing over Sylvanas in the end, because it will just be another instance of this. It will inevitably be stupidly contrived and based on the power of friendship and family and the light or some other nonsense (rather than an actually satisfying victory). More to the point, I’m hoping whatever victory he gets is poorly received by the audience at large, mostly due to the narrative costs associated with getting there. I want the reaction to force the character into an early retirement of sorts.
This all may be quite spiteful, but I just cannot envision a way in which an Anduin win is actually legitimately satisfying to anyone in the long run. I don’t want to have to deal with King Anduin in any sort of capacity down the line.
And explain to me again why you think it would make sense for the 17 year old to “put one over” on the centuries old veteran? Anduin isn’t perfect enough for you yet?
Ishnu’alah, I’m just disguised because Blizzard treats humans slightly better than they do Night Elves
I bow before your talents as a master of disguise.
I’m not gonna argue that Anduin should be able to pull that off on his own because I think that it’s good for every character to have flaws, and I also think that his inexperience should be utilized in the story to some capacity.
However, as a couple of people have alluded to/pointed out earlier; considering that Tyrande and Velen have at least as much time over Sylvanas as she does over Anduin, I don’t think that you wanna play that particular card against him.
You say
but i raise you
So, yeah, im not buying what you’re selling. The only reason sylvanas can play 4D chess right now is because of the dagger (maybe) and because Anduin is not only wearing kiddie gloves but also tying his own hands behind his back and trying his hardest to make sure everyone in the Alliance also is.
On the other hand, you saw what happened when Sylvanas fought someone would do anything to win, and would later move on to not anticipate being betrayed by a dreadlord.
Perfect? You think I think Anduin is perfect? I don’t think I’ve had a kind word to say about him this entire thread. I think he’s comically incompetent as a leader. I think he has the intelligence of a toaster. His greatest action as leader of the Alliance is to release Saurfang so that the Horde can do things for itself. He’s a character that’s eaten up a ridiculous amount of the story and gotten next to nothing out of it. He’s had arcs both in Legion and MoP, and it still feels like he still needs a third one before he can be pulled out of the oven as a fully-baked character.
He’s in a position he’s frankly awful at. He’s not a military leader, yet he’s in charge of the Alliance, which while a political entity, is primarily a… well, military alliance. A diplomatic victory like releasing Saurfang and starting a rebellion would be awesome if he had Terenas’ job while there was an Anduin Lothar out there commanding the Alliance’s combined forces, but he’s apparently combining these roles and fighting on the front lines.
If he’s going to have this role, and Blizzard seems determined that he does (not me. If I had a choice, he’d have stuck to what he was really good at, the empathy stuff, and have political leadership while giving the frontline work to someone else), he needs to demonstrate that he actually can with the sort of competence you’d expect from an average twelve year-old at the very least. What’s more, it wouldn’t be tough at all. Sylvanas’ strategies thus far, dagger notwithstanding (though that was a trap the Alliance shouldn’t have apparently dedicated its whole fleet to), have been pretty simple misdirects that anyone with basic pattern recognition could figure out. I’m not talking ‘my thousands of years of military experience are telling me that this is a trap’ (on a sidenote, didn’t work for Tyrande with the War of Thorns, so much for the wisdom of age) so much as ‘ye gods, it’s getting tiresome of us falling for the exact same trick again, lets try flipping it around this time and seeing what happens’. I don’t buy Sylvanas’ hyper-competence.