I’ll repeat here what has been said there, and elsewhere in this thread. The Winter Queen, Ara’lon, the entire Night Fae Covenant, are doing what is necessary to save as many lives as possible. The difference between Ursoc’s arrival in Ardenweald, and then the drought, is palpable. You can hear Ara’lon breathing hard, suffering exhaustion and worse. Its likely he’s been starving himself of the anima necessary to live to feed it to those under his charge.
What we’re seeing in Ardenweald is basically first responder/triage. You can’t save every life, but if you don’t act out of fear for losing one, you’ll lose them all.
The denizens of Ardenweald are facing the unprecedented end of their own existence, and yet we don’t see them stealing anima to prolong their own existence, but carefully harvesting anima to restore as many Wild Gods as possible before Ardenweald dies and the cycle of reincarnate is broken forever.
The Night Fae are singularly selfless out of all of the Covenants. They’re giving up everything to save as many lives as they can. They’re giving up their own existence, their peace of mind, their oaths and promises, their very way of life, all to save as many lives as possible.
The true evil here is the Jailer, Sylvanas, Helya, etc… anyone in league with the Jailer.
I wish I could give this many more upvotes. And this is why the Night Fae are my Covenant of choice. The raw emotion that I felt watching them, as well as what I saw drawn onto their faces and said through their voices, makes me love the Covenant that much more. I want to help and protect Ardenweald, and I will do everything in my power to do just that.
The Maw. Souls and their anima used to be divided between the various SL realms by the Arbiter. At some fairly recent point, they all started going to the Maw instead. The lack of incoming anima has bad effects on the rest of the Shadowlands which they refer to as “the Drought”.
Exactly when and how the Drought happened is part of the Shadowlands plot and hasn’t been revealed yet AFAIK, but it’s widely speculated that the Jailer and Sylvanas are involved, and that they may have spies in some or all of the Covenants as well.
Nah, fam. You can’t say anyone who says “Starve Ursoc, but make sure Hakkar and Dambala make it through the night” isn’t either evil or grossly incompetent.
Imagine you have 10 people including yourself and each day you have less and less water. You’ve tried searching for more, but there is none left.
Eventually your water resources aren’t enough to sustain all 10 people. Eventually someone has to kick the bucket so everyone else can have a minimum amount of water.
If you watch Star Trek enough, you’ll see an overriding theme of “we’ll save people if we can, but if we have to sacrifice someone to save everyone else, we will”.
There is an episode of TNG where Deanna is trying to pass her bridge officer test, and this is literally what she has to do to save the ship (it was a holodeck thing).
I would point out that’s a case of making the tough choice of putting those under your command in danger in order to complete the mission/save lives. Those who join Starfleet, the military, police, etc. sign up for that knowing that they can be called on to put their life on the line to protect people. The Winter Queen’s not sacrificing her “soldiers” to protect the mission, she’s sacrificing the mission: the very souls she’s there to protect, preserve, and nurture. Miles O’Brien signed up for that, but Keiko and Molly O’Brien didn’t. Ursoc didn’t sign up for that.
If you want to put the best possible spin on it, a better comparison would be a triage doctor on a battlefield determining who needs care soonest, who has the best chance of surviving their wounds, and who is too far gone to be saved. There even used to be a quest back in Vanilla that took you to Theramore, where you had to save a certain number of patients before too many of them died. I don’t know if the quest is still there, but back then you had to complete it to get Artisan First Aid.
That doesn’t make it palatable (decisions like that are not supposed to be), but it’s a better comparison. She’s still deciding which souls deserve to exist and which are unimportant enough to vanish into oblivion (so far as we know/are being told. It’s not like they’re just being sent into a form of hibernation). Apparently even Ysera, once a dragon Aspect and Guardian of Azeroth, is in the great scheme of things an insignificant soul, only afforded a new life by special request of the guy who gave up Ursoc’s chance at rebirth.
It makes me wonder who are the souls that the Winter Queen has determined are worth preserving.
They’re sacrificing souls so that ones that are the most important can survive. This is expressly shown in that they brought back Ysera over Ursoc to prevent the end of Azeroth.
I’m going to assume you’re talking to me, though I also acknowledge you could just as easily simply be responding to the original post.
I did pay attention, and I saw how she wasn’t going to bring Ysera back until after Ara’lon pleaded for her to do so, making the valid point that “some must be sacrificed, but some must be saved. If we forget that, all that will remain will be empty shells and sorrow.”
I was replying to the OP, and whether she had to be convinced or not, it still happened. In the end, she did the right thing. That’s not what an evil character does.
Later, she even helps Bwonsamdi despite knowing he’s probably up to something tricky.
