Smallest devil’s advocacy on this but I don’t think we know for certain if Sylvanas actually helped CAUSE the drought and the sorting system breaking… But she still aligned with the jailer anyway so the point is admittedly academic as far as her character is concerned.
But yeah, I think the point behind the exchange is to make Sylvanas look like a huge hypocrite for criticizing someone else for needlessly throwing away lives, which isn’t helped by the fact that the story still hasn’t explained exactly what this new jailer-inspired afterlife is supposed to be, beyond a platitude.
Yeah, I’m mostly generalizing for the sake of not over-verbalizing, but I figured the same. I know she herself likely didn’t cause it, but she’s definitely capitalizing on it.
“Um, saw you didn’t carpool to work today,” Sylvanas coos at the Winter Queen. “Just so you know, you’re killing the earth, sweetie.”
Sylvanas then climbs in her car that propels itself solely by shooting gas fumes out the back, with fifteen mini fridges in her trunk that she’s gonna plug in all at once, and rides off to go club a seal.
a baby seal. With a blight-bat which also deploys chemical, and biological agents onto the seal, until it dies- before she raises it from the dead to attack it’s baby seal friends.
This is odd, because usually blue backgrounds are arguing that BFL was a win for the Horde. I think Sylvanas was criticizing Anduin’s hypocrisy more than his violent actions.
Come to think of it, Sylvanas’ entire MO seems to be based at least in part on doing things that aren’t just terrible, but perverse and corrupting as a means of psychological warfare.
It’s not enough for her to simply kill people and take their land, she needs to also convince to them that it was never rightfully theirs anyway. It’s not enough for her to simply beat Genn and Crowley, she needs to humiliate them as well by messing with their families. It’s not enough for her to simply conquer Stromgarde, she needed to raise Galen and have him wield Trol’Kalar as well. It wasn’t enough to just conquer Teldrassil, she needed the world to watch her burn it.
Conquer Hillsbrad Fields? Nah, burn it to the ground and build a slavecamp for the survivors on top of it. Victory at Andorhal? Not without also ruining Koltira’s friendship with Thassarian. Her strategy against the Kul’Tirans? Raise their honored dead and dangle them in front of them to mock them.
It’s actually one of the reasons that a lot of her actions seem to come off as even worse than the Scourge’s at times even if they’re smaller in scale. The Scourge acted largely as a cold, unthinking and brutally efficient machine. Sylvanas was eager to demonstrate the kind of unnecessary cruelty that one can only get from free will.
It reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the Exorcist where the Priest question why the demon was doing all these horrible things for no apparent reason:
How exactly is Anduin hypocritical there? Because he’s participating in war after Sylvanas started the war? What exactly is he SUPPOSED to do, just roll over and let her kill them?
She criticizes Anduin for “calling for peace when it suits him,” but he is literally always calling for peace. He just got back from the Gathering, an organization that was politically unpopular in his court, that he put together because he cared about the prosperity between the Forsaken and the living - not, mind you, “when it suited him.” OH! And that was also an event that Sylvanas herself sabotaged and destroyed, so there’s that too.
It’s the same deal as her criticizing the Winter Queen for reacting to a tragedy that she helped to cause - she doesn’t have a leg to stand on against either of them, so neither of her snide comments really land. She’s trying to guilt someone for defending themself against HER attack.
You’re saying all this, but Sylvanas doesn’t care. This is your reasoning, not hers. Her only reasoning is that the universe was unfair to HER. Not her mom, not her brother, not Nathanos, not her loyalists, not her people, not the Horde, just her.
Everything has to be about her.
This is actually why I love Sylvanas so much as a villainous character. She’s not simply a mustache twiddler - she has a lot of cold and calculating depth to her that makes her seem like a real and credible opponent. Fighting Sylvanas is a frightening prospect, because Sylvanas is going to try and strip you of everything.
It’s just when the narrative frames this as a character we’re meant to root for (which it doesn’t anymore) that it falls short.
Probably because it isn’t going to be anything. The Jailer and Sylvanas are in the middle of a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum. The Jailer seems to want Death to be the only remaining power. But as we’ve seen Death requires Life to survive. No Life means no new souls, which means the flow of anima stops and the Shadowlands wither. The reason he was sealed in the first place was probably to stop him from doing this. He’s either too stupid, too arrogant or simply doesn’t care enough to realise the full implications of what he’s doing.
I appreciate that you’ve used the events of the PTR to express your opinions without relying on the same tired and exaggerated anti-Sylvanas talking points dredged up over and over again that seems to dominate this thread and the story forums these days.
I’m still calling the Winter Queen suspect. She has no problem using targeted killing to preserve her dominion, but she just straight up hands over her sigil? And why does it seem like Sylvanas and the Winter Queen know each other? That’s really odd. Sure, the Winter Queen may have been told about Sylvanas from some dead Night Elves, but how would she know anything about who is or isn’t loyal to Sylvanas? What a strange fight to pick.
“Haha, I’ve successfully brainwashed my loyal subjects to permanently die for me but oh whoops I’m just going to hand over the key to the Jailer’s release because of a few hostages”
Also in BFA when Malfurion would’ve killed her had Saurfang not panicked and axed him from behind…to which she gives off a rather lame “Hah! I was about to finish him”. Yeah Sylvie, sure you were.
Show or prove to be right, reasonable, or justified.
I think it’s reasonable to question The Winter Queen, in how she decides who is sacrificed and who is spared, because it serves no morally accepted concepts of “justice” that she spares evil souls at the expense of good souls. Her vague comments about how it “serves the balance” doesn’t justify why she lets good souls die and evil souls be reborn.
In a morally just system she would save the good souls before she saved the evil souls, but no system like that exists in Ardenweald… and I know because that’s the covenant I chose and have played through the whole campaign.
There’s also the issue of the Drust, who were somehow ‘cheated’ from being part of Ardenwealds system and they claim that Ardenweald was “stolen” from them.
