Reading all these commments makes me shake my head. Especially with the Stratholme thing. “Putting an entire city to the torch is the right thing to do.” I thought this was WoW, not Warhammer. I guess Jaina shouldn’t be blamed for the Purge of Dalaran right? She was justified in killing/imprisoning Sunreavers over the actions of a few, right?
Might as well slaughter all the Forsaken since some of them are still loyal to the queen who abandoned them. Don’t bother picking out the loyal from the disloyal, kill em all.
Besides, the Culling wouldn’t make much of an impact in the long run, other than ruin the reputation of the Menethils and further turn the people against one another. If Arthas was pardoned for it, what’s to stop him from doing it again? What’s to stop others from doing their own Cullings in Hearthglen, Strahnbrad, Tyr’s Hand, or even Captial City? It’d destroy Lordaeron from the inside out, and only the Scourge would benefit from the chaos. More bodies, more desperate locals. More oppurtunites to expand.
The end NEVER justifies the means. To think otherwise would make us no better than Sylvanas.
Not to mention the fact that early marketing for Shadowlands heavily suggested Arthas was going to have a role to play. It was even stated at one point “Arthas coming back isn’t going to be taken lightly.”
Regardless of where one stands on the many debates about Arthas Menethil (was he justified in his purge, how many of his actions post Frostmourne were his own, is he another victim, etc), I think the majority of the long time fans of the series can at least agree that he really got screwed over when he finally did make his “appearance” (I’m using that word very loosely)
All that buildup and early promotion for THAT to happen?
Ideally, I’d have had him being found in Torghast/The Maw during the events of 9.1 as yet another soul being endlessly tortured. We manage to free him, he assists us during SoD, then it all culminates in Sylvanas absolutely chimping out when the raid shows up with him as an ally.
As much as I disliked the Sylvanas didn’t have her soul “twist” (once again, using the term very loosely since it was a highly predictable way to say none of her insane crap was her fault), it could have led to some extremely interesting interactions between her and Arthas once that had happened, and it might have even made some of the Sylvanas nonsense slightly more acceptable if they drew a parallel to Arthas no longer being responsible from the moment he claimed Frostmourne.
Ultimately, I would have had Arthas sacrifice his very existence to free Anduin and save him from being another pawn of Zovaal, especially if Anduin was intended to be the Lich King 4.0 in the event that Zovaal’s plans at the Sepulcher fell through. This goes double if Blizzard decided they wanted to make the “Anduin is a Menethil” theory canon (never been a fan of it myself, but I can’t deny that it would have made future events/plotlines interesting)
Honestly, I think just about anyone with two brain cells to rub together could have come up with a better role for Arthas in Shadowlands.
i would of accepted him as a boss to fight aswell tbh.
cause why would the jailer waste a good resource like that just to make a sword for a young adult prince when arthas single-handedly wiped out the “Heroes” that tried to kill him?
Could of made em a new vessel and used em again! That’s a better use than a goddang sword!
Well, you may call it genocide but Sylvanas saw it as conscription. The Night Elves were not gone forever, they just got recruited into the Maw’s army.
And at the time Sylvanas thought that they were going to reform the entire death system so that it wouldn’t matter if you died, you would be just as free after death as you were before death.
Ok so she was wrong about that, Zovaal had different ideas but hey, no one’s perfect. We all make mistakes.
Yeah really. Tyrande sure fixed Sylvanas but good. Threw her right back into the Briar Patch … oh excuse me … the Maw … where she has a condo in Torghast and an army of Manswarn.
And now with Zovaal gone, she’s queen bee. Yup that bone head Tyrande sure fixed her but good.
Even if this was his sendoff, the characters that were present had nothing to say.
Jaina and Uther were important to his story and just sat there while Sylvanas monologued.
Not by my logic, by Blizzard’s logic. Sylvanas clearly established the fact that people are not responsible for their own actions when they are not fully in control of themselves. This means that only the Jailer is to blame for anything, because nobody did anything except what he planned for them to do. 8D Backgammon.
Let me start by saying that I do not understand nor do I support the idea of Arthas getting a redemption arc. Do not get me wrong I do in fact love that character but as a villain, giving him a redemption will just ruin him and is not needed in the long run.
Not saying it was the right thing to do but it was understandable and was a morally grey act (unlike a certain character).
Yes that was bad but it was also because his corruption had started, the Lich King was calling to him via Frostmourne and twisting his mind.
Everything here is past the corruption point.
Ehm no.
Nope. The blood elves were the most severe and If I am not mistaken their numbers are higher than the current NE population. Dalaran and Lordaeron were not genocides.
Sylvanas is worse than Arthas because the LK wanted to turn everyone into undead so they could not be corrupted by the old gods (horrible and bats^^t insane plan I know) while Sylvanas wanted to kill everyone in order to power up the blandest villain of all times to fix “the machine of death” because it’s broken. Also apparently in order to fix it they needed to brake it even more, essentially depraving countless souls of a presumably happy afterlife (we only got to see 4 out of countless ones in SL) and just automatically send them into super hell where you get tortured and become fuel, or in other words super death. For me that is worse and while both of them committed atrocious acts and while Arthas was more… sadistic in his approach at least I could understand the reasoning behind that, also he did have the whole “I got corrupted excuse”. I connot say the same for Sylvanas, presumably we are to believe that she became evil because half her soul was missing but Blizzard have not given us a clear explanation on what that actually means. The soul split does not turn one side evil and the other good, one side gets stuck in the moment while the other carries on… I’m sorry but what are the repercutions of missing half a soul, in Uthers case he lost some memories but his emotions were intact, in Sylvanas’ case there was no hint at her missing emotions or memories. After reading the Sylvanas novel I do not believe her motivations to justify the things she did or I did not fully understand them (in both cases that is bad).
Neither character should be redeemed and Blizzard have a very bad habit of trying to redeem really bad (morally) characters. Sometimes it’s better to let a villain be villain and not try to milk the audience for sympathy points.
PS
It was horrible send off given the fact that both Uther and Jaina were present in the room and had a much deeper connection to him than Sylvanas, and yet were just backround characters. Also it was a very on the nose talk down given the fact the Arthas soul couldn’t even speak. Let’s say I’m ok with the Sylvanas being the one that was interacting with Arthas, at least give us some back and forth and not “Oooh you are so bad and you shouldn’t have a legacy even though I did arguably worse things”. Overall I would have been perfectly happy (and would have preferred it actually) if they did not included Arthas at all. Like you said his story was over (and a lot of other characters that got featured in this expansion that got their stories retroactively ruin it the process) and it didn’t need to get a crappy sequel. I get that Blizzard now want to move on from the old lore and start fresh and tell new stories but you can do that without ruining the pre-established ones that people originally fell in love with.
