That still raises the issue of why they would easily join the ones who killed them in cold blood.
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Agreed, but I think we were supposed to just accept the “We are forsaken” explanation. Nothing in-game raises questions about it; it’s just that players don’t find it convincing (and I’m not saying I disagree).
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That’s been a very murky area since Cataclysm when Sylvanas started raising people from undeath and using them as shock troops in Silverpine. Blizzard says that when people are freshly risen that they’re so filled with grief and anger that all it takes is directing that at an enemy but that in itself conflicts with the ethos of not meddling around with people’s free will. If you’re manipulating someone to do something when they’re emotionally vulnerable, that is compulsion, and it’s not ‘free will’. Giving them the option to off themselves, wander out into the woods to die, or join the Forsaken isn’t much of a choice at all as most people will seek self preservation over destruction even when circumstances are terrible.
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Has this ever shown up in game since Cataclysm? I can’t remember seeing it apart from that one incident.
It seems likely to me that someone at Blizzard goofed and they just papered it over with an explanation after the fact. Wasn’t that the same zone where they had to retcon the Dalaran mages into ex-Dalaran mages, because otherwise they broke lore?
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Because it was either that or the Maw?
They could run away, like others have done.
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Now you’re learning the difference between rhetoric and action. Not everyone’s latter lives up to the former.
The official reason seems clear enough. They felt that they had been betrayed by Elune. They were getting back at those who hung them out to dry more than anything else.
Now there are three main responses to things.
- Makes perfect sense. Then you have no problem.
- Would be reasonable it Blizzard had developed in any way rather than have it suddenly happen. Then I think you need to “back fill” in your mind.
- Just doesn’t work for me in any way. Then you pretty much just out of luck. You aren’t going to find a more acceptable explanation because there isn’t one, Blizzard. The only thing I can see to do is to just move on.
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It hasn’t happened since then technically, but it was also never made non-canon or anything of the sort. I have to imagine Afrasiabi or Kosak were the ones who wrote those quests, both of which had an idea of Sylvanas contrary to what other people seemed to have of her.
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I’d say they’ve soft-decanonized it by never showing any newly raised undead in a frenzy again. (This happens with a lot of things in WoW.) Like, didn’t Zelling get raised onscreen without turning violent?
Possibly, or it might have been delegated to someone lower level who didn’t know the lore and probably didn’t have time to research it, since we know Cata was super-rushed.
There’s been no indication that this is the case. You can still go do those quests. Those were never stated to have not happened, just that Sylvanas used their emotions to turn them into weapons immediately after raising them and Blizzard apparently does not view this as a breach in free will, neither slavery nor imprisonment either. Apparently.
Zelling didn’t turn violent but he was also not being murdered at the time. He died of natural causes. Apparently if you’re in the midst of battle, it’s easier to raise somebody into undeath and turn those emotions from the battle into a weapon.
We just haven’t seen the Val’kyr raise that many undead during battles since then. Sylvanas didn’t put Val’kyr on the front lines very often after she had to sacrifice a few of them.
But the Forsaken quests were not. The Forsaken quests were some of the most well done and had a lot of attention paid to them.
As a newly raised Forsaken though, you generally have to deal with some who “came back wrong”.
There are a lot of bits of weirdness left in the game that represent an idea the devs had at some point and then were just left to quietly die. The further back you go, the more of them you find, and Cata is pretty far back at this point. I won’t assume this is still canon unless they show it again going forward. 
We just don’t know enough to say why the quest was written the way it was, I guess. It could have been added or changed at the last minute, it could be that Kosak or Afrasiabi wrote out the main storyline and someone else finished it up later, or, as you say, it could be that Kosak/Afrasiabi wrote that quest to reflect a personal view of Sylvanas and the forsaken.
This isn’t what the official explanation for that quest describes, though. The ones who “come back wrong” are going to stay that way, while this quest supposedly shows a temporary state that eventually passes.
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I have no doubt they wanted the Night Elves be mind controlled.
Nathanos was literally shouting it in the Night Warrior fight. “Muhaha you will serve us too Tyrande muhhaha”
But after the player outcry they decided to come up with this frenzy explanation to have it both ways.
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I don’t agree with this sort of stance. Nothing else that I can think of has been ‘soft decanonized’ from this particular era. We can’t assume that this is the case for things we don’t like that are inconvenient to our interpretations. Maybe the Forsaken are sometimes just hypocrites? Aren’t we all?
They wanted to use Scourge motifs because Scourge are cool. They wanted Sylvanas and the Forsaken to be the Scourge 2.0. When she was asked about what separated her from Arthas she didn’t say that she wasn’t Scourge, she said that she “serves the Horde” the implication being that there is not a difference in methodology just in goal.
We saw that coming into fruition in the War of Thorns when they wanted to retell the fall of Quel’thalas with the Night elves as High elves and Sylvanas as Arthas. You see this all the time in Blizzard writing, they just reuse stories over and over again and think it’s kino writing because ties back into cycles. Do you get it? It’s like poetry, it rhymes.
And as far as I can tell, the Teldrassil burning thing was Afrasiabi’s idea. Which makes it more apparent to me that Sylvanas doing this Scourge-y stuff was his idea. He said as much in interviews, that people got the wrong idea about Sylvanas and he had been writing her for 15 years and knew her better than anyone. Afrasiabi was also behind the whole Garrosh executes a commander for bombing a druid school thing, because he apparently wasn’t on the same page with the rest of the writers about turning Garrosh into a villain? I think that’s a cop-out honestly but I think we’re just laying all the blame on Afrasiabi here at this point.
Oh, and I almost forgot until just now, we did see the whole resurrecting thing in Andorhol too. The Alliance have to fight some of the farmers they trained that have turned against them. So it wasn’t just Silverpine, it also happened in Andorhol. So it’s not just a fluke in one zone, it’s something that they intended to be a part of the new Forsaken identity going forward from Cata.
The problem here is that people didn’t want that to be the identity and chose to ignore those facets of the lore, because it was inconvenient. It’s easier to just say that Blizzard are not very good writers, never have been.
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Or you know, the lore should have been all the darkfallen night elves went back to the Alliance. I hope the darkfallen realize the Alliance have had undead for almost 1-2 decades now.
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You don’t have to. I’m just giving my own opinion, not trying to say you have to agree with it.
Lots of things have been quietly forgotten over time. I’ve written elsewhere about how the meaning of undeath has changed since the early days of WoW, for example.
Serious question: how do you tell the difference between characters who are supposed to be hypocritical and characters who are accidentally made hypocritical by inconsistent writing?
Do you have quotes to back that up, or are you speculating?
It’s possible. I wouldn’t be shocked if that was true. But I don’t think we can say for sure with the information we currently have.
Someone may have intended that at the time, but it’s never been followed up. I don’t assume that it is still intended now, more than ten years later, when a lot of the people who worked on Cataclysm aren’t even at Blizzard anymore.
Well, yeah, that’s a given 
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So everyone agrees Sira is the best thing ever? I think that sums up the thread.
I only wonder how Blizzard can make her escape the clutches of the boring kaldorei and their alliance, to create some fun.
I like the cut of her jib.
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i can only tell one warden apart from any of the others, and that’s maiev
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I’ll take option 3. If they wanted revenge against Elune, they should’ve wanted it against the Forsaken as well. That would be like wanting revenge against a police officer for not getting there fast enough, but not the actual criminal.
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