If you try to hold on to the past, eventually you will end up holding only dust.
What I see here is that there are a lot of people who don’t want the Forsaken to move forward from their past–as though they should be perpetually what they started out as being. On one hand, that absolutely fits the Forsaken as a race, but one that would inevitably be doomed to die out. Callia as a character is meant to be a move forward; Sylvanas and the choices that she made were a choice of stagnation–perpetual clinging to a victimization that she could never fully leave behind (and part of what a lot of the stories since Cataclysm sought to showcase). While many of you see her choices post-WotLK as a means of coping and moving forward, they’re actually attempts at perpetuating a cycle in order to maintain some shred of the past. She never left it behind. And when the Legion invaded, and she saw that even the greatest heroes fell, it must have been a reminder of the fall of Quel’thalas all over again. She watched her whole world fall apart, and rather than succumb to the Legion, she chose to pull back and regroup–something that might have saved more lives in her past, though we’ll never know for sure. But those moments, to me, show that she never really moved past her death.
The way it was written was poor; I will grant a lot of people that. And many of you may not like the turn, or may have felt that she was growing and changing over time. I can’t dispute what you felt or thought you saw, but I continue to see that narrative for her played out over, and over, and over again throughout the stories both in the game, and in the stories, and in the books.
Sylvanas clung to the past; Callia is seeking to leave her past behind her–perhaps because she now has no other choice (though her past certainly isn’t something to be proud of or something that, for her, is likely something that she wants to remember; there’s a lot of pain wrapped up in all of that, and the fact that she took time to try and cope with her trauma only to have everyone she loved taken from her? Yeah…I can see how maybe she’d want to reunite the undead with the living in the hopes that she might find her own past somewhere–even a piece of it). But she also wants to see the Forsaken move beyond their own trauma–perhaps in the hope that it will help her to move on from her own. She doesn’t want them to “live” with only hatreds and regrets. And I get not every Forsaken wanting to do that; I get a lot of them wanting to just say “screw it.” It’s easier to hold on to hate than to let it go and find you have nothing in your life at all.
I’m looking forward to the wars to come within the Forsaken themselves. I think that’s going to make for some amazing stories. And how to they reconcile that? Do they cast the Plague-Spreaders out? Do they embrace the experimenters and cast out those who are unwilling to do what is necessary to “survive?” There are a lot of moral dilemmas within the Horde that need to be resolved–and as far as most Alliance players are concerned, they’ve kind of just been looking the other way for a long time. Which is why there have been so many problems in the past. Maybe that’s the legacy of the Horde.
And there are -plenty- of problems within the Alliance, too; so, don’t think I’m just laying it all on the Horde. Much like the Horde, I think the Alliance has also been looking the other way since the last war and just trying to rebuild. But all that old rivalry and tension–all the bad blood and pain isn’t just going to resolve itself. And sure, we’re distracted now with a new continent and new shiny things to explore, but if we keep pretending that everything is fine, eventually we’re going to turn around and see the problems we’ve been avoiding.
And maybe it’s okay to avoid that for another 10 or 15 years in the WoW storyline. I think that might actually be the most realistic thing to happen in this game’s story in a long time. I’m just looking forward to the day when we find the things we left behind have festered and taken root and given rise to real threats–all because we wanted to hope that by not looking at the bad things they’d somehow just inevitably stop existing.
Maybe then…we can truly move forward in the world.
In short: I don’t really mind that people don’t like Callia. I think that’s fine. I think that’s, in fact, a great story. I think it allows for more interesting stories in the future, and I really hope that Bliz will take that into consideration when looking at the future of WoW.
. And Calia was like oh, I know her. 
lol bad
