Calia should have been a real Forsaken

Lore Story Forum
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One of the biggest issues with Calia, beyond her ideological differences, is that she simply is not forsaken. She is being pushed as a forsaken leader, but her aesthetic and state of existence is entirely opposed to the forsaken as a faction. And the solution is simple: She should have been made into an actual undead.

To supplement this point, Nezmith created this amazing art of what an undead Calia could have looked like, as well as a concept of an actually rotting Derek, given how long he was at the bottom of the sea. All credit goes to them, they did an amazing job on this and I’m just posting it here for link/image purposes.

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Calia’s design freaks me out beyond reason. It’s her ashy gray skin in contrast with her intact body. She looks like a properly embalmed corpse, like one of those cadavers medical students use.

I assume that’s the point, but good god, is she unpleasant to look at for me.

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Calia’s first concept was rather… unsettling. Might be the feet. :thinking:

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I still don’t like the Menethil aspect but I think that’s a really cool fan redesign and gives her a neat “Castlevania boss” vibe, in my opinion.

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I’d argue that the Forsaken had that dissonance with their leader from the start. While everyone was fine with Sylvanas because she was Sylvanas, I always felt is was weird that their racial leader was a pretty well preserved undead elf while everyone else was a rotting corpse.

Honestly, I feel like if her story was exactly the same, but she came out looking like that first concept Breakcog provided, there’d be less issues with her because she’d suddenly “be” Forsaken because she looks like them.

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I think that they would need to change her origin story a bit too. Even if she looked like a Forsaken, the whole raised by Anduin and a Naaru part would still be problematic.

Perhaps, if she had never been around as a living human in WoW (i.e. she was killed back in WC III) and was raised in the slot where Derek was in the BfA story, or her corpse was found in a mass grave in Southshore and raised without the Forsaken knowing who they were raising.

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Fantastic design! I love how Calia’s feet are hidden in her dress, reminds me of a lot of WoW’s female ghost designs. I can picture how that might be animated to float. The lanterns are sick too. Great work from Nez.

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That would probably be better to be honest. I was just pointing out that her story could have been exactly the same but had she was not well preserved they’d be less of an issue with her.

Which honestly doubles back to a weird thing with Blizzard where important undead characters need to be somewhat recognizable in order to have any significant importance.

There was no need to give Nathanos, for example, a well preserved body. But here we are. I am willing to bet if they decide to make Voss the official Forsaken leader, she’s going to get a new pretty model.

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I’d argue that shows that the problems with Calia are based in other areas than her level of preservation.

Which, unfortunately, means that just making Calia look more like a “real” Forsaken wouldn’t fix her either.

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To be fair, I think Daiza has a point. It’s always been a running point (as far as I can remember, at least) that it’s a little weird how Sylvanas didn’t really look undead other than some purple make-up. I chalk it up to just being a legacy thing from people being more forgiving about it since she came from Warcraft 3.

This could have been cool, for example.
`https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECuprlVX4AAU36r.jpg

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I think it’s a bit twofold. Part of it is that Sylvanas does match the forsaken from an aesthetic point of view, aside from the rot (at least until her CGI model). She’s got dead skin and the dark armor, shadowy abilities, etc. But she was just the only person not limited by in game models. Logically, there should be a wide array of undead, from full skeletons to the player model to full intact people. And not just humans, the Forsaken should have had plenty of elves as well, of the same varying degrees.

That said, I definitely agree that Sylvanas having some proper damage would have been nice. I dislike that blizz seemingly tried to solidify some “she was untouchable” from a visual perspective with the Saurfang cut. She should have a gaping wound in her stomach, at the very least.

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Sarm: I’m not saying there’s no disconnect, but people were able to get past the disconnect of appearance. The disconnect of themes and connections is a much bigger hurdle.

PS: Not dissing the fan art. The fan art is cool. :slight_smile: Though I can’t resist pointing out that a “realistic” Derek would be a pile of soggy ashes, as he shouldn’t have a body in the first place.

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I’m honestly convinced that she’s going to be a Light-based villain in the future. If you showed me her model without telling me who she was I’d assume she was some evil vampire overlord. That’s not a design you give to a good guy.

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At this point I hope not. Unique models run about a 50% chance of dying or being villain-batted in the Horde.

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It was more acceptable because she was a different kind of forsaken. She was a banshee, but still forsaken. Back then there were a few other banshee npc around. They didn’t have their bodies… but still all were forsaken.

As the OP mentions Calia isn’t forsaken she is a completely different thing, and that the issue a lot of us have with her.

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I agree this looks better and it would suit the forsaken theme a lot more

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I always find it odd that we’re seeing this kind of pushback against Calia Menethil because she’s a bit different than the Forsaken, yes she hasn’t experienced their life in the past twelve or so years since the fall of Lordaeron.

Yet no one ever complains that Turalyon is too different than the Lightforged Draenei, despite being an entirely different race than the majority of the Lightforged.

The Forsaken experience is not the same for each Forsaken. The first ones faced way more hostility than the more recent ones. Forsaken risen in Cata had a home and a faction, they were not universally hated like the ones fresh from the grave after the fall of Lordaeron.

Also what exactly is “forsaken”? OP said she isn’t Forsaken. Are the recently risen undead in Cata, not Forsaken since they may have never been scourge and were just corpses risen by Sylvanas? What about Thomas Zelling? Was he Forsaken? He wasn’t like the original Forsaken who were scourge.

I’m not sure you can really define what a Forsaken is to the point that you can exclude Calia to the point that she isn’t Forsaken. Forsaken literally just the faction of undead. They have humans, elves, and other things. The only common thing is, they are all dead.

Calia Menethil is dead. She isn’t coming back to life. So she’s already checking one of the boxes to being a Forsaken. But what else does she need? She was never a former member of the scourge, but neither were many other Forsaken.

Can someone please clearly define the Forsaken experience that she’s missing? Is it rejection? Calia already faced rejection in Arathi from several of her own people. But even if that’s not enough, rejection seems to be the only common theme of the Forsaken. Because you have humans were scourge, humans who never were scourge, and most recently Thomas Zelling, who isn’t even from the same continent as the rest of them.

I think since Sylvanas was leader, the Forsaken were turned into a hivemind with absolutely zero expression of individual thought. Their entire story was to further her story and thus the Forsaken were always the side characters to her plot. That meant, they were this evil race of zombies who threw blight around.

Now in the most current lore, we’re seeing that isn’t the case, the Forsaken is home to individuals with unique thoughts and feelings, which aren’t always evil. Calia is just another one of those people.

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People pretty explicitly complained that a human was leading the mythical Army of the Light. And Turalyon, unlike Calia, has a thousand years of lived experiences with the Lightforged.

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What? People absolutely did voice concerns about that. Why it wasn’t as vocal, I don’t know. My guess is that nobody knew lightforged draenei were ever going to become a thing in the first place. And Turalyon isn’t replacing Velen as leader of the vanilla draenei in the process. Plus, I’d highly doubt forsaken fans would care that much about what the draenei do.

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The Forsaken have been around for less than fifteen years.

Lordaeron fell in year 20.

Cataclysm was year 28.

Before the Storm was year 33.

Forsaken are 13 years old. The kingdom of Lordaeron has existed for hundreds of years. Calia has more experience, like the vast majority of Forsaken, as a human of Lordaeron than being a Forsaken.

Why do we keep sweeping the fact that Forsaken were Lordaeron humans longer than they were Forsaken, under the rug?

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