Can Anduin ever become a likable character?

Not while Christie Golden has access to the WoW lore

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Anduin was an unlikable idiot well before Golden got too involved with WoW. She wasn’t exactly steering things back in Cata or MoP.

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But he wasn’t the center of attention and super important to Golden’s crusade against toxic masculinity back in Cata and MoP. He’s her pet character and the entire writing team admitted that when it comes to Alliance they have no interest so they just write humans cause it’s easier. Unless they need tragedy then they write Night Elves cause they love to kill off Night Elves.

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He was absolutely a focal point in MoP, having a significant role in every patch but 5.2 and being the reason we went to Pandaria in the first place.

No, because Alliance sadly has been painted as the golden child and will continue being the golden child.

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Then I guess the flaws he did have back then were enough to offset him? He literally is the purest boy to ever exist now and everything he does is the absolute most moral thing possible. Anything that goes wrong around him is immediately pinned on someone else.

Yep forget what it was called but I remember there being an incident of Anduins forces invading and killing innocent tauren and Baine literally justifies Anduin’s actions. The one time they had a chance to give him some flaws.

Wrong war.

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That was before Anduin became King. But you don’t have to go that far back. Anduin is just as guilty for Teldrassil as the Horde itself. If he hadn’t been a complete moron with his spies then Tyrande wouldn’t have made poor decisions based on bad intel fed to Anduin by Sylvanas.

Apologies for not getting the joke… hum… what does this means?

Going back to the topic, he needs actually “morally gray moments”
So far, he just has done perfect choices.

One would think that releasing a war criminal like saurfang without telling tyrande would have consequences.
And no, not only no one mentions the problems of releasing a valuable prisioner, but also his plan works pretty much perfectly.

Like, it is amazing that despite the fact that jaina was basically carrying the alliance war effort, in the end the one who succeded was anduin.
He got what he wanted. Releasing saurfang worked exactly how he planned. We say that sylvanas is the chessmaster? the true chessmaster was anduin who won the war with pure diplomacy.

And that is, hum pretty stupid.

Like other mentions, he needs to lose hard, face consequences for his actions, he needs a reality check, it is fine to be idealistic, but that didn’t really worked for jaina the last time. She should have influenced him at least a little, that peace may be impossible.

Maybe a new “stratoholme moment” where there is not good choice.
things like that would make him more interesting.
and please, he needs to feel more human. it is not possible that he is incapable of feeling anger.

The horde kills his people, his allyes, almost kills his auntie, almost kill him. and he feels… nothing… is this guy a robot?

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Ben is making a pokemon reference.

And yes Anduin needs to lose hard. But it needs to be him and the humans that suffer for it. Not one of the other races that have been reduced to nothinng more tham vassal states.

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oh i see, i never have played a pokemon :p.

Yes something like that would be good maybe in that way he will be capable of feeling anger like any normal human being.

the anger of not being able to forgive.
it is fine wanting peace but that doesn’t mean that you have to let your enemy do what they want and not make them pay.

This is something I’ve been curious about.

People say Anduin needs to lose and lose hard, and have other people call him stupid and incompetent and strip him of High King.

But when has that ever happened in Warcraft? A person losing a battle and everyone going back and saying “Man we lost cause you suck.”

At best, you had Garrosh calling Thrall out for leaving him in charge, but by that point it was way after he had gotten on the villain train and the moral of the story was that it was it was all Garrosh’s fault.

At best, what you’ll get is Anduin feeling like he’s done bad, and everyone else in the room saying otherwise.

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i believe that we had that dinamic between tyrande and maiev in wc3.
they both blamed each other. or at least maiev did.

When i refer that anduin needs to lose, i mean that he needs some defeats, like many if not all other characters had.

They probably intended to portray teldrassil has his defeat… and then lordaeron… but he pretty much got saved 3 times in that battle and no one mention the big elefant of the room that they almost all died because of him.

Or that it was because others put him into that position in the first place.
now the question would be, why was he in charge of that battle?

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Personally, I don’t think Anduin needs to lose. I think what would do wonders for him is to see him struggle with a situation that has no clear “right answer,” or alternatively, one where doing the right thing would cost him personally.

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I couldn’t agree more - I’ve been arguing this for a long time.

The reason that many people don’t like Anduin is that his successes don’t feel earned, and his mistakes are consequence-free, or are even just magicked into being successes (like the examples above).

Interesting characters make mistakes and grow from them. Varian, for example. Anduin just seems like he was born as the Perfect One.

And the notion of a seventeen year old being deferred to as the High King of an Alliance that includes so many characters of so much more experience and qualification is just ludicrous.

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What are you talking about? The Horde is now a league of mutually valued members led by a council of representatives. What is this “Warchief” position of which you speak? That emphasis on centralized government sounds like an Alliance thing!

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I think the problem with Anduin (in the context of BfA) is the same other characters suffered from. Anduin made mistakes in the war, as well as others on Horde/Alliance. However, in the end, all the responsibility for the war got dumped on Sylvanas’s lap. Her evil plan of starting a war to feed souls to the Maw overshadowed everything else going on. It’s not so much “The Blood War” anymore as it’s “Sylvanas’s War”.

The war ended cleanly when Sylvanas just banshee-clouded out of Orgrimmar to go hang with her new bestie (or old bestie, since this relationship started before Cata). We didn’t get to see Anduin really struggle with trying to bring and end to the war diplomatically, and try to appease people like Tyrande. The war just magically ended with Sylvanas’s departure. Perhaps if the war story was more than just a setup for Sylvanas and the Jailer in Shadowlands then the other characters could have been more than one-dimensional caricatures.

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Characters like Anduin can work, but they have to be part of an ensemble cast where other characters are allowed to be jerks/flawed. Otherwise, they can often become grating.

People may like Cyclops, Superman and Captain America, but there’s a reason why the badboys that are Wolverine, Batman and Iron Man ended up being the face of their respective franchises.

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I think one thing that would make Anduin more likable was if he took actual responsibly for his actions instead of deflecting.

For example in Before the Storm he personally gives the green light for Calia to attend the Gathering, despite knowing that her presence could cause issues to the point that he’s worried over her being recognized. He’s then shocked when Sylvanas lashes out over the fact the sister of the man who murdered and raised her into undeath is on the field. He had a hand in the deaths that occurred that day and yet despite feeling guilty he seems to deflect by talking about Sylvanas being lost.

Thus all in all the end of the novel just painted this picture of Anduin not taking responsibly and shielding himself from by blaming just blaming Sylvanas and now that I think about also Calia to a lesser extend when he confronts her after her resurrection.

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