But she also wasn’t in her right mind, having been warped by undeath even without the soul-split. If this counts as a mitigating defense for Jaina purging Dalaran and trying to drown Orgrimmar, it should count for Sylvanas too.
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It doesn’t and it doesn’t.
Never mind how far removed imprisoning people and putting down those who fight against it or going to drown a population center and then not doing it is from blight-bombing a massive population center or putting the torch to a tree full of civilians and killing nigh all of them.
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Attempting to do it twice and being prevented twice before changing her mind, you mean.
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Going to do it and not doing it.
Exactly.
“Attempted to do multiple times” goes considerably beyond “going to do.”
If Sylvanas had attempted to blight Gilneas and Garrosh had found out about it and stopped her, you wouldn’t be giving her a pass for that. Don’t pretend you would.
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It doesn’t to any reasonable person, because it never crosses the threshold from “going to”, to “do”.
Nice fanfiction, but we’re talking about what actually happened in the story.
And as the story goes, Sylvanas did it.
It does cross the threshold, though. She pulled the trigger and set the wave in motion. Twice. She did all the same things she would have done if Orgrimmar had been destroyed, and she did not stop herself from doing anything that would cause Orgrimmar’s destruction or do anything to prevent it from happening after she had set it in motion. The only reason it didn’t happen is because Thrall intervened.
That makes Jaina morally guilty of the action, to any “reasonable person.” That is way beyond “She thought about it but didn’t actually do it.”
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It doesn’t, because she doesn’t do it.
It is literally impossible for someone to have done something that they did not in fact do.
You’re basically comparing an apple to an apple pie and saying they’re the same thing, it’s really ridiculous.
Which I never said she did.
I said she was going to do it, and didn’t do it.
Seems like you might have been arguing with a straw man this entire time.
If I fire a gun at you twice, miss with one shot, and the other misfires, do you call it good because I decide not to take a third shot?
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Irrelevant, in this scenario you wouldn’t ultimately have pulled the trigger.
She did though, Thrall blocked them going through
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She did unleash a wave toward Orgrimmar to drown it. Twice.
She did nothing to stop the wave from drowning Orgrimmar. Twice.
Only the intervention of another person prevented Orgrimmar from being drowned.
Jaina is morally guilty. Twice.
If “She was going to do it” includes “She actually unleashed the wave and did nothing to stop it,” then there is no moral difference between “she was going to do it” and “she did it.”
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Alright then, she’s morally guilty.
And by extension so is Sylvanas.
was anyone saying Sylvanas wasn’t guilty as hell regarding Teldrassil?
Literally anyone trying to pin it on Arthas.
Because Arthas being bad isn’t any excuse at all for anything she did, and Arthas shouldn’t be punished for her actions.
Or her depression for that matter. Depressed or no, she had agency, and used it to do what she did.
However if Arthas hadn’t done onto her what he did, she would not have been the person who committed those actions. There is no consistent interpretation that condemms her and gives him a pass at the same time… especially when Arthas as the Lich King is so much the same character as Arthas the Petulant Prince.
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Which doesn’t matter, because Arthas isn’t her and she isn’t Arthas.
Arthas doesn’t get a pass, tho.
He still killed her, he still raised her corpse, but he’s not responsible for what she does when she has autonomy, when she has agency, once more. Those actions are solely hers, and none of it can be upon Arthas placed.
All that he is responsible for is what she did while under his actual compulsion, because at that point she actually couldn’t resist him and had no autonomy, making her in effect a tool.
One of the unfortunate things about Sylvanas’s story is that SL DID undercut her agency, in a manner of speaking. But it’s more of a meta story thing than being able to put it on Arthas.
The whole soul-split stuff that got introduced with Uther recontextualized Sylvanas’s entire postmortem existence away from being someone who represented “continuing onward in the face of trauma” and going “actually no, part of her psyche was forever trapped in that moment and she’d never be able progress”.
I figure the reason why the character is written as insisting she still made all of her choices is because a ton of players were still waiting for her to get punished, and her possibly squeaking by with an insanity plea after everything would utterly enrage them all.
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This is not true. Every evil sylvanas committed can be squarely placed on Arthas shoulders. He made her what she is. Without his action none of her evil would have occurred. This does not absolve her of responsibility though.
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Then nobody who does anything evil is for it responsible, because it is all only possible through creation having been brought into existence by whatever flavor of dogma you wish to believe.
Because existence made everything what it is, thereby liberating every villain from responsibility for their actions.
Which is absolutely stupid.
Why you people are so wont to contort yourselves into moldering philosophical pretzels trying to pin the actions of an individual with agency and a will of their own on somebody who at that point had no control over them is beyond me.
But it gave me the chance to say moldering philosophical pretzels, so I can’t say it’s all bad.