This may sound stupid, but right now, I honestly can’t think of any noteworthy characters in wow who have been redeemed from villain into hero yet.
There are plenty of heroes turned villains from Arthas onwards. Then there are characters like Illidan, who WE fought in tbc as a villain but who we learned was actually an anti-hero doing dodgy stuff for (mostly) legit reasons. Tbh, I actually liked that because the reasoning was good and it demonstrated that we can be wrong or at least misguided.
But I can’t think of any who have become heroes after being indisputable villains. I’ve heard that some characters in Shadowlands might be going that way, but as long as they’re still dead, it doesn’t count.
So that leaves Sylvanas. So far, her arc has been way too similar to Garrosh 2.0 and I do wish they had found a way for an Alliance character to have been the BFA villain that led everyone into Shadowlands. But, if she’s redeemed - as predictable as that is - at least it’s not a rehash of old story themes right?
I think that is a loaded question. It has a lot of baggage. Some posters will argue about what constitutes redemption. Then, we might discuss “redemption in the eyes of … whom?”. Then, is that redemption being sought in the canon, or amongst the Players?
For example :
Some might say he is redeemed, but some might argue. His case may be more of getting what was coming to him. A comeuppance. Contrition. I don’t think he is redeemed for the totality of his actions. I don’t even think that was on his mind.
But is he redeemed in canon? Do the Night Elves forgive him? Probably not all, but if Blizzard wanted to, they all would. Do some of the cooler heads on the Horde hold him accountable for agreeing to war? Who knows? We hardly ever hear from Horde Characters unless they are being built up to be the next evil Warchief.
When it comes to Varok and other veterans, I was referring to what they did Pre-BfA, redemption for their war crimes previously while serving the Old Horde.
Even Blizzard gave room for doubt about by offering up alternative povs through loyalists and Nazgrim.
Even that’s debatable, he saw his undead son as a monster because he trivialized “purity from all forms of corruption” as something he wished for his son.
If you want to know how I feel, I usually try not to root for any specific characters. I want to analyze the story by looking both sides, and from a neutral perspective.
One of the thing that interests me about the Loyalist BFA PoV was how it deconstructed Saurfang’s projection that he was the Grommosh to Sylvanas’s Blackhand. He built up this illusion that he was fighting a corrupt Warchief, from the Loyalist PoV it pushed that orc honor culture and OG Saurfang made the Horde villians… and the Horde hasn’t changed.
Saurfang was giddy to plan the War of Thorns. Had he not struck Malfurian in the back his honor culture would have glorified the destruction of the Night Elves.
Sylvanas’s plan hinged on having an honorable war and killing Malfurian would have demoralized the Night Elves enough to defeat them. The Horde didn’t have to burm the tree, but Malfurian escaped because of Saurfang. She postponed the Night Elf retaliation by committing genocide.
I’m sure they will get thier vengence on the Horde eventually.
Hard to say, at least insofar as our faction “heroes”. For whatever reason, the writers seem adamant that atrocities inflicted upon one faction by the other never be addressed, only skirted around.
Liadrin, maybe. She wronged the Light, acknowledged that she wronged the Light, spent the next few years fighting for the Light’s cause on various fronts… and then served as general for a genocidal zombie bent on world conquest…
You’re right, I had completely forgotten about the whole blood elf ‘redemption’ Sunwell arc in TBC so thanks for that! Liadrin’s story arc was all about redemption.
But that was (classic aside) a long time ago. Saurfang was more of a rebel standing up for his values. Even though he personally felt shame, he was hardly an evil villain.
Sylvanas, on the other hand, is. Blizzard is gonna have to play a delicate game of redeeming her whilst ensuring some satisfactory punishment. It would have been better if she had some justifiability but sadly that’s not the case. Honestly, I hope Kael’thas is redeemed instead. He was awesome in Frozen throne and, though chronicles explained it well, it was sad he was gone after TBC.
The game’s lore has sustained itself on a constant feedback loop of overwhelmingly negative sentiment since TFT at the latest. You can’t redeem characters in an environment that conditions the audience for maximum cynicism because good people are never successful and the setting has progressively gotten more and more miserable since WoW launched.
You want to know what WoW’s problem is? Compare it to other popular fictional settings. Your Star Warses, your Star Treks, your Lord of the Rings, your Harry Potters. What all of these other settings have in common is that the worlds that they present, while having problems for sure, are generally places that you look at and think to yourself “yeah, I’d want to live in that world” because they all present some kind of idealism or optimism to some degree in order to contrast with the threats to those worlds. The stories are richer because we have, consciously or subconsciously, decided that those worlds are worth caring about and consequently protecting because we can imagine living in those worlds and being happy.
Warcraft, by contrast, I cannot imagine the kind of psychopath who would unironically want to live in the World of Warcraft. The entire setting is so objectively miserable and filled with suffering that it’s considered too trivial to even really acknowledge.
That’s not an environment that lends itself to a satisfying redemption arc, because this is not an environment where good things happen. Only bad things happen in WoW, a byproduct of both the nature of the setting, the kinds of people who conceived it, the medium in which its presented, and the presence of a system where all of its inhabitants are mandated to think of everything in terms of permanent race war.
That’s why it’s so hard to envision a legitimate redemption story in WoW. Because this universe is so objectively miserable and the characters so unrelatable that the very idea of redemption is a joke.
I would also add that, thanks to the aforementioned nature of WoW’s systems (specifically the faction system that forces mandatory racial segregation) and the broader culture of WoW and of social discourse nowadays, audiences in general (not just WoW’s) don’t actually WANT redemption stories.
Being receptive to a redemption story requires that people are willing to re-evaluate their opinions on events or characters or what have you. It requires abandoning moral clarity and accepting the duality of man, and more importantly accepting that people can change.
We don’t do that anymore. We don’t want to deal with the kind of intellectual and emotional challenge that a well executed redemption story presents. We want the short term high provided by vindictive anger that assures us of our own correctness at the expense of our perceived enemies.