With the soundtrack " Sylvanas Free Will", her saying she’s setting us all free, and Blizzard said the faction war is morally grey, there seems to be some kind of revelation coming to “justify?” her actions. What’s the best way for such a plot to go? Maybe there will be a choice for players to accept the justifications or not, like the siding with Saurfang choice. Is a siding with Jailer or Arbitor choice too big? (I’m assuming the Arbitors orders will be shown to be flawed and oppressive during the story, and the Jailer might try to justify a rebellion) Or is complex plots too much for Blizzard now?
I’m not sure you can. She committed two world powers to a War designed exclusively to cause as large a death toll on both sides as possible; and also instigated an act of genocide against one of the races. There is no real way to “validate” her actions, without invalidating everyone else.
As for her “justifications” … I have no idea? Her core motivation for ages has been avoiding her eternal torment in what we now know is the Maw. So, perhaps she sees the entire Shadowlands and Arbiter systems as unfair as a result. Thus, wishing to uproot it, at any cost?
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The likely line, if it goes that way, is that she has been taking extreme steps to try and fix something about the afterlife to save herself/others from the fundamentally unjust nature of the Shadowlands. She’s always been a hold-nothing-back, no-holds-barred character and if the goal is to offer some kind of positive context for her actions it would necessitate that she did so in service of a goal worthy of such lengths.
If she did it all to fix something truly monstrous (which the Shadowlands do look to be) and there is some kicker like ‘and all the people I killed get to come back to life afterward’ then it could make a twisted sort of sense, to her, that she wanted to get them all killed (which they wouldn’t have agreed to) only to use that to right a wrong. Especially if they get to be restored to life afterwards. Blizzard loves to pull from pop culture and there’s a weird Endgame resonance to that.
There’s no making it ‘good’, but I can see them trying to expand on the logic of why she did what she did. Which would be good, because right now, as much as people whine about seeing too much of her we are… brutally light on any actual character development/exploration from Sylvanas. She’s barely in the expansion directly, which is a big part of why the Horde’s experience is so awful.
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They shouldn’t bother trying. An 11th hour twist to justify blatantly unjustifiable behaviour as some kind of ‘gotcha’ moment on the audience is bad writing. Just throw her into the dungheap of wasted characters and move onto something good.
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There’s one direction only such a plot can go- up it’s own butt. Which would fit with my personal suspicion that important sections of the development crew spend much of their time curled into balls so they can immediately sniff their own farts and croon “sO bEaUtIfUl!..”
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I guarantee that the plot twist will be that the Arbiter was evil the entire time and the Jailor and Sylvanas basically overthrew her or something.
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I do want to point out there are other “Hell zones”. She might not actually have gone to the maw.
yea… this would be a very dramatic turn, things like that polarize the fanbase and i dont want any more polarization, i got enough crap from bfa i dont think i can handle another plot twist for the sake of cheap drama.
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I think the best way, and probably the most likely given the setup in Shadowlands, is that the Jailer was going to do this one way or another. Shadowlands has made it abundantly clear that not only is Sylvanas not his only ally, she is not his strongest. He has multiple gods at his disposal, Sylvanas was just his way in to the Alliance-Horde conflict.
With that in mind, I’d propose the idea that Sylvanas is doing all of this to paint a target on the Jailer’s back. With the knowledge that the Jailer was going to do this, and her options were work with him or hell, she chose to work with him, and aid his plans, which are indeed terrible, but with the caveat that she does it in ways that sabotage him. Notably, her actions in the prepatch. From what we know of the xpac, there is no reason for Sylvanas to break open the sky and lead us into it at this moment. Were she genuinely helping the Jailer, she would merely wait until the covenants were defeated, and then break the Helm and destroy reality.
Which likely means that she broke the Helm/Sky, and kidnapped important leaders (something Genn specifically points out) in order to lure us into the Shadowlands, and garner our attention to these issues, including the Jailer. How would she know that we would be able to help? Well, because at an interview at Blizzcon, it was stated that Sylvanas was the first Maw Walker, and that we are the next one after her. She seems to be the only person who knows the capabilities of someone who can escape the Maw.
It would honestly be the first genuinely smart plan in the game, because no matter how tricky a villain is, nobody beats the power of the murder-hobos. As for what happens after she reveals that she was subtly helping us all along? Who knows. The justification would likely be “I had to play along convincingly, it was the souls of this war vs the souls of all reality”. And honestly, her not wanting to do this but having to would fit better with the character shown in A Good War, Before the Storm, and everything before that more than ‘sudden evil universe-destroyer’ does.
I can just hope that it’s a redemption in her eyes, and in the eyes of those who would want to see her justified, like the Forsaken/Horde, and not in the eyes of people like the Night Elves. For all its missteps, Blizz did rightfully have Tyrande and Malfurion leave Illidan’s redemption arc with a less than ideal tone, rather than fully forgiving him, and I can only hope they continue that trend.
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If this were the case, Sylvanas launches her campaign to gain the Jailer’s trust to shank him in the back and fix the ‘machine of death.’ If every soul in every timeline in WoW is being shoveled into the Maw, all the murder becomes small cosmic potatoes.
Would it be satisfying? That’s a different story…
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The only way i would be fine with this is if we find all of this in a notebook of hers after we nuke her to oblivion and i would point my finger to the writers for forcing me to go trough all this meaningless crap.
It seems youve given some thought in finding some sort of compromise, you see the main problem i have with all this story is the pacing… time. They did their big moment with teldrassil and we’ve yet to see it pay off, it has been around two years any resolution will be stale for someone emotionally invested, any twists like the one you presented would leave a sour taste to… well a sizable portion of the playerbase mainly the ones wanting revenge, ffs i got my enough of feeling sad and sympathy i just want the beach to pay and be done with it, i just want her gone so i can go kill the jailer.
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We also have to keep in mind that maybe she was originally meant to be morally grey, but plans changed with a new person/persons in charge. It may be an obvious thing, but we do have to remember that her story bears all the markings of one that’s been pushed and pulled in a bunch of different directions by different people at Blizzard with different visions of where she should go. The same thing happened with Garrosh.
She doesn’t make sense because maybe her writing actually just doesn’t make sense, and that’s all there is to it. I think this became evident when all of the BfA lead up lore hinted at a morally grey War of Thorns, and then she burned down Teldrassil.
Character arcs change for sudden reasons that we will likely never know. Players who have been here since Garrosh should have accepted this harsh reality by now.
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Simply: it shouldn’t.
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So does this mean that blizz is going to justify genocide. That’s not going to send a good message. Sadly it’s likely given their interviews where they said that Sylvanas isn’t evil.
It’s going to be a blast for the Night Elves for sure.
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Is that you Elesana?
That’s gotta be a tongue in cheek reference to all the free will memes if that’s what her soundtrack music is called.
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Why do people assume that every unhappy night elf poster is the same person?
I already said in another thread that I’m not a US player and using this character to post here, and also showed that I don’t have any character on my account called like that
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Imagine basing a theory on a song lol
Because it sounds exactly the same as her posts.
Genocide justified, Sylvanas redemption, Night Elves screwed over. It’s all there.
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Haven’t read much of it as I started reading the US forums like 2 months ago, but isn’t that something more people should be upset about?
I mean Blizz has admitted it in interviews, I don’t know what other proof people want
We had our moments and largely let go of our rage because it wasn’t very healthy to hold onto it over a work of fiction.
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