Honest Question: How Evil are the Forsaken?

Lore Story Forum
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So, to get in the mood of Halloween, I got me some pumpkin cider, put on a few creepypastas, and levelled a Forsaken. The ambient spookiness was pretty great, and the new customization options are :ok_hand:. Now, I haven’t touched Forsaken content since Cataclysm, and even then I did it on a Blood Elf, so this was my first time through as an undead.

I read Before the Storm, and, if memory serves, a lot of the Forsaken there fit the bill I had for them: a people dealt the worst hand by fate, doing their best to survive and support their allies, with a dash of chemical warfare sprinkled in. Vellcinda Benton struck me as a grandma figure, and there was that one dad who just wanted to get back with his family.

And sure, I knew the Royal Apothecary Society were all about their Blight, and Forsaken had little-to-no hesitation to drop it where ever to win a battle. Again, fit the bill.

But, doing the Tirisfal quests, it seemed like a fair amount of the Forsaken NPCs where all about “Blight everything.” Like, waaaay more than I expected, almost all of them. I thought that’d be isolated to the R.A.P. and maybe some commanders in the military. However, my takeaway from Tirisfal was aligning yourself with Sylvanas meant going all-in on that whole “death to the living” thing.

What sparked all this was my girlfriend doing the death knight order hall campaign. She got to the part about resurrecting Sally Whitemane and commented that there’d be no way Sally would be willingly onboard with that. Sure, that’s the Ebon Blade, but, of course, we’ve seen similar things with the Forsaken Night Elves shhhh. But, resurrection into undeath seems to give a non-insignificant amount of people “evil”, or at the least “warped”, mindsets.

So… I guess I’m having a hard time reconciling the Forsaken as “a band of lepers trying to make the best for themselves” and “chemical warfare the world”. Is it just that Forsaken society is very diverse? Or is it different writers? Or both? Or, are the characters one in the same? Is Vellcinda a grandma and wanting to blight the world at the same time? Am I missing something? Or just over thinking it? Anyways yeah! Would love to hear your thoughts.

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Welcome to trying to figure them out. Their PR has always been at odds with how they actually act. Remember Theresa? It seems like the average civilian isn’t so bad but anyone above “cockroach vendor” is a maniac.

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they are a diabolical evil race, the horde counterpart to gnomes

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There used to be some lore that suggested the longer a Forsaken lived, the closer they came to reverting to being mindless Scourge once more. I just don’t remember if this was RPG lore or not though. If not, well, I imagine the more, “Evil,” Forsaken might be closer to that point of going mindless once more, though I don’t think that’s how it was portrayed.

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They are Addams Family evil. Mostly harmless and misunderstood, but you wouldn’t let them dogsit for you.

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The ironic thing about the Sally whitemane becoming a death knight story is it actually leads into how the Light can warp a persons thinking.

She was so powered by the light it would bring her back from the dead over and over and it was only when she was raised as a DK it cut her off from it allowing her to regain some sanity.

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why do they keep genociding and invading other lands then

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It was RPG lore, but it also made it into the game with this quest:

https://wow.gamepedia.com/The_Chill_of_Death

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At least one of the Forsaken going “Blight everything!” was a Scarlet Crusader raised by Varimathras and appointed to the post of Innkeeper…

She and the Royal Apothecary Society are among the worst followed by that narcissist claiming Dalaran was named after him.

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Multiple authors is the biggest culprit, in my mind, and a lack of solid direction post cataclysm. We have questlines like Warden Stillwater where they kill their own if they go too far, but that is backed onto quests where you gleefully do the very kind of thing you just killed Stillwater for. They have a strong patriotic streak as citizens of Lordaeron, but then they also seem at times to be nihilistic and apathetic to their former lives. There is no given narrative that provides a synthesis for these portrayals, the reader is left to interpret it as they see fit.

You can find Forsaken lore to support most conclusions that you want to reach, be that about their personality, society, or very constitutions. A recent novel implied they were too frail to clap their hands, but in the expansion that novel depicts we see them as terminator-like soldiers who can be put back together after being cut in half, and as an army fit to terrorize the Night Elves. They are a mishmash of a lot of different sources and competing themes, all stirred up beneath the shadow of their use as a villainous plot device when the story demands.

They remain contentious because they are so diversely portrayed, but if you give them a chance you can enjoy them, as I do, as a bunch of tough, stubborn posthumans coming to terms with their altered bodies, minds, and world.

And the aesthetic is just amazing. Bats, spikes, and glowing green slime? Goth trimmings? Gallows humor, creepy stillness, and mad cackling? I signed up back in classic and though there have been rough spots they’ve never stopped giving.

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It’s hard to really get a sense of any of the races after, say, Cataclysm, because of how the writing changes and starts to become less cohesive in a worldbuilding sense… not that Warcraft ever really had good worldbuilding but there was a fairly decent consistency in terms of the races and their themes, if not necessarily the stories, from about WC3-Wrath. Even big old retcons like the Draenei felt more… authentic, before Cataclysm, nuanced, fleshed out. And the Forsaken are no exception to this.

I would say that they’re dark, but not evil, they’re just shackled to the writer’s obsession with metal themes and ‘morally grey’ things that has been slowly building since Cata, and this coupled with the simplification and sanding away of various themes of every race, this has made them more one note, and that one note wears a lot of black, kicks puppies, and collects sharp objects. I’ve said this before, but the writers tend to have a different ‘vision’ of a lot of the races than we as players do, and this vision isn’t always in keeping with what a heroic or at the very least not-evil faction is. They have a bias towards the Horde, especially towards Orcs and Undead, but it’s not a bias towards our idea of what those races are. Which causes them to have those groups win big and do all sorts of questionable things, and then backpedal and sweep things under the rug because they’ve realized those races are supposed to at least somewhat be good guys.

In essence, they’re victims of the writing in the last eight or so years, as much as Orcs and Night Elves and Draenei have been. They’re not evil, they’re dark, or should be, moody and conniving and cunning, questionable but still useful and seemingly have their allies’ backs. The role of the conquering evil zombie army just doesn’t suit them.

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People have pretty much encapsulated it here. They’re not evil, they’re just dark. They’re kind of messed up from dying and coming back, being monsters but still cognizant of who they once were. So they try and cope with it best they can, and try to forge their own path.

I think as the nuance has been taken out they’ve been hurt bad by it, since they’re a race that pretty much needs that nuance to make sense. They first joined the Horde out of convenience, since the Alliance was never going to let them live otherwise. It’s worth remembering that the Alliance were generally willing to turn a blind eye to the Scarlet Crusade, who kept the undead problem at bay and were quite popular with the humans, even if they were rampant human supremacists.

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The worst part is… what do they even do with those lands? They don’t need to eat, they don’t need water, or air, they don’t need sleep. They’re just kind of being selfishly evil.

I mean like dang, instead of contaminating undercity like crazy for years after taking it. Grow some crops for the rest of the horde and maybe even alliance so they aren’t starving or struggling.

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Wha-? The Forsaken are proud productive members of society!!!
There is at least one farmer in Brill, who walks around selling mushrooms, (his title is “mushroom farmer”). Additionally, they have mines, blacksmiths, and every other important trade on Azeroth.

As far as “crops” go, though… would you buy grain from the undead? A bit, prejudice, I know, but I sure as hell wouldn’t.

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You make a good point, the last time sketchy people started distributing grain from Lordaeron it didn’t end well.

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Sure there might not be as many food crops around, but you still need reagents to make concoctions and elixirs. And those need to be grown from somewhere.

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The answer is: it’s less of a set number and more of a scale, and it’s somewhere in the middle.

The Forsaken are inherently individuals, complete with their own beliefs, outlooks on life, demeanors and agendas, which comes in conflict with other people within that society. The means in which they even carry on is also in dispute.

I think the Sylvanas mask is iconic for the Forsaken, not because of who she was, but because it’s a shattered mask, which represents quite perfectly their fractured society, as well as the shattered illusion of a just world, or a peaceful one.

If I were to chalk it up in DND, I’d say they are not good or evil, but Chaotic.

Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral and Chaotic Evil all describe a great deal of NPCs in the Forsaken story.

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It’s definitely a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. Different writers have definitely viewed the Forsaken differently (and imo Golden does it terribly). They seem to run the gamut of good and evil considering you have individuals like Alonsus Faol and Vellcinda Benton on one side and then the R.A.P. and Lord Godfrey on the other.

At the end of the day I’d say that being an undead dramatically alters the way you see the world and your place in it. These lofty ideals of honor and fairness carry virtually no weight anymore, and the world seems much more cruel and pointless. I’ve heard that the shadowy magic used to reanimate the dead makes the undead less prone to happy sunshine-y feelings but it could just be the knowledge that you’re a walking corpse saved from being a mindless murder machine that served your patricidal prince.

Also it’s worth noting that the Cult of Forgotten Shadow is very highly revered in Forsaken society and that it places a premium on personal willpower and one’s ability to affect the change they want in the world around them. Kinda ties into their racial ability called “Will of the Forsaken” where any Forsaken can, through the force of their sheer willpower, shake off charm, fear, and sleep effects.

I’d say good touchstones for average Forsaken characterization are people like Lillian Voss or Commander Belmont. They’re very jaded, ruthlessly pragmatic, a bit pessimistic, but still with an ethical framework that’s more arbitrary to them. There’s nothing that’s necessarily morally off-limits as long as you deem it worth the consequences.

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I don’t see the Forsaken people as evil, some of their leadership however has been…morally questionable. They certainly are not exactly a chipper people but their dark humor is part of their charm.

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I steal candies from kids and jaywalk constantly so yeah, pretty evil

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