How was Illidan any different?

Lore Story Forum
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Say we were to get any random Demon of the burning legion, and forcibly cleanse them of fel and make them be normal mortals again. There would be no problem, but when Xe’ra tried to do the same thing to Illidan, its seen as some evil thing.

Context is important, Illidan was in fact, a demon, who’s methods of doing things were only slightly better than that of the Burning Legion it self. The stuff he did in Outlands was completely indefensible in terms of morality, what good does it do if you’re fighting the legion if you’re out enslaving people, corrupting them, terrorizing them, and mass killing them.

Xe’ra’s choice to purge the demon out of Illidan was the morally correct one.

To me, defending Illidan’s “Rights” sounds as absurd as if some one were to say during the movie the Exorcist “That priest is bad, demons have rights!”

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Illidan was something of an anomaly. Under normal circumstances whenever a mortal becomes a demon, much of their personality is replaced by a lust for power and destruction for their own sake, meaning that cleansing that amounts to erasing the imposed identity to free the mortal that’s underneath. In the same vein, when Illidari finish their training, they literally have a demonic soul taking up residence inside them and always trying to supplant their own identity. So changing a normal demon back into a mortal form straight-up amounts to cleansing all the nasty thoughts and motivations that make demons so generally malicious and arbitrarily cruel.

Illidan never changed who he was, and his misdeeds were never arbitrary. He did terrible things, but they were all squarely calculated actions as part of his preexisting fixations and priorities rather than a result of him becoming a demon. He didn’t do any of those things because he was a demon. Becoming a demon was just a means to getting them done, not the cause, so cleansing the fel in his case wouldn’t really be “getting rid of the evil” in him. The fel didn’t actually drive him to act as he did.

Xe’ra also wasn’t doing it out of morality; she was doing it because as far as she was concerned, fate dictated that his conversion was the correct (which isn’t the same thing as morally right) course of events that needed to happen in order to fulfill the specific prophecy that informed her actions. She could very well expect him to continue doing the exact same sort of things he’d done up to that point; he’d just be doing them with the Light instead of the fel.

Unlike the Illidari, Illidan never had an actual demon in him to remove. He never went through the rituals they did to become demon hunters; he was just outright empowered directly by Sargeras, then further empowered by consuming the fel energies that the Legion had pumped into the Skull of Gul’dan. He had no demonic personality embedded in his mind and soul, so in spite of his power being fel, Illidan’s mind and personality were still 100% his own. Consequently, he was driven entirely by his own personal ambitions and goals from before his transformation, and wasn’t governed by the generalized desire to inflict destruction and suffering that sets in when demons are normally made. He did such things anyway, but it was because he deemed them a necessary evil, not because he actually derived pleasure from causing harm as most demons do.

So unlike purging the fel corruption from a normal demon, had she cleansed him with the Light, she wouldn’t have been creating some better, more stable and morally upright Illidan. We’d have just ended up with the same callous, ends-justify-the-means Illidan, ever willing to sacrifice as many innocents as it takes to attain his goals. He’d just be forced to use the Light to do so. We already know awful people who do awful things can use the Light to do them if they really think they’re right, and few people believe themselves more right than Illidan Stormrage.

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Just to begin, remember this; we actually killed Illidan for his crimes and the only one bothered by that was a crazy Naaru.

But let’s be real here. Illidan wasn’t being cleansed to become a normal night elf. He was being Lightforged to replace the fel with Light.

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Illidan was nothing resembling a good guy and his actions were anything but justifiable, but forcibly lightforging someone is far from “the morally correct choice.” The Light is not an inherently good force, and the only real difference it’d have made if Xe’ra had finished the process would be that Illidan could be controlled by her - which we have no reason to believe would be a good thing. Given her rampant fanaticism in that moment, I’d wager it wouldn’t be.

I’m not gonna lose any sleep over us killing Illidan or him killing Xe’ra.

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This. Also, the current writing team seems really fascinated with echoing previous plot points with characters. Last time Illidan was yanked up by a godly force, it was Sargeras, and he forced fel energy into Illidan, who did not have the capability to fight back.

This time he did, and I’m absolutely not gonna mourn Xe’ra.

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Regardless of whoever thinks Illidan was right or wrong, Illidan’s power that he sought and he obtained and amassed was about to be taken from him and be turned into what would essentially have been (to him) a slave to another higher power. To him, Xe’ra was just another Sargeras.

Not excusing his behavior or choices, btw. Just saying why Illidan did what he did.

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Xe’ra isn’t lightforging Illidan because “he’s a bad guy and I must redeem him”. She’s doing it because she thinks he rocks and all the stuff he did was awesome and she wants him to keep doing those things under her control.

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“No one suffered as much as Illidan when Cenarius told him he wasn’t that great at druidism compared to his brother”

My draenei standing there who lost her all her family and loved ones to the Rise of the Horde and had to recover their trampled bones from the “Path of Glory”.
“yeah getting told you’re 2nd best at something sounds rough”

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Not really, Xe’ra completely took away the free will of the choice, and as we know the light isn’t exactly good. It just is.

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I don’t think the Naaru are evil, but I do think Xe’ra in both her incarnations has become evil by slipping into fanaticism as a result of her obsession about prophecy and control.

I’m personally glad such a Naaru was introduced in canon because it not only shows that Naaru don’t just blindly follow one path but in fact have their own thoughts and desires and, in the case of Xe’ra, can stumble and fall just like everyone else.

This seems to be directed towards a singular purpose true, but how it’s done seems to be different for each of them.

I really hope the developers don’t use Xe’ra to ultimately paint the entire Light as some morally bankrupt dictatorship. The whole ‘haha gotcha, good was evil all along!’ trope has been beaten to death over the past decade in particular and just isn’t new or, at least to me, remotely interesting anymore.

Call me naive, but I like the idea of a force of good existing without some morally bankrupt catch to it. Not everything has to be a corrupt facade, when did we become so depressingly jaded?

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I think the man difference between Sylvanas and Illidain remains to be seen.

It depends largely on whether all the later patches actually have us working with her against the Jailer, replaying key moments in her life from her perspective, and ending it all with her smirking off into the sunset after having ultimately achieved her goals and teaching us all a very special lesson about fate. All without every really showing any remorse.

Which I don’t think is an impossibility. They’re both popular enough characters.

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The only reason that a Naaru would justify this would be under the fact that demonic energies cloud a person’s better judgment, and if they were thinking without that handicap, they would certainly desire such cleansing. It’s a very arrogant and flawed assumption, but in most cases it is probably true.

Illidan was shown, or at least we assume, to be able to control the demonic impulses such that they did not cause him to act in ways he wouldn’t otherwise (he was already being a murderhobo before he became half demon). As such, with his reason intact and still refusing, it is arguable that no one should have that being lightforged should not be forced on someone who can in their right mind say no (although I’d say it’s a hard thing to argue that it would be fine on demons too, especially races that were not originally born of the twisting nether)

And I think the main point of this scene is not about Illidan, but about Xera and the Naaru. It’s meant to show us the Naaru’s flaws, and imply that they are less “good” then they might first seem, because almost every earlier interaction with the Naaru has seen them supporting a cause of righteousness and good.

Whether Illidan was deserving of being purged of demonic power is somewhat irrelevant to the scene, considering the whole purpose of it was a gift and not a punishment.

I believe the scene was more meant to show that the Naaru are actually a bit more ruthless than we might have assumed in the pursuit of their own cause, and how quickly they discount the word of any naysayers because they believe those naysayers simply do not know any better.

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Where the hell did you get this from? If you remove enough Fel from a demon, you liberate it from Sargeras’s, and the Burning Legion’s control. It however, still remains a Demon, if it dies it simply returns to it’s home dimension of the Twisting Nether and eventually respawns.
Demons are only “mortal” in the Twisting Nether.

No, Xe’ra did NOT try to do the same thing as what you said.
Xe’ra only sought to replace the Fel in Illidan with Light, completely controlled by her. That is the same thing Sargeras does to the Demons, completely control them with the Fel power that he commands.

Light without any shadow, is the same blindness, as Darkness without any light.

Only one difference exists between those two, if you are badass enough, Sargeras will offer you a place in the Legion, if you are not, or you refuse, you die, as proven with the Aldrachi.
Xe’ra doesn’t even seem to care about that, as proven with the Lightbound.

Yes it is, so why are you completely ignoring it?

Xe’ra’s “choice” and attempt to purge the Fel from Illidan, translates to an act of a sexual offense, that I can’t state outright on this forum, but most can figure out what it is, and is in fact a horrible crime. As well as the very obvious religious undertones attached to it.
There is nothing “morally correct” about it.

In light of the context of the aforementioned situation, that quote comes off as very disturbing to me. Especially when you consider what that particular sect of Priests, are typically associated with nowadays, the Demons don’t really seem all that bad now.

Oh, and the Exorcist movie sucked, and it still does.

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Considering the (highly-polarized) Lord of the Rings series is still hailed as one of the greatest works of fantasy in literary history, I would disagree here. If you really look at what’s long served as the “traditional”–and yes, as Mayerling rightly pointed out, highly-religious–fantasy narrative (Light = Good, Dark = Bad), the idea that “not all Light is good, not all Dark is bad, it depends on the individual” is actually pretty recent/progressive.

Also, Battle for Azeroth.

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I mean scarlet crusade is a clear indicator of the light being a force that was always morally ambiguous.

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The Scarlet Crusade is a group of fanatics who want to slaughter anything that isn’t human, living, or imbued with Light.

Example A: The fact that their organization is 100% human.

Example B: Lilian Voss

They’re not even remotely “ambiguous” when it comes to standards of morality.

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Using them to reference the lights ambiguity

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It should be fairly obvious that Mr “WHAT HAVE YOU SACRIFICED” is a hypocrite, considering that Xera was doing to him what he did to the mages of the Moon Guard.

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That’s…only a slightly-accurate comparison. The quest you’re referencing very specifically portrays Illidan as being surrounded by demons and in the heat of battle, with harvesting his Moon Guard soldiers as being a last resort. Sure, he doesn’t show remorse at the end (and the shouting match between him and Ravencrest is something that should have been done better), but it’s not like he immediately went into battle thinking, “Ok, who gets sacrificed first?”.

Contrast that with Xe’ra trying to force her will upon Illidan when he’s just as capable of slaying demons using Fel magic as he would have been with Light magic.

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She wasn’t trying to make him “normal” she was remaking him to what she thought He should be… one of her tools. And more importantly, without his consent.

Barry Goldwater would have had your answer. As any Demon Hunter would paraphrase. “There is no such thing as going too far to destroy the Burning Legion.” The Legion IS in the wholesale apocalypse buisness after all.

One of the fundamental rights is the ability to make one’s own choices. Xe’ra was intending on abrogating that right.

And she’s no nice and gentle cookie herself. She’s almost completely uncaring about how she affects others. Her first contact with you the player character, puts you in a coma for days. Her subsequent contacts are agonising as she’s forcefeeding you information in a data load too intense for your brain to take in safely.

It becomes quite clear that Xe’ra has no more concern for mortals than demons do, less in some cases. Xe’ra is the Dark Kosh of this story.

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