I never said she was. It is quite possible to love someone and not like them or enjoy their company. A lot of people do not understand that.
And of course, you can parallel that with Sylvanas’ “love” for the Forsaken.
How Sylvanas feels about the Forsaken has been up for debate since WC3. Though, it really sparked in Cata. I think at the very least, we can say she loves them the same way someone might love a new car. Someone who loves their car also takes care of it. Changes it’s oil regularly, washes it regularly, drives economically and carefully to avoid damaging it in an accident and minimize wear and tear.
When we say that person “loves” their car, do they really? Or are they just taking care of it to maximize it’s use? It really depends. There are some factors we don’t really know. It could be strictly utilitarian, or perhaps the car has some sentimental value, either under the circumstances of it’s acquisition, or just developed over time.
Is one real love moreso than the other? Well, that is a semantic argument and it doesn’t really matter. In either case, Book or Show, Cersi feels such a way toward her children. Sylvanas feels such a way toward the Forsaken. The depth of which is not entirely defined, but the desire to preserve and protect is still there.
The horde didn’t do anything wrong. It is the incompetent writers taht forced them to do stuff that they didn’t want to do at all in the first place. It is pointless villain batting and it needs to stop.
Just because something happened that you didn’t like doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The Horde has done horrible things.
The sad thing is that from what I’ve seen on the board, I don’t think most NE players are enjoying hating her now. They’re just raw and angry and they want her gone so that feeling will stop. Or they think it will.
I agree with that, but only up to a point. I think one of the big problems with her writing at least since BfA (and it may have started earlier, but it’s hard to pinpoint where) is that it has drifted away from being able to say that about her.
I feel like that whole concept of “character in the other faction who we can love to hate” got weakened because of BfA’s polarization.
I think Sylvanas was the best example of that type of character up to and during Cata: She was evil to and effective against the Alliance, so Alliance players wanted her head - but she was too helpful for the Horde to want to get rid of, had enough sympathy that she wasn’t a clear-cut villain to them, and was too clever/sneaky for even her counter-Horde actions (such as using blight despite orders) to ruin her position.
So, she got to be the position of being a dark-to-evil (with just enough sympathy to dance on the knife’s edge of being a villain) force in the Horde, who the Alliance could hate (without the story shaming anyone for it), but whose actions didn’t paint the entire Horde with the same brush (shown in various quests to both Horde and Alliance).
BfA threw her off that delicate balance and right into the deep end of the villain pool, while also removing the plausible deniability that had kept her darkest actions from staining the rest of the Horde as well. And they didn’t even make a deep story about it, just a shallow MoP-with-serial-numbers-filed-off one that I have not seen a single person be satisfied with.
And in doing so, it’s increased calls for other villains-to-other-factions to also get turned into full villains and trashed, because if it’s happened so stupidly to a fan favorite just to make her a loot pinata, why shouldn’t it happen to those other annoying people I want to punch?
I’d figured that Jaina was being set up for this role when the Purge happened: Something terrible and 100% evil to one side, with just enough reasons and sympathy for the other to only verbally condemn her for doing it, and done independently by the one character so as not to make the whole faction complicit.
But then the story went “nah, everyone should love Jaina” and made the Horde work with her anyway while needling them for not liking her.
And then, Genn and Stormheim! Another action that was evil and unprovoked and downright petty and stupid to the Horde, but had enough sympathy for the Alliance to understand even if they disagreed, done independently by Genn (even if Anduin was an idiot for putting him and Rogers both on that mission). I’d thought/hoped that BtS would add a scene where either Anduin thinks to himself that Genn is too popular for attacking the Forsaken for Anduin to officially reprimand him without losing power himself, or where Anduin tries to officially reprimand Genn anyway and the other Alliance leaders stop him because they don’t want to allow the precedent for a single Alliance leader to be raised above another - either way, to give Genn that same curtain of “too clever/sneaky for their counter-Alliance actions to ruin their position in the faction”.
But then the story went “nah, Genn forgives the Forsaken and totally isn’t hateful to the Horde anymore, he’s just Anduin’s big fluffy uncle” and removed a big chunk of what made him a good love-to-hate character for the Horde.
So, now Jaina and Genn are in the most annoying spot for Horde players, who can’t love to hate them because the story keeps popping up with “but… but they’re good people! And you drove them to this! Why do you still hate them?”
In a very understandable reaction to this hypocrisy, many people are simply getting angrier at Jaina and Genn, because the story is trying to hide (not even resolve) all the reasons the Horde was given to justifiably hate them. And in doing so, combined with the usual polarization and steadfast partisanship that BfA has whipped up in the playerbase, these one-faction-villains are portrayed as either 100% villain or 100% misunderstood hero. (I’ve seen a few good beginnings of discussions, but generally some angry partisans jump in pretty quickly and everyone flees back to their ideological bunkers.)
I think both the in-story whitewashing and the in-forum reduction of these characters (though the latter is almost entirely fueled by the former) is disappointing, because these love-to-hate characters fill a really important function in the story:
They’re the reason why each faction can keep distrusting the other without forcing one whole playable faction to be villains just for conflict to make sense.
They’re the reason that a player can still mostly respect the opposite faction even while still fighting them, because these love-to-hate villains in that faction both let the enemy faction’s heroes be heroes without getting stained by the evil stuff, and lets the player know why the enemy is fighting them, because their faction has its own villains.
They’re the reason why the factions don’t just merge even though we group up every time a third major threat rears its head.
So, while it’s easy to take one of these love-to-hate faction villains and make them take the plunge into full villainhood, because the writers can point to past actions to say “look, they’ve done evil stuff all along!”, I think it does a real disservice to the story, the factions, and especially the players.
If Sylvanas was going to be ripped from her throne as queen of the one-faction-villains and made into a villain to everyone, it should have been handled a lot more carefully to avoid reversing those 3 points up above. They didn’t, and it’s caused horrible effects in the the story, caused a backlash against other one-faction-villains, and left lasting fissures in the playerbase.
Etheldad is pretending that the one guy who still works at Blizzard has assumed Direct Mind Control over Nu-Blizzard, which has strictly and only built the Alliance up as an unstoppable powerhouse and often completely writes the Horde out of the story – unless the Horde is needed to be a villain, that is.
The band still had unspoken Dev endorsement via said video being broadcasted at Blizzcon. Even if it wasn’t intentional, that’s how its perceived in the real world, why the Blizzard CEO had to make a public apology, and its why Public Relations officials and Lawyers have so much clout. This is why only sanctioned representatives can speak to the public as the “face” of a company.
Its likely why there was no 2012 Blizzcon; PR and Legal probably had a sit-down with the devs, and had to draw up new policy guidelines that required C-suite approval.
I think it had less to do with Corpsegrinder saying it than Blizz playing the video as part of Blizzcon.
It isn’t like they gave the guy a mike on stage then regretted it when he started shooting off at the mouth unscripted. They played a video that they fully knew well what it said.
And CEO’s don’t issue formal public apologies without the clear understanding that someone messed up on their watch.
No, the dev(s) that set that up did agree with it. It was already well know what the video said and they had already edited the audio to censor out the swear words.
It wasn’t an accidental mistake but an intentional mistake on Blizz’s part. Or at least one dev with the authority to set that up during Blizzcon’s closing ceremonies on the main stage.
