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.