"I Feel Lied To," Post-BfA Version

Lore Story Forum
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Don’t mind me I just emerged from the grave to say that I got tricked by BFA being an absolute mess into trying to guess the twist/reveal that would make it all come together. :clown_face: mode from me.

Any of my 5head theories were dead in the water as soon as it turned out Sylvanas can lie inside her own head to trick the reader. Truly an unstoppable villain.

The argument can be made that Sylvanas’ actions make sense given her previous narratives, but what can’t be said convincingly is that they have been satisfying. There’s a billion words hammered out on this forum attesting to the fact that it wasn’t. And that, at least, I think is cause to lament the stories we did not and will not get involving actual character development from her.

So yeah, I don’t buy the ‘planned in advance’ thing any more. The story only makes ‘sense’ in the context where it’s a rushed hackjob. These quotes Pellex fetched for us were a painful but cathartic reflection on the expansion. With luck, it indicates that there isn’t a master plan and that there’s the agility among the creative team to try and restore some productive Horde storytelling. Who knows, maybe we’re getting some Garrosh rehabilitation this expac, they did him real dirty and it would be good to have some closure in that regard.

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posting to reminds myself to download the entire thread again.

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I don’t often go the “someone should be fired” route, but if they DID plan this mess ahead - a main storyline that wrapped up 2/3 of the way through the expansion, and two major lore elements (Azshara and N’zoth) each getting used up in a single patch - then the person responsible definitely isn’t suited to their job. It’s like planning a train wreck.

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I think Danuser should be ousted from Blizzard

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Danuser and all the others that made Sylvanas a mary sue, denied the Night Elves any justice or resolution and call genocide not evil.

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And I think Golden should be ousted from blizzard for her constant good guy do no wrong writing, but that’s not rational thinking, No One person at blizzard controls the direction for everything story related, it’s clearly a team effort where key people possibly have ideas of how things can go and then they all kinda just jam things together and hope it goes well.

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Hah, where do I begin?

When I saw the first cinematic for BfA, I was a little cautious, but excited to see how an expansion about total war between the Alliance and Horde would play out. That the Alliance appeared to have attacked first intrigued me, since it’s a chance of pace from the faction’s usual passive, ‘lie back and think of Lordaeron’ attitude to hostilities with the Horde. Then, of course, the prepatch came out. Yep. Pops the p That was the only beginning of this wild ride.

8.1 gave me hope for the Nelf narrative in BfA; Teldrassil would be avenged! Ashenvale and Darkshore would be reclaimed! The Nelves were returning to their WCIII roots! …or, at least, that’s what I thought. Sure, it was an improvement on their depiction in the War of Thorns/Elegy, but yeesh.

I expected more from the plotline involving Azshara, who was built up as a menacing, badass figure for many years. Nazjatar deserved to have a whole expansion to itself, rather than be stuffed inside a content patch for You Think You Want a Faction War, But You Don’t.

Also, if I never have to hear the words ‘morally grey’ within the context of this game’s story again, I’ll be a happy woman.

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She’s thrown insane temper tantrums before. She’s acted on blind emotion, in ways that have run counter to her objectives before. Her little temper tantrum in War Crimes when Vareesa “betrayed” her? Her need to kill and revive Vareesa at all to build a relationship with her, because she can’t truly love or trust anyone she doesn’t have complete control over? Her torturing of Arthas in WC3, rather than just killing him? Her core motivations of revenge and fear? So cold and calculating.

Regardless, Sylvanas has at least portrayed herself and become a person over the years that cannot trust those she does not have complete domination over. On top of it, while we may not have known the destination, this route of her being a selfish nihilist who uses others as personal objectives then discards them when they cease to be of use has been in the cards for her for over a decade. So then, to answer your question, why would she start a WW?

Simple, because the Bulwark Against the Infinite became obsolete. The Alliance of Convenience ceased to be Convenient. The question as to whether she’d abandon them both like she did her Arrows when they ceased to be of sufficient use for her objective was answered. We don’t know what her end goal is, but her desire to avoid the maw clearly evolved from just “Create the Biggest Meatshield” comprised of people she cannot allow herself to ever truly trust or love.

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I think what you mean is people who are invested in the Character and therefore like the character, and want more stories about the character-

-versus people who are not invested in the character, care nothing about the character, and do not want stories about the character.

There wasn’t a problem with this when Sylvanas was confined to her own story like she was in Vanilla to Wrath(gate). Those not invested in the character simply ignored the character and avoided the stories about her.

They changed this is Cata by making her the villain of the Worgen storyline. Then they just kept making her the villain of more and more storylines until now where she is the villain of every storyline.

This didn’t increase her fanbase because these players never cared for her to begin with. It just increased her “hater base” cause the character now needs to exit their stories in a permanent and preferably horrible and/or demeaning way.

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So while the “Is Sylvanas 100% evil?” topic is endlessly fascinating, as always, I finally found a statement I’ve been looking for–the implication that BfA was going to end the faction conflict for good. This is the interview that really turbo-charged a lot of speculation that Blizzard would do away with Horde and Alliance altogether with the Fourth War. (Ha!)

Note: The article has a lot of other interesting stuff about their plans for gameplay, some of which also may make you feel lied to. But the part below is the main part of what they said about story.

From November 9, 2017:

https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-answers-some-of-our-biggest-questions-about-world-of-warcraft-battle-for-azeroth/

PC Gamer: For a long time the conflict between the Alliance and the Horde has been ignored in favor of dealing with external threats, like the Burning Legion. Why is now the right time to respark the animosity that started it all?

Alex Afrasiabi: We feel the Alliance-Horde divide is foundational and fundamental to World of Warcraft as a franchise and as a story, but we danced around it for a very long time. We’ve had run-ins, we’ve had close calls, but we’ve never been able to finish it—to have that resolution. We’re coming out of this expansion, Legion, and the world is not in a great place—the players and the factions themselves are not in a great place because there is all of this old animosity that hasn’t been resolved. It’s time to resolve it.

In terms of a threat, one of the things we talk about is, in Warcraft, do you take part of what you kill and become it? When we look at WoW, we’ve done so much with so many big external threats. We’ve taken out Old Gods, Dragon Aspects, Elemental Lords, the Lich King, Illidan—at least once, and pretty soon maybe a Titan. So when we talk about what’s the biggest threat in this world, is it the Titan or is it the Dwarf Paladin that put a hammer in that Titan’s head? We’ve got tens of thousands of almost-living gods [players] now running amok on this planet with very different ideologies. That seems insane but that also seems awesome to me. And that’s how this expansion was born.

As these battles begin to play out, what are the consequences for one side or the other?

Afrasiabi: The loser is deleted, they’re just done [laughs]. It depends on the content type, right? Warfronts, for example, are a type of large group PVE, and maybe there’s some things we can do in the Warfront maps that will reflect your side’s victory or whatever. But in the world itself, we will absolutely see the outcome of the big kick-off events of this expansion. As we push forward more and more into where this expansion is going, we’ll probably see more stuff happening around us as a result of this big faction war.

Ion Hazzikostas: We are willing to permanently change the world where it makes sense and where it helps push that story forward. Actions need to have consequences.

But after the almost world-ending events of Legion, won’t the back-to-basics conflict of Battle for Azeroth feel less dramatic?

Hazzikostas: Uhh, did you see that intro cinematic? [laughs]. Honestly, this is war. What’s even more terrifying than a single big bad is a vast army of world-destroying forces like Alex alluded to.

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Funny, I came out of Legion with a bunch of other hunters, monks, paladins, and druids, from both factions, working together for the greater good because the factions were too dumb to get it together and save the world.

Going from “let’s put aside our differences and save the world” to “eh, let the world bleed out because woo, faction pride” felt absolutely jarring.

Man, someone really should have told whoever keeps writing this single-player plot that all of the other player-heroes actually exist in the world! We might have gotten a better story out of it.

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Her temper tantrum in War Crimes was also out of character. Christie Golden never “got” sylvanas. And it shows. I honestly should’ve preempted the whole “war crimes” argument but I expected people to be smart enough to draw a line on their own from that OOC characterization to BFA’s considering Christie golden went from a contracted author to part of the story team in the space between War Crime’s publication and BFA.

Also, the rest of your argument is trash. You type somewhat eloquently but you don’t have any real basis for the things you are saying. “Her bulwark against the infinite became obsolete” lol where? This wasn’t established anywhere in the lead up to BFA. All that happened is that they jerked us around until they decided she’d leave the horde. BFA’s plot would have been way more digestable if they had told us an inklin of her ulterior motives from the outset.

Instead, they wrote her INNER dialogue’s in BtS and A good War to outright state her goals to be political in nature, an accumulation of more power. This new “serve the Jailer” stuff is a direct retcon of BtS. Direct. Retcon.

Imagine engaging with stories in such an infantile and selfish way. Lmao.

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Ever since Stormheim I’ve been expecting her to do something like this. I expected her to do the single most in-character Sylvanas thing she could have possibly done and use and discard her Bulwark; which now included the Horde by then. She has done that exact thing half-a-dozen times before. It would be out of character for her not to do it. Regardless of her reasons.

Despite what some Sylvanas fans think, you do not just kill off a fan favorite like Vol’jin and replace them with another fan favorite like Sylvanas if all you want from the latter is to fill the same role the prior could have filled; but worse and more forced. They placed her in that position to stir sh*t up, so at the very least she’s been set on this general destination since Legion.

I like Sylvie as a character, but not to the extent that I’ll ignore parts of her characterization over the last 10 years that could have lead her to what she’s done in BfA. There were other facets of her character that could have lead her other directions, I will never deny that. Its just … thats not the way Blizz went sad to say. They went with the low-hanging fruit and the EoN Iteration of Sylvie; the less-flattering Cata iteration; the War Crimes iteration; and the Stormheim iteration.

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I personally loved the plot point of War Crimes where she was legitimately happy to be reuniting with her little sister and was heart broken when she turned her down.

Granted Sylvanas was planning on killing and raising her so they could be undead sisters forever but in some morbid she was just trying to reconnect with her sister and actually be happy again.

Convinced me there was a chance there was more than Sylvanas than evil banshee monster.

Oh how wrong I was for hoping huh.

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Except for the part where she went from “I need the Forsaken to keep me from going back to Hell and I will do whatever it takes to stop from returning there” to “I’m going to become the single most hunted person on the entire planet”.

But it was her plan the entire time to the point that she lied in her own internal monologue, sure.

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Heart goes out to the players who sided with Sly throughout the whole expansion thinking there would be some kind of pay off in the end or after BFA, but no you get the same treatment as someone who is/was not a loyalist.

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I love how she never bothered to tell Vareesa that little detail. It was very “I’ll surprise her after she kills Garrosh with a little murder and subjugation to me! Wont’s she be so happy I did that, solely because I can’t truly let myself love and trust her unless I control her?!”

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The problem with that is they repeatedly failed in that duty. They were a weak meatshield against the afterlife, especially in Stormheim when Genn was just allowed to walk in and foil her plans. They weren’t exactly a bulwark that she could total faith in by BfA, and Sylvie has trust issues at the best of times. So, she apparently was talking with Helya and found a method to demigod the crap out of herself with death steroids, and all it cost her was her meatshield.

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It kinda like they promoted the expansion as a different story, because the knew at that point how badly the story they had was going to be received?

I’ve always wondered when Blizzard realized how much of a mistake the BfA story was? Sadly, “not even now” is a strong candidate. But another possibility was that it was during the first patch. But, if you think about, the fact that they knew even before hand would explain the misdirection. They were putting off the reaction until after people had bought the expansion.

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She has trust issues, but trusts the Jailer to not just chuck her in the Maw when he’s done with her. I’m sure.