To get back to the pre-expansion book for BFA, by the way:
I am holding out hope that these were still Sylvanas’ feelings and that the things we are hearing now may have explanations moving forward. I understand that the Jailor is supposedly the big bad of Shadowlands now, but until about five months ago, we’d never heard of him. He didn’t exist. And I feel like that might have been the case until fairly recently, as well.
When trying to understand the lore of a thing, we are left with a lot of missing pieces. I feel like those missing pieces are something that somehow changed Sylvanas during BfA. Like, somewhere before the burning of Teldrassil and the end of Before the Storm (which is where we get Sylvanas killing her own people because they chose to meet with their living relatives in Arathi,) there is a story that hasn’t been told yet. It’s the story of how Sylvanas realized she was shackled to the Jailor. It’s the story of her realizing the choices that she made that day she dropped over the edge of Icecrown were binding. It’s why, when I keep rewatching that video of Sylvanas with the Helm in her hands, I see her considering the role she’s meant to have–wearing that Crown. I also see her choosing, instead, to destroy it rather than wear it. I have a feeling this is NOT what the Jailor intended. She was meant to become the new Lich Queen. But …now she’s something else.
It’s why, for example, we don’t see a lot of story for her in the prequel to this expansion. In fact, there is a whole lot of NOT Sylvanas in the book, and this leads me to believe that the reason for that is because there are things going on in her head that would make this next expansion completely understandable and destroy a lot of the mystery for the players.
It is one of the reasons that I continue to hold out hope that we will, eventually, get that middle story–the one where we begin to understand that Sylvanas is fighting her own shackles to the Jailor which she discovered–where her previous intentions and feelings (as noted above by Adarria,) are no longer important for obvious reasons. It will help to explain why Teldrassil occurred; perhaps there was something there that was …important. A tether. A tie. A person who told her about her relationship with the Jailor and the Valkyr. Honestly, I don’t know. I’m just hoping for something here that will explain it better than “Rawr! Kill all Alliance. Funnel souls to the Jailor!”–because frankly, …that doesn’t make sense to me at all.
And yes…I’ve probably forgotten something here (but thankfully I’m not a lore writer for Blizzard!) So please feel free to throw wrenches into my suppositions. I’ll happily listen. I know one of them could be something to do with Stormheim and her relationship with the Valkyr that comes out there, and also during the questlines in Legion. I didn’t do a lot of the quests that involved them, and definitely didn’t see that expansion from the Horde side in any meaningful way; so, there might be more about the Valkyr there that I’m missing.
All in all, though, …I don’t think we’re seeing the whole Sylvanas picture here, and I think that’s intentional. And hopefully we’ll get some good stories out of it–eventually.