My personal head cannon is the devs at Blizzard are freaking out because they realized they wrote themselves into a narrative road block concerning Sylvanas. That there’s going to be a MAJOR backlash, no matter what route they take with her. But that’s me. 
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Riiiight…it’s been a while since I read the book. Although,…I could see her wanting to kill them for just wanting to meet with their living relatives, too. After all, it will only cause them grief, as she well knows having two living sisters. grins
As for the last bit about marketing and whatnot–I don’t know enough about marketing to know what is and isn’t a good strategy; so, I can’t really offer much other than–this is what I’m seeing on my end, and what I’m hoping for. And to be fair, I think Sylvanas is an amazing character. And I definitely have ideas for plenty of Forsaken characters who will remain true to her. Just as I have several other characters that see her as well and truly damned and evil. So I can’t really empathize with the idea of people hating her, either, to know if that’s a viable marketing choice and reason to leave her out. I’m inclined to think otherwise, though.
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My other thought is that they had an idea of where the wanted it go but to over-corrected due to the massive fan backlash, leaving us with an expack that’s all-over the place lore wise.
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Yeah, I can also see that too. Whatever the cause, it’s over thankfully, and hopefully Shadowlands proves to be a enjoyable expac.
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Then she would have done it before the meeting even happened.
IIRC the book says she was hoping the meetings would fail, though.
I think she used to be amazing, but not anymore.
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She was definitely butchered in BfA and leading up to Shadowlands. Hopefully SL redeems her somewhat regardless of what her ultimate fate is.
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I think it’s going to be a hard sell. Enough that people who are more invested than me into Sylvanas being redeemed/dying who’ll actually quit over it if they find it insufficient enough or a slap in their face.
Even Garrosh wasn’t really yelled at this bad; I think Blizzard really stuck themselves in the back with the current writing.
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Yeah, but let’s be honest, regardless of what blizzard does with Sylvanas, there are going to be people who are going to quit regardless. Like I said, they written themselves into a corner with her and it’s going to be hard make anything less than death believable for a lot of people.
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The entire faction war could have been a product of N’Zoth and the story would’ve been stronger for it.
We see this with Anduin punching Wrathion. N’Zoth’s influence is so suble you can’t tell it from your own feelings in the moment. Apply that on a global scale a few patches sooner and you have a justification for a massive faction war that turns N’Zoth into the true big bad of everything.
Have N’Zoth imbed his slimy tentacles into global politics to bring ruin to the world. Say it plays on your darkest nature. Something that is a part of you, but something you normally resist.
Blizzard could have their “deep introspection” about the nastier nature of the Horde without villain batting them while at the same time holding a mirror up to the Alliance so they can have their own internal struggle as well.
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My expectation is that Sylvanas is the endgame narratively in Shadowlands. That is to say: her narrative(s) will be central to the story and feature heavily as Illidan and his flashbacks featured heavily in Legion, perhaps even moreso.
Blizzard have been pretty cavalier in recent interviews since the announcement of Battle for Azeroth. They’ve essentially stated that they don’t let established lore get in the way of whatever current story they’re trying to tell.
Personally I find this really disheartening as that sort of philosophy - as Dayon alludes to - shows no respect for the world of Warcraft that’s been built over decades and which players have come to love. I don’t follow WoW because it’s the best game, I follow it because it’s something I fell in love with over the last two decades.
I feel as though nothing matters anymore with respect to lore. How can anything be built on sand? Lore is becoming more like the gameplay systems that are built and left behind each expansion.
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I agree entirely, however I think that to the Lore team, they don’t see it as being built on sand.
I think they approach the lore as though it is the story of a comic book universe, where the lore is more like a mythology and the fandom is very used to the concept of AU, retelling, re-framing, and contradictions as part of a constant re-exploration of the setting and its themes. Some people hate that about comic books, of course, but I don’t think anyone can say that it isn’t a known feature of them. A lot of comics that are beloved are messes, in terms of lore and continuity.
Just take a look at Exile’s Reach, a great little self-contained story in WoW that showcases fun characters and shows off the factions. As we have seen on this forum, it’s kind of a mess when it comes to timeline. Why are Meerah and the Mag’har there? Why is there a Gronnling? These are questions that just get brushed off because they want to tell a cool story.
The issue is that comic book flexibility is not accepted in the kind of narrative universe that WoW represents. Comic book fans don’t all have their own characters with a stake in the story, that retcons and inconsistencies can mess with. They don’t draw people into having in-fiction identities in the same way that faction/race/class choices do in WoW (they do in other ways, though).
Blizzard’s approach to writing WoW is consistent, insofar as they are consistent about approaching it in the same comic-book manner, but I don’t think they’ve necessarily picked an approach that, well… works.
Making players wait an entire expansion to know the motivations of the villain is kind of a mess.
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It’s an attitude that we’ve seen pop up and gain traction all across the breadth of media discourse, especially in the last handful of years.
Continuity, consistency and coherency are bad, rather than good. They are just vehicles for gatekeeping, rather than marks of effective writing. And gatekeeping is understood to be the tool of toxic and regressive elements in fandom, rather than a bare-minimum requirement that the people in charge, or whose voices should be listened to, have some idea what they’re talking about and an established investment in the topic.
If you’re upset that the good things you used to have are being made retroactively worse, then you’re what’s wrong with fandom. Nobody should care what you have to say. Sticking to what’s established in the past is just another way media maintains its old boys’ club. We’re in the driver’s seat now, so we should be able to drive this classic car wherever and however we want without accountability or even disagreement.
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I like this idea. It reminds me of early Vanilla content: black dragons used to interfere with politics, plot and scheme to create unrest. Onyxia and Nefarian did this kind of meddling.
Also the whole “good v. evil, good guys win” trope feels uninspiring to me. It’s overused in WoW, and the promises of having a more morally gray area in this war were broken fairly quickly.
I was watching Battlestar Galactica this weekend, and noticed that the show makes a continuous effort not to paint one side as entirely pure (cylons performed a genocide, but it was because they were oppressed and treated as objects by the humans who created them, and made them so sentient). You couldn’t blame just one party, or at least it was open to interpretation. The whole time I was thinking, that’s how you do “morally gray”, that’s how WoW should have done things.
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I believe it is a by product of the Hollywood Studios no longer wanting to green light original work, preferring to have an established IP with an existing fanbase.
This has in turn left Writers/Directors feeling handcuffed to these existing IP and then having to twist and mold their original ideas into something that can fit inside the IP, even if just in a bare bones fashion with no respect for the existing work of the IP.
That then leaves the existing fanbase in an uproar, most of the time leading to a box office failure.
Which results in the Writers/Directors lashing out at the existing fans for not embracing their new twist, The Hollywood Studios shelving the IP believing it to be in need of a time out, and the fans just re-watching the older stuff.
In short, nobody wins.
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Currenly, as per the latest novel “Shadows Rising”, Sylvanas’s innermost thoughts are actually very pro-Jailer:
“The unjust ladder of their lives must be dismantled, not rung by rung, but all at once. All of it. She had been the plaything of a self-righteous cosmos long enough. The Jailer, too, understood what must be done.”
(From the last paragraph of the novel).
It doesn’t look like she’s fighting him off, on the contrary. I imagine she could change her mind later. Also, my latest experience is that you can’t rely on canonical writings in the Warcraft universe anymore, and they might retcon this too anyway.
Novels currently serve as a teaser and a marketing tool for WoW expansions, they’re a bridge between xpacs and not so much standalone books (like they used to be 15 years ago). I wrote here before that I find the retconning of books more frustrating than a Blizzard staffer statement on an interview.
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Does anyone else find it funny and or sad that N’zoth, the big bad N’zoth whose reach and influence reached back generations was regulated to almost like a side character near the end of BFA? With all the focus on the Shadowlands, Slyvannas and the Jailer, N’zoth really came off as “eh can we get to Shadowlands already ?”
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Ugh…yeah…I just re-read that last part of the book. While the video offers a tantalizing “is she going to put the helm on?”–the book offers nothing of the sort. long sigh That said, just before that quote you mention, she does mention wanting power–not for its own sake, but to use it. I was also reading that quote a bit differently than the meaning to which you seem to be ascribing it.
I see it more as her own belief that the Jailer shares her goals rather than a confirmation of it. So, while she might believe their aims are similar, it’s entirely possible they’re not–and I would argue that’s more likely the case than not. Quite a few people have often thought someone they were following shared their vision of the future only to find that not to be the case–and often found they were being used or duped, etc.
That said, it does read as being more pro-Jailer than not.
There is one small hope that that break between her conversation with Bolvar to the point where she’s destroying the helm leaves out some of that video narrative of her considering wearing the crown herself, but …all in all, breaking the helm does seem to be the plan, sadly.
And as you say, the books are mostly marketing tools for the next expansion at this point. Which, while I don’t mind that, leads to some mental gymnastics for people who do keep up with the lore and aren’t as forgetful as I am. >.< I’ll keep holding out hope there’s some more story explanation for Sylvanas’ changes other than N’zoth and the Jailer, though—ones that make her internal thoughts from the previous books at least make more sense than they currently seem to.
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I have been left wondering if this might have been a whole “N’zoth wants us to think we’ve defeated him, but really…!” And we’ll find out much later that this was all just a big fake-out that played into N’zoth’s bigger plan of …X, Y, or Z.
Most people seem to think we’ve killed the actual N’zoth, though. If that is actually the case, then I am absolutely, 100% disappointed, as that is a lot of wasted story potential just to create a raid boss-side note to keep us from focusing on the faction war. If N’zoth hadn’t shown up, for example, and wasn’t infesting Kul’Tiras and Zandalar, but these were just bad people being power-hungry or angry, or …literally anything other than manipulated, this might have been a very different story.
I still, for example, don’t really understand all of the ramifications that a sword shoved into the heart of the planet has. Was the world soul injured gravely? Yes, probably. Is Azurite her blood? Seems so. Was there anything we could actually do to heal her? …I guess? Did N’zoth actually have a longer-termed plan, and then sword-plunge interrupted that, and we learned about it too soon? That kind of -seems- to be the case. And if so, is that why we get to defeat N’zoth now–'cause this wasn’t part of his plan, but mwhahaha…he’ll work with it?
long sigh Anyway…this expansion’s story has left me feeling a little let down. Yes, we get to see that Silithus has a heart chamber, but we don’t know why it’s there. Did Sargeras plan his sword smash intentionally? Are there more such chambers in the world? Why didn’t we know about them until now? Or was it created once the world soul was injured in order for us to help?
I just feel like I am left with a lot of unanswered questions this expansion–many moreso than in the past, and it’s likely I’m forgetting things, but in the past, when there was some neat new lore information, I tended not to forget it. So maybe the presentation was better? …I don’t know.
But to answer your question, I feel like this expansion was more a “just play through it. Don’t ask questions,” kind of expansion rather than one that was meant to expand or explain the lore or give us something new and interesting to consider. I think, maybe, that’s why I’m pretty excited for Shadowlands; it has the potential to offer us answers to a lot of questions. It has the potential to give us new cosmos lore. But I kind of wish BfA had actually had something other than “here’s an azurite thing. Don’t question how you’re healing the tears with this necklace thing. Oh, and also, look! N’zoth! Oh noes!”
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i want thrall to be warlock-titan god leading a reborn old horde with giant flaming demon axes because that would look cool. i also want anduin to be a demon worhsipping warlock to that leads a massive faction war to finish off the horde. and also i want sylvanus to burn more night elves and she can get married to thrall and have undead demon worhsipping undead orcinelf babies that an expansion later show up as hawt 18 year old orcelf thicc hotties
and also gnomes and human allied races on the horde
thanks chief, glad you put me in the driver’s seat with no accountability
Poor N’zoth really felt like a case of, “Crap, we need to end this godawful faction war, but we’re only 2/3 through the expansion. What can we throw on the sacrificial altar for 8.3?”
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