They can always fall back on “Time moves differently in the Shadowlands” and say that it was eons for her, but only a few years for us.
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Yeah, gotta remember that all the characters who were stolen away at the beginning of Shadowlands reported that they had lost all track of time, and it had already felt like ages had passed.
Even though we the player literally followed them into the Maw the very next day with Tyrande.
So basically, it’s a bit Jeremy Bearimy.
Yeah… That is a very easy way to solve this, kinda lame, but there is precedent for time moving differently on the shadowlands.
Though her return I assume will be as controversial as her heel turn in BFA.
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It didn’t work at all. And obviously the line was using how bullets are used but applying it to arrows. Because she was saying they were completely disposable to her. Arrows are not disposable unless they break. And even with that you can salvage arrowheads. The line wasn’t meant to suggest that she’d save some of them and couldn’t save others, lol.
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Well yeah, because her whole face turn has been pretty controversial, too. Like soul split into half and she only had the bad half… That, like most of Shadowlands, wasn’t some of Blizzard’s best work, narratively.
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I hated that as well. They should have had Varimathras seek revenge on Sylvanas by posing as her. Permanently damaging an incredibly popular character to that point is dumb.
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I am going to defend shadowlands. Uther is pretty clear, like Him, Sylvanas wasn’t missing her good side, she was just lacking part of herself, and thus that affected how she perceived everything. The pre bfa Sylvanas still had her “good side” but she was still missing a part of herself. Is less about the morality, but that she was broken.
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For me, I think the problem with going that route is that it’s sort of writing themselves an out with her. By taking away part of her agency, it becomes a lot harder to blame her for her choices. I mean, it’s not fair to blame someone that’s broken when they do broken things.
Granted, as for me, I would have much rather they hadn’t gone anywhere near where they went with her character, even far before that point.
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It’s clear from the Sylvanas novel, that the Banshee Queen Sylvanas’ good side only existed when she’s off-screen or in books. Golden’s little attempt to salvage the character since she and the game writers had her grow a mustache just so she could twirl it while tying Anduin to the train tracks.
If they thought anyone would believe the whole “Not good or evil, just broken” line, they could have tried harder than a book written after the fact. But we know the truth is they were trying to salvage a plan that was put into place by a misogynist that was created for the sole purpose of destroying the fan-favorite female characters. Jaina was intended to be hated by the Horde fanbase, just as Sylvanas was for the Alliance fanbase.
What an awful mess.
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Yeah, the idea is to make her more sympathetic… which doesn’t work for me. (“cool motive, still murder”).
But her heel turn is just really a mess to deal with overall, and I think the writers were just desperate trying to find ways to fix the mess, and as far as we can tell, this is the best scenario. (Well, they could have double dipped into her being a full villain with a loot table, but she is too popular and it would be too much garrosh 2.0).
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But Forsaken have had that issue (if you want to call it that) since they were first created. The process of raising someone into undeath dulled their capacity to feel positive emotions and amplified the negative ones. It’s a feature of the setting.
Then the game sort of forgot about it for a while, and then they invented the soul-splitting thing, which is convoluted and silly. But the basic idea—that the undead aren’t exactly the same people they were when they were alive, that their personalities are warped and they will make different choices than they would have while living—has always been in Warcraft.
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Then they undid that too by creating Calia the Lightforged Undead and having her somehow be able to provide therapy to other Undead, or some such nonsense.
Everyone knows you can just pep-talk a depressed person into cheering up. It’s not like Calia should be in hysterics because the light is causing her to feel the fact that she’s a corpse, like the old lore said it does to undead.
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Which is what drew me to the Forsaken in the first place. You’re right; absolutely convoluted. Because it’s just like, an extra layer of being broken on top of being broken. There could have been many directions I feel like they could have taken it where it didn’t come to these missing part of your soul shenanigans.
I think what Nezmith said is most likely spot on the money in regards to what actually happened with her character, though.
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There’s also the abuse allegory and how Sylvanas used to represent taking back autonomy after tragedy and continuing on. The soul split thing may as well have spun that into “actually she could never move beyond that moment until her abuser’s abuser SA’d her back together”.
I feel like their attempt to salvage the character in that way retroactively negated any old positive aspects as well by making them into lies.
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For me, I think it boils down to the difference between mitigating and exonerating. What happened to her does mitigate things. So, when passing judgement (sentence) you should consider things like that. But it doesn’t let her off the hook. Mass murder is still mass murder. She does need to atone for those crimes.
I think her ‘turning good’ at the end of the raid was the actual heal turn. She has been on the villain path since WC3. And it was not subtle. The Arthas parallels LONG before BfA were very clear. BfA was less a heal turn and more going from walking the evil path to running it. Not saying it was good, just that it wasn’t really a reversal.
To play devil’s advocate, the old lore was never really clear why the undead suffered from using the light. Since it wasn’t directly said it was because of just being undead, it could fairly be explained that the pain was from the fact that shadow magic is what was used to create/animate them. So, in theory, Calia would be in pain if she tried to use shadow magic, as she was created by the light. Kind of a blurry line between a retcon and just new information.
That is kind of the issue with a soft magic system. They didn’t really have rules set out for how/why things work/happen. So, it leaves a ton to guesswork.
They wanted an explanation for the Forsaken to be screwed up and forgot that being violently killed, turned into a meat puppet, and used to kill your friends/family is the kind of thing that would typically screw a person up.
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One thing to remember is that “Banshee Queen” Sylvanas won’t be back. She doesn’t exist anymore. What we have now is “Ranger General” Sylvanas.
Maybe, but I don’t know if there was any way to save the character that wouldn’t do that.
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Figure I’ll start the expansion with my Worgen Druid and follow up with this Forsaken Priest after I’ve hit max and learned the ropes.
Then I can compare notes on who feels more irrelevant.
I’m sure it’ll be a tough call.
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I’m doing TWW on my vulpera lock, so I already know off the bat my race AND class is going to be 100% irrelevant. 
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To be fair OP, Blizzard’s World building hasn’t touched on either faction much in the last two expansions. I completely grant you that the Horde needs more effort put into its story than the Alliance right now. But, I also hope that the Alliance’s story (together with the Horde’s) can move beyond just one or two characters for a while and focus more on the faction as a whole. The day to day lives of people. The internal politics and motivations of the individual members. I think both factions need this fleshed out.
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