This is only mentioned in game to the player. Killing Malfurion was never a connected part of the plan.
Because they didn’t want to just give up their home without a fight. There’s no blame in an army trying to defend their land. And there is no clear extra impact Tyrande could have had in Teldrassil.
But they did use resources to evacuate. It was a split effort.
In A Good War, his death is never necessitated.
LOL. Lemme just torch the entire city because nobody is home right now. I think.
They didn’t think the Horde would burn a capital city and civilians to charcoal. They also probably believed that they could push them back long enough to allow their forces to come back and prevent them from reaching the Teldrassil.
So it was over confidence then?
They stand no chance, so why bother doing everything we can to protect our citizens?
Not gonna touch the rest of this thread but idk about this. UC was fully evacuated pretty quickly. But that was obviously a deliberate writing choice because they wanted max shock value and anger in destroying Teldrassil compared to Undercity. Both sides play out the WoT, it’s detailed in 2 novellas, meanwhile no one really knows what happened in Tirisfal before the point that the ruins of Capital City are being sieged.
While I’m all for pointing out that the original plan to drive out the Night Elves that Saurfang drew up was just as violent and bloody as anything Sylvanas did, even if it was more ‘honorable’ this is the rare moment I feel like defending Tyrande.
From in game it’s clear that Tyrande expects an occupation and part of why she lets Saurfang live is so that the occupation might not be as severe as it would be without him around. She is thinking about liberating her people in the future, but trusts that the Horde will treat their captured population honorably while she nurses Malfurian back to health.
Then Saurfang shows up at the shore without Malfurian’s head and a dying Nelf Captain has the cheek to pity Sylvanas to her face and the rest is tragic history.
Ultimately the plan was still to butcher the Nelves leaders, route their army, and destroy their home. Occupying Teldrassil was never part of the game plan, so Sylvanas burning it makes sense so long as you don’t value the lives of the civilian population.
Why didnt they just let me slaughter forsaken at UC for my revenge I will never know.
Now i need more comparable vengeance to address it.
This trickle of small victories are not enough. Horde needs to be on its knees like the Alliance was.
She spent a couple hours, at most, saving Malfurion. The entire rest of the time, she was in Stormwind, aiding and caring for her people, like they asked her to.
The Night Elves and the Alliance were dumping all they could into the evacuation. Portals going day and night, until mages practically collapsed from exhaustion. The entire Cathedral full of refugees, inns packed 15 Night Elves to a room, Elves stuffed down every alley and road, until they spilled all the way out to Goldshire, and were starting to fill that. And still the vast majority of the race died in Teldrassil. As a race capable of breeding, it’s not a simple matter of slapping open a portal, shoving a couple corpses through, and calling it a day.
Because we don’t blame the victims. The Horde launched a feint. A sucker punch. A ruse.
At the end of the day, Tyrande is not to blame, because Tyrande did not wrongfully invade Night Elven lands. Had the Horde not invaded, none of the unwitting choices of Sylvanas’ 9d chess game would have had to been made.
I’ve never said everything is Sylvanas’ fault. Sylvanas did not build multiple catapults, lug them across three zones, take out every Night Elven town and settlement en route, point the catapults at a city of civilians, light the payloads, or pull the levers. No, this epithet:
is for the Horde, in its entirety.
Sir, these aren’t the Halo forums, please take your Reach elsewhere.
No but seriously, I can’t stress how many holes are in this. You’re banking on Tyrande to basically have meta knowledge of Sylvanas’s real intentions, which basically nobody but her knew. Even Saurfang didn’t consider burning it down, and he was the one who planned the whole campaign in Darkshore.
You’re asking me to believe that Tyrande consciously thought “oh, if I save Malfurion, she’ll burn down my tree with thousands of innocent people inside!” Yeah, you gotta remember - meta knowledge =/= character knowledge.
Tyrande did everything she could; the only way off of Teldrassil was by hippogryph or portal.
How would the surviving Night Elves feel if Tyrande died in the flames and Malfurion bled to death along with the loss of their city? Poor attempt at victim blaming imo.
That depends on the time frame. Not to mention that Sylvanas had duped everyone into thinking the army was way down south so there wasn’t a threat to Teldrassil as far as they knew. They wouldn’t have known the Horde was there until they were literally in Darkshore and even then they would have to alert and evacuate everyone across that massive tree of a capital. That takes time both alert them and get them out. And they didn’t think the Horde would do what they did until it was too late.
Yes, by the end that is all they had left.
But when it started, they did have more resources available to them.
They used those resources to defend. They could have fallen back, used Malfurian to slow the Horde forces and then used what few resources they did have to evacuate.
Instead, they were over confident and used all their resources to defend instead of evacuate, and when it was too late only THEN did they evacuate.
It’s stated right there in the story. The Horde expected the Night Elves to fall back and run to Teldrassil, to use what they did have to evacuate the people.
To me, it looks like they were too worried about saving their land and too over confdent in their belief they could keep it. Why not concede the land and get your people out.
You get a gold medal in mental gymnastics.
For a lot of reasons. Pride, attachment, love, fear, anger, I could go on. It’s their land they fought and cared for. They aren’t just going to abandon it at the drop of a hat. I wouldn’t expect anyone to do that. If they did then it’s really suspect. Like, are they going to nuke the whole zone kind of suspect.
Alright man you’ve to be trolling if you’re asking why people would chose to fight for instead of fleeing from their ancestral home.
Wait a second. The plan Sylvanas proposed to Saurfang was for them to capture Darnassus and basically hold it hostage against the Alliance. That if the Alliance made any moves to attack Undercity or Silvermoon, the civilians in Darnassus would be killed. This essentially removes the Alliance as a threat in the short term. Additionally, Sylvanas anticipated that tensions would begin to form in the Alliance leadership since Tyrande would demand that they devote their resources to freeing Teldrassil, while Genn would become enraged since Gilneas has been sitting in ruins for a decade.
Now you’re saying that Sylvanas intended for Teldrassil to be evacuated? How does that work at all with her plan of holding Darnassus hostage? Plus, her entire plan hinged on the fact that the night elves wouldn’t have their fleet available, and that it would take weeks for Stormwind’s small post-Legion fleet to even arrive in Kalimdor. And by then it would be too late, because the Horde blitzkrieg would’ve already conquered Teldrassil and occupied Darnassus. How do these things fit with the argument you’re proposing?
It doesn’t. That where it all falls apart.
i hate to break it to you, but they were evacuating, as soon as they heard of the horde attacking ashenvale they started evacuating people through portals, but the horde bum rushed them
sylvanas knew people were inside it, because delaryn told her
page 83
“Why? You’ve already won,” the night elf said, struggling to force the words out. “Only
innocents remain in the tree.”
That was good to know, if it was true. Sylvanas knelt next to her. “This is war,” she said.
Yeah, this. Maybe OP should reread Elegy while he’s at it.
Thanks, I’ll have to go reread Elegy when I have some time.