There is so much truth in the words she speaks. Do you truly stand with Anduin and the “light” ? Do you truly favor life? She speaks of ‘An endless war’ … and that Anduin is cursed to die in this war ‘like every wrynn before him’ … The allegory is substantial! WE exist in an endless war, as personified by these stories. Wrynn up to this point, has been we!
“That momentary flicker” she says, " every cruel second spent delaying the inevitable" … “you know the truth, nothing is fair. Not life. Not death.”
Anduin counters - destroying everything will not take away the pain - truth - everyone suffers.
Anduin - and the player characters - misunderstand. We are the unwitting soldiers in this endless war. Every decision is made for us. I might prefer free will. I would fight for free will. I would fight with Sylvanas. I want to break free from ‘the system’ and truly experience things for the first time, as not a participant or an observer, but a contributor, one who affects.
She sees the bigger picture. The Cosmic War will not end unless one side triumphs over the other. Light vs Shadow.
The Light winning may not be the best scenario either.
“The light only sees one true path, the shadow sees all paths as true.” or something to that effect. I think good and evil are subjective concepts and the real comparison is order vs chaos. Order, especially oppressive order, as seen in the “The Purpose” of the Shadowlands, lacks free will. No one chooses which place they end up in, they all must “serve the purpose”
Fate also is a very confining principle, and I think the rejection of fate is a huge anti-hero theme in WoW. Sylvanas’s whole No Lies cinematic was centered around the fact that there is no free will in fate. Look at how the Light, through Xera, tried to force Illidan’s fate, as being a savior of the Light,on him and how he rejected that ‘gift’. Fate is something you accept or reject.
Her trying to force the fate of LK onto Anduin is a bit of an oxymoron but I think she will realize in the end that what she’s doing to Anduin, on behalf of the Jailer, isn’t right and isn’t aligned with her true goals/beliefs.
If Sylvanas got everything she wanted, your soul would be getting tortured in the maw right now. I don’t understand how sending innocent souls to eternal torture has anything to do with free will, or control of their fate, because Sylvanas controlled their fate and made them suffer.
Also, Sylvanas joined the very being that is responsible for the genocide of her people and made her what she is now, all of this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Even if she had some greater good in mind (which she doesn’t, she only wants to choose her own fate but doesn’t care about the millions of others), the methods she used are disgusting and wrong and shouldn’t be glorified in any shape or form.
But what she was doing to millions of innocent souls was right? How come she questions her choices only when it comes to Anduin?
In Shadows Rising it was implied that all of those souls went to make her personally stronger so if she’s got a plan to stop the Jailer then yeah I’m still on her team.
Shadowlands was broken at that point anyway so everyone dying was going to the Maw irregardless. If they didn’t go to her they would have just fed the Jailer’s army. At least if she manages to stop the Jailer their deaths will not have been in vain. Sira and Delaryn believed in Sylvanas after glimpsing what was on the other side of Death so why not believe them?
But considering she is working toward putting the Jailor into power in order to achieve her ends, I don’t really see how she hopes to achieve a better afterlife. Sure, the current system is flawed, but it hardly seems as if the Jailor’s system will be any better.
Whatever the number - It’s probably much less than the trillion-quadrillion souls who have been permanently erased by the heroic Maldraxxi since the dawn of time.
Ok, if you want to fight for Slyvanus, go find another few planets and slaughter all the inhabitants there. Send all those souls back to the Maw to empower the Jailor, where they will be chained and tortured till they are literally obliterated.
But hey, I’m sure they will be happy to give up their eternal existence for the empowerment of a being who will definitely bring about free will for all… called the Jailor. Ya, he seems like a guy set on Liberty.
I don’t necessarily need a pedestal or room on the dais to believe her cause is just. I think the system needs a change. There’s no such thing as good and evil, order and chaos are even subjective and confining terms. What is life without death? What is death without life? Perhaps she’s fighting, not to control her fate and everyone elses, but such that there’s currently an illusion of choice and she wants to destroy the illusion. Either choice or no choice, transparent and blatant seems to be her aim, to expose the big picture. I’m assuredly FOR that. Declassify WoW ™ !!!
That may not be how I would do it. Sylvanas might be trying to make a 3rd faction. I give up this endless war, let me simply exist, or let me choose sides while still being who I am.
The ends don’t justify the means. Especially when the ends is working with a cosmic evil overlord who is determined to kill as many mortals as possible and torment their souls into mindless weapons for his plans. She is a traitor, mass murderer, despoiler of the natural world, and generally an unrepentant, self-obsessed monster with an eternal victim complex.
Only Sylvanas is arrogant enough to believe she doesn’t deserve the fate set before her, as she paves her way with blood and torture directly to deserving that fate she rightfully fears. She is a threat to the balance of life and death itself, exactly the kind of soul that deserves to rot in the maw she has so eagerly condemned all others to. Because nothing matters to Sylvanas other than her own perverted sense of victimhood.
