The fact that it was red and all the anima in Revendreth is red makes me also think it was Denathrius, who we do know has been working with the Jailer.
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I don’t see it like that.
I think Anduin got a rise out of her because he brought up a sensitive topic, but got it soo wrong, which is why she said don’t go there.
I think she has been protecting Anduin from the Jailer from the start. She asked the Jailer to let her handle him. She has kept him in a cell away from the torment the others have been going through. When the Jailer says it is time she says he is not ready. She knows if he does not join willing the Jailer will make him serve and the consequences of that will be far worse. She of all people knows the pain and anguish of being forced to serve.
She is not threatening him when she says join us willingly or be forced to serve. It is not her decision to make. It is the Jailers. Perhaps she even wants him to join to be an ally with her against the Jailer.
Only time will tell.
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Yes. This interaction seams familiar. I know I’ve seen it somewhere but I can’t recall from where.
But the over all impression is that Anduin willingly joining is important to her… probably the most important thing for her. Though the significance of this is not so clear. I don’t get an overly sympathetic impression though, although I swear she does have a soft-spot for Anduin (in her rotten heart) but rather more like she wants someone else to join willingly like she did, to prove to herself that she was right. She’s conflicted. She’s not so sure anymore but feels like she’d gone too far to turn back. A common theme in “turning to the dark side” trope.
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All of that is kind of downplayed by the fact that she’s the one that put him in this situation in the first place. Even if she gives him the illusion of choice, she’s not really giving him a choice at all. If I tell someone “you can either do x yourself, or I make you do x,” then that’s a false choice. It’s also a threat. Sylvanas is absolutely threatening Anduin on multiple levels here, she’s just making it appear like she’s giving him a choice just so she can feel better about the one’s she made. She’s not doing this for him, she’s doing this for her.
If Sylvanas wanted to protect Anduin from the Jailer, the first step would be not delivering Anduin to him in the first place. She did, so any kind of “protection” she offers Anduin doesn’t really win her any points at all.
Whether she did or didn’t is irrelevant. Her aims were slaughter and genocide by any definition. Even if every soul she killed were sent to Elysium, it would make her actions no less horiffic as the intent also defines the act. The morality of an action is defined by the worst of intent and result. She scores big on both.
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It has nothing to do with kindness on her part. Anduin nailed it pretty plainly. She’s still having issues with the choices she’s made. She became part of the Scourge against her will, and it’s defined every action she’s taken since. She has this lingering doubt of the free will of her last choice and she needs Anduin to validate her choice BY CHOOSING TO SERVE OF HIS OWN FREE WILL.
If the jailor simply breaks him into service, that aim is not acheived and Anduin becomes a repitition and enlargement of her own questions.
Denathrius is also the dude who (probably) has Dreadlord minions working his will across the cosmos. If anyone could scheme to knockout the Arbiter, it’s him.
Re: Sylvanas and free will, I feel this is a meme the fanbase and then the writers themselves have started to internalise. She was mind-slaving hapless saps into being her meat fodder all the way back in Warcraft 3. She’s never consistently given a damn about free will, only vengeance, followed by a desire to avoid the place in hell she secured for herself.
then I am blinded by my love for this character. Only time will tell if the nuance that I’ve hinged on pays off or I’m bobo the clown.
But I trust the writers, who haven’t let me down, so it’s less blind faith in this character and more blind faith in Steve Danuser, Christie Golden and Robert Brooks and the nuance they purposefully wrote for this character and this plausible deniability that she’s still “good” despite the bad.
I mean, kinda yeah.
So… when the Jailer threatened Sylvanas with an undeserved eternal torment in the Maw unless she made a pact with the Val’kyr etc… it was just the illusion of choice, so she had no real choice?
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I mean, yeah it was. Who was saying otherwise? Just because Sylvanas had bad things happen to her doesn’t mean she’s incapable of doing bad and/or much worse things.
Did you think this was a gotcha?
Sylvanas has no concept of self-sacrifice, she is entirely narcissistic and indeed psychopathic. When given the options of damnation of her own individual soul and the mass damnation of innocent souls, including her victims, she chooses the latter. This has been one of the few consistent things about her character, that she will do anything and everything for her own benefit, including murder, torture, and betrayal of those who trust and are loyal to her. She’s a deeply self-centered person who only ever considers her own suffering. Just because terrible things happened to her does not give her the right to inflict terrible things on others. That’s two-dimensional nihilism.
Not so much of a gotcha as having someone explicitly say that statement. While I don’t disagree that she’s done plenty of evil things - I feel like plenty of folks sit there and pretend that threatened with an eternity of torment they would just “do the right thing”
I actually don’t really care as much about where the narrative ends up - I just wish they’d put in a lot more of the nuance that good stories tend to have.
Just to be clear - I’m not suggesting downplaying her atrocities or anything of the sort - but I tend to find the story (in-game so far) has been very much “mustache twirl Sylvanas turns more bad and pew pew now works for even more bad guy” and I find that narrative very unsatisfying.
A good villain really needs depth, otherwise they just come off as kind of cartoonish.
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Well yeah sure, nobody knows for sure how they’d react in a situation until they’re in that situation themselves, and nobody is saying that Sylvanas doesn’t have nuance or depth. But after like… her tenth genocide, she really runs out of any kind of pity or goodwill she might have racked up for all the bad stuff Arthas and the Jailer might have done to her.
Sylvanas has taken her bad situation, and has decided to inflict it on others. A lot of others, purposefully and unrepentantly. I’m not arguing that Sylvanas isn’t a good villain, but she definitely is a villain, probably unredeemable at this point.
Which I think you agree with.
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Yeah she’s a villain. I think what I would really like is a Chromie timeline quest chain (yeah they’re silly I know) where I just get a sneak peek at key moments in this decade long partnership.
- Here’s her in the Maw. Ow this sucks.
- Here’s her getting a picture of whichever sister she still cares about and letter threatening her if she doesn’t kill someone
- Here’s her agreeing to her first mass murder for the Jailer … instead of … herself I guess… so she can get the power to … mass murder someone else. It’s a work in progress.
- Here’s her smuggling some special chocolates into the Maw that the Jailer can’t get enough of
Just something that didn’t feel like “oh - so now she’s working for the guy who created the guy who ruined her life. And she’s got super duper powers.”
I don’t think it was clearly stated that Sylvanas chose who was kidnapped and brought to the maw. For all we know it could have been the Jailer who chose which Azeroth leaders he thought had potential to be forged into a weapon.
Your right. There is no choice and it is not up to her. The Jailer will use him if he joins willingly or not. I think she is trying to protect him from the latter because she knows the consequences of being made to server are far worse.
I have this theory that being “made to serve” really means the Jailer will forge his soul into the runeblade he is having crafted. Sylvanas doesn’t want to see that happen to him and has been trying to protect him from that fate.
Call it crazy and I could be totally way off, but I’m willing to see how it plays out.
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Sure, but again, none of that really nets her any kind of points in the end, because she’s buddied up right up alongside the Jailer. Even if she’s coerced or thinks that this is the only possible outcome, her complacency negates whatever sympathy she might earn. The same went for Kil’jaeden.
And frankly, let’s be real here - Sylvanas doesn’t give a damn what happens to Anduin. She just wants Mr. Hopeful to choose what she chose so she can stop feeling bad about her own decisions. It’s not for him, it’s for herself.
At the end of the day, Sylvanas is a self-important character who was owed a lot after what happened to her, but then decided she was owed more and more until she became just another selfish monster that people don’t want to accept can do such abysmally horrific things, even when they’re outright told by the creators of the story that she did them. I don’t need to wait and see how anything plays out to determine any of that.
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People, including you, are in this thread calling her actions one dimensional and selfish but thanks for the laugh.
I never called her one-dimensional, but selfish and nuanced are not mutually exclusive, dude. Sure, there’s probably more to Sylvanas and her motivations, but that’s not gonna magically negate what we’ve already seen about her.
If you’re gonna put words in my mouth, at least make them believable words.
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