They’re hanging around oribos on the outer ring.
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Randomly. On the outer ring. They seem to alternate between other characters every few days I think?
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Oh. Good to know 
I hope that Sylvanas’ character arc is at least portrayed as nuanced enough to be interesting, rather than the way Garrosh’s story played out.
Sylvanas’ plight is that she spent so much of the time truly lacking in free will. In her life she was a Ranger-General. After that she’s (almost entirely) forced to serve other masters.
- After the Lich King raised her into a banshee, she was given the ability to maintain her consciousness while forced to do unspeakable horrors upon her own people.
- After she broke free of his grasp, she was forced to face the horror of undeath. Her soul was “imperfectly” attached. She was limited to only rare moments of positive emotions, while experiencing a general dulling of her senses and feelings. She had free will and blamed the Lich King for her pained existence, so she did anything to her revenge on the Lich King. That’s not to justify any actions she took, it’s just her experience and goals. She wasn’t exactly portrayed as a “good” person.
- Once she was able to see the Lich King die, she killed herself to escape her misery. While she didn’t know what faced her, she should have been sent to the Arbiter for judgment. Very rarely were souls sent straight to the Maw (and the crimes of many in Revendreth are terrifying) so it seems extremely unlikely she would’ve been summarily sent to the Maw.
- The Val’kyr who had served the Lich King (and ostensibly the Jailer) grabbed her soul and offered her a deal which she rejected in favor of the freedom of death. So they dropped her into the Maw where she finally again truly felt the wholeness of her soul, only to experience excruciating agony, torment, and torture. She was offered a choice, to enter into a pact with the Val’kyr and escape the Maw, or to suffer for eternity.
- Once more she was forced into servitude with the threat that the Jailer could simply force her into eternal torment instead of allowing her to face an afterlife of her own design based on her actions.
- Sometime during Legion the Arbiter was disabled and afterward every soul in the entire universe was sent to the Maw.
- Until the Arbiter was disabled, her actions were more limited in scale and reach (comparatively). She wasn’t innocent, but in BfA her actions were more heinous and widespread.
Free will was something denied to Sylvanas for most of WoW. As an outsider it is easy to suggest that Sylvanas should have merely accepted an eternity of torture rather than serve the Jailer. Given the choice, whether anyone would have made that decision might be a different story. Similarly, given the burden of knowing that the entire universe was being sent to the Maw, was it better to simply aid in destroying the currently corrupted system and let the chips fall where they may (hopefully better but quite likely worse)?
At this point there are some simple facts:
- Sylvanas has suffered unspeakable (and unfair) tragedy throughout her life and undeath and even in death she wasn’t given a “fair hearing” but rather controlled by an outside force.
- The Shadowlands are broken. The Jailer seems to be entirely at-fault (though there is some wiggle room due to the question of why he was banished and how the Arbiter was disabled). However, even before the Arbiter was disabled, the Jailer was able to simply throw people into the Maw. The system was flawed and currently completely broken.
So I’d ask two questions:
-
Facing an eternity of perpetual agony, would you enter into a pact to avoid that damnation? This is given that (at the time) she was able to undertake questionable acts that were limited in scale.
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With the knowledge that the system was dooming everyone in the universe - potentially trillions of souls - to torture and obliteration, would you justify murdering tens of thousands if it could offer even a chance of saving literally everyone else?
My answer to both is simply I don’t know. Eternity is a concept that I can’t truly comprehend. I also don’t know whether I could sacrifice thousands of people, even for some prospect of a greater good for many more.
As an outsider it’s easy to brazenly suggest you’d willingly endure torture forever. You’d never murder innocents for any reason. But put in that position, with the weight of literally everyone on your shoulders, and the threat of eternal torment, the decision is a bit more difficult to make.
I’m not saying Sylvanas is right, nor that she will ever be portrayed as such. The writers will not force the players to see this point of view in any substantial manner. It doesn’t serve the purpose of letting us play the heroic fantasy. I think the narrative likely will go the route of showing her as just “evil” and not even considering these issues, then possibly Anduin will make her change her mind and she will die a “final death” trying to help beat back the Jailer, receiving a final moment of some free will.
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So just a little knit pick here, no one forced Syl to take up the mantle of ranger general. No one even forced her into pursuing becoming a ranger, those things where something she chose. Was she forced to do things under Arthas? Most definitely, was she forced to do any of the things she did leading up to wrath? No, she’s so far being portrayed as a character that is trying to shrug off any sense of accountability for her own actions and as much as people dislike Anduin his whole “everyone suffers.” Is true not just in fantasy but in real life.
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I’m sorry if it came across that the first part of her life - as a Ranger-General - was in forced servitude. I didn’t intend that to be what I was conveying at all.
I also agree that from the time of her “release” from Arthas until the end of Wrath, she was free. While she was forced into undeath, she wasn’t forced to serve a particular purpose (or master) while undead. Instead she blamed the Lich King for her pained existence and did whatever it took to seek revenge. That was most definitely her choice.
I put in a couple of quick edits to hopefully better convey that. It wasn’t very clear and I apologize for that. I was not trying to claim her life as a Ranger-General was void of free will, nor trying to justify her actions up until the end of Wrath as lacking in free will either. Just pointing out that she’s spent most of the last 20 years being forced to serve (and/or suffer) in one form or the other. Honestly, when you think of how old she must be (I Googled it and it said over 2,800 years old) it’s a bit of a blip in her timeline, but her most recent time, and pretty horrific at that.
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Oh no it’s all good buddy, I was also making a point of bringing those knit picks up and tying them to current story beats cause she really is trying to absolve herself off any accountability in her statement “We never has free will.”
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Yup, and that is really all it boils down to.
I trust a world that she would build to be a fair world.
When I watched the cut scene, Anduin came across as naive and Sylvans as disingenuous; to me, she’s using the "it was fate’ excuse to avoid accountability.
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Well Anduin doesn’t exactly come off as naive in that, he stated that “everyone suffers” in life. So it makes me think Syl is more naive then a human far younger than her which is odd.
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I think she is lying to herself when she says she is doing this in a grand gesture to save everyone. This lie allows her to walk the path she is on with no shame or remorse. As Anduin points out, she is joined up with someone who obviously does not believe in free will and has caged or forged into weapons every soul he can get his hands on. His initial tool to be used to escape wasn’t the Shield of Freedom it was the Helm of Domination. I think Sylvanas is far too intelligent to fall into such an obvious trap unless secretly yearning for oblivion.
If the Jailer wins it doesn’t turn the Afterlife into a million personal heavens but rather into a million little Maws where it doesn’t matter what you did in life or where you go. In the current iteration you make choices while alive and are judged by those choices.
PS I wish people would drop the eternal parts of their arguments. It seems for many souls the afterlife isn’t that long until they are just anima or Stygia. If the six forces are in balance you would imagine that the number of eternal souls in death equal the immortal ones in life. I wouldn’t surprise me if the average soul only survives for less than a century before becoming anima.
I’m with ya OP, let’s get our free will back.
Those bronze dragons are looking kinda shady now. They may have to go.
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Pretty sure it is allegory for the real world. There is a shift in the balance of power on Earth and the wow writers are riffing off it.
Because the construct of society is crumbling - let it fall and rebuild anew is I think what she’s saying.
Except “destruction of society “ as you put it is the whole cosmos and she’s only doing it because of her own personal experience, not from a consensus of other people.
Don’t think I implied “destruction” more like reconstruction. It’s hard to imagine “the whole cosmos” when WoW gives us very few aliens in the shadowlands. I thought souls from other worlds were supposed to be here. Where are the zerg? The zerg would stand with sylvanas too!
It isn’t a reconstruction though, she’s sided with the jailer who for all intents and purposes is going to create the maw but everywhere unless she betrayed him. And besides the Alien souls that go into the afterlife are given the vague whispy humanoid form with no actual details.
Well, they brought the Maghar from the AU, with sweet lady Geyarah. And they declined to bless Teldrassil. Those are pluses in my book. So lets not be too hasty.
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Sometimes it is fate and your actions, inaction, or different actions wouldn’t have changed a thing. It’s not an excuse or an avoidance of accountability.
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that seems entirely like your own projection tbh.
It is boring that blizz has written her in a way to make people dislike her. They have done a poor job of explaining her position. It makes no sense that she would speak in riddles to anduin or to anyone anymore.
It makes people assume that her purpose is absolute destruction.
Breaking the machinery of death and breaking the cycle we are trapped in does not necessarily mean the destruction of everything and everyone. But you wouldnt know it by blizzards story telling.
It could have been an EXCELLENT story. Moral gray areas. Explained much more in depth as to why Sylvanas believes the current machinery is unjust(as opposed to having her just go WE ARE SLAAAAAVVVEEESS all the time). How about having her explain why she thinks we are slaves and what she envisions a new world order as. I have many wonderful ideas on what she would say.
but I dont write the stories. and blizz is just leaving that part out.
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