It was your headcanon that the Night Elves wouldn’t know what to do. The following section doesn’t change that she believed that they would, as the section following that section Sylvanas still believes the Night Elves would demand to take Teldrassil back. Let me fix that for you:
This was just Saurfang buying into Sylvanas moving the goal post, which you should understand, since you’re so apt on that fallacy’s use.
I’m going to break down that whole section, too, since that was rather fun, actually. This is Sylvanas’ internal monologue at the beginning of her emotional break down:
To start, sure sounds like genocide, doesn’t it? But seriously, this is just Sylvanas moving the goal post. The plan was never to end the Night Elves as a people, and it was never about the Night Elves losing their leaders, yet here we are with Sylvanas going on about it:
- This battle was not about a piece of land. Even Saurfang knew that. Taking the World Tree was a way to inflict a wound that could never heal. Losing their homes and their leaders would have ended the kaldorei as a nation, if not a people.
This next part is just emotional rambling, as the only way this would have bled the Alliance would have been if Genn left it, leaving Sylvanas with just jumping to conclusions without any reason to believe any of this:
- Even the loss of one leader would have been enough to create a tide of despair. The wounds of this battle would have bled, festered, decayed, and rotted the Alliance from the inside out.
The next part is how Sylvanas expects the attack on Undercity and/or the attempt to retake Teldrassil would go:
- Anduin Wrynn would have lashed out in a final, desperate war, looking for a miracle, because only a miracle would save them.
And then her thoughts devolve into something not related to how Anduin would behave after Teldrassil was taken, but setting up her own self-chastisement:
- But a miracle already had. A miracle granted by the honorable hand of a foolish old orc.
And an overconfident warchief. Best to lay blame where it belonged. This was her mistake as much as Saurfang’s.
And then Sylvanas’ thoughts start to spiral out of control as she starts to panic that she had allowed things to possibly get beyond her:
- This conquest of Darnassus would rattle the kaldorei people. They would grieve for their lost, fear for their imprisoned, and tremble at the thought of the Horde ransacking their homes. But they would not fall to despair. Not anymore. Malfurion’s impossible survival would give them hope. Their wound would heal.
Even in this dark hour, they would say, Elune still watches over us.
At this point Sylvanas just starts rambling incoherently and emotionally, like someone having conspiratory thoughts that the world itself was out to get her:
- And that was almost certainly true, wasn’t it? Elune had intervened. Perhaps she had even stayed Saurfang’s killing blow. And she wouldn’t be the only force beyond the Alliance to oppose Sylvanas’s true objective.
Sylvanas’s anger grew cold.
She had known this would happen. It had simply come sooner than expected. That was all.
And even through all this, Sylvanas still was going forward with the plan to take Teldrassil:
- She strode toward the shoreline, ignoring the last few skirmishes and the wailing of those unfortunate kaldorei who had been unable to escape Darkshore. She studied the shape of Teldrassil towering above her in the moonslight. Soon, it would be in the hands of the Horde.
“Secure the beach,” Sylvanas said. “Prepare to invade the tree.”
And at this point Sylvanas didn’t even seem to know what her plan even was any more and was in a mental spiral of her own:
-
A wound that cannot heal. Sylvanas needed to think of a new way to inflict one. There was no turning back.
And you have not shown that the “wounds that cannot heal” are possible without Genn leaving the Alliance. You’re so hyper-focused on that vague phrase of which you can’t actually connect any details to that you don’t see that Sylvanas doesn’t have a plan outside of Genn.
Meaninglessly repeated, as analyzed above. Repeating something several times can be a fallacy in itself:
Proof by assertion , sometimes informally referred to as proof by repeated assertion, is an informal fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction.[1] Sometimes, this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam).[2] In other cases, its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies.[3]
This fallacy is sometimes used as a form of rhetoric by politicians, or during a debate as a filibuster. In its extreme form, it can also be a form of brainwashing.[1]
Oh, that’s the saddest line anyone can ever give. Are you so self-important that you think convincing you is that goal to anything for anyone? You can enjoy a conversation with people just for the sake of discussing things, you know.
Certainly can, and he does.
But the burning wasn’t, and he blames himself for it, too. If anything, the cinematics he’s given are pretty much a sequence of him finally being able to realize that the burning wasn’t him, but Sylvanas:
- Saurfang’s Flashback:
- “Old Soldier”: So… You know me? Is that it? What I’ve seen? What I’ve done?
- “Lost Honor”: I have given EVERYTHING for the Horde! Bled for it… killed for it… And Sylvanas is destroying it! She will destroy everything!
- “Safe Haven”: Do you know? Do you know what she’s done while you’ve been hiding?
That last line, as I’m surprised I haven’t seen more people pointing out, Saurfang might as well have been saying to himself with Thrall as a stand in for a mirror.
A “would that cannot heal” specifically used as a metaphor for, yes, the original plan:
- “The Gilneans will be furious if the Alliance acts to help the kaldorei first,” she said. “The boy in Stormwind will have a political crisis on his hands. He is smart, but he is not experienced. What happens when Genn Greymane, Malfurion Stormrage, and Tyrande Whisperwind all demand differing actions? He is not a high king like his father. The respect the others give him is a courtesy, not an obligation. Anduin Wrynn will rapidly become a leader who cannot act. If the Alliance will not march as one, each nation will act in its own interest. Each army will return home to protect their lands from us.”
That’s the horrible irony of proof by assertion. If you’re going to repeat yourself, the only way to counter that is to repeatedly refute it. And then we’re both just going ad nauseam.
Was never the plan, and matches what I showed before:
Also, thinking upon this more, to be fair, Genn does credit the Night Elves for taking in his people.
See above. Sylvanas had originally expected Malfurion to live and join Tyrande in divide Anduin’s attention with Genn, while Sylvanas had already already assumed she was holding Teldrasssil.