Why?
Illidari is known for this line: I have sacrificed everything. What have you sacrificed?
Yes.
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He’s neither. Illidan is an antihero - he has an overall noble goal, but he has gone much too far in many of his pursuits.
Also the line is “I’ve sacrificed everything. What have you given?” And Illidan’s sacrifices mainly involve sacrificing other people’s things.
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I don’t know what he is. All that I know is that he’s hilarious. "I AM MY SCAAAAAAARS!"
How can you not love this level of hammy edginess?
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That cinematic would have been 10,000 times better had they left that line out. >.>
He supposedly sacrificed his future with Tyrande, in order to prepare for the Burning Legion. 
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Just like I sacrificed my future as President of the United States. Such a heavy burden I carry.
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Villain, he talks about sacrifice all the time when all he does is sacrifice other people and somehow he always ends up with more power. Then when the time finally comes for it to be HIM that has to sacrifice he suddenly thinks twice about it.
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That was in the past, yes. I did not see him doing much sacrificing in Legion (excepting the quests of his past). He made some rash decisions, but you would always see Illidan in the forefront of things. People also clamor about how he dared not sacrifice himself for the good of the light, but as Illidan himself said: “I have traded my freedom for power before” while some may view this as him refusing to sacrifice his freedom for the better of all, a character like himself would in the past have viewed it as sacrificing power for himself.
Illidan at that crucial point, before the naaru, were offered what he in the past always dreamt to be - the savior, the hero, the all powerful who would save everyone from doom. Illidan denied, nay, sacrificed that.
Illidan have grown, he have realised that the only strength you can rely on, is your own. You can not sacrifice people for a temporary power boost to save everyone, it just won’t work. You need to rely on your own strength to accomplish your goal, you can not believe in some presumed birthright to go ahead and make you the hero, you must step up and do the work.
Illidan is, I believe, is one of the few successes that World of Warcraft have had in terms of storytelling and character building.
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No way. This is WoW’s writing at it’s best. It’s not what would traditionally be called good, but it’s over the top and it owns it. It’s stupid, but fun. (Sylvanas is not fun)
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Did you keep track of how many moonguard sorcerers he went through in X’era’s re-enactment? He literally burned them for magical fuel.
He is sort of an antivillain.
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not quite a villain, but he’s arrogant, entitled, and far less heroic than he sees himself as
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In Warcraft III, Illidan used primarily to show the rigid conservatism of Night Elf society. The player is first introduced to Illidan by way of Tyrande suggesting they let him out to aid the fight against the Burning Legion: Malfurion is disgusted by this and acts as though Illidan were worse than the Burning Legion (you know, the people currently burning down their precious trees and generally trying to kill every living thing on the planet). Then you meet Illidan and…he’s a whiny noble who gets mad when he does something good (for the wrong reasons) and Malfurion is still mad at him? It’s a nice bait and switch, but that’s the essence of his character, someone who does the right thing for the wrong reasons, and someone as rigid as Malfurion cannot get over that.
Then in WC3: TFT he and Malfurion have a little arc about letting the past go, Illidan moves on from Tyrande (bleh), Malfurion accedes that maybe Illidan isn’t so bad, and Maiev lets nothing go and ends the campaign as she started, fervently chasing someone who may not deserve that level of condemnation.
Then TBC happened, where we fight Illidan for reasons that never made much sense. The story writers were not prepared to tell a coherent story.
Then Legion, where he was blatantly retconned after the marketing team (the real force behind the story) demanded he be brought back, and the story devs did the work in the typical American way when ordered by your bosses to do something stupid: halfassedly. My favorite was trying to retconn his attempt to blow up Antarctica, which was 100% unequivocally because Kil’Jaeden told him to do it OR ELSE, as if he had done so for noble reasons. I generally don’t care about retconns for retconns sake, but these seemed particularly egregious and lazy.
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He’s a pragmatist with pretty much the most ambition/determination ever. He takes the existence of the word “No” very personally. That’s who Illidan is.
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Liam O’Brain really channeling his angsty teenage Caleb Widogast in that line, and I love it.
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Did they try to retcon it?
I keep hearing about blizzard trying to retcon Illidan, and Redeem Illidan, and all that jazz.
While Xe’ra did speak negatively of the player and those who stood in opposition to Illidan in the past, because Xe’ra believed he was the goose that was laying the golden eggs, her attempts at redeeming Illidan ultimatively falls flat as she turns out to be just as crazed as Illidan’s past self.
There was no attempt at redeeming Illidan’s past actions, no attempt at making players forgive his actions, a story was told - one of the few good ones in current Warcraft age. And it is no surprise to me, that the rest of the Warcraft story is the crap it is, because the playerbase don’t know good storytelling even when it bites them in the butt.
People are likely believing that there was an attempt at redeeming Illidan, because it was a glowy chandelier of the holy light; that the playerbase somehow believe to be the ultimate goodness, told them that Illidan did nothing wrong. The Light is not good, it is not evil, it is a cosmic force of energy that has no mind of it’s own, it just does what it does, just like fire just does what it does, and fire can be used for good or for bad, to warm you up when you are cold or to burn down your house.
The naaru are not good, they are beings with a mind of their own, they have goals and aspirations and are thus are prone to evil just as any other being with a some semblance of human intelligence and free will. And this was the entire point of Xe’ra and Illidan.
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Illidan is an impulsive, magic addicted contrarian and too destructive - to himself and others - to be a hero. His story had to be retconned twice before he even resembled a hero. And after that it turns out all of his “sacrifices” are either things he didn’t value (like the state of his soul), belonged to someone else (like people’s lives or the Black Citadel) or he never had (like Tyrande’s love).
When Illidan said “I traded my freedom for power before”, the closest thing to that actually happening wasn’t his bargain with Sargeras - he went AWOL right after Sargeras was done with him - it was his imprisonment under Maiev for creating a second Well of Eternity and killing Night Elves who tried to stop him. When called on to actually sacrifice something he cared about, he not only refused, but killed the one making the proposal.
Illidan: “Sometimes the hand of fate must be forced.”
Xe’ra: “I agree.”
Illidan: “My destiny is my own!”
I wish Xe’ra had said “Sometimes the hand of fate must be forced” before trying to Lightforge Illidan.
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Which is the entire point. He grew out of trying to be the ‘hero’ and cared solely for his goal; the Legion’s end. His entire arc was: “You have golden eyes and therefor you are destined for great things!” he went his life expecting to be good at everything, only to later learn that nah, things are not just coming to you, you gotta put in the work yourself.
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To his fans and Blizzard, a very flawed yet relatable, hero. To the morons who try to push their fanfics on the rest of us, he will always be a villain no matter what.
Illidan just went from one extreme to the other, and baselessly assumed just because his “great destiny” didn’t happen that there was no such thing as destiny and that help from a higher power = weakness just because “muh contrarianism”.
Remember “There can be no chosen one. Only we can save ourselves.” So says Illidan, who knew nothing about the Light until he met that elder naaru (likely Xe’ra), has no powers of prophecy, no ability to see into the future (Xe’ra might not have known everything but she at least had that) nor time travel. Illidan is so ignorant about the Emerald Dream, he wrote a book to discredit it just because he was jealous of Malfurion; “The Emerald Dream: Fact or Carefully Planned Out Farce Perpetrated By My Brother -By Illidan”
Illidan is in no position to talk about fate or destiny, what he knows about them wouldn’t fill a gnome’s thimble.