Is Jaina really on the same level as Sylvanas?

Lore Story Forum
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I was talking with a friend and He told me He really hated Jaina for what she did in Dalaran of pretty much murdering the Sunreavers during the Purge of Dalaran and was the Female Version of Arthas. He also hated the fact that the Writers was making Jaina more sympathetic during BFA while ignoring the events of the Purge.

So is Jaina really on the same level as Sylvanas, Garithos, and Arthas on genocide of the whole race? This is coming from a Jaina Fan who really didn’t like what they did with her character during Mists and Purge of Dalaran was 100% one of them.

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The people in Dalaran had the choice of standing down, Stratholme didn’t.

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Jaina tried to commit genocide and failed while having complete control over the way she thought and felt. Sylvanas was resurrected with only part of her soul in tact while suffering from the Curse of Undeath.

No they are not the same.

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Is Jaina as bad as some of the worst characters in Warcraft’s history? No.

Has she come close to being as bad as them? Yes, and she’s had to be talked down a couple of times - though most fans forgive her because of extenuating circumstance.

Have the writers been all over the place with her character, causing her to represent not just a serious conflict within the Alliance, but to also carry forward a note of hypocrisy in the Alliance that has never been meaningfully addressed? Absolutely.

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Jaina did some extremely shocking things in Pandaria, but ultimately the worst thing she actually did was the Purge of Dalaran - which even then can be argued was influenced by Aethas’s complicity in Garrosh’s theft. While she DID attempt to drown Orgrimmar directly after Theramore was bombed, she was indeed talked down from it.

Sylvanas burned Teldrassil with the intention of sending every innocent in there into superhell, started a massive bloody war with the intention of sending as many people on both the enemy team and her OWN team to superhell, then joined up with the superdevil to kill absolutely everyone and everything. All of which, she is neither repentant for nor does she show any intention of stopping outside of some minor discomfort.

No, Jaina and Sylvanas are not the same.

That excuse only really gets her so far. By and large, all of Sylvanas’s actions were done well into her Curse of Undeath, when it was largely established that the Sylvanas Windrunner of today was pretty much lucid and settled. There’s nothing that really establishes that her soul isn’t intact - just ripped from her body, then shoved back in.

If Jaina was of her right mind when she did what she did, so was Sylvanas.

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Does one have to be “on the same level” to be a bad person?

No, she didn’t commit genocide, destroy whole nations, and torture countless souls with undeath like Arthas.

No, she didn’t raze a city and do X, Y, or Z like Sylvanas.

Yes, she’s probably just as bad as Garithos, minus the racist motivations.

Is she still a war criminal who summarily executed people for no reason? Yeah. Did she still want to drown a city and its civilian inhabitants? Yeah.

Has she now flip-flopped back to her somewhat regular self, with the writers pretending all the stupid things they made her do didn’t happen? Yeah.

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What if Sylvanas had been talked out of bombing Teldrasil? Would that make her ok?

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I’m not sure ‘attempted’ genocide is something that can be negated, or put more directly; her having to be talked down to not do something terrible is still pretty indicative.

Necromancy has been explicitly described as ‘imperfect’, it’s pretty well established that a persons character can change wildly in undeath. Sylvanas actively tries to convince herself that she is the same person when she worries about it in Edge of Night.

Sylvanas isn’t necessarily ‘of her right mind’ but the scale of her crimes makes that a moot point.

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The “Purge of Dalaran” is the single most overblown event. Only Camp Taurajo comes close to the hyperbolic responses by Horde players.

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Here is the first problem: She didn’t do that.

The only ones she actually killed where the ones trying to keep her from arresting Aethas. Blizzard has confirmed that the NPCs that died when she was walking around was due to a bug in the game. Lore wise they were all imprisoned and have since been released.

Not even remotely.

Expelling a hostile force that had already abused Dalaran’s neutrality and arresting those who refused to leave is NOT the same as genocide. Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to paint Jaina as bad or trying to justify someone like Sylvanas with the ‘what-about-ism’ game.

Did. Not. Happen.

To add: Not to mention that she was not in her right mind and was still able to be talked down.

It would have been orders of magnitude better than what she did.

Though it would still have been worse. Let’s compare. One was a long term carefully laid out plan while completely calm. A choice carefully laid out well ahead of time. The other was someone in shock and in an emotionally compromised state and not thinking clearly. Which one do you think is worse? There is a reason first degree murder carries a worse sentence than 2nd degree.

So,

Jaina pulled back from what would have been a crime of
passion mitigated by a compromised emotional state.

Sylvanas carried out a pre-meditated mass murder.

Not remotely the same.

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Jaina murders all 6 of Aethas’ guards the second she sees him. No arrest attempt is made until they are dead.

Are we really going to have to do the thing where we explain that yes, if you fired a loaded gun at someone and it jammed, you are still just as bad as if it had not jammed?

Jaina sent the wave. Thrall stopped it. THEN she was talked down. I’m tired of having to explain that sequence of events.

Is Jaina as bad as Sylvanas? No, that’s absurd. Is she bad enough that if she was a Horde character, she’d be dead by now? Absolutely.

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The Purge of Dalaran is no more a genocide than the War of Thorns was, full stop. To call it such would mean to cast literally everything else in a massively exaggerated light. If the Purge was Genocide, what was Southshore?

People ask for morally grey writing but can’t seem to wrap their heads around it the few times Blizzard manages, mostly by accident, to pull it off. People dislike Jaina because she said mean things about the Horde and is a prominent female character, the Purge, while bad (and yes it was bad) is only part of it. Jaina has had a very odd dislike towards her in the playerbase going back over a decade, before MoP, the Purge is just one more straw to grasp at.

Jaina had no idea as to how many agents of Garrosh were present, knew the portal network had been hijacked, and the consequences for not acting could very well have been destruction, utterly. The only reason Garrosh didn’t win the war because of that Sunreaver betrayal was because Anduin destroyed the Divine Bell. In an equitable narrative, Lor’themar would have been raked over the coals for utterly failing to keep his own people in check, and I say this as someone who likes the guy and thinks he should be Warchief.

Blood Elves absolutely died, anyone saying otherwise is being contrarian, but the scale is often vastly overstated. No named Blood Elf NPCs died, every single one comes right back to Dalaran the moment they’re allowed to. Lor’themar himself works with Jaina the most readily out of any Horde leader, besides maybe Thrall, which wouldn’t really make all that much sense if Jaina had killed a large amount of Blood Elves in cold blood in Dalaran.

People scrambling to equate events as the same without being objective is why Blizzard manages to get away with constantly painting the Horde as bad guys and leaving the Alliance’s hands far more clean.

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Sylvanas is obviously substantially worse but that won’t stop Jaina from going to Revendreth when she dies.

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Honestly given the huge scale of things that seems to get someone sent to Revendreth I almost wonder who wouldn’t get sent there, out of the major characters, at this point.

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Jaina literally attacked Zanadalar for no other reason than they were allied with the Horde and killed thier king. The death toll from the attack on the Zandalari was comparable to what Garrosh did to Theramore and what Sylvanas did to Teldrassil. The Zandalari are still in a bit of a civil war over the fact that Talanji is still in the Horde even after they made a peace with Jaina.

The Blood Elves were in talks with joining the Alliance around the time of the Purge of Dalaran, and what Jaina and Veressa did was open old wounds because at one time the elves taught the mages arcane and the mages abused that power. So there was always a bit of xenophobia between humans and elves when it came to magic and who was allowed into Dalaran because of it. The Blood Elves lost out on a chance to rejoin the Alliance.

Teldrassil wasn’t a racially motivated crime, it wasn’t an act of genocide but “purging” Dalaran of the Sunreavers felt like a hate crime. You have to understand that Jaina grew up as the daughter of Daelin Proudmoore, who was VERY xenophobic towards Orcs so it’s not all that uncommon that she would have bigotry against the Horde which manifests as racism.

In the end of the Siege of Orgrimmar she was so angry about Theramore, despite the fact that the majority of the Horde did not side with Garrosh and rebelled against him , that she openly told Varian to take his opportunity to crush the Horde. Jaina believed all the Horde was guilty of the actions of one person… Tyrande in Shadowlands is no different.

And while, I play Horde, I’m not a Horde apologist. i know that Aethas Sunreaver aided Garrosh and the only reason the Purge of Dalaran happened was because they snuck the Divine Bell through the city. The Horde is not innocent. I would say that the Horde and the Alliance are on equal footing when it comes to atrocities committed. These characters are a product of their environment and that environment has been constantly at war with one another.

Every faction leader, Horde and Alliance has a handful of skeletons in their closet. and blood on their hands.

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Probably doesn’t help that it’s called a purge, although idk what else they could have called it.

Maybe expulsion?

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äh, what…no? Such an nonsense.

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We have no confirmed death toll for Dazar’alor… and if it’s comparable to Theramore, well, Theramore was almost entirely evacuated prior to the bombing, which puts the total death count from said destruction at under ten people. The evacuation ships being captured by the Horde later and then killed and abused is another matter. It is not implied nor ever equated as having the same death toll as the Burning, which we also have no numbers for other than the around 900 from the quest.

Per the War Campaign, which I’m sure you did, the Horde struck at Kul Tiras first, using Zandalar as the jumping off point. Moreover, there were Zandalari NPCs among the mobs during that attack, though that could easily be a Blizzard flub.

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Several things wrong her. Let me clarify.

Jaina was NOT in her right mind when she almost drowned Orgrimmar. So, there is that clear problem with your first claim.

Additionally, it was not that her ‘gun jammed.’ She was talked out of doing it.

It was made VERY clear that Thrall could only delay it. He was not actually going to be able to stop her.

To carry out your gun analogy, it is more like:
Someone that just watch their friends and family murdered in front of her eyes and who barely escaped herself. In shock and emotionally broken grabs a gun to shoot at the one who did it and those that were cheering and partying about it. And then someone reaches over and pushes the gun down hot and then talks her out of it.

How did you put those sentences together? You do know Sylvanas is not dead, right?

That is before we even look at other Horde characters. Shall we talk about the part the Horde leaders played in Garrosh war? Or in aiding Sylvanas war? Heck even Thrall did a very similar thing with Durnhold keep, only he wasn’t talked down.

There is a really key point here.

The Horde has been far, far worse than the Alliance. That is just an objective fact. And I do 100% agree with Horde players who do feel like the faction has played the villain far to much. That is a legitimate complaint. But to try and pretend it hasn’t been the villain is mistaking what you want for what is.

And actively participating in the war. Don’t pretend that the Zandalar where not an active enemy.

I hope you don’t actually believe that. Literally all the evidence we have is that the raid on Zandalar did not actually do significant damage to either the city or the population. Nothing like complete destruction of a city, or in the case of Teldrassil a city and all the surrounding settlements.

That was stupid when Blizzard put that line in. It was just a way to make the Blood elves seem sympathetic. To think that a nation in peace talks could raid the other nation, steal a weapon of mass destruction, turn said weapon over to a madman and then still have a chance at the peace talks is just insane.

Point of fact, Sunreaver is not a race. Sunreaver is a militarized political group. So, not a racial crime.

Point of fact, there was no rebellion at the time. And there was a celebration about the destruction of Theramore actively going on in the city at the time.

Nope.

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I did play the BfA Horde Campaign. I know that what started it, the Alliance had Talanji and Zul imprisoned. I don’t remember how they became prisoners of the Alliance but I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a reason I know as to why the Zanadlari Princess was in the Stockades. Can you clarify that?

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