And don’t forget the part about how (for a Horde player) if she hates us, it’s 100% our fault, and we should feel bad about that.
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Because at the end of the day, despite all that, Jaina still helped to prevent the complete destruction of Durotar in its infancy.
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Surely that debt was canceled out when she unleashed the wave upon Orgrimmar, even if it didn’t actually hit the city.
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If it was cancelled out that means it’s back to neutral ground. But yeah the story does phrase things in that Jaina is justified for her new found Horde-hate because of what the Horde has done to her. She was betrayed even though she continuously had the Hordes back. Killed her father, repeatedly held back Varian, all that. Then the Horde nuked her city.
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But…she didn’t unleash the wave at the city. That was…the reason it didn’t hit the city. She didn’t miss or something. She realized how awful it was and chose not to do it.
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I just wanted to add some context to Pellex, since this was posted on the old forums and I feel it’s still relevant now:
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(I wrote this for my fan fiction. I think it’s pretty good.)
Melfina narrowed her gaze at her, “You’re face looks young for a human even though most of your hair is white,” She looked at her nails on her hand and smiled, “and I heard how it happened.” She laughed slightly and touched a strain of her white hair, “I sure would have like to have kept a streak of green in the white I was given.”
“What would you know of that?” Jaina asked harshly.
“I know you got what your deserved.” Melfina said with a laughed.
“Leave before I kill you, what would you know about what I’ve been through?”
“EVERYTHING! Thal’darah Grove, that were my tribe went, that was my home, that was my people, women and children. People that didn’t even know how to use a sword killed by Overlord Krom’gar.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“Was it? The Horde were dealing with Venture Company that was polluting the water and for that we fed them. The Bloodhoof Tauren were a middle ground, but then your Northwatch allied themselves with their enemies. The Grimtotems, you brought the war where it wasn’t needed and that’s why Overlord Krom’gar was brought in. You know we were told that we wouldn’t be involved in the fighting, you could have spoken one word, one letter, and Northwatch would have been back to their stone towers, but like always, hundreds of people die because you refuse to do anything.”
“I helped the Bloodhooves take back their land of Thunder Bluff when they were being attacked by the Grimtotems.”
Melfina shrugged, “And yet you allied with them. I was 16 when I was on a hunt and felt the blast that reduced my people to a blacken hole in the ground. I killed so many members of the Horde for weeks and it was easy you know, I looked young, a little older than a child, and the Horde were hesitant to strike. Even the undead. I found High Chieftain Cliffwalker, well he found me, he was a familiar face and he asked me why I had killed so many people. I said the Horde killed everyone, so I need to kill them back. He said, ‘The Horde didn’t kill them, it was just one man’ He took me to the bones of Overlord Krom’gar and said the Horde killed him.”
“So why do you blame me?”
Melfina rolled her eyes, “Because you’re not a woman of honor, what was Garrosh supposed to think when you ally with your enemies for the sake of the Horde, but ally with his enemies for the sake of the Alliance to attack the people you supported in the first place. High Chieftain Cliffwalker told me that he never seen Garrosh so angry and disgusted for what had happen to my home.”
“And yet he did the same thing to me. Took my home and killed everyone I care about.”
“No, he killed soldiers and mages. He waited for days for you to bring your best and clear out the ones that couldn’t fight, and you did. No women and no children, you know that everyone you brought to Thermore was ready to fight, kill, and die if need be.”
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Admittedly she needed some convincing but it was still her choice to stop. Most people, especially the Horde, probably wouldn’t let themselves be stopped if they were in Jaina’s shoes.
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Nope–she unleashed the wave twice, the first time “with a smirk and a simple flick of her wrist.” Twice, Thrall and his air elementals held it back and kept it from hitting the city, while Thrall tried (and failed) to talk her down. She was about to kill Thrall and unleash the wave for the third time when Kalecgos showed up and finally convinced her to stop.
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The cognitive dissonance on this piece of lore shows just how strong the Jaina = hero imperative is.
She did unleash it. Twice. Thrall stopped it. As has been pointed out many times in this thread alone. In fact, once she unleashed it right after being reminded about the innocents in Orgrimmar, such as the orphanage. She literally said that the orphans deserved it, and tried to kill them.
She’s the super villain who launched the nuke, only to have the hero disarm it. And she did it twice. She did it while out of her mind with rage and grief, whereas Sylvanas was cold-blooded, if that makes it better (I actually think it does - but it’s still a super villain move).
When you try to murder a city and the narrative continues treating you as a paragon while scarcely mentioning the inconvenient attempted genocide fact ever again…that’s what causes a lot of people to question whether Jaina is a “Mary Sue.” The narrative bends around her.
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Well, sort of. It’s not like she did it just hours after the bombing of Theramore. It was several weeks later, and she had to do quite a bit of not-unhinged methodical planning to get the focusing iris and get herself into position. I agree that she wasn’t her normal self, though.
And here’s where the Sylvanas = villain imperative takes over. She’s actually not cold when she orders the burning of Teldrassil. The Warbringers video makes it look like a temper tantrum, and A Good War speaks about how her eyes are filled with “white-hot anger” when she gives the order (p. 84). But people remember her as being cold at the time–or even as cackling with pleasure at the flames, which didn’t happen in any source material I saw. Because “She’s a villain, and that’s what villains do,” I guess.
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Correct, I’d been mistaken. Didn’t have Tides of War in front of me at the time, and external summaries of events tend to omit finer points like how many times something happened in succession before it was stopped.
Well, she was also basically isolated and dismissed by her own allies. The passage of time can often do little to calm someone in the middle of a breakdown when she’s been left alone with nothing but feelings of resentment, abandonment, and thoughts of what to do about the awful thing that happened. Varian and Anduin both did little to assuage her in any way whatsoever; while admittedly taken aback by her sudden about-face regarding the Horde, they helped nobody by taking the extreme opposite position and making it seem like they didn’t really intend to do anything about the situation.
Especially since Varian basically either lied to her about having any means of retaliating against Garrosh or was uncharacteristically slow about deciding to do so at all. If he’d told her they were amassing a fleet (which, as it turned out, they were), she’d have had no reason to think she was alone in wanting to retaliate, and she wouldn’t have almost sank said fleet when it unexpectedly showed up between her and Orgrimmar. Rather, she’d have had every reason to want to be involved in a proper military reprisal instead of striking out alone and taking matters into her own hands because her own friends and allies seemed paralyzed and ineffective at best, and dismissive of her loss at worst.
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Only a elitist would judge an entire group of intelligent beings based off of faction choice.
(Seems like you’re trying to defend Hitler, which I have heard a few people do and some have made very persuasive arguments. But it’s that simple minded thought process that lead to the genocide of the Jews.)
Just for future reference, so it’s on the new board and I’ll have something to link to if/when this topic comes up again, I’ll cut and paste the detailed summary of the scene I wrote up for the old board.
It’s near the end, when Jaina has the wave ready to crash down on Orgrimmar.
Thrall shows up and says the elements asked him to come and stop the wave (he didn’t know she was the one creating it). He tells her he’s sorry about Theramore, but what she’s going to do won’t help.
Jaina snarls back that Theramore is his fault, because he appointed Garrosh.
Thrall says she can blame him, and that he blames himself. But he still asks her not to use the wave to destroy his people.
Jaina says they’re not people–they’re monsters, and they all deserve to die. She says Thrall tricked her about the true nature of orcs, but now she sees how bad they really are. She announces that she’ll join Varian in breaking the blockade … as soon as she’s destroyed Orgrimmar.
She then unleashes the wave “with a smirk and a simple flick of her wrist.” Thrall calls on the spirits of air to hold it back. The two of them wrestle magically for a while.
Thrall tells Jaina that her pain is justified, but she shouldn’t kill children because of it. Jaina does a Force Throw on him, er, I mean, she slams him back with a magic attack. Thrall realizes that the only way to get her to stop is to kill her, but he also realizes that he can’t bear to do that. He concentrates on holding back the elements. Jaina hurls a fireball at him.
They go a couple more rounds of trading spells and words, with Jaina accusing Thrall of working with Garrosh all along and Thrall begging her not to let what happened at Theramore destroy her. He says she should fight Garrosh, not the innocents and children in Orgrimmar.
Jaina says that orcs don’t deserve a future when the “good and decent people” in Theramore didn’t get one. In fact, “Why should anyone have a future?”
She unleashes the wave again. Thrall and the air elementals just barely manage to stop it, but it takes all his energy, so he knows he’s defenseless. Jaina starts summoning arcane energy, telling him to release the wind or she’ll kill him.
Thrall says she’ll have to kill him, because he’s not going to let this happen as long as he’s alive.
Jaina hesitates for a second and then says “So be it,” preparing to strike. And then Kalec shows up.
Link to thread on old board:
This ultimately is all that really matters to me. That this was where Jaina was at, and she has mostly been able to come back from that. But not on her own. The story saved Jaina, in that Thrall prevented her from actually being a mass murderer (attempts and actual success are two different crimes), and Kalec talked her down. That makes her not actually a Mary Sue, in that this was a display of multitudes of imperfections.
And to note, I’m not a Jaina fan. I found her very irritating in Warcraft III and Wrath of the Lich King, and even more annoying after Mists of Pandaria until BfA during her “Knowledge IS Power!” phase.
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I mean you have a faction full of omega-strength level people with space tech.
There is literally no reason why a faction war would progress this long, unless plot.
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Question for those who know more than me: is the wave episode ever mentioned anywhere in the game?
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Yes. Jaina talks about in the operation shieldwall questline.
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Blizzard uses its characters as plot devices and nothing more. They and the characters (and players) around them will say and do anything Blizzard has deemed necessary to shove whatever plot they desire down our throats.
This is not a new development, its just extra egregious because of the asinine Faction War plot no one wanted.
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