Jaina's character progression discussion

Lore Story Forum
1

Jaina has been around since Warcraft 3.
She is a huge character probably Alliance’s greatest character in both presence and growth. For Horde, I would say that title belongs to Thrall but due to Chris’ health his presence has been an on-&-off for a few expansions now. So maybe she is WoW’s biggest character considering these parameters.

So I wanted to maybe have a discussion about her journey from WC3 to today and how the latest BFA material fits in with her progression so far.

Does she deserve the hate she gets from certain Horde posters? Was she unhinged? logical? Flip floppy? And so on.

1 Like
2

well as many may know she is my fav character.

i think that she suffered heavy bad writting in general and i blame that to a number of factors.

such as faction war or blizzard making the varian look better that anyone else.

i don’t think that she deserves the extreme hate that some have for her, but i can’t really blame them either considering that blizzard hasn’t decided what the hell to do with her until recently.

this was particularry true during the mop era, like i understand that blizzard did theramore to change her character that otherwise,without arthas would be pretty much irrelevant.
but they went from one extreme to the other. many,many times. (hell, you can see it in her warbringers)

i think that i am glad that blizzard managed to “redeem her character” during bfa, i think they have done a great job with her in bfa.

But we have 2 main problems, her previous characterizations between “murder all horde” and “oh,maybe not all of them are bad”
and the fact that blizzard escalating the conflict so much with teldrassil.
While i do understand that her current character is basically consistent with tides and war crimes, ingame we also kinda had a different character (probably because blizzard wanted to villain bat her, but at some point someone decided that no, she should be a hero)
this struggle is what truly damaged her character, blizzard is just not consistent, not with her, not with faction war, not with the story in general.

So here i am, a fan of her that has to see how blizzard treats a character i like and feeling hostage and frustrated with some of their decisions (like she not pressing the attack versus the zandalari when they could have done so many things differently)

i think that i like that she even risked her life to save baine to return him the favor, mixed feelings about working with the horde again
because, like i said blizzard escalated it too much.

i buyed bfa because of her,and i continue to play because of her,i enjoyed her journey in wc3 and wow, and even in bfa we got all these cool scenes with her,
and her story about reuniting with her family and seeking redemption with kultiras was great (going as far as bringing me to tears her cinematic in thros and that a character manages to do that is incredible to me) even being cool as raid boss.

i could go all day talking about her character during wc3, or wow
i think that in general i am satisfied considering that this is basically the end of character arc. (maybe she being the key to ending the faction war)

But that doesn’t mean that i can deny the many flaws regarding her character and her biggest problem:inconsistency. such is the nature of blizzard writting.

anyway, my 2cents.

10 Likes
3

Jaina used to be my favorite character before Cataclysm but now she just represents when the horde was made worse and worse in order to feed into her character shifts. I don’t care if she’s BFFs with Thrall again. I just wish she’d disappear from the story because I don’t want to think about her anymore.

17 Likes
4

She’s dropped from one of my favorites to one of my least favorite characters precisely because there hasn’t been any progression. We just went in a circle with her.

We had idealist Jaina. Then we had realist Jaina, who finally saw the world (and the Horde) for what it really is. And now we’ve gone back to idealist Jaina. Because Baine felt sorry for a corpse (and not thousands of Night Elves), and Thrall is vaguely sad. Or something.

Edit: I’m just reminded of a hamster wheel. All that time and effort, just to end up right back where we started.

24 Likes
5

I don’t hate Jaina per say, but I hate her presence in the narrative. She is a frustrating mix of overpowered deus-ex who is strong enough to come into a battle the horde has already won and then singlehandedly turn it around not once, but twice and a character who I’m supposed to feel bad for even though she has constantly been a thorn in my side at best.

The fact that Horde players are told to feel bad for Jaina and to work alongside Jaina when she was just our final raid boss of the patch, trash talked us and ported out, and has a history of emotional breakdowns that she chooses to cope with via mass murder… but I’m supposed to feel bad that Sylvanas was mean to her brother :roll_eyes:

That being said, I kind of enjoyed her on my Alliance play through of their side of the story so I think my frustration is just based on how she comes across from the Horde side.

31 Likes
6

I used to dislike her goody two-shoes nature, she felt too one-dimensional to me. I was a Horde player for the majority of my time playing Warcraft up until BfA, so I didn’t really get to see a lot of her in-game story progression moments through WotLK and MoP.

I went back recently and ran the end game 5-mans for WotLK, did the Theramore scenario in MoP and just general lore clean-up for things I missed as a Horde player on the Alliance side.

I quite like the bitter, jaded version of Jaina who takes no prisoners but I really hate that she’s reverting back to the naive, ‘everyone is nice’ version of herself. I feel like it’s a selfish take on her as a character that she can so easily forgive those who decimated Theramore and burned a bunch of civilians alive because they returned her undead brother. (Who they also resurrected in the first place?) I will reserve my final opinion until the whole story unfolds, but it feels like her development was for nothing if we just go back to ‘tense but not killing each other’ terms.

4 Likes
7

Jaina can never win, honestly. When she was a peacelover people disliked her for that, and made fun of her emotional moments in Wrath and such. When she was anti-Horde, she was disliked for that too. The Purge of Dalaran was held over her head like something damning to the entire character, her telling Varian to ‘dismantle the Horde’ was mocked and frowned on (I remember the forums when it happened).

Her progression up until 8.2 was probably one of the more realistic ones of any character, if you focus only on the in-game stuff and not the book where she flip flops back. She gets hate purely because she’s Jaina, and she says mean things about the Horde. She’s called overpowered when we’ve seen other spellcasters do equally ridiculous things before, but because she does it against a player faction, it becomes OP.

Her story path from 8.0 to 8.1 was probably my favorite, riiight up until she said to back off the Zandalari afer killing their king. That was some of the best writing Blizzard has done, and I was genuinely happy for her when she called the fleet home.

Jaina is one of the better written characters, always has been. The faction war just poisons her, the same as it poisons every other character.

14 Likes
8

as a fan of her i am kinda like this as well.
i don’t want that she just forgets everything because baine returned derek. and that she goes back to “peace at all cost” mode because that’s character regression, like jaime lannister.

when we go to theramore for derek, her dialogue is still like “i am wondering if i am becoming my father” so that tells me, that her hate is still there, she can’t get rid of it. so i kinda want to think that she is in the middle of “wanting peace to protect the alliance” and “all i need is just one excuse to go in a killing spree”

that is why i have mixed feeling about the crossroads cinematics, because i don’t know if she is just willing to forgive the entire horde and baine and friends and pretend like everything is fine or she just is doing it because she really wants to stop the bloodshed and the death from bothsides, specially of alliance citizens.

i think that i agree with this as well, considering all other wow characters (they are all inconsistent) what they did with her in bfa was pretty solid, and i agree that it’s a little unmeasured the hate from some horde players because they just can’t kill her for the grave crime of just insulting them. and at the same time, i don’t blame them either, we all have our biases.

4 Likes
9

Anetheron has had some great character progression this expansion. J/k.

Her bfa progression is sensible. I liked how in her nightmare cinematic the black ink spilled onto KT on the map, sort of prophetic of the OG forces and influence spilling their way in. Jaina’s pretty brave.
I don’t think she will ever trust the Horde again, especially without Thrall at the helm. She will backstab anduins ideal of peace to annihilate the horde. Just an opinion.

10

She’s definitely flip floppy. I would’ve preferred a middle ground between warmonger and peaceful Jaina, but I guess she’s gone full idealist again.

I’m just hoping it sticks this time.

4 Likes
11

One of my favorites, then again I’m Alliance. As others have echoed in this thread, I enjoy how she went from kind hearted, to hateful due to tragedy, and now somewhere in between after all has been said and done.

12

Jaina is one of the worst written characters in the game, probably THE worst.

At first she’s a lover of peace, then she attacks the Horde, then when they attack her she forgets what she did and acts like they were at peace to an insane degree, then she goes ragemode and tries to destroy Org, then she forgets all of that and returns to peace mode in Dal, then the Bell gets stolen and she starts mass slaughtering and imprisoning people without any evidence in a purge that she never seems to realize directly mirrors Arthas’, then she helps the Horde PC in WoD, then she disappears on the Broken Shore for no reason despite easily being able to save Varian, then she abandons the entire war effort against the Legion and her position as leader of Dalaran because the Council of Six outvotes her, then she pulls multiple deus ex machinas to save the Alliance leadership despite not doing anything to help the Night Elves, then she thinks she can get Kul Tiras to return to the Alliance even though she’s the reason they left, then she has literally the most stupid story arc in the entire game on Kul Tiras where she accepts her father’s reasoning and the fact that she was wrong, only to then be totally forgiven by Katherine for no real reason and get told that “NO, EVERYONE ELSE WAS AT FAULT BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T LISTEN TO YOU ENOUGH, FORGIVE THEM ALL FOR BEING WRONG, AND FORGIVE YOURSELF FOR GOOD MEASURE”, then ALL of Kul Tiras forgives her too because she stopped some pirates even though she was a boogyman days before, then she goes and helps sack Dazar’alor, kills Rastakhan, fights the Horde PCs only to escape virtually unscathed and render her entire fight pointless, only to then do ANOTHER 180 where she suddenly DOESN’T want to attack the Zandalari and the Horde in order to let them mourn the guy she JUST helped kill, and now she’s going to be forgiven by the Horde and probably Talanji too, the daughter of the guy she killed, because her friendship with Baine “redeems” the Horde somehow because she’s just such an angel that’s friends with all the good people and everyone against her is just such a bad guy.

Jaina sucks. She’s the worst. If she was retconned to have died back on Hyjal the story would be a million times better for it.

17 Likes
13

You lost me there… when did she attack the Horde? Grom attacked her forces first.

3 Likes
14

I’m not a fan of her flip flopping beliefs either. Having her go from naïve idealist who trusted the Horde time and again only to be betrayed to a harder individual who finally saw them for what they were is character development. Going back to trusting them again because of a few sad faces is character regression and really irritating because we’re right back to her being the trusting shmuck ready to be stabbed in the back again.

3 Likes
15

Cataclysm.

2 Likes
16

I Love the premises of the character and love the Voice acting but she is a broken character.

Like Thrall was used in Cataclysm she is being overused and forced down the other factions throat as their savior.

She would have been fine if she had kept a middle ground however between blizzard and the writer of the books she has gone from one extreme to another with very little context or motivation. I can’t imagine that she could just forgive Saurfang/Baine for their part in the war of thorns. I mean who are Tyrande and Malfurion to her? just passing acquaintances who she doesn’t care that the Saurfang would murder if he deemed it “honourable”

I really feel like blizzard should twist expectations and have the Alliance not come save the horde rebels instead leaving them to their fate.

17

In Cataclysm Garrosh attacked first. Jaina has always been part of the Alliance otherwise Theramore would have been a neutral city like the goblin settlements.
So… its not that shocking she would be ‘attacking the Horde’ for a war they started.

7 Likes
18

Jaina is okay over all the game has never been the greatest at character development but i can understsnd her and why she did things. I see getting mad at hernot wanting to drown org agsin but hey she actully likes baine and thrall so eother of them leading thr horde might be hood to her. I am glad she isn’t kill the all i mean look at blood elves she kills a few abd suddenly that is just as bad if not worse than the guy that killed 90% of them. Jaina has to bd good an oeace loving because if she dares to harm a horde npc then she has commited a new genocide.

1 Like
19

See what I mean about Jaina being hated because she’s Jaina? Worst written character in the game… okay.

7 Likes
20

She was one of my favourite characters until BfA. Now she’s in every scenario and every cinematic. And just like sadfang in the Horde, everything Alliance related Is seen through her point of view. It’s annoying.

Also, I hate her godlike powers like navigating a galleon over a sea of ARCANE, conjuring arcane cannons that fire arcane cannon balls, dispelling plague, freeze the freaking OCEAN ! She’s an instawin button! Why am I even fighting ? She could just lift the sword of Sargeras and stab every Horde city with it.

10 Likes