While Shadowlands ruined Sylvanas as a character for me, I’d say it handled Kael’thas and Kel’Thuzad remarkably well. All three committed or at least planned to commit genocide, but only the latter two managed to be actually compelling villains. Which is strange, right? Kel’thuzad was a mere underling of the Jailer and Kael’thas has been irrelevant for decades. I think it boils down to two factors: convincing motives and coherent personalities.
Kel’Thuzad has always been the archetypical evil sorcerer who craves knowledge and power for their own sake. Kael’thas joined Kil’jaeden because he genuinely believed he could cure the magical addiction of his people while also securing their place as the ruling elite on a new, demon-controlled Azeroth, and he stands by it.
But Sylvanas? Her characterization has always been incoherent. She never cared about the Horde or the Forsaken. She never cared about the free will of all living beings either prior to Shadowlands.
Kael’thas is compelling because he genuinely loves his people and wants to rule over them, as questionable as his methods may be. Kel’Thuzad is compelling because he simply loves necromancy and had the clear goal of becoming the most powerful necromancer in the entire universe. What exactly did Sylvanas plan to do after achieving her goal? How does a universe with “true free will” even look like? Nobody knows. “Free will” alone is too abstract as a motive.
Kael’thas and Kel’thuzad are better characters because they’re either cartoonishly evil but fun, or they embody a convincing combination of heroic and villainous traits. Sylvanas tried to destroy the universe for a nebulous philosophical concept.
I don’t think Sylvanas never had coherent characterization? Up until the end of WotLK, her single-minded obbession with vegeance against Arthas was a simple but understandable driving motivation.
Then she gets that vengeance, and neither she nor the writers seem to know what to do with her after that point.
In fairness to Kael’thas, his original heel-turn came so totally out of nowhere that any more context was going to be an improvement. Pre-SL, he was rightly considered one of the worst-written villains by far.
That’s because for a decade, Slyvanas’ characterization was made up by a series of writers who didn’t communicate and strongly disagreed with each other trying to tug her in several different directions. To the point where half the fandom couldn’t agree if she was a villain or not.
Then Afasabi eventually became the lead guy in charge and molded her into a reflection of himself: a malignant narcissist weaseling their way into power and inflicting suffering on people everyone around them, using them for their own selfish gain.
Then like right in the early stages of writing for Shadowlands, he was sent to the shadow realm for unspeakable crimes, and despite the justice of this, it left the remaining inexperienced writing team leaderless, and forced to resolve a bunch of subplots nobody but Afasabi wanted in the first place.
Christie Gold had to write an entire book to try to salvage all of this chaos into something coherent and re-contextualize everything to make it remotely satisfying, and most people are still underwhelmed by it.
It started even earlier than that. Our best guess is that the last patch he worked on would have been 8.2.
I’m not a particular fan of Golden’s, but I have to admit she had an unenviable task there. I don’t know whether it was possible to do much better than she did given what she had to work with.
Tragic villains are hard to write without being cheesy on a long enough time scale by a single author. Writing Sylvanas by committee pretty much doomed her from the start to be a victim of bad writing, though she had a few good arcs in there.
There’s a reason why people prefer the likes of Garrosh or Kel’thuzad–they aren’t sorry for what they did and they’d do it again. The best decision Shadowlands made was giving Garrosh that one line of his before preventing his character from being ruined by sub-standard “narrative leads” later on who’d make him all sad and mopey.
But yeah even Hogger’s a better villain than Sylvanas at this point.
I’d argue Kel’Thuzad stopped being a compelling villain as early as WoW, and was done an even bigger disservice in Shadowlands. He was great in WC3, a scheming, sorcerous monster with an oddly touching loyalty to the dark lord he helped create. That didn’t really carry over into WoW, however, and by SHL he could’ve been replaced with any generic lich.
Kael’thas took an even worse turn as a villain. A turn so laughably bad we got to salvage his character in the afterlife.
I thought the first two thirds of the book were an enjoyable exploration of the character. Her early days as the banshee queen, her failure to reconnect with the sin’dorei, and the Forsaken’s entry into the Horde were especially interesting elaborations. But then she took her header off Icecrown, and the book’s remainder read like a checklist of retcons to every notable act she committed after the fact, all to weasel Zovaal’s omnicidal agenda into the canon. More insulting than underwhelming, I think; but like Pellex said, Golden only inherited the mess.
Zovaal and the lore around him is almost impossible to salvage into anything good. At his core, he’s just a big silly action figure that wants to destroy the universe. Not inherently bad, and perfectly fine for a straightforward high fantasy story, but not the most compelling way to write a villain.
But making him into super duper important puppet master who was the real one behind all the events of Warcraft 3 absolutely ruined any good will. Not only is it insulting, it also robs him of any chance to stand on his own as an antagonist. Trying to awkwardly shove him into stories we actually care about, and then retroactively make those stories all about him, means he has no identity or value of his own as a character. Completely changing major character motivations and the facts behind major invents also cheapens the story.
It’s always going to feel hollow, because the original writers had no conception of Zovaal and didn’t write anything for or about him into their story. Despite supposedly being the most important figure, he has no actual presence in the story at all.
Frankly speaking, the vast majority of World of Warcraft’s villains have come out looking like absolute chumps by virtue of the fact that the story will twist itself into the most complex knots just to place a character on a platform, in a building, so that they may stand in the path of raiders.
I fear for any character who comes under the writing pen these days. They’ll lose all reason, all critical thought, and all their former attachments and beliefs just to drive a plot forward.
Imagine someone admitted to you that they were the one who hired the guy who burnt down your house and killed your family. And he’s not sorry it happened, it’s just that you have no idea how important to him it was that your house go up in flames, and the fact that only your house burned down is really unfair—and a good reason why you should help him torch the rest of the neighborhood.
After all, he super-duper promises that he’ll rebuild your house once the entire neighborhood is ashes and he owns all the land it once resided upon. You can totally trust him and sign over the deed to your burnt land and grab some kerosine.
Even a child following along could see that Zovaal had all the grace of an 80’s real-estate villain.
I always say Sylvanas shouldve actually died falling off Icecrown. Tragic character → tragic end. The problem is that it wasnt in the game and needed to have the buildup, cutscenes etc.
That leaves catas revamp to explore what the Forsaken are like after her death. There could still be stories about how much she knew about the Wrathgate and other things which can be explored even after her physical death.
I would say Shadowlands ruined Kel’thuzad as well. With that horrible line about how he was always working for the Jailer. Even before he was beckoned to Northrend by Ner’zhul.
Blizzard backtracked on that line of dialogue extremely quickly due to the backlash. Making it so that Kel’thuzad was serving Zovaal after the events of Wrath, like it always should’ve been. Since he bro, Arthas was dead.
That is why I am fine with the retconning they did with N’zoth. They did it over a long period of time and chose events / characters that needed expanding. The key ones being Deathwing, whom was just a generic evil dragon in WC2: BtDP and Azshara. Both of which got their story expanded in the WotA trilogy. Deathwing became a tragic character and Azshara became a magnificent bastard (the tv trope). Then other media like the warbringers Azshara video, or the charge of the aspects short story expanded on those plot points further. Giving actual motivations to those characters. Deathwing viewed his aspect powers as a curse, a burden. He basically became WoW’s version of Atlas. Something that is reinforced in a mural we see in Aberrus. Azshara played a battle of wits against N’zoth and seemingly came out on top.
Did we get anything like that for Zovaal? Nah not really. He was shoved into plot lines that were already resolved. Created plot holes into WC3’s, Wraths and Legions storylines. Came off as a bland, one note villain who had his motives changed every second he was on screen. And when Blizzard could’ve done something interesting they did not follow through with it. Such as implying that he was the prototype Arbiter and the first ones disappeared before they could finish the release version. I mean why else was there a spare Arbiter body in Zereth Mortis but there wasn’t any for the other Eternal Ones? Why did we not see a prototype Arbiter during the Prototype Pantheon boss encounter? Could explain why he went ‘rogue’.
Exactly. Good retcons expand a previous story. Bad retcons change it needlessly. When you write new characters into older stories, you job is to make them fit in with and react to the previous events. Not to make the previous events revolve around them.
I dearly hope Blizzard eventually retcons these retcons. Maybe now that Metzen is in charge.
I feel like Kel’thuzad and Kael’thas both were greatly missed opportunities.
Kael’thas never should have been anything other than the leader of the Blood Elves. After Illidan lost to Arthas in Northrend, Kael’thas should have returned home with the mana draining techniques and lead his people to rebuild. Having forces in Outland whom betrayed him for more power and allied with the Legion while professing to be loyal to Illidan, would’ve worked perfectly fine.
Kel’thuzad could have gone in any of a hundred directions after Wrath, as his phylactery had never been collected. Maybe I’m mad, but I would have preferred if he had joined the Horde as a member of the Forsaken. The Val’kyr were cool, sure, but having Kel’thuzad as a secondary racial leader, free of the Lich King, and able to create more free-willed undead, feels like it would have done a lot for the Forsaken racial fantasy. The loss of Sylvanas and Nathanos would have felt a lot less damning for the Forsaken if they’d had someone like Kel’thuzad left in their roster as a power house and major lore character.
If the Alliance can accept the Manari into their ranks, I don’t see why a Kel’thuzad free of the Lich King’s control couldn’t return to his roots and seek to expand his knowledge of necromancy for the sake of his fellow undead.
Kel’thuzad was never a slave to the Lich King. He had his free will the whole time. That is why Arthas calls him a friend before he [Arthas] departed to Northrend to save Ner’zhul from Kil’jaedens strike force.
In fact you could draw the conclusion that all the undead that willingly became so (usually from the cult of the damned ranks) also maintained their free will. Why mind control a willing servant?