Lore Confusion - Sylvanas Trailer (spoilers)

Community General Discussion
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So, the new trailer blames Sylvanas’ actions completely on the Jailer, saying she didn’t have control over herself. That doesn’t add up, considering if you go just one cinematic backwards he says all will serve him, and she clearly has a flashback in her head when Arthas said the same thing and then she made the conscious decision to defy the jailer and shoot an arrow at him saying “I will never serve”.

So, if she was being mind controlled… how could she even have that thought to begin with? I know the writing is weak, but… this was so recent it’s hard to ignore the plot hole.

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The story is all over the place, I am not even sure the writers know what the hell is going on.

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Also the good half of the soul vs the bad half of the soul thing they have going on. Didn’t Uther say literally last patch that it wasn’t as simple as that and neither half had been good or bad per se? Are they already forgetting their own lore? After one patch?

Edit: Seriously though… Do they just have multiple devs working on the story, and none of them talk to each other? At the end of the day they just throw their individual projects together and hope it works? 0_o

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That certainly seems to be how the gameplay design works, so it wouldn’t surprise me if none of the writers read what the others are doing.

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She was not mind controlled. Her personality was changed because she was missing part of herself. The bad Sylvanas was still Sylvanas, her views and emotions were darkened and twisted by her state of undeath, being stabbed by the Jailer’s magic, fractured soul, and all that had happened to her since. It jazzed up her mind.

That’s the whole point of that cinematic is for the good Sylvanas and bad Sylvanas to accept that they’re the same person responsible for the same things. Just two sides of one coin. Now that she’s whole again Sylvanas is in a clear head and needs to come to terms with all of this, that she is in fact still responsible. It wasn’t mind control that the Jailer was barking orders, but more of a mind alteration.

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I mean it didn’t do that but good try I guess.

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Don’t forget the fact that she chose to spare her sisters when she had the chance to kill them, or that she tried to get Anduin to serve willingly so that he wouldn’t suffer at Zovaals hands… or that she felt she had no more purpose after Arthas died and threw herself off of Icecrown…

Basically this whole severed souls thing makes absolutely no sense and was thrown in there just for the short term storytelling, old lore be damned. It’s also yet another plot element that this expansion has sprung on us on the 12th hour with no warning or foreshadowing.

Zovaal manipulating all of the events of WC3, controlling the Lich King, and even having manipulated the Burning Legion since their formation? Absolutely no foreshadowing, no clues of a grand design. Just a plot point of convenience made up in Shadowlands to try to capitalize on WC3 popularity, and of course to copy the homework of Endwalkers end of a saga advertising campaign.

Covenant sigils? Literally never existed until all of a sudden Zovaal wanted them. Sure, the Arbiter thing was foreshadowed by the extremely obvious gaping hole in his chest that was conveniently about the same size as her orb (rip Arbiter btw, in the running for most irrelevant character in Shadowlands), but the sigils never existed prior to 9.1 and their purpose still completely unexplained, unless opening a portal to Zerath Mortis was their only purpose?

And now fractured souls. In all the history of World of Warcraft, the soul of a victim of Frostmourne went, in its entirety, into Frostmourne. There were no examples of fractured souls ever. Not even King Terenas those times he came out to help - or even Uther himself, who was also in Frostmourne! It wasn’t until Shadowlands invented the fractured souls concept with Uther. Even then, there wasn’t really amy details on how fractured souls worked. Now we get new lore made up seemingly suggesting that the stolen soul segment is basically in stasis and has no memory of what the rest of the soul has done. Oh and also the stolen segment is the “good” segment. JUST IN TIME TO MAKE UP A WAY TO REDEEM SYLVANAS!

Oh, sorry, there was foreshadowing. In a nursery rhyme book published separately for $$$. Though hey once again that was published during Shadowlands so even with that foreshadowing the point of Shadowlands constantly introducing new concepts at the expense of old lore still stands!

THIS is why we can’t get invested in the story. Because Danuser just writes things on a whim, usually in service to his precious queen, with no regard to any of the story that came before, and if there is ever any kind of foreshadowing, you put it in a book forcing people to shell out money if they want to have any kind of inkling in wtf is going on in the story. It’s all absolute trash. And the sad thing is, the concepts are perfectly fine, possibly even good, but the story has done NOTHING to validate any of it.

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We saw this on Star Trek.

Well, it wasn’t related to Frostmourne, but they did this exact same “transporter accident” story with Varian in those horrifically awful Warcraft comic books.

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But Uther mentioned after we got his soul back that it wasn’t as simple as one good half and one bad half. They purposefully wrote that and stuck it in as dialogue, but now it IS that simple?

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Apparently yeah.

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If you actually saw the cinematic then you would know that the Ranger General part of her soul came to realize that her and banshee Sylvanas are one of the same and her last words were I must answer for what happened not banshee Sylvanas because she understands even with that missing part of her returned , they are both the same person .

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Constantly changing story and setting foundation, spiraling into new directions midstream, and failing to keep your writers meaningfully apprised does seem to be a good recipe for a disjointed mess.

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Meanwhile over in FFXIV, Endwalker is pulling together 10 years of backstory smoothly and eloquently in a way that makes you believe the entire story was mapped out in full a decade ago.

With Warcraft, the story is simply a necessary evil whose sole purpose is to point everyone at the next raid and it doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not. It wasn’t always this way but the current Blizzard team just stopped caring. The entire game is just a pale memory of it’s previous glory, just going through the motions each patch/xpac.

It’s really very sad, I and many others truly loved this game from the beginning and it’s painful to watch it decay like this.

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Anyone who thinks the cinematic is Blizz going it isn’t Sylvans’s fault because part of her soul was missing only watched half of the cinematic stop and came to GD and went into full on REEEEEEEEE mode .

Because if they had actually watched the whole thing , they would have seen that they are saying yes she is responsible and they do so by having the returned part of her soul admit that it is just as responsible because both are still Sylvanas and she flat out says She (then paused I must answer for what happened.

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All writing can be called bad if you just straight up lie to make your point. :man_shrugging:

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That’s literally exactly what it said. Lol.

I watched the entire thing several times trying to understand it because it doesn’t add up. The severed soul arch also doesn’t make sense, since she clearly had free will in “evil sylvanas form” because she defied the Jailer the second he brought up having to serve.

Where did I lie? Instead of being hostile for absolutely no reason, try explaining it. I obviously took the trailer as it blaming it (essentially) on mind-control, which didn’t add up to her betraying the jailer.

I have no point. I’m asking a question. Either explain it or go make yourself a tea and scroll past.

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Because she wasnt being mind controlled. People are really not seeing what is happening in that cinematic. Everything Sylvanas did she did of her own will; the problem was that her actions were the result of incomplete and inaccurate data.

What Blizzard are telling us with that cinematic is that from the moment of her death, part of her soul was gone, taken by Zovaal and kept from her. She was effectively brain damaged, as if part of her mind was gone. And everything that was done to her from that moment on was done to a damaged and incomplete psych. Its not simply a matter of Good Sylvanas and Bad Sylvanas but of a partial Sylvanas tortured and embittered without the balancing insight that she would have had if she’d been whole.

Do I agree with the whole idea and how it was implemented? Not necessarily but I get what they are trying to say. From a certain point of view, it makes sense, because most would agree that Ranger General Windrunner would not have burned Teldrassil, and yet she did, and she behaved for a very long time in ways that Ranger General Windrunner never would have. Becoming Forsaken does not automatically make you evil and murderous, and those who are, were generally nasty types before they died, or were driven crazy by the transformation.

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I saw what happened in the cinematic, which is why I’m asking my original question of how she was able to hear “serve” and was like “oh, absolutely never again” and tried shooting the Jailer in the face but somehow wasn’t able to stop herself from burning down Teldrassil?

I get what you guys are saying, but can we stop pretending that any of this actually makes sense? She clearly had enough free will at the end to choose not to serve UNDER him, so why couldn’t she have had the same amount of free will to not do other things? You can’t say she wasn’t mind controlled and then blame her horrific actions on… magical soul control? Lol?

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I did see the cinematic, and that doesn’t negate my point. They’re basically portraying a good half of Sylvanas vs bad half of Sylvanas that eventually came together because she realised that it’s two half of the same person, when the previously established quests mentioned that it wasn’t so black and white as one soul shard bad and one soul shard good. The new cinematic is throwing that out and say that it’s exactly that, and Sylvanas was split into one good part, one bad part.

But hey, I’m prolly expecting too much from Blizzard’s writers.

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If I just theorybash the logic, my response as her would be “I chose to destroy Teldrassil. My choice, my decision because I believed the end would justify the means. But you just said ‘everyone will serve’ and I’m nobody’s lackey!”.

Good or bad writing, we each decide. Im not necessarily saying its good, but that is, to me, the logical reason.

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