Making Calia Queen?

Whatever happens next, Calia is going to be a fairly relevant character to the Forsaken. Some people have decided Calia is simply beyond exoneration. An inherently bad idea doomed to have not only no value but to actively inflict detriment on the game. In the hands of the current creative leads I would agree with that assessment, but that’s my opinion of the entire enterprise at time of writing.

But I do not believe her to be a bad concept.

Thankfully Calia’s such a nothing character atm that I think it would be very easy to course correct her. I mean hell the ships still in the harbor at this point, its more picking a better course than correcting one.

Here’s What I Recommend;

  • She Needs To Be Undead;

Yes I know she is technically undead. But she’s about as technically as the concept’s ever been for this setting. I wouldn’t call Whitemane or Zelik Forsaken, but I would call them undead. Calia is described as smooth, unblemished and glowing from within with an arresting light. I’ve never described a lover that charitably, using it to depict a a member of the living dead is so off brand as to make her sound like a creature of heaven, not the night.

(Side bar no disrespect for Roux- that is what Calia looks like and she didn’t invent the character)

So how do we fix it?

Simple. You know what shows off blood really well? A white dress.

The undead are fundamentally apex predators; insofar as they’re predators that eat other predators. All the WoW races have forward facing eyes, even the Tauren. They all hunt, kill and eat other things. And undead happen to hunt, kill and eat them. Not in the literal sense of that, not all of them at least, but the Death Knight’s craving for sadism and a Lich’s hunger for souls is just the same idea with extra steps.

And as Calia is to be Forsaken, she’s going to forgo the extra steps. I speak with some authority as an undead Priest main when I say I don’t know the taste of someone else’s blood but I do know the taste of in combat mana regen. And it is sweet.

  • She Needs To Learn To Be Forsaken

To start we’re going to have to bloody up that dress, or more to the point, her teeth.

How brutal we want to make this is up to you. Personally, I’d have her throat slashed. And to add insult to injury I’d have it during an encounter with her brother’s soul. As Sylvanas described him as a scared child in EoN I’d have him at least appear as that for a minute, maybe even having a genuine moment with his sister, before morphing into what he truly, and let’s face it always, was and attacking. All monsters were just scared children, once upon a time.

But however it happens a slashed throat is pretty immediate short hand for undead; having a grevious, fatal injury and walking around. And more importantly it would prevent her from casting spells. And I’d have her being unable to heal someone, watching them die, embrace them but then… well;

https://youtu.be/A75TiX1Z6tY.

to heal herself.

Now if we want to make that a feature someone like the Primus or whatever told her about, or some dark instinct taking the wheel - that’s up to you. As is who she chugs like a wild cherry Capri sun. Some hitherto unknown hastily introduced generic friendly soldier quest giver would probably be the safest option. But maybe it could be like the Accuser or Morgraine SR to give it some oomph. Personally I nominate Baine. That’d be a roundabout fulfillment of the Tauren’s pledge to cure the Forsaken (via being the catalyst for their true queen’s dark rebirth), I honestly think nobody would care if we just started fresh with Hamul leading - he’s a similar blank slate but I’m not the gut to tell you how to do him right (I love the Tauren but just as a friend) and c’mon something in orbit of steak tartare has to be a much more palatable for your first time.

But when it’s all said and done she needs to eat somebody. And that needs to make the shadowy parts of her undeath start to take over. But she’s also 50% Holy, mind you. So yeah her nails grow long & sharp, her lips turn from red to violet, and her hair becomes more unruly. But that unblemished face starts to look like a cracked porcelain mask and that arresting inner light glowing from within is still there- but now it’s more lonely lighthouse glimmering through a fog in the dead of night than heavenly. Oh yeah and now she craves flesh.

Why?

  • She Needs To Learn From The Forsaken, Not About Them

This is seriously the only aspect of Calia I find genuinely offensive. How dare this character, who’s been undead for all of sixteen minutes, come over and Lightsplain to the Forsaken what the agony and ecstasy of undeath is like.

She needs to come to them as a prodigal princess, in need of aid, in need of guidance. Undeath doesn’t change you that much. She can still be herself. And in fact I kind of like her being a well meaning but oblivious idiot. She’s royalty- that is unfathomable levels of shelter; wealth and privilege in your formative years, of course she’s like that.

But we show her ‘living’ with the Forsaken. Learning to master and revere the Shadow as much as the Light, and proving herself as an asset to and phenomenal leader of the Forsaken.

In the end we’ve someone still fundamentally Calia; which is to say very friendly and not particularly observant, but now she’s a goth cannibal with a face that looks like the icon of Torment.

Why is any of this important?

  • There Must Always Be A Dark Lady

I really loved the concept of Sylvanas as this eerily beautiful queen of the living dead. Someone wrathful and vicious to their enemies but gentle and fair to her people.

Even if we do get a Desolate Council revival I still think having a new Dark Lady would be fun. Calia being the newly dubbed Raven Queen. Replete with a baleful Dark Archangel spell that gives her jet black angel wings.

Crackled porcelain face dark queen + ravens = Icon of Torment is still super relevant. The arrows don’t have to mean anything about Sylvanas. A ish ton of national iconography has arrows - its just short hand for "we know how to kill people btw’.

  • But Why Calia?

Well… because she makes me laugh. Not intentionally but any creative worth their salt should know “Sure… I meant to do that…” can be helpful now and then.

The thing I fundamentally love above all else with the Forsaken is that they have a near omnipresent sense of dry, awkward and gallows humor. The charm of it is that it never feels out of place, either. It’s just realistically how even the mundanities of a society of the living dead would function.

Having a as beautiful and terrifying as nightfall queen who’s also a bit of a polite idiot would absolutely track with them. The Forsaken toy with some of the darkest subject matter in WoW. Being a credible spooky threat and also chalked full of comic relief is a hard line to walk. But it’s a lot easier when you remember the Forsaken are monstrous, but not monsters.

PS: I’d have the Forsaken be a constitutional monarchy. A 4 person Desolate Council and her would be the Royal Quarter WPVP boss fight. I’m picturing her less as a composite class and more her ‘Hero Class’ ability being able to use all 3 Priest specs at once. So maybe she’s the healer but if you kill the DC then she goes into shadowform.

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I do.

I don’t think you can fix her. But it’s late here, perhaps I will replay sometime later with something better.
Until then: Keep Calia away from the Forsaken, the Horde and everything.

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I mean, have any arguments against the course correction ideas I laid out? Because I think that would make her fit perfectly.

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I would rather the forsaken place her on a slab and find out what makes her tick. They can tell her its part of the inauguration process.

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That’s just lazy. The Forsaken have like 3 characters right now. Making what they
have work is more interesting than just failing.

Just… did ya miss the part where she eats people? Because not even Slyvanas did that. And it’s pretty much instant air of menace.

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I don’t think anything you posted is wrong in any way. It’d certainly spice her up a bit; but I feel you could do that with anybody, really.

I know it’s a bit of a hard-headed stance for me to take, but one thing I liked about the forsaken was the fact that they were forced to move on from having Menethils represent them as leaders. Yeah, going from a monarchy to a tyranny might be more of a lateral move, especially with how Sylvanas turned out, but I dislike Calia on the basis of her last name alone. I really didn’t want to see any kind of “return of the king” scenario. I know she’s not going to go anywhere but that won’t change how I see the character. The light-risen stuff was just the ugly cherry on top.

Although I think your proposals at least limit the stink.

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I hate (love) to rain on your parade but you’re expecting a level of detail that blizzard has no skill or interest in doing.

Calia is not meant to be a Sylvanas 2.0, or frankly an ideal representation of their current culture. She’s probably going to change them.

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I’m aware that’s the truth for literally all of my posts, and everyone else’s.

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This immediately evoked an image of Catelyn Stark as Lady Stoneheart; the possibilities from a character like that are limitless and would have served as an interesting parallel to Sylvanas’ own arc. Unfortunately, I think any development of that nature would feel like a retroactive shoehorn and completely antithetical to how Calia has been presented from Legion to the present.

For Calia to have been able to integrate into the Forsaken narrative palpably, her death should have come at a crossroads moment that defined her allegiance to them as Forsaken first and foremost, rather than to the Alliance, old Lordaeron, or their former humanity; likewise, her christening into undeath should have come by way of the Forsaken electing to resurrect her, or something similar–it could have still involved the Light to some degree. As it stands now, however, with her being risen by a naaru and antagonistic towards Sylvanas and much of the core identity of the modern Forsaken, the only real potential I see for Calia in the narrative is as an agent, much like Yrel, to represent the oppressive and deceptive nature of the Light, whenever we get to that cosmic chapter.

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I disagree. She’s a dud on so many levels. The best thing that could happen to Calia and the forsaken is for her to fade back into the nonsensical existence she came from.

The best story for the forsaken going forward is self government in the form of a collective.

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All of this is true. But having seen a character hastily ruined, I do not mind the concept of one being hastily fixed.

The only alternative is letting her fade into the great vagueness of memory but I think that practice;

IS WHY WOW IS ISH

Because instead of working to fix, build or expand new characters they keep the same, what, six in orbit of being widely popular.

Screw that. It is how you posion an evolving narrative. Azeroth shouldn’t be a super hero comic. The universe should not hinge on a handful of weirdos. It should be a world that changes.

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https://i.imgur.com/qonTRoJ.jpg

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Imagine she became ‘High Councillor’ of the forsaken with a looming light expansion coming our way. They are not going to take the cricket bat of evil designs to the alliance when there’s a horde faction waiting in the wings.

They wouldn’t do SoO3?

“Muhahuawa muhawahuawaha!”

Calia in my view is (like Derek) just a bomb.

If they wanted Calia to be a Horde they really should have made her sympathetic at least to the forsaken without a massive alliance seal of approval on her forehead.

If she has a future I think its with the Argent crusade. It seems to be the colors she wears anyway.

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Not all undead have the decomposing look; just look at Sylvanas and Death Knights. Calia not decomposing doesn’t make her any less undead.

As for bloodstains, Calia died from being shot once with an arrow infused with dark magic, so there’s not going to be lots of blood.

Plus there’s a valid reason for Calia to lead the Forsaken that people keep disregarding; in life Calia was a member of Lorderaen’s royal family, who most Forsaken also served in life. With Arthas and Terenas gone, that means if these undead are going to invoke the laws they followed in life… CALIA IS THEIR RIGHTFUL RULER BY LAW.

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I also do not think Calia is a total lost cause. Medan was sort of put in the closet. Baine was tossed by the Jailer. But Calia still isn’t entirely an embarrassment to have on the Horde. She is too new, and hasn’t done much. The problem is, she is clearly headed in the direction of lame. But I do think she can be salvaged in many ways.

Personally, I wouldn’t go as far as the OP. I like that she is different as far as her ethos. The Forsaken are a bunch of Undead Humans. And just like living Humans, there can be a breadth of skill and opinion. Faol is the notable Undead Healer type, but he never really submitted to Sylvanas as a Forsaken. In Before the Storm, he acts like he doesn’t answer to her. Having a nice healer do gooder lady in the midst of the vile and cunning Forsaken is pretty neat - just not as their leader.

Maybe after Shadowlands ends, Sylvanas apologizes to Calia and tells her loyalists to follow Calia. Maybe Sylvanas rejoins the Forsaken and is part of a council with Calia and Lilian and others. I don’t mind current Calia, I just think she would make a better advisor or spiritual leader than a Head of State.

I don’t think Calia is in that bad a place, development wise. I am just nervous about where her story seems to be heading, and what is going to be destroyed to develop her.

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I feel this would make her not only work. But I also think it would be fun to watch someone turn.

Seriously WoW’s curses are quite sudden. No real time to appreciate a metamorphosis it’s just stab, plop, zap and away we go.

Having someone functionally human turn undead more gradually, and this being framed more as a goth butterfly thing, I think would be fun.

I’m also not suggesting she becomes dictator. She’s a sort of a ditzy figurehead. The Desolate Council run the order of the day. But having Scary Godmother over here to

A. Provide legitimacy to the Forsaken as not just the natural but royally legal heirs of Lordaeron

And

B. Offer a friendly if mildly disconcerting face for them to use in amongst other things; diplomacy and propaganda.

Would be helpful. Nations cannot live on military might alone. Soft power has its roles. Especially if there’s a new decidedly cold war on with the Alliance.

If the Kingdom of Lordaeron is now the undead lordaeron kingdom then who better to lead them than Calia besides WC3 Sylvanas?

A split soul Arthas coming home to redeem himself?

Lord Calston’s Murloc? Dumass? Gordo? The shovel from the Sludgefields what can render moral judgements?

I was speaking more about medieval rights to rule. Terenas was highly honored by the forsaken. They even buried him in Lordaeron with the broken crown, why wouldn’t they honor his daughter now that she is one of them?

yeah yeah she never did anything to help them but she didn’t do anything against them either.

Again, I said this would be more the Forsaken welcoming her after she assimilated and proved an asset.

The image of a kind of benevolent twilight angel queen would be helpful for a lot of troubles, foreign and domestic.

Let’s not mince words here. The Forsaken absolutely have an image problem. Calia could be very helpful. But, she at least needs to be properly undead and properly Forsaken.

The legal benefit is to help defeat the Alliance with a weapon a billion times more insidious than Blight; estate and contact attorneys.

I’m sure Greymane himself signed some agreements with the Lordaeron Crown, no? Are those no longer binding because they respective parties are spooksters now?

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