Gollum could have gone either way in LOTR, and people were rooting for him, but did anyone honestly want him to get the One Ring back rather than see it destroyed in Mt Doom?
Joker is the best part of the Dark Knight, but we all know he’s a villain who needs to be stopped, even if we enjoy watching his twisted schemes play out.
Part of what made Black Panther so enjoyable was Killmonger, who was indeed a villain that we were glad to see stopped, but nevertheless raised some salient points and stood as an example of how a messed up system can produce a messed up individual.
And I mean who doesn’t enjoy a good Disney Villain? Scar? Ursula? Dr. Facilier? Maleficent?!
You can have fun with bad guys. It’s a matter of execution more than actual content, though.
That’s why Vader and Palpatine can kill like thousands more people than Sylvanas- including personally slaughtering children and leading a space fascist army- but tone, execution, and other factors mean that people actually cheer whenever they’re teased in a trailer rather than go to forums to express their disgust.
Honestly it reminds me of the Punisher. People think He’s cool, put punisher skulls on everything, Cops like joke about “cleaning the streets” like he does. People don’t grasp that he’s a monster that exists BECAUSE the system failed. The environment is so bad that a damaged individual thinks that purging criminals is the only way to improve the city. And even if it works (it doesn’t), his story is a basic Nietzsche example.
I don’t know, look at all the people trying to white-wash the Wehrmacht those days.
i don’t know about that,many of her fans relates to her because she is a tragic character, and if anything all races and allmost all important characters have some sort of tragedy to be “relatable”.
otherwise, people would simply don’t care about them.
for example, the other windrunner sisters… can we safely say that they are more important or that the sisters has more fans than her?.
point being, that the circustamces has lead her to do this horrible atrocity maybe can be seen as “relatable” is all a gigantic tragedy.
or that is how i see it, at least.
I agree with that in general but I think Sylvanas is done to such an extreme that I find hard to believe it’s the case with her. Nathanos and Gallywix are unscrupulous but I understand why people find them charming in a certain way (though at the same time I’m not sure that’s what the writers intended to happen. I got the impression Gallywix in BtS was inspired by Harvey Weinstein and Access Hollywood Trump.)
Gallywix is a play on the fat cat archetype. You know those old political cartoons? The greedy cigar chomping overweight guy with a top hat, cane, and fancy clothes who wrings every last cent out of his workers to the point where he practically engages in slavery and other unscrupulous dealings. They’re capitalism run amok.
The real world figures you cited are just their modern day equivalents.
I definitely agree she was originally a tragic character. I think they just pushed her despicable actions way too far. In all honestly I liked pre-Cata Sylvanas (not including the Arthas novel) and she was one of my favorite WC3 characters.
A character that has something horrible done to them and turns into a miserable shell of their former self (and out for revenge) is a common and simple trope. But it’s one that can be compelling and easy to relate to because it’s easy to project personal experiences onto it. Sylvanas going through a hellish painful experience that was out of her control and ending up self-loathing person that resents her existence meant something to me. But her doing the same thing to other people made me feel sick and wish I never attached that meaning to it. Thinking about this is making me feel a little down so idk if I’m explaining this well
I feel the same way on this point. It was the Arthas novel where I went from being indifferent towards Sylvanas to strongly disliking her, and then Catalcysm where I just turned to hate Sylvanas as a character exactly for spreading the misery of undeath.
Unfortunately Blizzard wants their writing to not be seen as shallow, so even as they let Sylvanas’ villian train run down the tracks, they want to support her and draw out her screentime so they can pat themselves on the back for how deep and engaging a character they want to tell themselves they’ve written.
It doesn’t matter they are trying to bait people into thinking that she will be killed and that she’ll eventually has to pay for their crimes, but they’re going to have some redemption for her and everyone is going to be soooo surprised…
Who says the writers didn’t cheer, and so did the crowd at Blizzcon.
Basically this. We are talking bout some imo pretty bad tier writers here at Blizzard, and it’s not that they dislike Sylvanas, it’s that their vision of her is incredibly dumb… but in their view her huge power ups and super villainy is suppose to be like REALLY cool development “if only the plebs that play our game could understand!”
I also think the evidence of The Lead Narrative Designer Who Wrote Dark Mirrors love for the character is undeniable, it’s just a really weird kind of love…
A now fired blue poster literally joked about it in his big blue text right after it happened lol
Fan On Forums: “What do night elf players have to look forward to?”
To be fair, examples of characters (heroes and villains alike) that the writers wrote intended to seem deep and/or cool, only for them to come across as wishy washy/dorky/unsympathetic and hated by significant portions of the fanbase are a dime a dozen in WoW. Every cut scene in which they start just feels like Blizzard twisting the dagger into the heart of their hatedom.
He was right though, we literally only got our race destroyed and our home transformed into a pile of ashes, then we got (and are still getting) ignored.
Juvenile responses like that only fuel the responses of naysayers; one can’t complain about night elf fans when Blizzard reps are literally fueling their complaints. I would be lying if I didn’t appreciate the irony of him getting pink-slipped to be honest.
Yeah I thought that was in really poor taste and I agree it’s a completely inappropriate comparison to make for the playable factions. I was disappointed that kind of stuff started to appear again in BfA with characters expressing sentiments along the lines of the Nuremberg defense or even outright saying it. I can’t post links/images but I’m going to ask Anya to post them for me. I’ve heard there’s even a death camp in Darkshore and it was even worse in the PTR but got toned down a bit.
Although to be fair, the Nuremburg trials were not the first, nor the last examples of people “following orders” when it comes to violating peoples’ rights or committing crimes against humanity.
It’s just the example people are most familiar with.
And, unfortunately, we (as people in general) do tend to give “our own” the benefit of the doubt when it comes to this kind of stuff.
