Player Choice, Sylvanas Loyalists and Consequences (or Not)

Wyrmrest Accord
41

I look forward to confronting Sylvanas in her sub-subterranean villain lair under Garrosh’s subterranean villain lair under Ragefire Chasm under Orgrimmar. It’ll be a tough fight, with Sylvanas channeling the power of the Old Gods through Xal’atath and turning into a hulking purple abomination once you get her below 10%.

But the heroic Alliance and whatever’s left of the Horde will win the day, and Sylvanas will be arrested and tried before the, uh, idk, Council of Tirisfal or whatever. Until she escapes with the help of a renegade bronze dragon named Futurios or Chronalia or something, and together they will travel back in time to the future-past of an alternate reality dimension version of the Eastern Kingdoms, thus leading us into the next expansion… The Warladies of Azeroth.

Meanwhile anyone who sided with her will be put on RP trial, but it’s okay because it will go nowhere, nothing will happen, and everyone will forget about it entirely in, like, a month. Thus the ultimate consequence of siding with a genocidal maniac with all the tactical competence of a small beetle will be a few hours of tedious RP and some mental gymnastics to justify them taking part in whatever storylines their guild cooks up for Warladies. Also maybe they’ll miss out on an ugly cosmetic cloak with Saurfang’s face on it or something.

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42

:slow clap:

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43

That’s one interesting point. I haven’t seen Sylvanas Loyalism pursued with the same intensity as Garrosh Loyalism was. Lack of interest or was the last one enough of a trainwreck that no one wants to be around when the pieces fall?

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44

thousand yard stare

… I still remember the walk-ups… the kor’kron RPers… they’d come up and just yell at you. For… anything. Not being an orc. Being female. Being an orc, but the wrong class. Being an orc, but female. Being too short, being too tall, being warlock, being a death knight… and if you didn’t act like you were scared, they’d whisper you angry rants.

I still wake up sometimes, thinking I’m in the Valley of Honor, screaming “I’M SORRY, I’LL KEEP MOVING!”

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45

I wish I could have seen this era. It would have almost been worth being sub’ed at the time. My imagination of the drama is just not good enough.

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46

Nothing you can imagine is as bizarre as some of these people were.

47

Oh, Zen, you don’t wanna know what I can imagine. :smiling_imp:

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48

It gets less interesting when you realize it’s not the interesting or funny kind of bizarre and more the thinly-veiled-harassment bizarre.

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49

Different demographic, I think. I’ve known some pretty diehard Sylvanas fans, but they’ve never been, you know, Like That.

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50

Must be a strange feeling to know that one’s RP style was too extreme for the followers of someone who wants to wipe out all life.

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51

As someone who doesn’t really RP on Hordeside ever, I’ve always got the impression that Sylvanas loyalist RPers all basically agreed that Sylvanas and her followers do some pretty monstrous stuff, whereas Kor’kron RPers too often OOCly relished in the dominance powerfantasy that orcs provide.

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52

I’m starting to suspect it’s because Sylvanas is the type who quietly disappears the opposition and relies upon plausible deniability while Garrosh was the type to relish publicly dominating the opposition. The espionage side just requires you to be civil and have the other side work with you when RPing.

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53

That and, in-universe, it’s been what, one year or maybe two since all of Garrosh’s shenanigans finally expended themselves.

And don’t forget, Garrosh was the charismatic warrior who had to learn real bloody quick about how to be underhanded.

Sylvanas has been writing university-grade textbooks on it, year after year, since the moment she broke free of the Lich King and everybody and their dog knows it.

Nobody is gonna be stupid enough to openly try to rebel unless they are looking to die as a martyr for their people or they honestly think they can out-do the Queen of the Damned’s stranglehold on sly and underhanded.

She’s willing to Blight her own city, render her own people homeless and engage in an act of war so heinous it makes what happened to Theramore and Dalaran under Garrosh’s tenure look like just another monday.

You’re damn right people are keeping their mouths shut and obeying what she says, because to do otherwise if you’re not the player-character and haven’t gone toe-to-toe with Old Gods, Dragon Aspects and entire armies of everything from bug-people to Faceless Ones, Sylvanas is the scariest thing left standing at this point.

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54

Basically this. Sylvanas Loyalist RP is almost always done with the OOC understanding that you’re playing a villain.

Garrosh Loyalist RP was done with the understanding that you are an orc irl, with real authority, and elves are gay, and no mom I won’t go to therapy, stop bringing it up.

In a nutshell.

Kor’kron RPers, at that time, a LOT of them, were some of the most easily angered people OOC I’ve ever dealt with on WrA.

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55

Some people who love Sylvanas don’t seem to realize that she’s a villain yet. It’s a little unsettling - they think she’s actually a hero and the Alliance deserves everything happening to them right now. I’ve seen some pretty uncomfortable RP going on Horde-side too. Maybe these are just my experiences, though.

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56

I have seen a few ic debates on the morality of it all, of honor and so on. Perhaps it’s just my luck to avoid some of the other encounters, but I am curious to witness this rp you talk about. I don’t always understand what makes them uncomfortable to others. I am not belittling their/your feelings. I just don’t quite get it.

57

I’ve got characters on both sides of the equation, but am personally more invested in my Forsaken. There’s a lot of opportunity for deep roleplay here, but 99.9% of the time it either starts as, or becomes, a pissing match where nobody backs down. To be honest, I’m tired of the “I CAN” “No, I CAN” “I’M GOING TO” “NO, I’M GOING TO” bull. I’ve hardly ever seen people mature enough as roleplayers to be willing to compromise OOCly for the betterment of the current IC situation, to the detriment of everyone’s RP at the time. I know I won’t be doing much public faction RP because of it. You can still see the different factions doing their thing in back rooms and less public places if you look for it.

58

Mostly the edgy, murder is cool type of people that seem to think the more puppies/kittens they kick and babies they murder, the better rper they are.

59

I getcha. So… like a murderchad? I think we just coined a new term. I guess I can see why these don’t stand out to me. I mained a DK since Wrath so that kind of rp doesn’t phase me anymore. Thanks for clarifying.

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60

To all the folks bringing up Sylvanas, the Forsaken, and morality, that I can’t reply specifically to post by post,

As a society, the Forsaken have no morals as we as living, real, humans understand them. They’ve been killed, raised, outcast, and hunted by every living thing on Azeroth at one point in their society’s history. As their leader and savior, Sylvanas will do ANYTHING to protect her people and that’s what she’s doing right now. Yes, she’s their savior, in that she saved them from slavery by the Lich King and helped them find a refuge from the living. It’s no secret that many Forsaken have a quasi-spiritual affinity toward her as well for all of that.

Sylvanas brought the Forsaken into the Horde is because the Alliance rejected and started destroying them, and the Tauren convinced the Horde races to not hunt them down too. Right now the Horde is the only sanctuary the Forsaken, as an entire people, have and she’s going to do whatever she feels necessary to protect that sanctuary for the good of her people. Everything she does is focused on keeping her people safe and continuing on (as shown in the Silverpine story arc).

Metaphysically, all Forsaken (and likely Death Knights too), aren’t physically and spiritually whole any longer. There’s a force of Shadow between the soul and body that are keeping the two joined, but incompletely. The previously mentioned social history coupled with the metaphysical differences has created a very different outlook on existence for the Forsaken. In a way they’re true sociopaths in that they have little to no empathy any longer and their moral compass is pointing to a very different North than the living have.

I would hope that we’re not going to see people boohooing about how it was morally justified to burn the tree or do all of the things we, as real people, consider heinous simply because -Sylvanas and the Forsaken are almost completely amoral- on the whole. I’m sure there are examples of in game exceptions and people RPing their characters as exceptions based on them. However; I’d be willing to bet that the majority of those exceptions aren’t active members of the Forsaken, but undead doing their own thing. Also, keep in mind that all of the PCs are the few exceptional members of their respective societies. We represent the outliers of much larger societies whose belief systems and social customs are outlined by lore. We, as players, can only have meaningful interaction with other humans, not the NPCs, so our experiences are always going to be colored by the outlook of another person on the other side of the screen.

Are Sylvanas and the Forsaken villians? At the moment, it feels that way to we humans playing pixels on a screen, yeah. Was the burning of Teldrassil an awful thing for the Night Elves and Night Elf RPers? Absolutely. Does that make Sylvanas The Enemy of the Night Elves? I’d hope so. Does that automatically make the Horde the enemies of the Night Elves? No. We have always been enemies.

Even though all of the stuff BfA and the lead-up to it have given us, I believe we’re being set up for a larger story that we’re not fully privy to yet (even with the new datamined stuff) though. Time will tell and I hope to meet a lot of RPers who are mature enough to hold opposing views in their head at the same time to RP with.

Thanks for reading,
Dromtar/Vendorioc

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