Are you sure
Because we are getting that
We are getting Sylvanas’s 100% true no take backs internal monologue from her time as Ranger General, to her Banshee-fication by Arthas, to her resisting Arthas, to her wanting to fight Arthas, to her suicide, to her deal with WoW’s Lucifer Satan Sauron and her apparent trust in him, to her decision to commit genocide, to her siding with the Lich who is the cause of all the aforementioned suffering, to her realizing maybe Sauron Lucifer Satan Bald Man Of Death is actually bad because the local twink is sad and mind controlled.
It’s honestly cruel they’re expecting Golden to write that book and come out unscathed.
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I agree with most of what you said. There’s a recurring trend with Sylvanas; she loves to say things that break other people down (her interactions with everyone who opposes her in anything from Legion onwards)… but can’t stand it when people turn it around on her (like Saurfang in Orgrimmar, Anduin in Torghast or Tyrande in Ardenweald)
Sylvanas is not the only abuse survivor in WoW, or even the only one victimized by Arthas (as the entirety of the Ebon Blade can attest) but not all of them went down the same road she did, so she has some agency.
What you said about how stupid Sylvanas’ turning against the Jailer now is… that’s so good I want to highlight it. What turned Sylvanas against the Jailer?
Not seeing the Jailer make an army of the dead via torturing souls.
Not working with Kel’Thuzad - the Lich King’s right hand and one of two reasons Quel’thalas was attacked in the first place.
Not even seeing Zovaal help make a blade that looks like Frostmourne right down to the same runes.
It’s one word. This is a singularity of bad writing.
On a side note, there’s a confirmed rape victim in WoW and it’s not Sylvanas, but the red dragon Keristrasza.
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I think that’s a totally bad faith reading of what happened but I can’t even be irritated about this reading when major plot details that shouldn’t be ambiguous are left ambiguous.
I do think these stories make some sense when they are puzzle boxed back together with paratext and future reveals which disregard dramatic pacing, and I still think they shouldn’t do that if they want to deliver satisfying narrative structure.
But I’m kind of used to that at this point.
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Yet, this approach isn’t one that general audiences use, and it’s not one that our lizard brains use - competent storytellers are aware of that, and accordingly work elements to prevent bad first impressions, sour tastes, or just plain confusion. You can’t really call that bad faith when that’s simply how audiences react to stories and generally how emotions work.
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Which part is a bad faith reading?
Because Sylvanas wasn’t shown to doubt herself at any point until Anduin questioned her.
Because of course.
The rest is verbatim, if sarcastic, what happened.
It’s really commonly used in games moreso than books and movies. Lots of visual novels and web comics do it. Bloodbourne and the souls games do it too but the whole game is already finished for you so you don’t run into cliff hangers on top of that.
Let me ask this about Souls, because I haven’t played it, but I’ve heard about it.
Is it more that you piece stories together from artifacts and books and such, or that you are given major beats that you naturally judge throughout your gameplay?
The part that shies away from “this character is, as addressed by many characters who knew her former self, a fragmented approximation of a person who no longer is. A banshee who was ritualistically shattered by death magic and literally isn’t her whole self through no fault of her own who is echoing atrocities of the past, like a curse, to unmake the unjust reality which made her through any means possible.”
All the while having fleeting memories of justice and unity and no longer being able to grasp them.
Except… now she can again. Which means whatever she does in the future will be with a full sense of agency. The curse is unmade, and we’ll get to see her make choices as her true self again.
This development is personally the most excited I’ve been for Sylvanas ever and it’s exactly the thing I’ve wanted to see for years. Anduin said “you never got to choose.” And she really didn’t, even as a banshee. Now she does get to choose. And I believe we will see consequences for it, for her good or bad.
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You realize that’s worse right
Because then it means the Survivor didn’t have agency until the Giga Spooky Chad Abuser gave her agency lmao
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It’s both. Sometimes you will find an item of a character in a pool of blood, or you’ll meet a monster in a cg with very little context that you have to you beat and discover what it really was several levels later through books or stone tablets.
I’m reminded somewhat of how Deus Ex tells its smaller tales with things like emails and environmental storytelling when you mention that, and I do like that approach. However - to circle back to my initial point, I’m not sure that the audience is operating in that frame of mind when we’re talking about cinematics and other moments that they are forced to see - parts that aren’t presented as breadcrumbs, but as cinematic moments.
I mean, magic denying agency is not my cup of tea in the first place because it’s so divorced from reality or is really often being used for an allegory rather than a suspenseful drama. But I like it when characters escape that idiot ball plot.
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I agree. I think it is not wise to do for major beats in an mmo’s story.
But I think it can work in some self-contained things— or when it’s applied to minor plots.
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I agree that it can work - and in general I think that the MMO should trend towards more emergent and exploratory narratives rather than these big “epic” moments. The trouble is - I think these moments have to be criticized as they are, not how they could be.
Yeah. I just think we should be criticizing execution and presentation of the narrative in this specific case rather than Sylvanas getting her soul back. But a lot of outrage is more… “this person who was made to come across as incredibly unpleasant (which disregarded her previous lore) may not get the karmic justice some people want.”
The weird thing is, the cinematic manner in which her “revelation” is portrayed carries this implicit assumption of the viewer recognizing Arthas’ use of the word “serve.” And not just knowing the word and hearing his voice. It’s framed in the sort of way that would normally be used to evoke her and our (the players’, not our characters’) shared recollection of a time when Arthas said that to Sylvanas while she was still a banshee under his control in the Scourge.
Except that word alone doesn’t evoke any such familiarity. So it feels like some bizarre, awkward attempted callback to a signature quote of his that we’re all supposed to recognize along with her in that moment in the vein of if Uther were recalling Arthas’ tirade outside Stratholme or Muradin were hearkening back to Arthas’ “Damn the men!” rant. But that one word isn’t remotely enough to incite familiarity and produce that sort of response. The cinematic context feels like it’s supposed to be reminding Sylvanas and us of “that time Arthas said that to her,” but the word “serve” by itself is so minimalist and short that it can’t carry that sort of callback alone and doesn’t really hearken back to any particular conversation between them that looms in the lore.
It’s the sort of presentation one would expect to portray Sylvanas recalling their exchange when he killed and raised her, but just “serve” in Arthas’ voice only manages to have me trying to remember if we ever actually heard him say that to her in a significant lore moment. And to be honest I’m not sure we ever did. If we did, it;s unlikely to have been a line from one of the looming moments of dialogue in WC history that people broadly attribute to their characters.
If it were Zovaal saying something that directly synced with a very specific, particular and unique statement that Arthas had made that snapped her attention back to reality, that would make sense, but just the word “serve?” For that to be all it took, it indeed makes her seem like an idiot because absolutely everything about the Jailer from his army’s creation to half of what his soldiers shout at everyone (when they aren’t shouting about nobody escaping the Maw) to the very name of the magic he’s using has had him up to his eyebrows in forcing servitude from everyone and everything from the very start. She had to be hearing that word a billion times a day from every minion of Zovaal that was torturing innocent souls into submission or rendering them down into raw material, and none of it sank in until that one mundane word was said one more time?
All he said was “serve” and it triggered the sort of heel-turn response one would expect if he’d just said “After all you’ve put me through, woman, the last thing I’ll give you is the peace of death.”
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I think you may be considering the development in context to Sylvanas only, without ignoring the pain this character has been used to cause.
To put that in context, people told me to get over Teldrassil because it was setting up a hero narrative that tends to end in the defeat of the bad guy. I knew that would never happen, but this development cements that. My loss was entirely pointless, and because the event in question demolished the idea that my character could ever be competent or could enjoy a space of cultural expression that Teldrassil once provided - it removed my willingness to play.
There are more stakeholders in this than Sylvanas fans.
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The guy jumping off a cliff? His was likley one of the more anti climactic deaths in game.
He merced Sylvanas in the back of the head with a pistol while she was doing a longwinded villain monologue. It was absolutely fantastic
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Have you ever read a story or watched movie without dissecting every frame of the media in an effort to portray the writers and director’s decisions as some sort vehicle to spread a message?
“Oh in this movie this single mother character is horrible! Surely the director is trying to say single mothers make terrible parents! DISGUSTING! OUTRAGEOUS!”
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