"Redeeming" Sylvanas versus "Absolving" Sylvanas

I hear a lot about how Sylvanas shouldn’t be redeemed - and I’ll be frank, I don’t think I know the word exactly for what I want her to be.
Do I want her to be the “good guy?” Someone who was good all along, who’s actions place their atrocities in somehow a “good light?” no.

But I don’t want her to die as a Villain, because i feel like that runs counter to everything we’ve seen of her so far.
Sylvanas Windrunner has been a tragic villain throughout her storyline - she’s someone who has caused pain because she does not know how to deal with her own, and has alienated everyone around here because of her own responses to trauma.
Does any of that excuse her actions? No! Hardly!

But it would be really nice for this to catch up to her - and for her to realize this. Painful, absolutely - frankly it’d be soul-destroying, realizing that there really was no justification for your acts other than your own petty hatreds.

But it’d be nice to see as a reader, as a player, because it’s showing a character, showing a person, realizing their faults…and maybe trying to atone for them.

It wouldn’t redeem her of her actions,
It wouldn’t lessen my hatred towards her character,
But it would give me a little more hope.
And I think we all need that right now.

14 Likes

I understand the sentiment, and frankly I agree to an extent. But this isn’t someone who ruined a marriage or ostracized a friend because of their inability to move on from their trauma - this is someone who has the blood of thousands (honestly probably millions at this point), in both the living realm and the afterlife, and shows pretty much no remorse or self-awareness past some ephemeral pitiful glances at a kid she went on to violate anyway. A lot of that blood is people who looked up to her and trusted her, and her actions (and her words to a degree) tell us she couldn’t care less.

Would Sylvanas being redeemed justify her actions? No, of course not. Only a handful of people would argue that.

But at this point, Sylvanas is just one character standing amidst a menagerie of characters she’s wronged in absolutely horrific ways. Her door for redemption is closing, and given what 9.1 entails, I’m fairly certain it’s gonna end up closed.

48 Likes

I imagine you’re right - any which way i just wanna see more of her. I don’t just want to kill her as a raid boss - at least, i don’t want that to be the next thing we see of her.
Between her death and now, i really want to see who she is. Is she doubling down on her cruelty? Her detachment?
Or is she going to try and do at least one thing right in her life.

6 Likes

Her pain and hopelessness I’d wager. That’s her gimmick isn’t it? A woman who allowed her own pain to consume her to the point it made her far more of a monster than either undeath or Arthas ever did. Her “hope” at the end of ICC was to free herself from the Undeath she despises, only to find that there was a worse torment she allowed herself to be a slave to. A torment she seems to believe the Arbiter System is responsible for, and thus that system stands in the way of her and her release.

I would wager the only possible way to really have an option of a redemptive path open up for her is to absolutely shatter the ideology she turned herself into Arthas for. The Hell she’s desperate to avoid needs to be a convenient Lie, meant to get her to move in convenient directions for another. Her means should only justify the ends of the Jailor himself, not her own. And you need to really sell the idea that she’s been played by her own Primes and Zovaal, with the steps she herself took to avoid what she believed to be her eternity … being the very same ones that likely condemned her to it. Then she might find some sort of path.

7 Likes

What “petty hatreds” are you even talking about?

What “faults” is she going to atone for? and how? Why?

Seriously, what the hell are you on about? Because I would rather have Sylvanas go down as some hated villain than suddenly having her feel bad about everything.

6 Likes

whatever Marvel did to kill off Thanos is probably the best way to kill off Sylvanas though I doubt Blizzard has the chops for it.

2 Likes

I can’t imagine she’s going to die in the raid, and the Sylvanas novel is likely gonna touch on some of those things, so you’ll probably get your wish - at least in part.

3 Likes

To give you a brief rundown,

There’s Sylvanas’s jealousy of the living - and frankly anyone who didn’t suffer through what she had to during the third war. A lot of forsaken all had that landmark trauma - and a lot of them dealt with it in different ways. Hers was an unfortunately appealing one, and irl you can absolutely fall into this. When you’re traumatized by something, sometimes your response is to inflict it on others - you don’t know how else to deal with your pain.

Of course, Sylvanas centered most of her hatred on Arthas - which is more than reasonable. She built the entirety of the forsaken around becoming a weapon against him, at any cost. This spurred some, like Putress (who, yes, was also spurred on by Varimathras) to go a step further: Hatred against everything. Living, dead…or otherwise.

Sylvanas could have chosen to help the forsaken after victory against their fallen king - but she was done. Which is fair - honestly I don’t think she was in the wrong to feel that way - her unlife was built around getting revenge - and she got it. She deserved to rest.

She didn’t of course - she was cast into somewhere dark.
But she was given another chance - shown what the world would be like without her - but instead of trying to better it, she solidified in herself an ultimate goal - to destroy death itself. To guarantee that she would never fall into that tormented place again. She has treated everyone as an accessory to this goal, the jailor included - her selfishness and fear has lead to genocide and death itself breaking.

What I’d love to see is a bit of self realization. A sylvanas windrunner that sees past herself, and to the others she’s hurt over time.

I mean goodness, her memories of the fall of Quel’Thalas aren’t about how she couldn’t stop it, it’s about what happened to her. How she suffered. How SHE was wronged.

She’s always tunnel-visioned herself - and I’d like to see her break out of that. Not so much to give her a second chance, but more for the catharsis. I don’t want her to die smugly, assured that she had always done the right thing - I want her last moments to be full of regret.

15 Likes

Now that would be a good end for her.

5 Likes

EEEEEXACTLY
You get it. <3

3 Likes

Honestly after re-reading this thread, I don’t really see anything wrong with the scenario. There’s a fine line between fully redeeming someone (like a Kerrigan) or just letting them die with some self-awareness - and ideally remorse - towards their misdoings, which can be comforting in itself.

8 Likes

I’m not even sure this is accurate. And even if it is… who cares?

How do you figure? It sounds more like you have a narrow view of Sylvanas to me.

You may as well have just said “i want her last moments to be regret” because the rationale behind it was a bunch of nonsense.

2 Likes

Sylvanas must be returned as the forsaken leader. I don’t care how they do it.

11 Likes

That door’s closed, brosef, she’s pretty much said she doesn’t care about them and is outright hostile towards them now. She might not die. She might even end up redeemed. But she’s never going to be the Dark Lady again.

18 Likes

I was referencing the Warbringers video and the novel that went along with it.

And…I was using that as an example of how self-centered she is? How little anyone else matters in her world, and how that’s led her to do some rather horrific things…despite the fact that she also knows that she’s doing something wrong.

She knows full well that the forsaken depend on her - and view her as a savior figure. She knows about Nathanos’s devotion, and she knows how her sisters feel about her.
And, somewhere, each time that she’s faced with any of these groups, there’s like a little fight within her. A brief “should I…?” Followed by a swift and crushing “Yes, I have to, if I want to escape death.”
But the important thing, the thing that I’ve hung onto and been happy to see keep cropping up, is the fact that that little hint of doubt is there.
Her fear and her arrogance are overriding that - but…maybe not this time.

Because this time, she really is pulling an Arthas. There’s no little wraparound loopholes she can make, no justifications - she met with someone who continued to try and reach out to her despite everything, and just watched as he was enslaved, forced to endure what she had to all those years ago.

And I feel like this is going to be the moment to break her facade of control, because in the end…

She’s just a scared little elf.

11 Likes

No explanation at all. !0.0 launches and Sylvanas is in undercity- Varimathras too… they’re just chilling in the royal quarter (which has also been restored with no explanation at all whatsoever) like nothing bad ever happened.

I had no doubt that’s what you were referring to, but I disagree with your assessment that Sylvanas’ focus was on herself alone… and even if it was, so what?

Sylvanas has an objective that is more important than her feelings, and somehow that is a character flaw?

Weird speculations. We know little about the ultimate fate of Nathanos. Sylvanas spares her sisters lives in the comic, planning to eventually win them over; and apparently enough forsaken did not trust in Sylvanas’ plan that she left them to their own devices.

We’ll see.

Uhhh… screw Anduin? Nothing he said made any sense anyway.

Maybe that’s what happened, but it’s also not her problem. Anduin has been nothing but an enemy, and is so presumptuous in his “reaching out to her” that I would have let him get mind controlled by the Jailer too. He has to learn one way or the other.

1 Like

On this much, I agree. When it comes to Sylvanas, people like to throw the word “redemption” around as the antithesis of their desires. Those folk start with redemption as the red line.

“Redemption” and “Absolution” seem like happy endings that Sylvanas would see as tortures worse than the Maw. They are “floofy” words.

I think Sylvanas would aspire to “Vindication”. There are shades of her “Vindication” being strewn about, as far as the Shadowlands being broken. If she didn’t raise a stink about it, and draw everyone’s attention to it, it may have gotten worse.

9 Likes

Why are people so uncreative? Can’t she end up “saving” everyone or whatever her plan is, and also be evil and unforgiven? What’s with people and this weird obsession over characters being pure in whatever they are. Sometimes horrible and evil people achieve some decent ends, and good people sometimes do bad things.

8 Likes

No absolution, no redemption. Even if she sacrificed herself to try to correct the mistakes she’s made, it would not make up for anything she has done. I have said this before, and I’ll say it a hundred more times, the ONLY way to give her any sort of saving grace or good quality is to LITERALLY change her into a different person. Repair her soul so much that she actually FEELS everything she’s done, and is NO LONGER the Banshee.

Now the problem with this is that if she is forced to feel all the suffering she’s caused, it would destroy her all over again. There is no way out but death. That is the only absolution here. They’ve written themselves into a corner with her. Too many people love her to death still, as evidenced by how many of these redemption threads there have been. So idk how Blizz is going to reconcile that with their desire to keep people subbed.

2 Likes

I feel that the upcoming novel is going to reveal a lot about her character, personality and motivations. We need to know all that because there is just so much about what is driving her that we don’t understand.

My personal take is that Blizzard will come up with a totally 90 degree direction to take her in when it comes to the point. I mean, how many people thought she would break the Helm? Obviously that was important to her and the story; she mused on how powerful it was, hesitated and then broke it. She does things with a lot of thought but just what that thought process is we don’t know.

They have said that the outcome of her raid fight will change the Shadowlands forever. That’s a fairly big change and I can’t see her just getting flattened in a fight in Torghast is going to do that. Something she does or something that someone else does regarding her, will cause a massive swing of the cosmic structure of the Shadowlands. I want it to be something she does because I think she has, to use Natasha’s line, a lot of red in her journal, and she needs to balance that. Not be all bad, not be all good but something else.

So I won’t be at all surprised if she pulls a totally unexpected move that isn’t redemption so much as it is balancing things. While I don’t necessary want her to die, I think her death (or massive life change) is on the cards.

5 Likes