Character redemption has been a rather hot topic in WoW’s writing of late and it has pretty much always been misused in every case I’ve run into it in the game so I thought I would throw this little clarification post up so that we can stop pretending like reprehensible actions can be bought with the right ‘good deeds’.
Redemption is the action of saving or being saved from evil, error or sin and is sometimes defined as gaining possession of something in return for payment.
Atonement is making reparations for a wrong or injury.
The key difference is that Redemption has a much sharper focus on morality whereas atonement is more mechanically interested in how you’re going to set things right.
So unless you think there is any way in this or any other universe that ethnic cleansing and mass murder can be morally justified then characters like Garrosh, Illidan and Sylvanas cannot and never will be redeemed from those actions. But they can seek to make things right. They could set aside their ego and political machinations to try and make right the lives they have ruined.
Illidan being ‘right all along’ and Sylvanas having her soul split does not justify their actions. Their actions were still wholly unnecessary and destroyed millions of lives. To pretend they’re ‘all better now’ because of some half-asked Good Samaritan plot point is so profoundly flippant toward the nature and severity of their actions that it’s hard not to believe the writers themselves believe the characters’ actions were moral and just in the first place.
So please Blizzard, stop using your story to apologize for hate and treat the heavy themes in your stories with the weight they deserve. Stop trying to ‘redeem’ your evil characters.
Sylvanas is a victim of Zovaal’s soul splitting and Arthas soul twisting. She doesn’t need redemption she needs to have whatever they did to her soul reversed so she can become 100% herself again.
This is like an innocent person getting drugged and going out and doing horrible things because they were influenced by drugs that were forced in their body and then claiming that the person needs to be redeemed. No, the person that drugged the victim needs to be brought to justice and the victim needs supports.
In order to have redemption or atonement, the universe would need to have a set moral code to follow and break, and warcraft does not have a universal moral code.
To judge either Garrosh or Sylvanas’s actions, we would have to hold them to the moral code of the Horde, and the individual factions to which they belong. Both the Warsong orcs and the Forsaken do not have strong moral codes, neither does the Horde really, everything is fair when it comes down to survival.
There’s no moral code in all of Azeroth that says ‘thou shalt not kill thine enemy or face punishment’ there wouldn’t be a franchise at all if there was.
The Arbiter determines who goes to Revendreth, who gets damned to the Maw for all eternity, who goes to the temporary afterlives of punishment, and who goes elsewhere.
With the introduction of the Arbiter concept, and with how they did the shadowlands in particular, heavily relying on Western metaphysics, they did accidentally also create a universal, cosmic soteriology/harmatiology.
Redemption is in the eye of the beholder. Imo Sylvanas doesn’t need it, but by her true heroic nature she may seek to atone for what she did when her soul was violated by Zovaal and Arthas.
The developers have a chance to tell a really wholesome and captivating story if Ranger General Sylvanas is back.
I question whether Blizzard themselves consider the Arbiter’s judgements to be perfect, just, or universal, for a variety of reasons.
She does not judge the demons of the Burning Legion or malevolent creations of the Void Lords, both of which are villainized by the narrative, and rightfully so.
Her system is pointed out as unjust in-universe a few times. Anduin openly states that no one’s soul deseves to be twisted by the Jailer. And, this system seems to be intentional, since the Primus made Zovaal the Jailer of the Maw. Perhaps Blizzard is invoking the problem of hell.
Zovaal himself was once the Arbiter, and was replaced, so it’s not as if the holder of that title is trusted blindly.
It’s extremely difficult to parse what deserves redemption or atonement because we’ve now gone so far beyond anything grounded in actual, relatable events.
I am generally not a fan of setting up parameters for Blizzard’s lore ( not that they are forced to obey them, anyway). I give Blizzard alot of leeway.
Blizzard seems to have this perspective that Players want to face off against their Characters. We (the player base over all) want to fight Jaina, Sylvanas, and Illidan, even though we love them, and we want to work with them. That entails a bit of villain batting as well as “redemption”.
I believe it is more a phenomenon of the Gameplay/Marketing side than the Story.
The Horde didn’t need much more reasons to hate Jaina. Blizz did display how some Blood Elves as well as Zandalari hold a grudge against her. The Champion of the Horde, Rexxar, also called her out. But here we are, working with her. She certainly is not redeemed and has not atoned.
Putting up with Jaina practically being the leader of the Horde while Baine mopes about and Thrall whines about his equipment is at least tolerable, because I know Illidan got the same treatment, and hopefully Sylvanas will, too.
Maybe Night Elf Players can get a quest where they save Sylvanas from other Night Elves who want to kill her. Kind of like Blood Elf and Zandalari players are constantly forced to help Jaina. We didn’t get the option to stab Jaina in the face and cheer Hathorel on.
It has something to do with cosmic forces needing to be in-balance. That one Kyrian World quest kind of implies that she just chooses not to judge them. Maybe her position is, “Yes, they’re evil, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
IMO it’s evident they’re following rule of cool and simply accidentally stumbling upon metaphysical implications with no priority for consistency or in-depth world building.
Still salty af about this and I’m not even the biggest blood elf fan in the world.
But the whole scenario was just so extremely demoralizing for horde players, I really don’t know what they were thinking.
At least loyalists should have had the option to side with Hathorel. I mean, that’s the guy who helped us in the Quel’dalar questline, who fought with us on the Isle of Thunder, who we freed from prison after the purge of Dalaran- vs Jaina who, at that time, had Rastakhan’s blood still fresh on her hands.
We also aren’t even really considering the characters as characters anymore when we talk about the narrative. We treat them as abstract symbols that can be used to score points off of one another for our respective forum obsessions and reinforce our own identities vis-a-vis the World of Warcraft.
This game hasn’t had characters for a while now. It’s had superficial automatons that people either rally around or rally against as social identifiers.
And similarly, nobody has treated the game world as a believable, living place in a long time. Part of me wonders if it’s ever really been treated as such, since even from its conception in Warcraft 1 Warcraft has basically just been an arena for people to smash their action figures against each other in.
world of warcraft’s story essentially exists in a state of a smug philosophy student’s stupid hypothetical that only exists in the realm of pure theory and doesn’t reflect on the real world in any way shape or form. anyone who thinks that there are intentional allegories or themes is deluding themselves. there is no question of ‘redemption vs atonement’ here, it’s just been done because the writers think it’s ‘cool’.
an example; sylvanas may or may not be redeemed, atone for her sins, or be vindicated depending on the ‘machinery of death’ and ‘the cycle of life and death’. we are still not entirely privy to what the cycle of life and death actually means. it’s just something that’s namedropped again and again. as far as i can see, there’s no cycle. it’s a straight line, you’re born, you die, you go to the shadowlands - unless you’re a wild god. ok, so does that make the entire shadowlands a factory to rebirth wild gods? if that’s the case, that means that every single being in existence is a piece of food. ok, so if that’s the case, then one (minor) slash-and-burn genocide across one world is actually nothing, y’know? so - in this case - genocide is good actually.
see how that falls apart to reflect on the real world? boiled down it’s simply the question “given literally infinite suffering, is an arbitrarily high amount of suffering preferable?” asked by some smug second year philosophy student whose cornered me at a party. all i can say to him is “well of course because infinite is infinity y’know? infinity is literally endless, an arbitrary amount is finite.” and then he says “hahaha so in this case the very bad things are actually good” and it just doesn’t work. the question itself is flawed. it’s probably the biggest lore problem of shadowlands; that nothing works because the entire premise is flawed on such a fundamental level. narrative warps around infinity.
there is no real answer to “redemption vs atonement”. there is no real answer to any moral question in shadowlands. we’ve all simply been cornered at a party, and the only answer is “the question is flawed”
I think Blizzard added these elements to the setting without thinking the implications through.
The Arbiter was appointed to judge mortal souls (with the possible exception of Wild Gods), which explains why she doesn’t judge the Void Lords or demons.
But what makes Anduin qualified to judge whether or not the Maw is right? We can say that because we’ve explored the lore and learnt the history behind it from those who helped set it up, but Anduin doesn’t know what we know. Blizzard using the Maw to invoke the problem of hell doesn’t work since there is an intrinsic and specific moral code and way for redemption to avoid hell.
There is some vague concept of sin in WoW, as seen with Revendreth, but to have laws there has to be law-giver. And to hold mortals accountable to those standards, the laws and the law-giver’s right to authority have to be communicated to them.
You’re absolutely right about Zovaal. I think the reason for that is there’s an authority higher than Zovaal.
This typifies most of the arguments I see when someone calls out Blizzard’s gross writing and it misses one very important point;
Fiction does not exist in a vacuum.
If it did representation wouldn’t matter and reactionary nerds wouldn’t be getting wound up over characters being portrayed as ‘gay’ or ‘black’ or whatever it is that makes them feel like they don’t have a place in the story. The truth is the messages sent through entertainment are very real and have very tangible impacts on the world around us and everyone knows it. The difference is some people delude themselves into thinking entertainment is siloed off from reality rather than an active part of its social landscape and others choose to be consciously aware of how media and entertainment influence the social fabric of the world around us.
If you don’t understand that then you have no business critiquing any kind of media.
We get redemption every time we redeem a coupon. Morality has nothing to do with it. Same with atonement , atonement is payment for past debts. It doesn’t mean you’re paying back a moral entity.