Repairing the Forsaken Narrative

Lore Story Forum
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(This thread is mainly reposted from a thread I had made in the past, but I feel it is still something that is worthy of discussion and debate, so I would like to restart it. I am still able to post apparently, btw. :wave:)

To start off this is mainly aimed at forsaken fans and those invested in the race in general. While anyone should feel free to post and discuss, please keep that in mind.

The forsaken narrative has been going through rough times since at least Cata. I would say that at this point, however, we have probably hit a new low. There is nothing really left at this point except a race of villains.

During this expansion, the Forsaken have continued to become more and more similar to the Scourge, and still do not realize or notice this fact. This is compounded by the Forsaken being put in a major role for the Horde. They have become such villains in the current plot that many players wish the race could just be killed off like a villainous group, such as the Burning Legion or the Twilight Hammer.

The Forsaken were originally sold as a race of outcasts, of people that were turned into monsters against their own will, and shunned upon regaining themselves. They were always dark, but they retained a sense of who they were. They didn’t exist solely to cause death and destruction, they wanted revenge on the man who turned them into monsters, and to fight for their right to exist in a world that despised them for who they were.

It is also important to point out that in the forsaken’s original story, the ground was laid for there to be many different types of forsaken, with many different ideas and views. While some were evil of course, that was not simply the default state for all forsaken until proven otherwise. (I would like to give a quick shoutout to Vivette and Samariyu here, because it was discussions with them that led to me thinking about this point.

I know a lot of people are going to say something along the lines of “kill sylvanas, that’ll fix it”, but I really don’t see how that could be the case. These problems are not the result of Sylvanas, they are the result of the writers deciding to turn the forsaken into this, and she is as much a victim of that as the race as a whole is.

What I would like to discuss here is what exactly can be done to get the forsaken to remotely become what they were originally sold as again. Is there even a way to do it? Because for me, it is becoming harder and harder to see any solution, and I would really prefer if this expansion doesn’t end with culling a lot of major forsaken characters, and then 180’ing the race into something else that STILL isn’t what I initially became a fan of.

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Step 1. Replace the poorly-written edgelord racial leaders Sylvanas and Nathanos with characters that aren’t out of a teenager’s fanfic blog.

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I mean sure the Forsaken have a sympathetic origin and background (at face value) as people killed and raised but at the same time their whole schitck was a questionable group of undead who only joined the Horde to further their own goals. Even then it fits in with the rest of the races. Orcs came to Azeroth to defile and kill sh*t. Trolls are cannibals who either wanna take over the world or kill people they dislike. Goblins destroy the land and would sell their kids for a quick buck. Etc.

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Maybe try not coming in hot with this crap when he clearly wants a legitimate discussion and not you nerd raging about characters you don’t like.

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Someone didn’t hug their body pillow enough this morning.

My advice is legitimate advice that will improve the forsaken narrative. I’m sorry you can’t handle the truth.

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One of the key problems of the current Forsaken narrative is that there is no contrast, there is no showcasing of any other aspect of their vastly splintered cultures. It shows only the worst, the type who would be quick to embrace the Cult of Forgotten Shadows and all of its tenets.

It will never be that the Forsaken are the good guys. Rather, it should be that the Forsaken are individuals, who range from good to bad, just as any human being.

It should be the story of men brought into undeath, that either cling onto the last vestiges of their own life, change to meet the new environment that surrounds their unlife, or succumb to the horrors of a life where no precedent exists for their condition in nature or in man made society.

It is a story of good men who become bad from the tragic experiences they suffer. It is a story of denial, to believe that the condition is but a malady. It is a story of growth, of those who face the world, learn its new lessons, adapt, overcome and become something different, yet familiar with who they once were.

It is all of these things and unfortunately BFA’s writing team fails to see this. Christie Golden’s entry on the Undercity was absurd, contradictory to the foundations of the Forsaken and destroyed the outside world’s opinion of the Forsaken- something that originally pushed their story along, so that they had a reason to actually fight or stray from them and seek out a new life. Why would they go through all of this trouble if their former countrymen would just embrace them with wide arms?

But to answer your question; if they followed the words above and made the Forsaken do some good and fix some of the troubles that plague the Horde (such as pestilence, or famine from barren fields, etc), they might become more tolerable. It’s an unhealthy relationship to have nothing but contempt for one’s neighbors without any positive high notes with them.

We won’t get that though. By the end of BFA, there will be so much Forsaken fatigue that no-one will ever want to hear or see from them ever again.

I’m calling you out, big B.

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Your advice is pointless since he already explained that Sylvanas is also a victim of the writing and doesn’t need to be replaced but fixed. Also, real mature with the body pillow lol. Yeah I’m totes just a lonely fanboy in it for teh boobz.

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Fatigued! Fatigue? The Forsaken were virtually non existent in BC, MOP, SoO, WoD, and Legion.

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I like the idea of the RAS toning down the evil blight makers to focus more on healing remedies, blight reversal or trying to find ways to stop the Forsaken from detoriating so quickly. I’ve also brought up the idea that the Horde as a whole should have some kind of sign up system where they agree to be raised after dying in battle or a case like Zelling. This would be a nice bridge between Sylvanas’ love of necromancy and the rest of the Horde accepting it while also keeping the Forsaken population afloat.

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The forsaken have always been this way though, it’s just not been so up front in everyone’s face. some of your first quests, before so much as leaving your Vanilla WoW starting area, have been focused on brewing new plagues IIRC. Come wrath, particularly the wrath gate, they openly started blighting everything. Everything they touch dies and they like it that way, even as they lament their condition.

While I never felt strongly enough to post about it, and thus can’t actually prove this, I’ve felt for years that the story and RP opportunity granted by having the forsaken as a player race would eventually be overtaken by blizzard’s inability to see them as anything but abhorrent monsters, an existential threat to Azeroth. They’d make ever-weaker excuses not to have both sides exterminate the lot of the them. And now, here we are.

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I don’t know man, the cult always struck me as one of the redeeming aspects of the Forsaken. They want balance. They know how to drink deep of darkness, but not be overcome. This was when ‘Shadow’ wasn’t just rolled into the big, boring Voidball.

To me, the Forsaken always had a potential narrative in Transhumanism. Looking forward, not back. They are absolute tanks, able to shrug off environments and wounds that would outright slay a human and keep on trucking without sleep or food. They have a genuine curse, the kind that has actual drawbacks, but also boons as a result.

I want to see Forsaken like Gunther Arcanus, and maybe a little Hecular in there, too. Forsaken who have embraced what they have become, not out of cartoon evil but because they choose to face what they are and not flee from it. They are a species that is only… decades old? Who knows what they could become, where they might go. They have this entire new form of existence to explore, to embrace. Sure, they should be looking back as well, but where is the development in that?

Give me stories about the Forsaken mastering non-magical medicine. A hunter going after big game to augment his body with beast tendons. Forsaken trying to achieve lichdom through study. Give me a church of shadow, a choir of the damned. The forsaken have fallen off the edge of the mortal plane and found themselves in a strange new realm - and I want to see how they make lives for themselves.

Oh, and put Calia in the box with Med’an. Or better yet, a woodchipper.

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Slight point that may worry you: They never repaired the Orc narrative post-MoP. WoD actually made it worse and Orcs may as well have not factored into Legion at all.

BFA, well…

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Welcome to every race that isn’t humans, Orcs and Elves. At least you have Wrath and BFA. Oh and Draenei but I think their time in the spotlight is about go down the drain, hard.

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Forsaken have always been, in my opinion, one of the most interesting subjects for a fantasy race in the game. They have so many differences from us (humans), but because they come -from- us that it makes it so easy to sit back and wonder what it would like to gain such traits. The Forsaken curse is undeniably one that has several, substantial drawbacks, but it is also in those drawbacks that unique strengths can be found.

The Forsaken can not, or do not need to sleep. Nor do they require food, or any of the normal human needs. This means that they are able to be effective all day long. Their bodies do not tire in the same humans do (or any other race in WoW) and they have so much more time to do things in. If you think about how we all live, we spend such a massive amount of time sleeping, eating, and how much resources are spent in society on making sure that humans are able to sustain their society (on food production, moving, etc) then you can already see how much extra time, resources, and focus the Forsaken now have at their hands.

I mean, most of WoW’s human societies are in some sort of medieval / renaissance period. In theory, most humans are still farmers or living off the land, with only a small percentage of trained craftsmen, merchants, military, and nobility really having any sort of non-agricultural role. A vast majority still have to tend the land, and grow crops. Yet now you take that civilization, and thrust them into a situation where NONE of them need to focus on food production, and every civilian can live a life free of having to worry about the majority of their basic needs. It’s a situation that should be causing massive culture shock, and a massive increase in production / leisure pursuits.

Yet we see none of that. The undead nation seems to have none of the things we would expect in a post-necessities civilization. There are countless stories that could be told with how the Forsaken are having to adapt, and change to find ways to fill their time, more time than even any of us have.

I mean, just look at your own lives. How much time do you spend sleeping? How much money are you spending on basic things like heating and cooling, food and drink? Imagine if none of that was needed anymore… that all you needed was to stay somewhere that you could avoid serious injury, and just… exist?

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The cult preaches rather alien tenants that share little no similar moralities with a common, highly intelligent living thing. It absolutely opens the idea to transhumanism and that is one of the Forsaken’s many faces.

The problem is that with such an alien way of thinking, they do not share any moral boundaries with the other faces of the Forsaken, or the Horde they’re to cooperate with, leaving them to do morally abhorrent things that sully the relations with outsider organizations, both with themselves and the government at large.

We’re currently facing a predicament where there is no contrast. Only morally bankrupt activity without any saving graces for the Forsaken and without any agency to act out of this current narrative. That sort of story, the one that is supported by the tenets of the cult, is not in danger or not being ill represented. If anything, this is its best time to act. It’s in such a prime spot that it puts everything else in great danger for a continued story.

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BFA provides an important lesson.

The lesson is that stagnation is better than bad story progression. No story is better than an awful one.

If the Forsaken never got their time in the sun, I’d be okay. Arthas dying was the closure to the Forsaken story I was willing to take. Even if it meant another Lich King took the throne and the horrors of the Scourge were still a great danger to the world, it’d provide a means to get back to the story that originally ushered them in.

Would it end up like a treadmill eventually? Yes, but I look at what we have now and realize; that treadmill is safe and not about to play fire with something I found so deeply fascinating.

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Create divide in the Forsaken, don’t portray them as monolithically villains. The greatest appeal to many Forsaken players–including myself, when I was one–was their roots tied to Lordaeron and how they were victims to one of the worst atrocities to befall Azeroth.

By making them all be just wacky cooky mad scientists, it paints the entire race in a terrible light and making Sylvanas go off the deep end isn’t helping matters.

Before the Storm did almost irreparable damage to the Forsaken narrative since being ostracized by their colleagues and family is one of the core tenants of the Undead. We’d need to undo that mess first by having the people rise against the leadership.

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Pretty much nobody in this thread has a clue whats going on.

The Forsaken haven’t changed a bit. Please go ahead and research the Desolate Council, and The Felstone incident. They started to defect and reunite with their loved ones.

Sylvanas, her shadowy agreements with Helya (and her ilk,) and her rigid grip on her society are the problem here, not the Forsaken as a people.
This is just a bunch of players not paying attention and a crucial lore incident that a ton of folks missed.

#ScarletTolerance

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There’s a lot that the Forsaken is doing without Sylvanas giving out any orders to do so. There’s also the additions that change the Forsaken culture, such as the actual, factual, no nonsense thought police that was introduced in Before the Storm. Another cut BTS dealt is that most survivors of Lordaeron didn’t blame the Undead for being what they are, they blamed Sylvanas for making them what they are, contrary to the first outlook that spurred the Forsaken into acting the way they are now.

Oh, and Calia’s condition. Yippie-ki-yay, she needs to be 404’d along with Med’an.

The Desolate Council is the one and only nod that the Forsaken is a splintered society. They died off in several pages. Everyone.

That was the sort of conversation that was at hand. What had changed to make them so unattractive to the Horde and their continued narrative together.

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Greetings,as as you may know, i am not the biggest forsaken fan.

But i think that what currently is their biggest problem is what basically has poisoned the story, and that basically hit with the negan bat. (pun intended) to not only forsaken players but also, horde players.

  • the lack of villains

You mention something that is very true.
“They wanted revenge on arthas”
but illidan say this better than anyone.
“A hunter is NOTHING without their prey”

The forsakens were actually VICTIMS, not victimaries.
But after they get their revenge, after they finally succeded their goal.
what’s next? their goal was just “survive” and that means “doing anything to do it” so we end up in a place where the only way they can survive is to killing everyone else. so they are the perfect villains.

other of the things that i keep hearing is that “they are victims of the alliance” that may be true in the past, but recent leadership in the alliance has proven that they would accept anyone

From anduin the high king of the alliance
To jaina one of the biggest voices of “hatred” vs the horde is willing to accept her brother to help him.

We end up in a place that not only the forsakens don’t have any actual villains (like genn himself claims that sylvanas is the problem)
While sure, the common peasant would still hate them and see them as monsters.
3 alliance leaders are totally okay with the forsakens and not just any leaders, we are talking of the biggest “warmongers”.

i may give another example.
I am a worgen player, i have long-term goal that has motivated to play the race and has keep me invested.
1)retake gilneas
2)revenge on sylvanas.

But makes me wonder, what’s next after i succeed those goals?
would i feel better after my long-term villain and goal is fulfilled?
and the answer for at least in my case would be just “no”.
i would just get bored of it and re-roll to another race.

The perfect candidate would be just calia, she is just an abomination to everything what is forsaken, so calia will try to “redeem” them, some sort of scarlet crusade but that actually damages the forsaken enough to make her the long term villain of the forsakens.

use her to define what is a damn forsaken, why they are victims, why they are justified, why they don’t just kill for fun. removing the sole “villanistic” role that they are currently having and make them actually VICTIMS.

of course i may be totally wrong since i can’t really know what an actual forsaken needs, is just my 2 cents as a worgen player.
TL’DR
So here is my point, what forsaken narrative needs is a villain, probably worse than any other before or that just justify the forsaken story to a point where we can say “hey, forsakens are also victims!”

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