But… why should a mass murderer be allowed to have an afterlife that’s just as good as someone who was a saint in life?
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You do realize she’s not being completely rational about this, right?
She’s someone who earned a happy afterlife the first go-round, got violently ressurected and defiled, was forced to slaughter her own people. She was apparently consigned to the Maw afterwards, even though there were far, far nastier people who got pointed to Revendreth.
She’s not right, but she’s got a point that the system failed her.
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The thing you should question if it was naturally occurring for her to go to the Maw. As shown with the Bastion afterlives video, not every soul was brought before the Arbiter. Thus it’s very possible that the Val’kyr slid Sylvanas into the Maw during the events of Edge of Night, which is where Blizzard has declared at the time she and the Jailer entered their partnership.
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Oh absolutely not. I’d bet money on the jailer’s forces intercepting her soul, and Sylvanas going berserk when she finds out she’s been duped.
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Why not? The afterlife is supposed to be a second chance at life. Your mistakes in your first life shouldn’t impact your new one.
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Been waiting for it. She’s always worn vengeance very well as a character, and the only conceivable way to even start her on a redemptive path is to absolutely shatter her twisted world view that she’s operating off of right now. Plus, there would be something very thematic about her being the victim of the same sort of machinations she’s used so many times on so many others.
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I think her motivations and beliefs are probably totally correct, the problem is just that it’s obvious to everyone but Sylvanas that allying with the Jailer and feeding him souls is probably an awful way to go about fixing the problem of justice in the Shadowlands.
Her ends are good, but her means are hilariously wrong.
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The fact that she consigned souls to the maw shows she has no understanding of the word justice.
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We need a second maw.
An afterlife for those who want to choose their afterlife. It’s just one long endless hallway of doors. You get taken through a door and put into a blank white void, and whatever you imagine appears. You make your own afterlife. You imagine your grandmother making cookies? Bam! You’re in her kitchen and she’s got a piping hot tray of the best cookies ever. You imagine your jerk of a boss? Custom torture dungeon where you get to make them suffer and force them to actually listen to your grievances and then beg your forgiveness.
Never do these souls know they’re trapped in the Afterlife of their making. Sadly, I cannot imagine they’ll ever truly be happy either, especially if they ever figure out the people they make to populate it are constructs of their memory rather than the actual souls of those they once knew.
If this were the case people wouldn’t be sent to afterlives based on their behavior in their living life. Sylvanas, imo wants to change the system because she doesn’t like her consequences catching up to her.
That said the valkyr’s were probably lying to her, they aren’t ascended so its not like they can bring Sylvanas soul to the arbiter for judgement, and they aren’t the arbiter so they couldn’t judge her either. In effect they were probably allowed to send her wherever they wanted.
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Also they’re created by the lich king and where bound to his power, probably allowed the jailer to influence them.
The system of the Arbiter did not fail Sylvannas. It rightfully detected her capacity for the same evil as Arthas and placed her in the Maw. She is merely delusional and unwilling to see herself as anything other than a victim, even as she victimized others. In the same cruel ways as Arthas.
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I think her angle is; the system is flawed because fate puts you on the path that you must walk and that man isn’t fully in charge of his destiny and is either rewarded or damned based on the part he has to play, and wants to destroy the machine of fate so that cycles cease and that, for the first time, one’s choice is actually their own to make.
Or some wild hoo-hah like that.
Still too high stakes of a story for me, but, hey, it’s where we are.
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Why should any finite sin condemm someone for eternity? All sins in the end… are finite. Eternity is infinite.
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Fair point, but those that would only sin for a limited time and can be rehabilitated are sent to Revendreth. Those that will only sin and will always continue to sin are those sent to the maw.
If someone can’t be rehabilitated, well… there’s no other option for them other than obliteration or the maw.
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There is literally an infinite amount of time to rehabilitate; there is no such thing as a person will refuse to repent for an eternity, as there is always more time to try and get them to repent. Given time, any personality is malleable—hell, rewriting personalities (“brainwashing”) is relatively easy in the real world given a year or two.
This forum would be a lot more honest if people would admit they just illogically and immorally find joy in the idea of punishing Sylvanas (or anyone who has committed finite crimes) eternally.
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This is part of her argument, but more importantly-
In her own words ‘the afterlife decides what fate we must endure’. They aren’t rewarded or damned at all. They are just sent to an afterlife that is determined by the Arbiter, but regardless of where the Arbiter sends you, your soul is still corruptible, and vulnerable to being destroyed and even dominated by necromancy. Or if the Arbiter (or something else) throws you in the Maw, there is even a way out of the Maw.
The saint can go to Bastion and a Lich can turn them into a bone wraith and make them kill other Kyrian.
The mass murderer can go to revendreth, get eons of corrective torture and get sent to happy land. (or maybe just as bad… get eons of corrective torture and miss their redemption because it was interrupted by some Venthyr that needs to pay their tithe.)
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I wonder if she was sent to the Maw because of a Minority Report reason. When the Arbiter read her soul after she committed suicide, she saw what Sylvanas was capable of and that she’d stop at nothing to achieve it. Maybe she saw a personal threat to herself.
Terrifying system, either way.
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I wonder how far back you can go with that logic. Maybe you just happen to miscarry a bad baby with the potential to go evil but it’s slam dunked into the maw because of it.
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You can’t ‘undo’ a full on sociopath, regardless of what you do you can’t force them to feel empathy. That’s not to say all sociopaths are evil, but it is to say that is quite impossible to teach them to have the same inhibitions other people have when it comes to harming another.
I don’t think it’s actually possible to rewrite someone’s personality? You can like, scare them into the straight and narrow for a bit sure, and they can endeavor to make decisions to change on their own, but you can’t like, insert the personality of a whole different person into someone else. Change requires effort and some won’t make that effort, for others it might not be possible in the first place hence the separation between the maw and revendreth. Revendreth can have people suffer for eons but knows they will choose to change. The maw is exclusively for the ones that never will, which is why the jailer would have never been able to get enough anima to break free (too few souls) before the machine of death broke.
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