Easy questions actually if you don’t wish to condemn the Forsaken to being pure edgelords forever.
What are they to do? Same thing the orcs did. Forge a new (un)life for themselves. Accept the fact that while they may be “abominations”, they are not, and do not have to be the monsters the world assumes they are. They are not the Scourge. Maybe make moves to prove that. The stupid part is, more often than that, whenever we see undead just out and about with the Horde, they function just fine. Bit morbid sure, but overall, they can be pretty acclimated to not only the rest of the Horde but the the world at large.
How can Calia even help? Because by some fantasy, not all undead are able to adjust that well, you have people like Calia, or based on BfA level headed folk like Voss who are there to ease people into their new life of undeath. This doesn’t always have to be through manipulation of their rage or sorrow, sometimes it could just be kind word to get their head back on track. Especially now where it would be…rather bad to continue raising more Forsaken through a battlefield.
All this talk of ‘Calia actually makes sense in the lore’ skips over the fact that the issue isn’t (primarily) in-fiction, it’s with the writers choosing to set her up as they did. They dropped the ball, or rather chose to cause necessary tension, by having her alienated from the very nature of the Forsaken and embody a force that (until her, for some reason) causes them anguish.
Wouldn’t it maybe have been easier to not make her full of the undead-killing energy than to try and excuse why ‘actually they like it when it’s her’, or retcon/adjust their entire relationship to the Light? And surely it would have been better writing to have her first appearance not include unfortunate overtones of her sense of birthright… instead of her suddenly abandoning those to play coy about her ‘advisor’ role.
I dunno man Chadwick Paxton and co., Hecular, Herbert Gloomhurst, Shademaster Kiryn, Belmont, Lydon, etc., etc., the list is pretty long:
They all seem to be having a great time. Any time they make a new Forsaken NPC they tend to be pretty cheerful, tbh. This line about undeath warping people seems limited to when the writers remember it and decide to add edge into the proceedings - the older Forsaken seem pretty well adjusted, if a little unhinged at times. But hey, who isn’t?
Calia feels like a poorly implemented solution to a poorly conceived problem. I am not 100% against her as a Forsaken story point but she can’t be the new center of their ideology without undoing a lot of the appeal of the species - which contrary to your assertion, is (for me) not so much about edginess as being about very interesting questions about posthumanity, as well as a killer goth look and a bloody, spiteful, single-minded refusal to let go of what they consider theirs.
Yeah, their called Sylvanas Loyalists. Or Scourge.
Obviously their are plenty of exceptions. Especially among the military types.
But pretty much everyone we raised in BFA was a mopey mess. And clearly their are a lot more Forsaken who are suffering, because that’s what Calia has been stated to be spending most of her time doing. She’s like a magic grief councilor.
To that end, I think Calia can work as the leader of the Forsaken as a people. Even if her ministrations aren’t in much demand by the Forsaken military or PCs.
Warcraft has this issue where every race’s leader is also it’s primary military commander. Every race leader is some huge badass you can often find in the middle of huge battles. But not every race leader NEEDS to be that. They don’t all need to be a Hero unit.
There’s no reason Calia can’t be the Forsaken’s queen, ruling the kingdom and caring for her people, while someone like Voss serves as General of the Forsaken military. Making her the character PCs normally interact with during world crisis.
Sure, but the BFA ones were mopey mostly because they were raised as military assets - and with some coaching most seem to be getting better and accepting their unlives. That would seem to make a case for Calia being useful except that:
It was Voss we see doing all of this counseling, not her.
That still doesn’t serve as a need statement for a Menethil full of anti-undead energy with deep ties to the people the Forsaken have been warring for survival with. That’s the need statement for Lilian Voss, proven counsellor, or just freaking Nils Beerot for that matter.
Now, I can absolutely see the use for a peacemaker in the post-BFA world, and Calia’s claim is certainly useful to the Forsaken. 100%, the zombies should use the lightbulb politically - and if Blizzard had the guts to have her end up as basically a captive figurehead puppeted by a Forsaken council, that would be badass.
…But that’s not what we seem to be getting, she is kind of osmotically oozing to a leadership position without any synthesis of her glaring incompatibilities to the Forsaken’s core themes. Something has to give, and Forsaken players are (I would say understandably) worried that it’s the Forsaken themes they enjoy that will be discarded.
What could solve this? Have her be faced with a stark choice, in in-game content, between supporting the Alliance’s interests and supporting the Forsaken’s interests on their terms (not what she thinks is best), and she decides to back up her words and support the zombies. It doesn’t have to be a lot of dev time, it can just be a damn book we can read, just clearly have her put the needs of the Forsaken, as they see them, over the expectations of her friends in the Alliance. If that causes her to be ‘Forsaken’ by those friends who expected her to be a useful method for controlling the Lordaeronian undead? Wow, wouldn’t that be a fun little narrative flourish. Pay me, Blizzard.
Yeah, but Voss takes, like, 2 years to counsel 3 people. I assume Calia is better/faster at it than that.
Again though, those are likely core themes to the players, but not to the Forsaken people.
That doesn’t appear to be the case though, as the Forsaken find her presence helpful, not harmful. So for whatever the hell being light undead actually means, it seems to at least make it so her energy is not “anti-undead”.
Then it would be nice to see her doing that, maybe? Voss seems to be doing a pretty good job of it, and in stories that are some of the more human (heh) of the Horde campaign, in interactions with some of the more remarkable undead appearances.
“Embrace the Shadow”
The Forsaken choose to treat spiders like cute dogs, grow giant bats, build skull-shaped war machines and live in towns decked out like a Tim Burton movie set. They ‘sleep’ with their arms crossed over their chest, in coffins. They name themselves ‘Dreadguard’, ‘Deathstalker’, ‘Dark Ranger’, ‘Forward Commander Onslaught’, they cackle and wear plague doctor masks. They build aboms. They lived in a sewer filled with green sludge and collected cockroaches they apparently liked. They constantly name their things after morbid tropes and laugh while doing it. They crack jokes about their spookiness and delight in their identities so consistently that Blizzard’s comments about them being miserable just make no sense - Have you seen these zombies? They are having a ball.
They constantly, in-fiction, embrace the themes you say are player only with every in-fiction aesthetic and cultural choice they make. The light-filled, non-rot zombie who isn’t even in the right color palette is not gonna match the decor.
I mean, we see her working with Derek and we see her walk off at the end of BFA with an entire squad of undead NEs with the intention of helping them cope. So…we do?
Again though, all of that is, like, their military. I don’t think it’s fair to judge an entire race of people by only their soldiers, unless it’s a race like the Orcs where war is practically their entire culture.
And that’s something that has always bothered me about the Calia hate train.
While it’s amusing that her being Lordaeron but not Lordaeron enough, the fact that because she’s not “roar me eat Alliance hearts”, she’s somehow…totally pro-Alliance. Like ride or die, she’ll sacrifice all the Forsaken if it’ll make Anduin happy.
Which has…never been shown to be the case. If anything she’s shown her loyalty to her people to a damn fault, thus why she decided to encourage a defection and got an arrow to the heart for it.
But it comes back to a main thing I’ve always hated about the Forsaken fanbase on this forum in particular; to be Forsaken it’s like you must with no if and or buts, be opposed to the Alliance. Like their entire race can not exist without Team Blue being a constant antagonistic force, which is not good because to date every antagonistic encounter these two have had thus far has been started by the undead. So not only are they defined by this antagonistic relationship, they are the ones who are being antagonistic lol.
If you see that as sufficient, and/or the equivalent of the time spent to develop Voss in this capacity, then that is your prerogative as a reader of the text. That is a subjective assessment and I suppose my only response would be to state that I do not agree.
But even for every civilian expression of their culture they still embrace themes of morbidity and shadow. My examples weren’t just military. You can scoot over to Old Brill, or Tarren Mill, or Vengeance Landing, or old UC for that matter - and see that their embrace of their undeath aesthetically and culturally is not at all a purely player-driven contrivance. These damn zombies just seem to like the look, man. Calia’s plunging neckline is gonna need to change color scheme, at the very damn least.
Come on, man, Vengeance Landing Inn had been there for three hours and it already had cobwebs thicker than an abandoned outhouse. They had to have put the damn things there for the comfort factor.
Oh actually I can clear this up, this has been a big misunderstanding and I’d like to repair this given it’s apparently a source of hate. We actually don’t need total antagonism, especially not from Calia who is not antagonistic by her nature. As I said above, it would just be nice to have some in-game character development from her that demonstrates some identification politically with the Forsaken and not just as a matter of personal interest. She’s stated that Lordaeron is the property of the Forsaken, which is nice, but I’d like to see action (you know, expressed agency, in a narrative?) to support these words.
The Alliance and the Forsaken have materially opposed interests, expressed pointedly through the recent taking of Arathi by the Alliance. I’m not asking for her to start blasting 7th Legion, but her current ‘two worlds’ shtick is a bit tired for Horde players. We’ve lost a lot of leaders and seen others ground down into a disappointing state through their use as political bridges, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be disappointed with Calia’s projected trajectory. And keep in mind I don’t (any more) consider her totally unacceptable - few Forsaken players and posters here do - we just have preferences informed by our love for the subfaction that we’d like to see come to pass.
Sigh … it kind of sickens me some of the Calia supporters on here.
Truly, they know the issue with Calia in her current iteration utterly destroys whats left of the Forsaken Racial Fantasy in favor of “Human Potential”.
They know she’s never once been shown actually interacting with any of the actual remaining Forsaken reps; and instead the Forsaken have been flooded with recently dead Alliance characters for her to play around with.
They know that she only represents who these people were in life 18 years ago, and in no way represents who and what they have become since then. And truly invalidates most of that history for pure “Divine Right to Rule”.
They know that even if there was danger in doing the contrary she abandoned them for 18 years; and is so lacking in leadership qualifications she’s leaning on a 16 year old (when she died) once vengeance junkie to offset her crippling weaknesses.
They know with how they’re writing her right now they are SLAMMING a square peg into a round hole and shoving her down Horde player’s throats; to pretend she’s a Horde rep for SLs.
None of this matters. Because Calia represents the Citizens of Lordaeron, and that truly is the only part of the Forsaken that should matter. She makes their racial fantasy very convenient for … largely the Alliance playerbase. And it doesn’t matter that truly she is simply replacing one cult of personality (that only fostered one half of the Forsaken identity) with another … that fosters only the other half. Thematically, atm, Calia is a nightmare choice that seems to exist primarily to let the writers stay in their picturesque, spotless “Alliance” comfort zones.
After all, why build up replacement Horde characters if you can either shove Alliance leaders into Horde leadership positions instead, or make those few non contentious to Alliance Horde leaders left simply accessories to Alliance characters? Blizz loves “writing the Horde” right?
Blizzard: Why don’t we take a cheap knock off Velen who has basically been MIA for the entire game’s existence and who has nothing to do with anything related to forsaken lore at all other than once being a Princess of their long dead and rotted past kingdom and shoehorn her into the darkest edgiest part of the Horde and have her lead it, the fans will love it!!!
I’m just quoting this part because…blizzard likely thought the forsaken player base would eat it up. She’s another Menethil after all! Why not have the sister of the guy who murdered your entire kingdom moralize to you on why she knows better than than the forsaken at knowing what they want.
Blizzard can’t be this out of touch with its player base?
I’ve blabbed about Calia’s narrative and meta issues enough in the past. She could work if Blizzard puts in the work and changes her to fit the Forsaken far more than the Forsaken change to fit her. Tossing aside their achievements just to return to some shadow of what Lordaeron was like, only with more sunshine and rainbows, is not the play.
However, I also don’t believe Calia will ever be that popular among the Forsaken fanbase even if they jump through the hoops because she is always going to be in Sylvanas’s shadow. There is no overcoming that.
This all honesty would have been like if they took Kil’Jaeden after we beat him in Legion and had Velen do some light purification BS and BAM we have a new light forged KJ and he is now partial leader of the Draenei. I mean hey him and Velen were once best friends let’s make them that way again but with extra cringe and let’s force feed it to the fan base!
I know that’s somewhat of a stretch but it’s the best I could scheme up on the spot.
How many of the current undead are from the 1st wave raised by Arthas is not clear.
Maybe, maybe not.
Well, it also reiterates that Calia is “between” now, not a horde character.
I did not do the Horde BfA quests yet, but I am sure both Lilian and Rexar told to Zelling that he can’t come back and the alliance is enemy territory. So, Sylvanas does not seem to be the only one to spread this idea in the current horde.
Oh, they sure do, especially after the 4th war. But there are some complicated cases.
Calia is also having her own game, and it’s not clear where will it go.
Not really. iirc if was one of forsaken, who told Sylvanas about Calia’s presence.
Depens on how the devs see this exact part of the story, but it’s a known side effect of the exposure to the Light. Unfortunately, there are others. Also, ease pain / suffering is a player interpretation, it “just” seems to fix a way the soul of an undead was reattached to the body.
We do not know how the forsaken react. We’ll see over time I think, but so far I am not aware of the exploration from the perspective of “within” forsaken characters
Depends. The forsaken are not quite like what Calia thought they are. She thought they are friends. A forsaken told Sylvanas about her presence. Forsaken did not follow her when she suggested. Sylvanas was not a “fake queen” for them. And we can arrive to a situation, where whatever happened to her family, might also be because of the forsaken.
On the side of the forsaken, they were next to Calia. While she is away in Shadowlands, they will have time to compare. The mere exposure to the light changes senses and emotions of undead. Which is a good thing for those who want to become “less undead”, but would everyone be happy if her presence alone is enough to force them to be more like who they were before? They might have time to compare. And think, if this destiny, going back to what they were, is what they need the most.
Well, it’s not like there was no alliance presence there before.
Ok, so, I don’t know what the devs are willing to do. But from my perspective, Calia does make sense now, when Sylvanas is not around.
IMO the forsaken are not a monolithic group. Some found a new home, a new path, new friends. But even in Classic there were those, who does not care nor need any of that, they only cared about who they were before becoming undead.
Exposure to Light does just that. From Ask CDev:
Forsaken priests do not disintegrate or explode from channeling the Light for an extended period of time… though they may wish they would.
Are there long-term effects on an undead who is in regular contact with the Holy Light in a positive way?
There are reports, however, that some Forsaken have slowly experienced a sharpening of their dulled senses of touch, smell, etc., as well as an increase in the flashes of positive emotions that have otherwise become so rare since their fall into undeath. Unfortunately, this may be the cause of the Forsaken priesthood’s increased attempts at self-destruction; regaining these senses would force the priests to smell their own rotting flesh, taste the decay in their mouths and throats, and even feel the maggots burrowing within their bodies.
And the reason for the dulled / warped senses and emotions is stated to be the dark magic not allowing souls to be properly attached to the body. So, likely that connection is what is affected by exposure to the Light.
All of it is a good thing for those who wants to “go back”. Might not be a pleasant surprive for those who would not want to. If just a regular contact is enough to cause such changes, it does not matter if Calia would be a queen, or be a courier.
And that is how I see this story. There are forsaken who embrace who they are, who accept the horde, and want to follow this path into the future. And there are those who cares about none of those thing, and would rather go back to their past. Before there was Sylvanas, as a force binding them all together. Now, IMO those groups have no reason to be together.
And it could be a source of progression for both groups. The amount of drama those, who would try to go back, might have to endure could very well be the most painful experience they ever had. And it’s not clear how would react those who emraced the horde life, when some of their former allies would say “see you on a battlefield”.
So, yeah. Calia is a dangerous tool. She can be a way to destroy what people know and like about the forsaken. Yet, she can be a path to a rather interesting story, and a lot of progression for everyone involved.
Maybe because Activision is forcing them to save money, they just put an intern in charge of the story dept. Poor guy doesn’t even know the very basics of Warcraft Lore. That’s the only reason I can think why their writing has been so terrible and confusing.
The idea that Sylvanas had any problem with Forsaken remembering their past lives was a HUGE retcon that started with BtS. In fact, she used to encourage it–she used to emphasize how Lordaeron was rightfully theirs because they had lived there in life and returned in undeath.
In other words, the writing has been ridiculously inconsistent.
This is not, by the way, a pro-Calia post. If the Forsaken were supposed to be pining for the return of the Menethils all this time, we should have seen it. But what we saw instead was that even if they remembered their former lives, they (as a group) accepted that things were different now.
I’ve mentioned it before, but her line post Blight ganking is just funny.
Tyrande doesn’t care about anything right now other than getting the Banshee Queen’s head.
Do you know how I know that? Because I read the part of Shadow’s Rising where she made this abundantly clear to everyone there. Including Calia.
So on top of being aesthetically antithetical to the Forsaken and having the personality of a night light with a smiley face drawn on it, she’s also kinda an idiot.
But not because they LIKE it. It’s because they have no other choice. They’re forced to live in plagued wastelands, so they make do. They try to find what little joy they can in a joyless existence. It’s all to try to get back some semblance of their old lives, as twisted of a poor substitute as it may be.
Or maybe it’s the Player base that’s out of touch?
I mean, this is Blizzard’s story. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s “wrong.”
This isn’t actually a recon as much as the lack of clarification in the lore of Sylvana’s character development (and slowly deteriorating mental state) following her rebirth after Icecrown. There’s some evidence, though not directly referenced in game, that she came back changed and acting more dictatorial.