I think this is actually what makes me feel as disillusioned as I have with the story of Sylvanas post-Legion.
Before she wasn’t “good”, she had committed her fair share of crimes. But there was a thread of logic that you could follow and although she may have committed acts of evil - they weren’t for the sake of evil itself in the vast majority of circumstances.
Whereas the burning of Teldrassil really did feel like a point that’s difficult to return from and here we are nearly at the end of the Shadowlands expansion and we still don’t have a great idea as to why she did it. What is “killing hope”? How does it factor into the overall plan? If her plot was to instigate a war that would claim the lives of both members of the Horde and Alliance alike; in turn feeding their souls to the Maw - then what was burning the tree supposed to actually achieve? Given that motive shouldn’t she want the NE and the Alliance to vigorously fight back? At that point it didn’t matter to her if the souls being sent to the Maw were Alliance or Horde.
Surely them taking Teldrassil, pushing all of the NE out of it and then burning it down does enough to push the Alliance into war. That would be the Horde destroying a major Alliance hub and the home of the Night Elves. It doesn’t even make sense from the perspective of sending the souls of those who died in Teldrassil to the Maw as she had no way of knowing that Elune had been reached out to by her sister and as a result opted to send the souls of those who fell in Teldrassil to the Shadowlands - she couldn’t have possibly known that those souls would end up in the Maw.
So was it just evil for the sake of evil? Did she just want to kill hope out of spite?
Given the revelation since, it’s hard not to see events like that and wonder if the culture present at Blizz impacted the story - that they felt compelled to ensure that this major female character was shown in such a light.
As if they couldn’t let Arthas, a male character, be the abuser without adding on the addendum of “but wait, the female victim is also just really bad guys”.
The situation with Anduin also seems rather tasteless. As you said:
That only serves to solidify an overall misogynistic viewpoint of Sylvanas. It reeks of the stereotype of the “impure” woman corrupting the “pure” man - which bleeds into an idea that has had significant historical prevalence where women are chastised for actions that their male counterparts are not. Because in the case of the woman it’s considered “impure” and in the case of the man it was not scrutinised at all.
Obviously that wasn’t the overt implication intended there, but it speaks of the subconscious mentality that we have now learnt pervaded Blizzard as a company. It wasn’t the pure man Anduin that fell due to his own flaws, it was the impure woman that worked to tempt him. We didn’t need the temptress subtext on top of it all.
