People say this all the time, but then it usually happens exactly as predicted, just as the night warrior doing nothing and being irrelevant, we were able to predict that since 8.1.
Why would Tyrande quote Sylvanas? Tyrande wasn’t there to hear it since Tyrande has been entirely irrelevant to the entire SL story so she has done nothing the entire expansion, and really nothing last expansion either. Just like killing the one valk was literally pointless. Tyrande is just there to reinforce Sylvanas’s redemption arc, just like Uther’s entire soul fracturing story from the beginning was only about setting up Sylvanas’s redemption arc, the only character story that is even relevant in SL is Sylvanas’s.
Were people honestly expecting something else? I would be honestly shocked if someone legit thought Sylvanas was going to die in SL. Many of us called it that sylvanas was going to get redeemed or at least forgiven after SL was announced.
Blizz isn’t very good at being subtle. They treat everything like it’s a nail.
They are usually just the people who say “the story isn’t over” when things are telegraphed from a mile away and you can usually predict based how blizzard has written in the past how it’s going to play out. I linked that post before and you can see their response to it after they were proven wrong.
Everything related to Zovaal and Uther’s roles only exists to handwave away the evil crap Sylvanas has done.
“It wasn’t her fault, she had her soul split just like Uther’s. Ignore that this was never established about Uther before.”
“It wasn’t her fault, she was just following this big armored guy’s orders. Ignore that he was never even hinted at existing before.”
The ultimate purpose of both of their narratives in this expansion is just to absolve her. They don’t do anything else in the story besides fulfill those roles. Everything Uther did was related to the soul split, everything Zovaal did was to show how eeevil he was. They care so little about making Zovaal an actual character that we don’t even know why he’s doing anything. He’s the main villain and he doesn’t even have a proper motive.
I would say it’s the same with Tyrande’s story as well. Her “story” really serves no purpose in Shadowlands other than to be the night elf representation that essentially forgives Sylvanas after Sylvanas ALLOWS Tyrande to pass judgement on her, basically to tell the players to get over it. What did Tyrande even do in shadowlands? Essentially nothing and she’s not even there to fight the jailer, she has zero impact on the actual plot.
But that also goes back too 8.1 when I don’t believe they had any actual plan for the night warrior but after all the complaints about how bad 8.1 and after the complaints abuot they saying “the night elves got their revenge” with the stalemate at the time in darkshore, was they gave her a bit part in SL after forgetting about her in BfA after 8.1 (except too yell at anduin in 8.2.5).
So to blizzard it’s like “why not” bring her to SL for no other reason than to essentially forgive sylvanas, you don’t have to say “forgive” but that’s essentially what it’s going to be in the form of Tyrande giving her some punishment, maybe saving all the souls in the maw or something, but essentially she only serves as the representation for the night elves to say they are moving on quickly from the genocide so blizzard can forget about it completely.
In the event, as described in AGW, and as represented in prepatch and even Elegy, outside of the irresponsible, lazy, cheap emotional appeal that was the choice to use “genocide” as literary low-hanging fruit, It was not originally a genocide.
Genocide’s most common use is to vilify the accused, or to illicit sympathy for the victim. It is rarely used to describe a factual genocide, so Ive been calling out Golden for using the term since… first reading the novellas when they were published. It was bad writing when there was meant to be two sides to the story.
So both, I guess? Semantics shouldnt be dismissed when talking about writing. How words are defined and used is kind of the point.
Furthermore, the original narrative quite clearly had Sylvanas INTENTIONALLY sparing most of the Night Elves. Thats not a genocide. Thats not even an attempted genocide. It can’t be compared to conquering Europe, rounding up everyone of an ethnicity from every settlement, putting them into trains and shipping them off to camps to be worked to death and systematically exterminated as part of a planned final solution. It was the sacking, and razing of one major city that had intentionally been permitted to mostly evacuate first. AGW shows us the Horde leadership monitoring the evacuation progress, holding off taking Darnassus until most of the Night Elves have left.
These are things that I have personally pointed out in previous threads that I know you have been a part of.
None of this is to say that the current story isnt one of intentional genocide on the part of Sylvanas at the behest of the Jailer. But that was a sloppy, mid expansion retcon, favoring the worst take on the event.
If you create polarizing narratives intentionally, you have a responsibility to write for the people you polarized. That has been WoWs bread and butter for a long time.
I dont think we ever really questioned what would happen. I just think we are surprised its going to be Ranger General Sylvanas, consumed with guilt over what the Banshee Queen did, who is going to Kerrigan 2.0 meets Darth Vader because her sins are unforgivable and someone has to do something and be the new jailer…
However, you want to spin this many, many, many Night Elves were killed by Sylvanas and the Horde. And they are both 100% guilty of it and need to answer for it in one way or another.
We got an entire zone destroyed along with some other zones either conquered or scarred by the war that Sylvanas and the Horde started.
All these are facts and Tyrande along with the Alliance deserve their pound of horde/sylvanas to correct these wrongs.
Now its up to Blizzard is to deliver the pay off for Teldrassil and the 4th war… I wish them luck.
So you are invoking the “pound of flesh” trope. Harkening back to The Mechant of Venice.
Sure, I was always sympathetic towards Shylock. He was a victim of the conventions of the time. But the lessons regarding the price of seeking vengeance do fit with the expectations some fans have towards Tyrande.
All I am invoking is a payoff for all the crap that BFA started. If we did all this just to pat Sylvanas on the back and say we forgive you that would suck very much.
The UN doesn’t even strictly define Genocide further than the literal definition which is as follows:
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people, usually defined as an [ethnic], [national], [racial] or religious group.
What the UN does is mark 5 acts that can be cited as acts of attempted genocide, to justify acts by the UN against the accused member nation.
These acts pretty much sum up the way the Alliance has treated the Forsaken since the beginning of WoW. The way the Alliance has mostly treated the Orcs. The way the Forsaken has treated the Living and the way the Orcs have treated their enemies from Draenor to Azeroth. There is a reason genocide didnt exist as a term until 1944. Every act of war could be defined as Genocide. To the point that it wasnt important to have a term until it was necessary to motivate a powerful “neutral” force to take action.
As wikipedia says (and I have been saying) “As a label, it is contentious because it is moralizing,” further, the term isnt typically used to describe acts by a nation against its martial enemies. It is used to describe acts by a state against a people under its domain.
If you want to use ANY definition of genocide, Sylvanas didnt do it. She didnt commit acts of genocide. At best, since the retcon, she virtually commited genocide by wiping out the majority of the Night Elven people who were, I guess, already on the brink of extinction. And I havent even been arguing this since the genocide became the narrative.
If you dont want to acknowledge the fact that the original narrative was not a genocide except in instances that Golden wanted us to feel morally repulsed by it, that’s on you.
That… isn’t how people responded to LK-Arthas in WotLK, haha. People absolutely hated that he kept showing up and monologuing at us then teleporting away. I’m like 99% sure there were even dev talks, maybe Blizzcon, where they admitted they might have gone overboard with how much Arthas exposure they put into the leveling experience.
But I agree with the main thrust of your point all the same. The Jailer didn’t have the benefit of being a mainstay from the RTS games, so he desperately needed a lot of groundwork be laid in order for him to be taken seriously as the BBEG of this expansion. Instead, we got a garbled monotonous “Villainy Dialogue 101” dispensary without clear motives.
