They have been beating us over the head with this info in game all 9.2: She is going to face the consequences for her actions.
I sort of feel like people are just ignoring what isn’t congruent with their own rage narrative of “Redeemed” Sylvanas who gets a slap on the wrist.
It’s been datamined she will jump into a Maw, so a death, which many anti-Sylvanas-people want, is unlikely.
What does death even mean in the shadowlands? Like… really? Unless you are really willing to destroy her soul?
We know she submits herself to the judgement of Tyrande; my running theory is she is consigned to the Maw to right the wrongs she did. Destroy Mawsworn beyond salvaging, ferry wrongly damned souls for proper judgement before the Arbiter, etc.
…it will take her basically forever.
That presumably only happens to souls that were already judged, or native creatures of the Shadowlands. If, say, Bolvar or Jaina got killed in the Shadowlands, their souls would get sent to the Arbiter normally, or just directly in the Maw in this case.
People still want her dead, though.
Right, but in accepting her wrongdoing while ‘alive’ she has already completed what Revendreth is designed to do with unwilling souls as part of their last stop before damnation. She wouldn’t be sent there, now.
So, she at most would be sent to some low security prison realm for a bit before heading off to somewhere nicer. We are better off with Tyrande sentencing her to maw cleanup duty.
Not going to happen. These same people also wanted arthas to be redeemed or be sylvanas’ torture for eternity.
They have been beating us over the head with Sylvanas as Goddess of Death since at least EoN. They have been broadcasting Kerrigan 2.0 since Legion; then heavily in BFA; then solidly in prepatch. The consequences of her actions is apotheosis as the new Jailer, a choice the Ranger General will make to attone for the sins of the Banshee queen, robbing the Nelves of a victory, and settling the matter in possibly the most unsatisfying way.
Not all of them.
Enough though 
The amount of random meaning being placed on “redeemed”, “justice”, ETC., is amazing.
A jumping Sylvanas animation was being worked on. I do not recall it ever being datamined in a specific location, be careful following other people who jump to conclusions.
She’s the first Maw Walker, the Devs already said Maw Walkers are nudged back to life by Azeroth. So…
The thing that makes me not accept that assumption is she’s a Maw Walker. She can travel in and out, likely with the stones now.
It’s not hard for her and the Kyrian to empty the Maw of those needing judgement now; there’s no reason for it to be “locked” like it was with Zovaal there.
Sending her to clear the Maw, if it’s claimed to be a massive task, is mere plot; not effective story.
Yes indeed. Redemption is about the individual who did something, and their dealing with it. A lot of this argument runs around misusing words.
That’s what AA was going to do, past tense. That arc has been abandoned. I wonder if any of you know the quote he was going to use at her apotheosis? It’s pretty self evident.
Not now, no. They broke the narrative chain to do “there must always be a Jailer” in this last cinematic.
The Jailer is a product of the Eternal Ones imprisoning Zovaal, not a designed part of the Shadowlands. With “Arthas begone” they shouldn’t repeat the “there must always be…” formulation.
To sum up:
Nothing yet kills Sylvanas.
When Shadowlands ends the living must leave, if she’s not dead she needs to leave (or they break their own story, not impossible!).
IMO, Tyrande talks about others being consumed by vengeance, and that won’t be her.
It would be insane to have that Arbiter platform full of those leaders, and Pelagos, watching Tyrande kill Sylvanas. (That… is also very unlikely to happen.)
Sylvanas has been so back and forth because there were multiple people with drastically different interpretations and goals in a bitter tug of war over story direction. There is some decent (if circumstantial) evidence that the tug of war culminated in Lord Cosby Suite going out of his way to sabotage Sylvanas and the overall WoW story during BfA as a final middle finger when he was forced out for being a terrible human being.
That isn’t the case now, as Danuser has full creative control. So, her story has been salvaged as best they can.
Sylvanas’ inner monologue in A Good War:
And no need for an interpretation on Wikipedia when we can read the UN definition directly:
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
If you look at how Blizzard treated Sylvanas so far, and the horde for this whole action quasi excused, yes, the probability is not very big that she has to pay a real price for her action, that she gets no real punishment.
It doesnt seem like it. It seems like they probably had a slick cinematic already worked out for it, and what they have done is reframe the narrative to include split souls and a blameless martyr in Ranger General.
This quote from the CCPPG doesnt contradict anything I said.
The “following acts” when committed against an enemy nation, includes acts of conventional warfare. You know… killing a member of the group.
Further, all I did was point out that every source besides Elegy shows an effort to commit something other than genocide, deliberately avoiding genocide. Creating an altogether different humanitarian crisis in Stormwind… until the devs embraced the genocide narrative.
In this quote, Sylvanas points out that taking the tree, and killing their leaders was the only intended literal destruction. In doing so, she invokes the same figurative spirit behind the phrase cultural genocide where a culture is destroyed while the people remain. That is not the same thing as literal genocide. It is not the destruction of a whole people or a part of a whole people. The reason you invoke figurative genocide is to provoke emotion.
Considering they contrived the soul-split to force giving Sylvanas more pathos, I don’t think anyone has any faith that Sylvanas will face any real satisfying consequences for anything she’s done. At this point we’re just kinda reduced to hoping that she screws off to “clean” the maw and stays out of the story forever because that’s the absolute best we could hope for.
And I don’t buy for a second “the soul split doesn’t mean she’s not taking responsibility” clause for a second. Then there would be absolutely no reason to contrive that for her. The inclusion of that utterly stupid plot device is so that even the people who want Sylvanas dead would feel bad for her. Blizzard is trying to have it both ways with “she accepts culpability” but also “her soul was split so she was snapshotted as a negative version of herself”.
Pretty spot on, I think. The soul split is most likely a panicked response to negative feedback about a story that was already on rails to a predetermined solution.
Like a lot of solutions WoW tries to give players, it looks like it will be worse. This can probably take a top 5 worst decisions spot right next to a 3v3 mode that doesnt allow you to play with your friends.
It really hasn’t… and I highly doubt Danuser who wrote Dark Mirror wherein Nathanos starts feeling disgust at what Sylvanas did for him is salvaging her story in this way… but maybe.
If so, why did the First Ones create the Maw. What is the purpose of Domination magic? The Maw wasnt created for Zovaal and he didnt create Domination.
The Primus made Domination.
The Primus
I created Domination as a tool to punish Zovaal.My anger informed that creation, and now we pay the price for my hubris. Even Eternal Ones err on occasion.
There was no Jailer until the Eternal Ones put Zovaal in the Maw, he was The Arbiter. Domination was made by The Primus to chain Zovaal, which made him into the Jailer.
IIRC Grimoire said they dragged the Maw out of the ether to put Zovaal there.