The second I saw Garrosh go out I knew Sylvanas was without a paddle.
They made her perhaps the most hateable character in WoW canon. Then slammed the breaks at the last minute in what was just so completely cowardly. She could’ve at the very least gone out as a ish talking, cackling villain.
That wouldnt be ideal but they wrote her as just way too far gone and at the very least she could’ve gone out like a badass.
Instead they killed the Banshee Queen and replaced her with essentially a new character that frankly I don’t want to see again. The Dark Lady was for all intents and purposes destroyed in the lamest way possible. And this malformed abomination they put in her place is actively unpleasant to look at.
They took one of the most interesting characters in the setting, made her Super Hitler - the Hitler that fllllies! for the express purpose of leading us through two of the worst expansions ever. Only to kill her off in an indirect way and replace her with basically just some High Elf with a skin condition.
I mean her reasoning is she’s told people don’t get to see their family again in the afterlife. As expressed by spousal eel mercy cannibalism. Because this story is a fever dream.
It’s just so stupid. She has no critical thinking skills. She just expels all doubt from her mind and takes at face value someone she knows is responsible for all cosmic cruelty.
Nah, the real problem is that they tried to frame her as Super Hitler, then they turned her into a Jesus metaphor (she just wanted to undo the unjust afterlive and now saves people from hell), while also telling us that she was wrong for killing all those people, because deaths totally matter and the afterlive wasn’t actually that bad (example: "Draka is ok with living in Maldraxxus, the people in Revendreth all deserved it).
And whenever people bring that up, I point to the moment when the Jailer directly told her “Yep, you’re going to hell. Not Kael or Zul’jin. YOU.” That kind of existential angst seems like a pretty good motive to me.
This is why the best case scenario is to just fix what they broke in BFA, then move on, and we all agree to never speak of this again.
I’m happy to go full “there is no war in ba sing se” on this. Because I’m beyond convinced that nothing of value can come from this tortured mess of stupidity.
And to be clear, I don’t see Sylvanas as an angel without sin. That was NEVER her appeal. That wasn’t why i enjoyed playing her campaign in Warcraft 3 or why I rolled an Undead. But the inherent problem of the novel was that it had to give Sylvanas sympathetic motives, while also already concluding that she was totally wrong.
Only point of contention is, you know, the issue of recruiting people she herself killed, instead converting already existing Scourge soldiers. Not because it’s amoral, but because it’s illogical.
I just hate that she actually plagerized Turalyon x Alleria’s first love scene in Beyond the Dark Portal for Sylvanas and Nathanos in the new novel, like we wouldn’t even notice. Plagarism is not good for a writer of her status.
Since she possibly wrote this scene in Beyond the Dark Portal and she wrote the Sylvanas novel, maybe it’s not actually plagarism but verbatim copying the same thing she wrote in another one of her books. It’s extreemely lazy writing.
Tbf we see repeatedly in Forsaken lore that’s pretty much impossible. You’ve to put down undead who just didn’t have the willpower to maintain their minds in both vanilla and Cata Deathknell.
To date the only successful rehabilitation we see is Nathanos and that takes a tremendous amount of effort, resources and the power of true love.
The Forsaken’s hatred of the Scourge is sort of a mirror of the living hatred’s of them. If the Forsaken are what’s behind the human’s fragile facade of flesh then the Scourge are “there but for the grace of God go I” for the Forsaken. Grim reminders that they very easily could have been drolling, feral meat puppets.
Sylvanas is bad but Alleria… Alleria is terrible. Golden’s obsession with genocide is messed up. Can we talk about this conversation in Beyond the Dark Portal. (I can’t seem to find the scene where she goes to him and asks him to ‘make her forget’ before they have sex… it’s in there somewhere… I just don’t remember which book it is.
She frowned. “And the sooner we reach Lordaeron, the sooner I can seek
out more of those green-skinned abominations and cleanse this land of their filth!” Her voice rose with passion and her eyes flashed. Some heads turned in their direction. “I will see them dead, every last one of them. Even if it takes me a hundred years!”
Turalyon felt a shiver run down his spine. “Alleria,” he began, pitching his voice low, “you’re talking genocide.”
The smile that curved her lips was a cruel one. “It is only genocide when those being slain arc people. This is nothing more than exterminating vermin.”
Alleria still hates orcs. She also envies that Sylvanas is not ‘tied by the same contraints of morality’ she’s itching to commit a genocide. She’s envious that her sister did it and she can’t in Shadows Rising. She will be someone to watch on the Alliance side.
Have her be Lady MacBeth for Turaylon then just let the Velves be proper Dark Elves - as this setting really doesn’t have any save for the Naga who are elves in the same sense the Forsaken are human.
Then just rip off Warhammer and have Alleria and Arator do the Morathi and Malekith shtick.
Because it’s still hilarious to me dark elven Darth Vader still lives with his mom. And also kinda reveals how screwed up it’d be to have all your elders be ageless super models.
“Grandma just - can you not wear the death dominatrix outfit in front of my friends? I can literally hear their thoughts”
I mean, of course she does. She has only ever had bad encounters with them. They attacked Azeroth, destroying everything in their wake. Enslaved dragons and forced them to set fire to Quel’thalas in the 2nd war. She leaves through the Dark Portal, sees what the Orcs did to their own world and lives through the destruction of Draenor, which again, the orcs did themselves. She spends the next 1000 years fighting the Legion, whom are the demonic masters of every single orc she has ever fought. Then she comes back to Azeroth gets to learn about all that has happened in the time she was gone, including Garrosh and the Iron Horde. And before she can stop to take a breath, she is thrusted into yet another war with the Horde.
I feel like, if you were in her shoes, your mind would be pretty set and made up on orcs as well.
Sylvanas, on the other hand, just wanted to kill everything because she is angsty and life is hard. So she is projecting her pain onto everyone else in the world, and she totally thinks she is morally justified in making the decision for them. I think Sylvanas is the worse of the two.
Alleria is a genocidal monster whose bloodlust tops that of her undead sister. She’s the threat. Sylvanas was manipulated because she wants to build a just world where her brother didn’t die to orcs, Alleria just wants to commit genocide as revenge.
That is also the only Sylvanas of the Forsaken that exists. Sylvanas when she was alive was a very different character, and her screen time is too short for her to be anyone’s fan favorite.
The “Complete soul” version of Sylvanas is not the Sylvanas of the Horde. Not the Sylvanas of the Forsaken. If anything, she is an Alliance character lol.
I had hoped the Night Elves would be the ones to go full murder hobo on the Horde, and look how that turned out.
I’ll be thrilled if Alleria tries to kill a a single orc and Sylvanas is there to challenge her, showing that Sylvanas is still the Horde Warchief, and she will protect the Horde even from her own family. I’d drink up your night elven tears.
Sylvanas Windrunner, defender of the Horde, has a nice ring to it.
Plus she could still be the Dark Lady as she defends the horde from the shadows, only actually showing her face to face down threats like Alleria, in this hypothetical scenario.
Sounds good to me. Plus it gives Greymane even bigger excuse to be even more wary of Calias promise.
