(sigh)
All right, here we go, then, if you insist on doing this dance. But seriously, you’ve heard all this before.
“Arrows in my quiver” is a metaphor. Using metaphors doesn’t make you a sociopath. It’s also important to look at the rest of the exchange:
Her companion is on the verge of giving in to panic and despair, even jeopardizing the whole mission by becoming careless. She’s snapping back hard because she can’t let herself be pulled over that same cliff. I’ve never been in combat, but it stands to reason that a commander can’t allow herself to agonize over the lives at stake while the battle is going on. You come to terms with that before and/or after the battle, not during.
On to “Mongrel race of rotted corpses.” That is part of her thought process when she’s about to commit suicide. Again, I don’t expect her attitude at that moment to be identical to how she’d see things on a normal day. There’s also a large degree of self-loathing mixed up with it, suggested by the references to how she notices the changes in her own body from scene to scene. That also ties back into how, at the time, she had melancholy dialogue in-game referring to the undead (including herself) as “slaves to a curse.”
Now about the second “arrows in the quiver” scene. Again, let’s look at the entire context. The picture I get from the scene as a whole, rather than laser-focusing on just the bit you quoted, is of a character who’s fragmented and broken, with shards of … well, I have to use the word humanity even though she’s an elf … still scattered into the snowy landscape of her undead worldview. It’s like reading an inner war where those older perspectives keep trying to come out but then she clamps down on them.
The scene mentions the “cold sheen” of a memory lived after death–that’s a clue to the change in attitude.
She looks at the Forsaken, seeing all the grotesque details of their appearance, but their “plaintive, desperate gazes” make her see them for a moment as children … and then she immediately reverts back to “No, they’re disgusting and I am just using them.” It’s like she’s actively refusing to allow herself to follow the comparison to them as children, but it came through anyway without her wanting it. She couldn’t help it.
There are other shards in that whole scene. She recognizes the Forsaken as “plaintive and desperate.” She thinks of them at one point as “these poor people.” She recognizes Lydon from the previous night, showing that they aren’t just some faceless mass. At the end of the scene, she thinks she’s grown cold.
“But,” I see you starting to type, “each of these moments is undercut. When they’re plaintive, she thinks about how disgusting they are. When she calls them ‘poor people,’ she thinks about using them. When she notices Lydon, she plans to use him. And when she asks herself whether she’s become cold, she follows that up by answering no, she’s exactly the same as she was in life!”
Well, this is the part where it just comes down to different readings. You look at the counterpoint to each point and say it obliterates the point, and you see her as a “horrible, selfish nihilist.” I look at it and see the counterpoints as Sylvanas struggling to maintain her nihilism in the face of her unwanted better impulses, and the fact that the impulses are there at all is the interesting part. You see a finished product, and I see a work in progress.