Not at all. I’ve repeatedly used excerpts from the text to firmly establish why I believe that the EoN version Sylvanas was not only a horrible person, but is also the one we saw in both BtS and BfA. I always go back to the text to establish why that short stories characterization of her can be extrapolated out to get to the destination that we did. Even if other destinations did exist.
Why can’t those saying Sylvanas came out of EoN caring about her Forsaken do the same?
Address the rest of my argument.
OK, it is true that a good archer can and does reuse arrows.
However … Sylvie’s only other prior use to that quote was used in reference to how she was using her Rangers … as she was tactically sacrificing them to the Scourge. The time after that, she was referring to the “Humans” in the Northrend Campaign she was using as sacrifices to break themselves against the Scourge to get her a chance at Arthas. Then, when Sylvanas gets her revenge, she willingly abandons her arrows, despite being outright told what their fate would be without her.
It is true that a Good Archer can and does re-use their arrows in their quiver. But that has never been Sylvanas Windrunner. She only ever uses that analogy when referring to arrows she uses … then discards. Even if she plans on using them sparingly and wisely, She never returns for them. And the only reason she returned for her “Bulwark” is because she realized she needed them again.
(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.
Souls who served nature all go to Ardenweald.
She got dumped in Ardenweald by Elune. It’s why she’s literally the only azerothian dragon you see there.
There is no evidence of this, other than the fact Elune was the last being we saw her interact with. However it is hard fact that it is stated that all souls who served nature in life go to Ardenweald. Ysera served nature in life.
If Elune had this power, you’d think she’d reroute all the night elf souls to Ardenweald, instead of the damnation of the maw.
She clearly does, since Ysera came out of her wild seed as a constellation.Gods are fickle like that though.
i really dont care about the story in a video game and this is why.
in my opinion, Sylvanas’ whole storyline is arbitrary and hollow.
I’m not a major lore nerd but i always thought she was trying to control the forces of death and become the next lich queen, or use the powers of death to free herself from death which i thought she was doing for the past several years. now she’s working with some death titan to give every soul in the afterlife free will which does not seem to aline with the stuff she’s done in the past. cough battle for azeroth cough
nothing in this game’s story makes sense anymore.
she’s not even an entertaining villain honestly. she’s dull, lifeless (fitting) and has almost no personality other than emo dead elf archer lady, i actually zoned out in one of the cutscenes she is in. i honestly wish she wasn’t involved with the jailer and she was attached to some questline to get a legendary similar to the quests with magni, but i guess it wouldn’t work since it would not appeal to the 12 year olds and dress up simps that play this game.
if they continue to milk her story dry, then I’m out.
all i want is for them to kill her off and have the light or the void be the big bad already.