I guess this is the best place to post, and I can’t believe I am thinking it. Granted we don’t know (and by we I mean me) what she is up to in the Shadowlands or how it will all play out, but if she is gone for good or even put in a deep deep hole for a really long time then I am really going to miss her.
She is personally my favorite of the Horde leaders. Normally I play Alliance and I have tons of reasons to dislike her, but I really like her as a character and I hope Shadowlands doesn’t become her “Swan Song.”
While it will be good to get to a place where she is not the middle of everything or (close to it) I do hope from time to time she does show up on Azeroth to torment and challenge it’s people. For me personally, I like her better involved with Azeroth and not some sort of cosmic force and I really hope this isn’t where this is headed. At least not on a permanent basis. But that’s my feelings, I am sure others are hoping we can be done once and for all.
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How do you give this story a satisfying ending without ending her story?
I am legitimately asking because I see no way to give the current story they’ve set up an end that is at all satisfying without her biting the bullet, for good.
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No, I don’t either. But I am not a writer, so I don’t know if it is doable. It does appear to me though that they may have written themselves into a corner. Don’t know if it was intentional or not. Either way, if it is for good, seems like a waste to me. But the way she has been behaving of late, it was bound to happen sooner or later.
I haven’t really liked her since Edge of Night. Which I still just think was a weirdly cruel middle finger to Forsaken fans, as if they were really setting up SL for that long they probably would’ve included the part where she talks to the Jailor in it.
I’d already stopped playing towards the end of Wrath but that short cemented my disinterest for the better part of a decade. As out of nowhere going; ‘Turns out your favorite faction’s greatest hero and leader doesn’t care at all about them, and actually finds them gross and pathetic’ is wont to do.
But I came back in Legion, and was hopeful. She’s quite selfless in the Silverpine storyline and is unambiguously framed as heroic in the Legion cinematic, loading screen and Broken Shore scenario. But then BtS happened, and then BFA happened.
She was hands down my favorite character. But Blizz decided to make her the sort of villain who couldn’t enjoy eggs for breakfast if she couldn’t force the mother hen to watch. And I honestly hope she’s done after SL. There’s no real redemptive path that won’t come off as insulting. The Nelf fans, okay many of them will never be happy, will be upset but more importantly I’ll be upset because it’ll mean all the Forsaken I was forced to kill in the rebel storyline were right. So between that and Teldrassil I’m just being rail roaded into villainy.
And I don’t mind playing the villain. My DK went loyalist for much the same reason I did a Cesar’s Legion playthrough eventually but it’s not something I like being forced to do.
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We’ll see what they have in mind soon enough, tho. This expansion’s speciality seems to be recontextualizing existing lore, so any attempt at prediction is kind of pointless.
Suddenly someone was writing Arthas’ checks.
Suddenly the Titans had “titans” of their own.
Who knows what will suddenly happen next, the rules are out the window.
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You raise some good points. I like the Nelfs. I have several. Honestly, as the story is being written now, I don’t know why anyone would roll one now. Unless you happen to like playing some one backed into a corner and doesn’t seem to have any future glory to look forward to and I do feel like their revenge was a bit lacking. Maybe that changes in Shadowlands.
In SWTOR I played villains and blew up planets, killed people for looking at me wrong or talking back to me, gassed an entire population. All things considered atrocities by civilized standards. But I can see why the Horde and Forsaken players in particular are angry at being used and being pawns.
Sylvanas did some really horrible things and yeah, does seem past the point of no return in any kind of redemption arc. I have been “angry” at her since Varian Wrynn died. But I do think BfA went too far to the point where you can’t really fix it. Good writing might be able to. But if good writing was a thing, I am not sure we would even have came down this road.
My OP was more of a lament. The true Lament of the Highborne, if you will because she was in her day such a good character and cool character. I realize that this likely can’t be fixed or undone. Not even sure that Blizzard wants it to be done. I just don’t get the why because in her day she was such a great character and imo the story that got us to this point wasn’t great storytelling. Yes mileage varies, but that’s my opinion. I really do want her to remain an active part of the lore in a positive way, but as many have pointed out more eloquently than I, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that without ruining more of the story.
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I pretty much gave up in BtS when she’s killing Forsaken civilians because a few of them wanted to live in Stormwind.
When the most interesting part of her character was she wouldn’t hold the undead as thralls. The Forsaken were always free to leave. Many undead NPCs do be it for moral disagreements, personal quests or simply a better job offer.
Seeing as she was herself made a pawn by Arthas, this made sense. It was a line she would not cross. In fact taking away undead free will is the highest crime in Forsaken society, for which the punishment is True Death.
But then the aforementioned. And then in BFA she tries to torture the free will out of a now undead Derek Proudmoore. The most compelling aspect of her character was unceremoniously destroyed and the saddest part is the only undead to comment on this desecration of the only thing they hold sacred is Voss, in a bit of optional dialogue I’m sure a lot of people missed in the quest where Baine gets arrested.
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It’s definitely going to be her swan song regardless of her fate. The most likely outcome is that they Illidan her, and put her in a place where she can be brought out of story stasis whenever they need her for marketing.
Because love her or hate her, behind people like Arthas and Illidan, Sylvanas is the biggest marketing tool they have alive right now. There’s a reason she’s in so many of the CGI cinematics, despite barely making a dent on the in game story itself. She sells like hotcakes even after all they’ve done to her characterization.
Even if she ‘dies’, they’re not going to permanently destroy her soul, she will be around in some form to eventually be brought back whenever Death is ready to be relevant again.
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Stasis savings for future plot device against Xalatath most likely.
Sort of the old “long con”.
I would imagine some sort of self sacrifice play or ascension would be best for the Forsaken. She’ll still be important to the culture but she’s been retired.
Likely sealed at a chamber or afterlife suffering this at every minute:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3nZPpbQfDjU/maxresdefault.jpg
Also “available” for when Blizzard decides to user her again
I too want to see Sylvanas continue and I don’t think Shadowlands is going to be the end of her story. I’ve said it before, but Arthas, Garrosh, Kael’thas, Kel’thuzad, Lady Vashj etc. are all still in the story with Shadowlands. Sargeras is still in the story. They brought back Illidan and Gul’dan (and of all those only Gul’dan is currently “gone”)
They aren’t going to unceremoniously delete one of their most high profile characters just because some people think that’s the only direction the story can go in to satisfy people who cannot and are unwilling to be satisfied.
They broke her story, they can fix her story. Either way people will complain.
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I don’t think they can fix her story. The best they can do is lock her away in a dark place and and make her the subject of correctional children stories like the bogeyman. -If you don’t eat your vegetables the Dark Lady will come and steal your kidneys-
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Nah, she’s crazy and needs to go down.
The reason Illidan’s redemption “worked” is because the genocides he pulled off were off-screen and done to races that nobody had emotional investment in. This is a kind of shady literary technique to make sure the audience can still sympathize with the villain when they do their heel face turn. Look to Vegeta for the same. He’s actually an unrepentant monster who’s responsible for the destruction of dozens of planets full of sapient life and civilizations, but because he didn’t destroy Earth or Namek and the people he killed (minus Nappa) all came back he never did anything to draw the audience’s ire.
This won’t work with Sylvanas. She burned down a major capital city of the most popular race in the game. She did it in a big, grand cinematic that tells us there was no good reason to burn it down because it was filled with non-combatants. Then later any justification she had to do it, such as doing it for the sake of the Horde and her people, get thrown out the window when we learn she was also planning to kill off her own people once all was said and done.
There’s nothing to redeem. She can’t even be successfully soft redeemed like Illidan or Vegeta because her big act of villainy cannot be hidden by the narrative and cannot be shrugged off with “well, not like I was emotionally invested in those guys anyway”.
The absolute best case scenario for Sylvanas fans is that rather than die she just gets sealed away like Sargeras was so the writers can break her out again at a later date.
But redemption wise? It isn’t possible. Not just without pissing off the night elves, but without pissing off nearly everyone invested in the story even a little bit.
Hopefully she’ll get an arrow through her black heart by Tyrande and have her soul dragged down into the Maw by loa Vol’jin so both factions can get some catharsis from her doom. It is the least Blizzard can do after all thise nonsense.
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Here we have the rare and previously thought extinct Sylvanas fan. Their species once covered the globe anywhere there was a computer and smutty fanart but the great fire of 2018 all but wiped them out. We’re witnessing a real rarity today folks!
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The people who have held on to this grudge for 2+ years now are never going to let it go, no matter what happens to Sylvanas.
There are always going to be people who hate Blizzard’s writing, and honestly there’s a lot to hate sometimes. Doesn’t mean they are going to kill off lucrative high profile characters to satisfy people who do not want to be satisfied.
People complained about Thrall being too front and center in the story so Blizzard puts him in the background and then people complain about that. Blizzard can do whatever they choose to with Sylvanas’s story, there’s always going to be people who say “Oh so she’s Kerrigan 2.0 now? Lame writing”
Guess what? It’s been Garrosh 2.0 all throughout BfA and people complained the entire time and Blizzard still did it anyway.
You say that like Sylvanas fanart doesn’t get posted to the WoW subreddit every other day. They just don’t post on the main forums anymore because obnoxious Night Elf alts drove them all away.
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We don’t know what she wants.
If we knew, we could better guess the kind of fate that would be in store for her.
You don’t have to be so hostile I’m just poking fun at their near nonexistence on the story forums these days.
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Not calling you obnoxious, I’m talking about the level 10 alts that won’t be satisfied with anything short of deleting the Horde from the game and spam every story forum thread with it. No hostility intended.
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I gotta say, I see more people complaining about this occurrence than I see the actual occurrence itself. I mean it is definitely happening, but I am also pretty sure I see posts like this in those same threads often times when it’s not even occurred, or being the one to start said argument.
It’s like some people have gotten so annoyed by something they dislike on these forums that they’ve then taken to going into every thread and mentioning that thing they don’t like, often times when it’s not even on topic or hasn’t even been brought up yet.
That above statement refers perfectly to both sides of this particular argument btw.
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