Sylvanas Redemption in Shadowlands - Why it will happen

Lore Story Forum
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I’ve thought about this quite a lot recently and discussed about it with a few people and many seem to think that Sylvanas will definitely be a villain in Shadowlands and killed off. I thought that it’s time to make a thread where I list all the reasons why I think that it’s very obvious that she will be redeemed, this will probably turn out rather long I’m afraid, but I’ll try to make it as short as I can.
Just to clarify, I really do not want a Sylvamas redemption, I just think it’s kind of obvious that it will happen.
I will start making this list and update it later when more things come to my mind:

1. - “Morally Grey” - My first point is that prior to BfA, the writers stated that Sylvanas’ actions in BfA and the faction war will be morally grey. Now obviously, burning thousands of innocents alive and sending them to hell is not morally grey, but since the story is always planned 2 expansions in advance, it would make sense that the Burning of Teldrassil will turn out to be a necessary event for some greater good.
What exactly that is will be revealed later, but I have a theory that I will mention later - If killing all those civilians and sending them to the maw turns out to be necessary for some greater good, then it can be seen as “morally grey” - It was a similar situation with Illidan after all considering he did evil things without telling anyone why he does it, and his goal turned out to be defeating the Burning Legion.

2. - Loyalist Questline - The second and most important point for me is the loyalist questline. Never in the history of wow have they given players the choice to side with the “villain” before. They didn’t let us side with Arthas, Gul’dan, N’Zoth or others simply because they were clear villains and they wouldn’t let players side with a character that is obviously evil and going to be killed off.
Sylvanas loyalists were also told things like
“I would tell Sylvanas fans that her story definitely isn’t over yet. We have a lot more to tell . She’s not Garrosh 2.0. She has a lot more going on. Don’t want to spill anything, but there is a ton more coming for Sylvanas’s story.” (thanks to Dyzon for bringing it to my attention) which heavily hints that Sylvanas won’t just be a one dimensional villain, but rather something like an anti hero, similar to Illidan.
Sylvanas will NOT be a Garrosh 2.0, because the difference will be that Garrosh actually died in the expansion he opened up while Sylvanas will instead be the hero of that expansion.

3. - “Setting us free” - Sylvanas wants to set us free and save us. This is not only stated in the official shadowlands trailer, but also hinted at in a Nazmir questline in the Alliance war campaign. When you kill Ranger Captain Areiel, one of Sylvanas’ Dark Rangers, her death dialogue is the following: “Darkness… Sylvanas… is this what you saw… What you wished to save us from?” -

https://imgur.com/a/asBhe1D (can’t post pictures sadly)

Now with more Information, we can definitely say that she went right into the maw after we killed her, and it looks like Sylvanas has told a few of her loyalists about her plan which seems to be saving us from going into the maw.

4. - Teldrassil is not treated like an atrocity - This point I have to shorten a lot, otherwise I might end up writing a whole book here. When Theramore happened, Jaina was very upset and angry about it. The revenge for Theramore was Garrosh’s and his Loyalist’s deaths and purging the Horde off Dalaran. Theramore wasn’t even close to be as bad as Teldrassil though, because there were barely any casualties compared to a whole civilization that was wiped out in Teldrassil. The entire revenge for Teldrassil was killing 1 of Sylvanas recreatable Val’kyr in 8.1. (added a few sources)
In addition to that, nobody in the Horde really cared about Teldrassil itself even though many should have, atleast according to the old ideals of the Horde. Especially the Tauren and Druids should’ve instantly had their problems not only with burning Teldrassil, but also with invading Night Elf lands to begin with, especially since they already got Azshara from the Night Elves for their ressources.
Anduin, Jaina and others (excluding Genn and Tyrande) seem to also not have too much of a problem with Teldrassil as of 8.3 anymore even though it’s a full scale genocide, the painful killing of tens of thousands of civilians in a war the Horde started out of nowhere.
Could this mean that Teldrassil will eventually turn out to be a necessary mean for a greater good? To find a way to justify genocide and torture of innocents just so Sylvanas can shine in a good light later on?
It seems very likely, because not only did the devs condense the entire revenge plotline into 8.1, they also stated that the faction war and events related to it were concluded/wrapped up in BfA, which kind of confirms the statement they have made about 8.1. Again, since they plan the stories far in advance, they already know that Burning Teldrassil will end up being a good thing and Sylvanas will be a (anti-) hero for doing it - so they don’t treat it like an unforgivable atrocity anymore and try to make people forget about it so that it seems less confusing when Sylvanas turns out as a hero even after commiting that crime. Because of that, there is also no room for Night Elf revenge or conclusions in Shadowlands, that’s why they quickly dismissed Night Elf fans by saying that Tyrande got her revenge for her people.

5 - Surprise Effect - Short one: They are currently making it seem like Sylvanas is definitely evil and we will kill her, just so they can say that nobody expected the genius writing of a Sylvanas redemption and we got all baited into thinking that she is actually evil.

6 - The forsaken are leaderless - The forsaken currently don’t have a leader and it seems likely that Sylvanas and/or Nathanos will return as forsaken leaders after they have been redeemed. Also they didn’t change the forsaken dialogues saying “Victory for Sylvanas” and things like that. It makes sense to keep them if Sylvanas returns to the Horde.

7 - “Sylvanas’ destiny is to be found out and discussed by the player base, but it would be dismissive to think she’ll just go down as another raid boss, because she’s a little bit more than that.”

8 - Horde’s and Sylvanas’ crimes whitewashed - Currently on Alpha, all Teldrassil references have been removed and the Horde and Sylvanas described as noble heroes and protectors of the living - even after they commited Teldrassil. Also Tyrande is portrayed as WRONG for not trusting the Horde, looks like she’ll be killed off.

That’s it for now, I will probably add more later when more things come to my mind, feel free to let me know if you have any more points that could be brought up in regards to this.
There seem to be a lot of ways how exactly this redemption can play out in Shadowlands, but something like Sylvanas destroying the maw to save others from going into it seems like a very likely one.
If we will save the souls from the maw or not isn’t certain yet, even though I can very well see them not letting us free the souls because they are mostly Night Elf souls anyway and who has ever cared about these? Or they could just make the Jailer or Sylvanas consume those souls to become even more powerful, which would destroy them. That’s also a possiblity, of course.
As for a conclusion to Teldrassil, we know that Tyrande already got her revenge but she still goes to Ardenweald. With a Sylvanas redemption, this means that there is no room for more revenge (obviously, they even said that the revenge plot is over) and they won’t have Tyrande kill a redeemed Sylvanas.
A theory of mine is that Tyrande could maybe play a role in freeing the Night Elf souls from the maw, but that seems rather unlikely and absurd and I don’t expect anything of that sort to happen.

I personally will definitely not like the Sylvanas redemption itself, because I don’t like the genocide of my favorite race to be seen as a good thing and justified, but it seems like it will all be justified in the end for some greater good. Sadly this means that nobody, not a single person (character) will ever be brought to justice for the crimes they have commited in the War of Thorns and Teldrassil and that there also won’t be a conclusion in favor of the Night Elves.

Let me know what you think about it, I’ve been wanting to make this thread for quite a while now because I’ve seen a lot of people saying that Sylvanas is definitely a villain and she will definitely pay for her crimes, but for me it seems more like the opposite at this point.
This post is probably not going to end too well, but I just wanted to bring up a few of my points and tell people why I’m so worried about the Sylvanas redemption…

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death goddess

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i hope ele is right, maybe once she’s vindicated she can quit this game and save herself

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Her character has been ruined beyond repair without blatant expansion retcons, the best they can do now is mercy kill her off or make her replace the Jailer as some new evil jailer of the maw.

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When we heard about teldrassil burning, the first thing I thought to myself was “gee, the worst possible outcome would be that Sylvanas actually did it on purpose”

Then Shadowlands was speculated heavily, and weeks before Blizzcon dropped the cinematic trailer, I thought “man, I think the worst possible thing they could do is have Sylvanas solo the lich king”

Now, I think, going into shadowlands, the worst possible thing they could do is have sylvanas double cross the jailer and take his power for herself

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Okay, so I’m more open to the idea of a seemingly out of nowhere “Sylvanas hero switch” than most. Not judging the merits of the idea, just the plausibility, it’s plausible. More plausible than alot of people are comfortable with.

I don’t disagree with arguments 2, 3, and 5, and to keep this response amicable I’ll say a little on each of them.

The loyalist questline is something they added to the game while knowing what would happen in the Shadowlands expansion. If Blizzard intended to heel-turn Sylvanas and kill her, we’d be seeing them softening that decision. Vol’jin’s death was softened by making him largely absent so that, while we could be frustrated by the waste of potential, we only think about what could have been, and not what we lost. Garrosh’s death was softened by making him a completely reprehensible jerk to the entire Horde playerbase, by the time he was ousted we were mostly relieved to be done with him.

With Sylvanas we’re seeing the opposite of that. We’re seeing content designed to be enjoyed tied to the worldview and tactics espoused by Sylvanas. They aren’t preparing the fanbase for Sylvanas’ demise.

Setting us free can mean alot of different things. So by itself it really doesn’t establish much of an expectation. But saying something ominous like “The world is a prison, and I’ll set everyone free” to make people assume one thing, only to set up a dramatic twist, is very on brand for Blizzard.

Which leads us to 5. Yeah, if Blizzard can pull a quick switch at the last second of their expansion, and give us a boss we don’t expect they will. They showed us Grom but give us Archimonde, they showed us Sargeras but gave us Argus the Unmaker and an angry cloud of smoke, and they showed us Sylvanas but gave us N’zoth.

We’re almost at the point where the most surprising thing would be Sylvanas killing the jailer, taking his place, and being the final boss, just because it’s what everyone expects. But I don’t think we’re at the point where expectations are subverted by being met yet.

As for argument 1. I don’t think their promise that BfA would present a morally grey situation where both sides felt justified in acting has anything to do with their future plans for Shadowlands. No, this was just a bad case of a failure to implement some parts of the story they thought would be present. An easy bit of evidence for this is the perplexing statement by Rexxar that Jaina must be stopped.

Well, Jaina was stopped, whether it was because the developers ran out of time, decided to take Horde questing in Zandalar in a different direction, or just plain forgot about the war while making loa and blood trolls, I do not know. But whatever Jaina was supposed to do to make her the gravest threat facing the Horde, she was stopped, before she even began.

For argument 4, Teldrassil was treated like an atrocity. Mostly that point of view was given voice by mopey-boy Saurfang, but it was there. Theramore’s destruction had the benefit of a novelization and the development of a popular character for three expansions. So far Teldrassil has not had as many opportunities to affect the story, but within the expansion of BfA Teldrassil’s destruction has already had an effect as great as Theramore’s destruction did in the Mists expansion.

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I think you forgot about Anduin I think he will actually prevent anyone from killing her. So he can bring her in for tea party trial just so he can be morally superior to everyone.

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I fail to see how anything can redeem Sylvanas’ actions. She frees the souls? They wouldn’t have been dead in the first place if it wasn’t for her. Killing is not something you can easily take back once it’s done, not even in the Warcraft universe. You can argue till the cows come home about the Horde’s culpability but Sylvanas is undeniably a genocidal monster. She will never be redeemed to me.

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Not to you or me, but it has to be just enough to please the Sylvanas fans or in other words: Their targeted audience.

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OP, you are really obsessed with this. Your going to look kind of silly if they don’t end up redeeming her.

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I’d rather look silly than actually getting a Sylvanas redemption

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Well honestly it isn’t going to make a difference one way or the other. I don’t even think any Blizzard employees even bother looking at these forums. They will do whatever they want to. Trust me, as someone who hated the BfA war campaign plot with every fiber of my being, we have perfect evidence of that. Our rage means nothing.

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Sylvanas becomes a Xel’naga and defeats Void Amon

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My only hope is that the Blizzard writers continue to maim and kill off characters in order to drum up the drama they think they need to have us gripping the edge of our seats.

Remember, they praised the latter seasons of Game of Thrones. They’ve got a big roster of characters and they can go through and knock them down one by one in dramatic ways to cause emotions in the fanbase.

The only playable race immune to this will be the humans under Anduin. Anduin can do no wrong, so he can’t cause drama.

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Development changes. When the devs said Sylvy’s actions would be morally grey, they also said that the start of the war would be ambiguous (it wasn’t), that both sides would be acting morally grey (neither did), and that we’d love island expeditions and warfronts.

Devs have long over-promised and under delivered. Faralon’s not coming. Don’t take a clearly changed development plan as proof of your conspiracy theory.

Actually, we have sided with the villain many times. In Vanilla, Alliance players actually worked for the Scarlet Crusade in a couple quests before a later quest tells them the Crusade’s not so good. As much as you say we didn’t get to side with N’zoth, there does exist a whole series of quests where we’re working for him directly in this expansion. Our characters have sided with and given aide to evil before. Look at the mantid, who told us straight up that they were sided with the old gods. We can hit exalted with them.

Garrosh did not die in the expansion he opened up; that was Mist. He did not open up WoD, which was always supposed to be about the… Ahem… old Warlords who were from Draenor. That’s where he died.

We were told Sylvy wouldn’t be Garrosh 2.0, but we were never told that meant a heroic turn. We were told she would look at what Garrosh did and know she could “do better”. She has slaughtered more, she took out two major cities (sure, one was her own), and she didn’t even lose the Horde; she ran away from it.

She is indisputably not Garrosh 2.0.

You’re clearly selecting this quote right out of context. “This world is a prison, and I will set us all free”. Yeah, she wants to set us all free. Of the prison. That is our world. Meaning she wants to break the world.

Nothing about that even remotely implies that she’s trying to do a good or nice thing.

Tyrande treats it like one. Anduin treats it like one. Genn treats it like one. Baine treats it like one. Saurfang treats it like one.

Just because they stop mentioning it every ten seconds while going after Sylvannas doesn’t change the fact they all treated it like a horrible thing.

This holds as much weight as saying “they only treat Sargeras as evil so that when they reveal he’s actually good, we were all baited”. It’s not proof. It’s nothing at all. It’s a non-point, a troll argument.

Your whole theory hinges on nothing, is composed of nothing and it is all nothing. I could just as easily use that nothingness of an argument, point to Sylvy calling the entire Horde and Alliance army nothing, and say you must be a Sylvannas loyalist, whose overblown and exaggerated anger over the treatment of night elves is all a facade to make night elf fans look bad, all to make Sylvy loyalists look better by comparison.

Your Banshee Queen’s a villain. Sorry.

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Regardless of your other points, I’ve actually never seen or heard anyone think that I like Sylvanas, especially after my efforts and posts trying to get some conclusion for the Night Elves while advocating Sylvanas’ death.
You’re the first to ever think that I’m a Sylvanas loyalist, and how am I making Night Elf fans look bad when I merely make a post here and there asking for Teldrassil not to be completely ignored?

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I genuinely don’t want a Sylvanas redemption. I understand why Illidan had a “redemption” (mostly because the history of the character deserved more than a raid), and I kind of get the thing with Garrosh.

Sylvanas, though, is a case of them crossing that whole moral event horizon. The reason I don’t think that she’ll get one is honestly, because she openly betrayed the Horde. It’s not a particularly well-kept secret that the Alliance tends to suffer the brunt of catastrophes; usually with a troubling degree of impunity.

But in this case, Sylvanas is causing destruction to afflict both the Alliance and the Horde.

Teldrassil was her. But so was Undercity. She tried to have Thrall killed. And then, in Orgrimmar, she told the orcs, the trolls, the Tauren that she didn’t care about them. She mocked the entire premise that the Horde was founded on.

If you’re asking do I think this makes it less likely that she’s going to be redeemed, then yes. I am saying because she also did stuff to the Horde. People do stuff to the world, or the Alliance all the time. That’s just, “eh, you know, he was having a bad day”.

Anyway, to answer your points.

  1. Morally Grey. I just think that’s something where Blizzard kind of dropped the ball. Aside from one or two brilliant bits of dialogue, at no point did I feel like I was doing anything grey during the War Campaign. The Alliance was defending against aggression, the Horde side was kicking puppies. It may have seemed grey to the writers, as they had the benefit of knowing both sides of the story, but to most players, that’s not going to be something they encounter.

  2. Loyalist Questline. If memory serves, this was something that they made. This wasn’t a plan, this was a response to an outcry on the Horde side. I think - this is purely conjecture, mind you - that they had genuinely intended for Horde players to openly rally behind Saurfang, and feel good about doing this. Keeping their honor, overthrowing an evil regime…kinda like the whole Durnholde thing, right? I don’t think they anticipated people having such a strong reaction to Saurfang, especially given how this was in keeping with his character.

  3. Setting us free. You know, I think Sylvanas is genuinely under the impression that everyone is going to go to the same place she went to when she died. Which wasn’t true until she came up with this plan that totally wasn’t pulled out of nowhere. In short, she’s not setting us free from anything.

  4. Teldrassil is not treated like an atrocity. I don’t necessarily agree. Even when Wrathion first comes to Stormwind Keep, Anduin is already annoyed that no one has found Sylvanas. Tyrande is still looking for her. Genn. The Horde, I believe, is still looking for her.

I think it’s less that they’re not treating it as an atrocity and more that they’re treating it as an atrocity that she - and only she - had a hand in. Which, I mean, I get why they do that from a developer standpoint, but…it ends up just feeling weird.

  1. Surprise effect. While Blizzard has exercised…odd judgment in the past, in terms of “what a twist!”, I don’t really think this is going to happen. There are pretty clear lines that she crossed. Garrosh didn’t even cross some of these lines. Garrosh wasn’t butchering people arbitrarily and en masse. He was at least trying to make the Horde better, before Old God stuff. Sylvanas went full cartoon-style super-villain a while ago. This is apocryphal, but I remember someone saying something about the developers wanting to make her a full-on villain for a while, now.

Having said that, yes, I am still anxious about them “redeeming her”. It’s the kind of thing I can see them doing, and thinking it’s cool, or hip, or anything other than frustrating for most of the player base. I’m afraid that they’re essentially going to set her up as someone who “gets away with everything”. Taking the place of the Jailer. Escaping any kind of responsibility, because she was somehow 20 steps ahead of everyone this whole time. The kind of thing that’s grossly insulting to the player base.

I absolutely want her dead. I don’t want some kind of nebulous thing where she might be set up to somehow come back later–no. I’m done with her. She’s a guest who’s long overstayed her welcome.

And for God’s sakes, don’t do the same thing done with Garrosh, where the players have to watch as someone kills them in some quest chain where we’re supposed to do it. Have it the culmination of this whole thing, then not only do we not get to kill them, but we have to be saved, then sit through a cut-scene that proves we were completely unnecessary.

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See, when you intentionally take things and remove the context for them (like you just did to my post), you can easily misrepresent others’.

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Sorry, I didn’t understand the other part of the sentence properly then.

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i dunno, they have been trying to make her look worst and worst, they have even retconned past events to make sylvanas look bad. i find it hard to see them redeem her now

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