Sylvanas Sabotage

My dad is a Freemason. It’s… er, interesting.

I’m the second person in my patrilineal family to reject membership since the Latin American lodges were founded.

But I was briefly part of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (or well, its US heir claimant) which is functionally just Rosicrucian Freemasons But With Women Allowed

3 Likes

Bestie, what did you do?!?

That is purely the retcon from Chronicles. Until that book came out, Sylvanas never had any plan to invade Gilneas and only took over after Garrosh had already started the attack.

Also, Gilneas wouldn’t be very useful from the point of view of raising new Forsaken because anyone with the worgen curse is immune.

Er, you don’t seriously think that just started 15 years ago, do you?

Did you believe it was possible to come away from the burning of Teldrassil without the Alliance having the high ground?

I disagree—or at least, I disagree that it could work in the context of the game WoW promised us. Again, I was sold on a world where both sides had flaws and yet were heroic. A world where each side would be doing our best to live up to our respective ideals, even though we knew we’d sometimes fail. Where there were two sides to the story and each side could feel equal amounts of justification when looking at it from their own viewpoint.

Following an unhinged leader into morally wrong actions doesn’t give me that. Having one side be clearly innocent and the other clearly in the wrong doesn’t give me that.

That might work in a single-player game where there is not another playable faction experiencing the so-called genocide. But in an MMO, it causes problems within the playerbase.

No, I disagree. Asking our characters to be complicit in the act was a problem with the narrative.

First off, remember what I said above about the inconsistency of Sylvanas’ writing and how it led different people to see different things in her character. She had quite a lot of fans pre-BfA who didn’t see her as pure evil. I myself saw her as a character with the potential to go different directions.

I believe that had they chosen to do so, they could have shown how being thrust into a position of authority led to positive changes in her character, in which she gradually stopped viewing the Horde as allies of convenience and came to see them all as her people. I never expected her to be warm and fuzzy, but she could have been ruthless and smart and unwilling to risk her precious resources without a good reason.

I’m pretty sure that means “Pull out all the stops! Make it the biggest climax ever, and make sure it ends on a relatively neat wrap-up point! Don’t think about saving stuff for later, because there might not be a later!”

5 Likes

Mmo champ is better imo than whatever the hell is going on here. Games kinda dead so sadly both forums are a bit slow but atleast there you get more actual lore discussion and less fried posters who make Bloomsday look like an intellectual.

1 Like

Honestly? Yeah. If they’d played up Anduin being a good boy too trusting of those around him and not wanting to be mean to them like Saurfang believed because of his handling of Genn after his attack on the Warchief of the Horde during a Legion invasion and didn’t make the burning a full on innocent murderfest outright acknowledged in canon as a genocide it could have worked.

If they’d have treated Teldrassil like Taurajo ( I know, I know) and Theramore then we would have had players arguing about whether or not it was a valid military target, if it was or was not a genocide, all of the various justifications and condemnations we had going on for Stormheim’s events, and if the Horde had justification to feel threatened by the Alliance instead of what we have now.

On a side note… what is it with Blizz and places starting with a T being destroyed?

Local queer uncomfortable with using any one fictional group as 1:1 analogy, especially the forsaken as she would rather use the Pandaren (just want to be left alone and live their life, somehow keep getting dragged into everyone’s nonsense anyway) as the Awkward Poorly Fitting Fictional Counterpart, news at 11.

9 Likes

It wasn’t. Even as of Cataclysm that was her plan, to raise as many new Forsaken as possible. She didn’t attack that Kirin Tor town in Silverpine because Garrosh told her to. She did that because she wanted more corpses. More Forsaken to project her influence.

She didn’t know about the Worgen infestation beforehand. She came into this with, “hey the wall is down and the reefs that closed off Gilneas are down, let’s invade”. Literally as soon as the Cataclysm started causing earth quakes all over the place and it broke the wall and the Gilnean coast, Forsaken ships arrived. Almost like they were waiting for something to happen, maybe some sort of naval support. Like an invasion was going to take place soon. You don’t just levy a fleet and move it into position that fast.

Maybe I’m forgetting something. But I don’t think so. I played both sides of this story. You make first contact with the Forsaken as a Worgen player and later on find out the Horde are working with them. You don’t fight Orcs until the end basically. As Forsaken you get shipped off to the front lines of a war already in progress. Sylvanas is moving huge caravans of soldiers into Silverpine for a purpose. When you get there, the Orcs are all drunk and useless and the war is already over. Sylvanas is cutting her losses and just deciding to salt the earth.

Sylvanas had her own plans. It’s easy to pin all of it to Garrosh, but he was not the sole instigator. Even if Garrosh told her to jump, she coulda just told him no. What was he gonna do? Invade her? Sick, just split your troops in a civil war while fighting the Alliance. That’s worked out every single time the Horde has done it.

Sylvanas did not get roped into a war she didn’t want to fight, she’s not a smol bean who would never do any wrong. She was killing people, twisting their souls back into their corpses just like the Lich King and then forcing the decision on whether or not to end their lives again on them, putting the responsibility onto the victims. And then branding anyone who didn’t tow her line as a traitor if they took issue with her power structure. The only ones who were permitted to ‘live’ were those who ran off into the wilds to fend for themselves, which is easy for Sylvanas to let them do because she knows that they’ll probably just be killed.

2 Likes

Good thing nobody did that and I was pointing out that Forsaken themes serve as a general allegory for people who exist on the periphery of society and are considered monstrous abominations which is literally a thing that has existed in media analysis of Victorian Gothic and Southern Gothic literature since the genres came to be.

Getting gamers to think about media is like pulling teeth

Ergo why the Magic Circle (see Synthetic World’s by Castronova) of the game for those and other players was broken.

You cannot break the foundational fantasy for the whole game.

You cannot choose to make the whole Horde unilaterally evil 16 years into a game.

6 Likes

“But Baal, you don’t understand The Horde was always evil you were just too dumb to notice all these years.”

I beat the hardcore Alliance fans by saying what they are going to say first, so now they don’t have to derail the thread.

5 Likes

Actually, because Saurfang did, twice, and he assumed that this time he would feel good about it. The whole time he was planning to attack the the Night Elves, he was both lamenting how bad the attack on Shattrath was, and getting aroused about his new good war.

4 Likes

Okay, you start in Tirisfal Graves, you move on to Brill, then stop in UC before going on to Silverpine, where you assist Sylvanas in executing Garrosh Helscream’s expansionist invasion of Gilneas, but only on the beaches of Silverpine. All of these areas are Forsaken Territories since before Vanilla. You then go to Hillsbrad, which is no longer being TAKEN, but is took. It was contested territory from vanilla to wrath, and cononically, the Horde won TM v SS. The Forsaken character is just working to hold Hilsbrad.

The entire game on both alliance and horde contains elements of the faction conflict in every zone, but it takes some pretty interesting mental gymnastics to claim that the post cata forsaken storyline is somehow more expansionist than the others. If anything THRALL’s storyline in WC3 is expansionist, and if Drek’thar has a problem with expansionism, he need only look in the mirror.

3 Likes

So he followed the spirits… on a military conquest of the land he named Durotar, but only after that land was called Kalimdor, by the Kal’dorei. He gave military support to the Tauren to fight the centaurs, and fought the Eastern Kingdoms outposts there.

The whole point (that Saurfang realized) is that Thralls horde wasnt the horde. It was a brief point in history that was barely a footnote. And it was really only Thrall, not his horde. Even his soldiers still shouted warcries of “slay them all!” And “victory or death!”. Even under Vol’jin, the horde invaded an alternate demension, and established a military base there.

1 Like

everyone was making these insane theories about how the old gods, the light, the tree was corrupted, alliance attacked first ect ect because of that one statement and then when it came to it we all just watched her burn the tree down just because lmao. funniest moment in wow history to be honest.

I think we’re a little bit past that point no? The game is bordering on SCI-FI Instead of Fantasy. I straight up feel like I’m in eva or something with how the entirety of azeroth will be at risk if a cosmic force reaches the titan our world is housing lel.

7 Likes

Just a foot note here. The early Thrall had no qualms about killing alliance, he didn’t seem as far removed from the horde at large as he later became. To me he seemed simply a lot more selective about when it was worth engaging with ‘the enemy’ than say someone like Grom.

5 Likes

Which they did, in part, to appease the players. It really speaks to the concept of “You think you do, but you don’t”

The MMORPG needs developers who understand that the community is usually wrong.

3 Likes

That is incredibly offensive to the Worgen peoples.
They are natural. Organic and overall pretty swell despite not having any tails.

Who asked for a Night Elf genocide?

8 Likes

Horde players! If cataclysm and Garrosh did nothing wrong community response is any indication!

As bad as this still is it would have been better. We’ve had characters on the alliance that have wanted revenge on the forsaken for the entire course of the game at this point. It would’ve made some sense (granted Anduin would have to be limited somehow since his whole character revolves around being a borderline gary stu). I would’ve preferred that over feeling like my race was just the residential punching bag blizzard decided to use because it was in the same zip code as some horde territories.

Garrosh did nothing wrong was originally a joke that gained traction because ironically, Thrall is the guy at fault for putting a military leader in charge instead of someone that knows diplomacy.

4 Likes