Once again I curse that short story and the author because dude isn’t an archer and doesn’t understand how arrows work for archers.
I curse the Lord of the Rings movies and the early 21st century Roman/Greek antiquity movies for creating what I call Legolas Brain in cinematic design where arrows are magically infinite and are like bullets
And creatives otherwise internalizing this representation as fact
Actually, Sylvanas says in an earlier flashback,
“They are arrows in the quiver,” Sylvanas said. “They must be spent if we are to win this.”
Which completes the metaphor. It both acknowledges the tendency to protect troops, wishing to lose none, and the need to sacrifice them in order for them to be functional.
She succeded in taking Gilneas, by using blight. Didnt you do the Worgen starting area? You have to evacuate and live in a tree.
Well, the hornets nest is already kicked. And the Forsaken are horde troops. Sylvanas would lose more forsaken leaving the horde than she would taking Gilneas.
If she took it, where are the Forsaken inhabiting it? The entire point was that she didn’t take it. She had to settle for breaking even, retreating and trying to convince the Worgen to stop their incursion into Silverpine. That’s why she kidnaps Lorna.
The hornet’s nest that she kicked on her expansionistic endeavor to create Forsaken so she wouldn’t die.
She wouldn’t have to leave the Horde anyway. She can just be like “nah i’m not gonna invade lol” if she really wanted to. But this was never about trying to minimize Forsaken deaths.
I agree but they didn’t do that yet.
Golden did in Before The Storm
There are a lot of things Golden wrote in that book that I think we all agree had very little bearing on the game itself.
I honestly don’t think these books play any role than to make a quick buck for Blizzard.
While Silverpine is a bit separate from Gilneas- Sylvanas makes it clear that using blight “as planned” was always her intention. Gilneas was going to go down as she planned and the fact that there is no known occupation force doesn’t detract from the fact that the Gilneans were driven out, any more than there being no new alliance troops in Hillsbrad or Arathi or Darkshore detracts from those victories.
My personal opinion is that the transnarrative should hold more weight than the game influenced narrative. It definitely DOESN’T. But it should. Why wouldnt you tell the official story in a medium not affected by game mechanics and systems and wave away any inconsistencies as victims of fun?
Ive been saying this for years.
The problem is the in game writers don’t read the books. Hell, even the people that write the books don’t read them if we are to believe Copeland’s wife.
So, I spent a few hours playing through the first half of the Worgen zone and I also made the additional effort of making a new Forsaken character in Tirisfal to piece events together.
As a Worgen, the very first time you see any invasion force, it’s Forsaken. Immediately after awakening in Duskhaven after being a Worgen for some 2 decades almost, you’re sent to go find out what happened to a watchman, and you find he’s been assassinated. Immediately a Forsaken Assassin accosts you. You report back with this information, and by the time you do, Forsaken are already invading Duskhaven. At this point, there is no indication whatsoever that the Forsaken are working with the Horde. It’s also worth noting that nobody knows what the Forsaken are, and are surprised that they’re being invaded. So if the Horde did invade before this point, the Gilneans didn’t know about it.
After the earthquakes from the Cataclysm start swallowing up the coast, you leave to Greymane manor and speak to Genn. He has you look through a telescope and you see a small fleet of Forsaken ships accompanied by a Horde airship. This is the first indication that the Horde is working with the Forsaken. You still don’t see any Orcs yet. I didn’t play any further than that, stopping just when Ogres ambush your caravan.
I then started a Forsaken and the first indication you get that something is happening is at the Calston estate. Deathguard Simmer mentions that the Alliance looms in Gilneas. I almost thought that this was an oversight by whoever wrote the quest, but surely enough a Worgen rogue accosts you in Tirisfal and tells you that you deserve to lose Tirisfal for “what your people did to us”.
The Worgen do not meet the Alliance until later in their zone, well into the invasion of Gilneas and after meeting the Night elves that had been spying on Gilneas for a while by that point.
This puts the timescale of a newly risen Forsaken being after the invasion of Gilneas. There is nothing in the game that indicates that the Orcs spearheaded this invasion that I saw. Maybe there is some quest text in Silverpine that I wasn’t able to get to before the server reset that mentions offhandedly that the Orcs started the invasion.
So unless there’s something in the Shattering, or some other book or short story that I haven’t read, it remains that the Forsaken spearheaded the invasion and were accompanied by forces sent over by Garrosh later.
Then we don’t actually disagree. Chronicles said she was making invasion plans in that era, and I consider it a retcon.
“Edge of Night” is my evidence that she didn’t have time to plan. It shows her going directly from the revelation at Icecrown to joining Garrosh’s invasion of Gilneas already in motion, therefore not providing any downtime for her to think about invading Gilneas herself before Garrosh did it for her.
Note that “an invasion in motion” is not the same as “an invasion in progress.” It means that Garrosh had moved his forces into position and was preparing to strike. It does not mean that combat had actually started.
From “Edge of Night.”
The order in which the worgen player encounters various Horde groups is not necessarily the order in which they arrived or had the idea to attack. We know from “Edge of Night” that Garrosh wanted the Forsaken to take the brunt of the casualties in the assault, so it would make perfect sense for him to send them as the first wave.
That is not the strawman. The strawman was you claiming that anyone was ever implying Sylvanas was a “smol bean” who would never be a meanie.
That just means your character has incomplete information. (I also checked out a “let’s play” video to refresh my memory.)
I’m not claiming that orcs spearheaded the invasion in the sense of being the first ones to attack. I’m claiming Garrosh was the one who ordered it and the one who sent the Forsaken as his advance troops. Which he had the authority to do as warchief, especially with Sylvanas being MIA after Icecrown.
Edge of Night, a short story shows Garrosh’s intital invasion of Gilneas. That’s the piece of the puzzle you are missing. It’s free to read on the WoW website.
At the start of the battle Sylvanas is Awol, which allows Garrosh to use the Forsaken as meat shields and a living battering ram, and it’s because she’s getting the Valkyir that will allow her to raise new Forsaken for tye starting zone experience.
The story of the Forsaken invasion of Gilneas is a bit of a cluster$#@% in my opinion. There are three stories which don’t necessarily match up. Edge of night has Sylvanas turn up just in time to stop Garrosh wasting forsaken charging the wall. Worgen questline sees Sylvanus take Gineas by sea and Gilneans leave for Kalimdor. Forsaken questline presupposes a forsaken counter offensive against worgen led by a coalition of Ivar Bloodfang and Darius Crowly. Crowley ceases hostilities upon receiving his daughter back. Sylvanas gets the back of her head blown off by Godfrey, and while at the same time the Alliqance 7th legion has shown up and taken the port. I don’t know if they are still their but there are forsaken troops and blight wagons in the area now. Gilneas just seems a bit like shroedingers cat.
State unknown.
Then I didn’t remember this part which is likely. If I read it at all and just confused it with one of the other short stories that came out around this time.
So it seems like Sylvanas didn’t even have a plan going in, but knew that she could use the Val’kyr to raise humans into new troops very early into that invasion. As I wrote in my post above, a new Forsaken player is risen probably by the time the Worgen player has already left Gilneas.
Ah, you’re right. People don’t pretend she’s a smol bean. She just does atrocities and those that want to believe that she’s ultimately good ignore them. I guess that’s a small but important distinction to make.
Okay, that makes sense. My initial assertion was incorrect because I had either not remembered or not read Edge of Night where it is mentioned that Garrosh is already preparing to invade. I was specifically remembering the gameplay side of things which I haven’t done in years and the specifics became muddled in that. My recollection was that there was at least some time between her incident in Icecrown and returning to Tirisfal in which she plans to use the Val’kyr.
Regardless, as you said in the top of your previous post, Sylvanas will definitely capitalize on something like that. So she didn’t order the invasion specifically herself, but saw no reason to pull her troops back after she returns from Icecrown because she saw fit to benefit from it insofar as she could get more bodies from it, which is established as a motive for much of her behavior in Cataclysm very early on.
The new corpses, including the new forsaken character as of cata, are not invasion forces, they are new forsaken, meant to preserve Sylvanas’ bulwark against the infinite, or to sustain the Forsaken as a people, wether you take Sylvanas’s word at face value, or read deeper into her toxic codependency or not. Only the corpses raised when you first arrive in Silverpine are presented as troops for Garrosh’s forces, to the disgust and horror of the orcs present.
The Tirisfal Graves risen, are fully free willed, and are gathered from myriad places, not necessarily killed by forsaken, raised by valkyr and becoming forsaken, as some people have complained makes little sense. They are not Gilneans. There are quite a few human hold outs in the area, including the scarlets. There was a refugee camp outside the Greymane wall.
what is that? Infinite?
Thats a quote from Sylvanas in EoN. Thats what she calls them in her thoughts, as per the narrator. Its a fancy way of saying hell. The eternity of the afterlife.
This is the cartoonishness I was referencing here.