Anduin does, Turalyon and Genn are still skeptical but they also know via Anduin. The air on this was cleared at The Gathering in Before the Storm.
Anduin’s lie detector Light powers told him Sylvanas wasn’t lying about Sylvanas not wanting to betray Varian and feeling bad she had to leave the Alliance to thier fate.
See this is … ugh… where we can talk about inconsistencies again. Anduin’s Light powers also told him Sylvanas cares for her people and sees them as her children… and BFA she says she never cared about the Forsaken at all except pity them so who do we believe? Anduin’s Light powers or Sylvanas?
Would the Light really lie to whitewash Sylvanas? That makes no sense, the Light is objectively good, it doesn’t manipulate like that, it must be true. Sylvanas must have been lying in the Loyalist ending.
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Oh, so that’s why his interest started slipping after Cataclysm.
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Not really. What happened only makes sense if you assume we got a rewrite from a different plot.
Sending souls to the Maw is not logical for what happened in game and lore.
Two airships with blight is the sending souls to the Maw plan; surprise blight SW and Teldrassil, and the war is over, no risk.
Again: The entire claim of a Faction Conflict in BFA was a lie in the end; first an Old God, and now Zovaal.
Except Anduin literally counters that in the intro in the Maw. /shrug
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Sylvanas lies to herself several times in Before the Storm in both her own thoughts and through narration text.
I’m at the point that we can barely consider BtS canon at all because it’s obvious it was written before/during a story pivot and it’s been contradicted several times in newer lore.
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Her lying to herself and others doesn’t make the whole story wrong or a retcon. It just means that Sylvanas herself is an unreliable narrator in that book, she’s not always though ypu just have to sort the fact from the lie. In any fiction you have to stick to the pov of the most reliable narrator and sometimes it’s the reader, this is where critical thinking comes into play.
You can’t just read the words of a book you have to understand what’s written between the lines.
The reader/viewer has was more information than some of the character narrators. For example in the Alliance Broken Shore cinematic when Genn tells Varian Sylvanas betrayed them. He’s assuming that she intentionall let them all die, you see her turning her back, it looks intentional from his PoV. But when you see hers, she runs in panic to save Vol’jin after he’s stabbed. We the audience know Genn’s perception of events is not accurate. Sylvanas did not turn her back on the Alliance.
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We can rewrite the BFA we wished we’d got until we’re blue* in the face, but the crux of the matter is that we got what we got.
*if you get blue from typing, consult a cardiologist. Or possibly a therapist, if it’s a metaphorical blue.
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Does it count if we paint our faces blue? 
I’m not sure I’d consider “is acting on a completely different series of events in a canon that was changed” an unreliable narrator.
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Unreliable Narration would mean that she believes it, at the very least. The point people make about the book being retconned is that the things she thinks to herself are things she cannot believe herself based on what happens in the later narrative.
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She does though, she’s downplaying her own feelings. She does this a lot when her motives require it. She’s always struggled with feeling emotions she doesn’t want to feel because they would jeoprodize her mission or her goals.
Her emotions stopped her from killing her sisters, even though she wanted to kill her sisters.
A lot narrative disagreements stem from the fact that blizz often says one thing in a novel or tweet and than does the complete opposite in game
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The game has limited storytelling ability, outside source material are not as limited. OSM are the ultimate source of story not in game.
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Its your fault Deathlord, didn’t you explained to you fellow death knights what happened?
Jokes aside even if its not explicitly stated there was a lot of interaction between fractions for Alliance to be ignorant.
The problem with the Sylvanas unreliable narrator excuse is that its a skewed point of view of a certain events. A good example is the Broken Shore “Betrayal”.
What happened in BtS is that Sylvanas is saying things that are clearly wrong… like she doesn’t mention the jailer, her plans, her real goals.
Its like they don’t exist while BtS was written… and when the new expansions are launched and the new story is presented we have to actually entertain the thought that Sylvanas was working with the Jailer since Wrath of the Lichking.
How many books has there been since Wrath? How many comic books, novellas and etc? Not a word about the Jailer… or Sylvanas’ internal struggle to go along with his plans or do something different.
In a book where we see Sylvanas think outloud to the reader there is no excuse to have her lie to the reader. If the Author needs character to lie to the audience and herself then they would do it much differently.
A great example is Harrow the Ninth.
The new Sylvanas book is being written because for years no one has had a consistent view on this character. Golden has been given the impossible task of making sense out of something that unfortunately has had very sense for a very long time.
The people defending these excuses are either coping or have very little experience with story writing.
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BFA, and specifically Sylvanas role in the narrative was admittedly retconned after Before the Storm. So, basically that means that at the very least, her rise to warchief in Legion, her characterization in Three Sisters, both the Battle for Lordaeron cinematic and the Mok’Gora (and therefore the War of Thorns that led to it) were all created prior to a major shift in the narrative. Specifically, the devs said they werent sure where they were going to go with Sylvanas, when Golden wrote Sylvanas as lamenting that she was made warchief and how her plans (as influenced by the Azerite) would be easier if she was not, even though they later decided ( at least after BtS) that her rise to warchief would be all part of Sylvanas’ plan.
What this means is, a great deal of BFAs story is part of a coherent narrative. That narrative was sabotaged to fit in a Sylvanas/Jailer deal and pretend it goes back to EoN, when in reality, most of BFA was complete before this relationship was fabricated.
Anduin. Sylvanas’ default is to deny she is sentimental, lash out, then cradle the shattered pieces of her sentiment and call upon a choir of banshees to sing Lament of the Highborn.
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Exactly!
That was my point to prove Sylvanas also cares about her people. That’s what the Light believes is true, and the Light doesn’t lie.
Anduin’s pov is correct.
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Can someone remind me what was happening in the live game at the time Afrasiabi was reportedly removed from the WoW team? Were we still on patch 8.0, or had 8.1 dropped yet?
What happened was not a retcon.
We know how the books are written now.
The author is given a list of instructions and they do the job. Sometimes the author is given some explicit orders as Roux explained. Like she can’t just write Thrall dies for example.
The new exploring for Kalimdor proved that as well… there is no consistent vision or authority on the characters or the world.
These authors just write whatever they want and hope the community doesn’t complain too much. And if anyone does they just pretend certain fans will never be happy and are just nitpicking.
It is obvious that Golden had been given no instructions for Sylvanas, her goals, her actual psyche… so she worked with what she had and thats what BtS is.
To say what Golden had written was the master plan was all along and there was a last minute retcon and we stumbled helplessly into BFA and Shadowlands is in my opinion very misleading.
Afrisiabi was the creative lead until after shadowlands officially if I remember my timeline but… speciously he kind of became absent right around Tides of Vengeance. No one knew what was going on until this summer where everything became public.
Who knows when he actually lost control but we didn’t see much of him midway through BFA.
June-August 2020
After BFA before Shadowlands.
That’s when rumors started that he quietly left the company. He removed Blizzard from his linkedin profile. One year into Shadowlands pre-production.
I knew something fishy was up.
Realistically 9.2 may be the first thing that didn’t have his influence.
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