So many people just don’t have more than a surface level understanding of Sylvanas. They don’t know who she was before the latest cinematic and who she is now. She was literally just anger and rage before all of this. These were tools the jailer knew he could manipulate and use to his own ends. Sylvanas is such an interesting character but the problem is a lot of players don’t know or just don’t care about the things that happened to her and made her who she is. The fact that everything that made her the ranger general she was before was taken from her has huge impacts on who she became after as well as everything she did. This latest cinematic is so well done in bringing out so much about Sylvanas, the fundamental aspects of her character and how the jailer used her own broken state of her soul against her without her even knowing. These are the things all of the outraged people are not seeing or just ignoring. If you don’t know these things and don’t know who Sylvanas really is you’re only going to have that surface level understanding and come to quick conclusions on everything. I really believe they are going to present Sylvanas in a whole new light now which will reflect her WHOLE self and not the broken hate and rage filled undead banshee she has been all these years. People need to realize how big this is and how important it is for Sylvanas to now be whole again.
Weakened the Alliance, empowered the Horde. Not difficult.
It’s just a plot point.
Her becoming Arthas was her rock bottom. But in A Good War there was still hints that Sylvanas didn’t want to burn the tree to kill as many people as possible she wanted to scare the Night Elves into evacuating. There’s whole internal monologues wrestling with herself to dehumanize the night elves, which in hindsight with new context she may have been fighting the Jailer for control.
Either way, the Burning of Teldrassil was an attempt made to have a large chunk of the fanbase who play Night elves, experience the reality Sylvanas’s character faced. I think that was a deliberate choice by the writers to make Sylvanas’s anger, pain, etc relatable to her victims, because Tyrande instantly became a narrative foil and followed the same path as Sylvanas. Seeing night elves reaction and how they have called for spilled blood, are they any different than sylvanas and her fans were after Arthas? NE’s are now where the Forsaken were after WC3.
Lastly, it’s fiction. So I’m not as emotionally invested in a fictional race as I am about real world issues, there’s real genocide happening around the world night now. The victims of Teldrassil, are not real.
What gave it away 
yeah I’m not huge on a lot of BFA’s story- after reading a good war I was ‘fine’ with Saurfang- because he was horrified at the burning of teldrassil and tried to stop it.
The whole civil war again thing was very confusing because I just didn’t understand how after Teldrassil the horde didn’t immediately go “nope nope nope, you’re gone”
It was never explained very well
Ever played Total War, sometimes you raze a location you have no intention of paying the manpower cost to hold on to, so the enemy can’t use that location against you properly. It wasn’t the ideal situation, but with the strongest druid and strongest priestess of Elune still alive, holding Teldrassil would have been even less realistic than Darkshore.
Innocents die in large scale wars, if you don’t want to accept the possibility you shouldn’t be at war in the first place, and we had no option to say no to striking the first major blow. Kaldoeri also had 10 thousand years to build major settlements all over Kalimdor, not the Horde’s fault they didn’t.
Humans identify more with smaller and more personal tragedies than large scale ones.
One person dying horribly is a tragedy.
5’000 dying horribly is a statistic.
war is h3ll…and if you want to blame anyone for Teldrassil, blame Genn Graymane and his unprovoked attack in Stormheim. Horde and Alliance were at a truce to handle the legion threat. Graymane violated it with his brazen attack.
this excuse …nothing…you know, thats the point. Its only explain things, but don´t excuse things, in other words, the Alliance and “other Players” Don´t have to care about this backstory…if they judge sylvanas because of her deeds in the past.
Horde did it before by betraying the Alliance, the reason why Varian died.
That leads to 1-1. But after that Alliance and the Horde had a peace again, before BfA.
So no, your argument is not valid.
P.S. Now we know that Genn Graymane did nothing wrong, since Sylvanas was already working on Jailor at that quest line.
but did they? Why would anyone continue to fight when you have lost the objective of the campaign?
And Varian died to save the alliance leadership…
the benefit of hindsight…At the time, he violated the truce.
You know, Legion has been out for a long time and everyone knows that’s not how things went down.
Varian’s death can be attributed to 1 of 3 things:
- Shaw and his ineptitude
- Jaina and her magical(LOL) ability to forget how teleportation magic works
- Machismo
Teldrassil isn’t something that matters to me because there is no meaningful loss, except for a location. None of the NPCs lost were of any importance - it was all nameless. For me, it’s not different than the quests where we the player kill a bunch of nameless mobs. There’s no weight, nothing meaningful to cling to. Sira’s death was more impactful to me as Night Elf fan because I at least liked her prior to what happened. It doesn’t feel like an event that truly meant something.
Good. A truce with omni-Hitler isn’t worth honouring. Genn should be applauded for not walking around with scales over his eyes.
Sylvanas did Azeroth a favor by burning that giant weed. An abomination. A total monument to night elven vanity and arrogance. A blight and leech upon the land.
It was a creation that existed outside the natural order. The Earth Mother would never approve.
She was never my favourite, but I liked Sylvanas. I’m really fascinated by the Lich King and the lore surrounding him, and Sylvanas was a character who was scarred by that experience. A noble character who sacrificed for the good of her people, she was raised against her will, becoming bitter and cynical, willing to utilize nefarious means to achieve her ends. But even so, there was still a hint of the person she used to be, and you got the impression that as ugly as her methods were, she was genuinely interested in the welfare of both the Forsaken and the Sin’dorei.
And then the War of Thorns happened. I didn’t like the idea of capturing Teldrassil, but I thought to myself, if she uses the situation to force a peace treaty with the Alliance, isn’t that an overall positive goal, even if the means of achieving that goal are damned nefarious?
“Burn it.”
Those are the words that basically killed the character. She wasn’t working in the interest of anybody at that point - not even herself (or at least not until Shadowlands brought up the whole anima situation). Instead of forcing a peace treaty with the Alliance, she decided to torch a city with its civilian population, one she could have just as easily captured to pursue her original plan, because…a dying Night Elf said that she couldn’t kill hope? And I guess she took that as a challenge?
Great. So you’ve just involved everyone who followed you in a war crime because you couldn’t resist the urge to throw a tantrum at the slightest provocation. Yes, Tyrande and Malfurion were both still alive, but that doesn’t mean the original plan couldn’t have worked. How did she plan on proceeding if her forces had failed to capture or kill them originally? Did she really think that the two of them leaving while the rest of their people were left behind wouldn’t affect the way the Night Elves viewed their leaders?
Hell, she could have sent mostly Tauren to occupy the city proper, just to show the resident Night Elves “Hey, this situation sucks, but we’re not here to sack your city.” If anybody from the Horde could have helped put the residents at ease, made the Alliance realize the Horde wasn’t in it for blood, it would be the giant cow men.
But no, I guess torching the place was too tempting.
So, to answer your question, OP: how did I reconcile Sylvanas with the Burning? The answer is: I didn’t.
I wouldn’t call myself a Sylvanas fan, but I’m at least in the “she used to be kinda cool” camp. And to me, Teldrassil was something the writers forced her to do because it served the story they wanted, not something she did that I then blame her for.
To put it another way, I see her being treated as a plot device, not as an organic character.
I just like drama queens, edge lords, and all expressive a-holes of similar ilk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Ain’t nothing about Teldrassil that interferes with that.
I also like kind, generous mentor types who want the best for everyone and everything, but you know. Gotta have that wide-ranging palette.
I don’t even consider myself a fan of Sylvanas per se, but these moments you describe basically destroyed my immersion in the story wholesale. I don’t really think there is really any reconciling of Teldrassil with anything, and I instead resented the writers for resorting to resorting to emotionally manipulative shock tactics - and then continuing to do so for all of BfA. I really was not able to (and continue to not be able to) view the actions of the characters in the story as “actions of the characters”, but rather I now see everything as “because that’s what the writers need to happen”.
So my only perspective now is that of viewing the story fully through the lens of an outsider reading what is obviously fiction. I don’t ask myself if the characters’ motivations are consistent, or wonder how X character could have done this and what they are thinking, because to me the answer is always the same - the writers needed it to happen. I feel that the emotional manipulation of the writers is fairly evident and I do get frustrated that people let themselves get so fully sucked into obvious attempts at manipulation, but I think I’m actually the odd one out for being so apathetic, so take that with a truckload of salt.
You basically said what I was saying, just in a more condensed and less rambly form. But basically, this is it. I don’t get mad at Sylvanas for doing anything - I get mad at the writers for deciding what they want to happen, and then ramming a convenient character into the role for it, whether that be Sylvanas, Tyrande, Anduin, or anyone else.
nonsensical kneejerk reaction. Since breaking truce/treaty is no big deal, Garrosh did nothing wrong when he nuked Theramore…a military target. 
ANIMA. Sylvanas would have had to kill all of the rest of the Alliance races to even come close to a quarter of the anima that the Night Elves and their wisps contained.
Oh and again, all those fallen in the fourth war, still didn’t even make a dent on the anima that Night Elves had. eons of immortality and even after that, turned into wisps to get even more anima.
But then again, Elune was going to save them all…or so they thought. Maybe Sylvanas called her out on her bluff…and the NEs paid for it, dearly.