Yasss Queen!
You tell 'em. Chew off thier heads.
Well you deleted the post… but you called them problematic so I assumed thats what you were talking about. With all the shipping between the characters. From bad guys, to students, teachers and beasts and whatever. The Harry Potter smut writers are infamous.
Night Warrior, even if it had gone well, was a weird as hell thing. Because it was essentially just giving Night Elves back the fangs Blizzard themselves had taken out, and creating brand new lore out of nothing. Sure the eclipse looked cool, but it didn’t need to be a super secret ultra special power up, it could/should have just been the Kaldorei holding nothing back.
Especially since that power up didn’t even… do anything.
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It gave Tyrande instant, unavoidsble Moonfires that vaporize your body completely. Plot armor prevents her from just using them constantly.
Which she could do already. All the Night Warrior powerup turned out to be, in addition to being a lore muckup, was a detriment. It had all the drawbacks but none of the payoff, which is weird because Blizzard has handed out non-drawback powerups like candy to other characters.
Did not like.
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Interesting and I must admit that I never did look at it from this perspective, buut we also do have to take into account that Azshara was the only ruler of the kaldorei before the Night elves split up. Prince Farondis, Tortheldrian, Ravencrest were the patriarchs and leaders of their respective houses but ultimately ruled under Azshara, it is not defined if that was how night elf society worked at the time, meaning that only a male can be the ruler of the house or if in fact there were famales that were rulers of their respective houses. It’s a flaw in the storywrithing and I cannot link it to sexism because as I said ultimately they were under Azshara.
But we have had plenty of women in power in Warcraft, Aegwynn for example was believe to be as strong or more so than Azshara, she was confident, smart and defeated the avatar of Sargeras, while she wasn’t technically a leader she was the guardian of tirisfal, in fact she has been depicted as near perfect with her only “flaw” being that she didn’t want to trust the council with picking the succession of the guardian power which she wanted to leave for her son. What I am trying to say is that it seems more that the writers hate night elves in general and not women.
Yes, I agreed on this part. To clarify why I said “it’s complicated”, is because even though we are told it’s a matriarchal society the writing so far somewhat contradicts it, again it is a failing in their storytelling.
My problem with this is (will ignore the SL lore as we are talking about perception of the character before BfA) that I’m not buying how her jumping off of ICC and seeing hell would turn her into the complete opposite of what she was. I mean with Jaina it took the destruction of Terramore and the betrayal of the BEs to turn her from a peace lover into a warmonger. For Sylvanas it didn’t really track how her wanting to “live longer” even though she did hate being an undead would result into creating even more undead and painting a bigger target on her back. It didn’t feel natural for the character and actually felt manufactured.
Hmm I have never seen anyone say that Maiev deserved to be tortured by Illidan, and if that’s the case yes I agree it is misogynistic. As for Illidan… he is suffers from inconsistent writhing, he and Kael’thas got butchered in TBC for the sake of “rule of cool”, Illidan was an anti-hero pre TBC, then straight up a villain in TBC and finally back to anti-hero in Legion with the help of retcons. I’m not sure if the Illidan toruring Maiev is still cannon in fact, far as I know they changed it to her just being a prisoner.
I feel like you are reading to much into it, people probably don’t like her because she is the foil for Illidan (who like it or not is more popular), which is normal take any movie where the lead is something like a thief and their foil is a police officer or an FBI agent, people end up hating the police officer even though he is the one that is morally right.
EDIT The more that I think of it, you are probably halfway right when it comes to Blizzards writing of women. They are either writing them with no flaws at all (or other characters completely ignoring or forgiving their flaws) or with too many flaws and jumps in morality. Again taking Maiev as an example, her losing her mind because “the hunter is nothing without the hunt” was an interesting concept to explore and I wouldn’t have minded the heel turn, but straight up going homicidal maniac was a huge jump and the reasoning behind it didn’t fit for such a morality shift. I still cannot chuck this up to sexism though, more likely to me is that they can’t write women.
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I think the all the hang ups you are having is that you acknowledge that the story telling is flawed, but you have not yet asked yourself why it is flawed.
It’s not like the writers went “Oopsie, every single victimized woman is consumed by vengeance and they need to learn to let go and forgive.” Which is interesting given the accusations against them now.
It’s not like the writers went “Oopsie, every current woman in power is a villain or incompetent. Even female Gods can’t seem to do things correctly.”
It’s not like the writers went “Oopsie, we kind of contradicted our own lore by limited this race’s competent leadership to exclusively male characters.” or “Oopsie, these 10,000+ year old women leaders are defined by their romantic involvement with the far more competent male character, Like Malfurion and Jarrod.” or “Oopsie, these 10,000+ year old women leaders learn a much needed life lesson from the younger than 40 year old human men, like Varian and Keeshan.”
It’s not like they went “Oopsie, this is a trend that keeps happening across several writers and several years. Oopsie doopsie, we made a screw-wooey, a dang ol Fudgy-wucky, a wittle Fudgo Boingo!”
That doesn’t happen.
You are not looking hard enough.
Why do you think that is?
Why is the friendzoned, edgy inel, egotistic, fedora wearing war criminal more popular than the plate-wearing Bad-a muscle queen with RBF. Who is complex, nuanced, determined, disciplined and has the moral highground?
What possible reason could there before for that?
Because Blizzard have never been very good at writing after the RTS games were over. The only reason WotLK was well written, and lets be honest here it two had big flaws, was because they squizzed every last drop of nostalgia out of TFT and it ending on cliffhanger with it’s villain winning in the end.
But you are ignoring that we have had morally good women in power in the lore. We have countless women that have not been victimized. I already gave the example of Aegwynn, others would be Alexstrazsa, Ysera, Liadrin (granted she did have a part of the story where she got tortured by trolls but that’s not her sole motivation nor is her driving force). And speaking about the dragon aspects, Alex and Ysera have been the prominent dragon aspects in WoW and have remained pure hearthed, while the males have been severally flawed, Nozdormu- pretty much does nothing, Malygos-Wend insane tried to destroy the world, Neltharion- Started calling himself Deathwing, went insane and tried to destroy the world.
Again I am really not seeing a discrimination against women or the lack of women in power here, what I am seeing is a discrimination against Night elves.
Looks cool, has edgy one-liners, is voiced by one of the best voice actors, has a decent character arc (excluding TBC), there is something compelling about the “I will work from the shadows to protect my people” aspect, I mean there are countless answers for why people like something. To bring us back on point why do people like Sylvanas? Why do people like Sasuke from Naruto?
Oh and there is an explanation for why Illidan and not Maiev. Illidan was introduced as a playable character in WC3:RoC, however Maiev was introduced later in TFT. It’s natural for people to perceive her as the foil to Illidan as opposed to Illidan as the foil to Maiev because Illidan came first and people bonded with him first. If the story started with Maiev chasing down Illidan and then learned his backstory I would think that Maiev would have been the more popular character.
Also Maiev is not that complex or nuanced, she is pretty straight forward and hardly ever gets past “I will do my job no matter the cost”. It was only in Legion when she showed some nuance to her character when she stopped seeing Illidan as the enemy or a tool for the job. She doesn’t even have the moral highground even, she has the highground from her perspective, she was chasing Illidan because she perceived him as a threat to the Kaldorei while he was using dark powers/tools/forces to stop the Legion.
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I personally ship illidan with matron mother malevolence
I gotta say I really hate these subtextual readings of characters. Like yeah, characters and their designs and where the come from and all that jazz. But a lot of what a character means, means different things to different people.
Some people see Illidan as an incel because that’s the buzzword topic of this time. Except that Illidan bears no ill will toward women in general, he just has a very specific unrequited love with Tyrande. Unrequited love, you know, a storytelling trope that is incredibly old by this point.
Illidan was multifaceted. He wasn’t a bad guy but he wasn’t a good guy either. He wanted power, he wanted to have his own kingdom, but he also wanted to do right. He was cast out by society and was the loner archetype. Just because you don’t see any value in the loner archetype, doesn’t mean there isn’t value in that for someone else.
And by the way, I liked both Illidan AND Maeiv. Illidan was a cool half demon and Maeiv was a cool elf judge dredd.
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He is not an incel though, yeah his main interest Tyrande rejected him but he did have that harem in BT.
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Yes, I know. In the sentence immediately following that I laid out that he doesn’t bear one of the defining traits of the incel subculture.
Also there’s not any indication that the harem was for him. I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t for him at all, and was probably for his Succubi and Shivarri. He still kept a memento of Tyrande with him, and his last word was Tyrande.
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I know you agree but here is the proof he is not an incel. The harem was in his house, so to speak, and Succibi and Shivarri are… well sex demons. Couple that with him being their master… he was getting offers. Regardless if he partook in said acts or not he is not an involuntary celibate, the argument is if he was a voluntary celibate or was he even a celibate at all.
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I think he was volcel. He only had eyes for Tyrande.
Well doesn’t matter now, Illidan has a fruit shop there now instead of a harem. 
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Still has an army of scimpy looking demon huntresses calling him master though. I have watched too much anime to know where this is going.
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But there is a reason for that, that is what you are not getting.
Who is nowhere in-game, and is honestly that that important to the overall lore. There is no need to know of he and you don’t miss out on anything by not knowing about her, nor is her story all that accessible to people new to the franchise.
Literally all of them have been victimized. But it’s not the victimization that is the problem, it is their reaction to it. If it is not one trope it is another. Either total consumption of vengeance and the villainization of the character, or completely gentle and forgiving matron of peace and purity.
Female characters, in Warcraft, are not people. They are caricatures. Ideal images for male characters.
But that isn’t a trend that extends to ALL men in Warcraft. Whereas there IS a trend when it comes to all women in Warcraft. Especially women dealing with trauma.
Maiev also has all of these.
Illidan had, I think only one mission in RoC. Between RoC and TFT, you get 2-3 missions with Illidan? Whereas you get an entire campaign for Maiev.
We didn’t even KNOW his backstory during the RTS games. We knew he was imprisoned but we had no idea why. Illidan in the RTS was like Boba Fett, there was nothing to bond with… He just looked cool.
Whereas Maiev has her warriors slaughtered, had her Lieutenant (and lover in my headcanon) murdered by Illidan. And when Illidan was finally within her grasp, her victory was stolen from her.
Maiev is infinitely more complex of a character, equally well designed, and far more sympathetic.
He uses the term “woman” in a derogatory way towards Maiev several times.
It’s not love, it’s infatuation. He views her as an object, a trophy to be won. He does not care about Tyrande as much as he believe he is more deserving of her love than his brother is.
Ironically, that is exactly WHY she doesn’t love him, and exactly why he doesn’t deserve love.
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I really don’t have any idea of what you’re referring to, I’m sure you have a litany of very hyper specific instances so dredge them up.
That’s your subtextual reading into this because of your viewpoint. Counterpoint: There’s a reason why he left her and his brother alone after it was time for him to go to Outland. I’m pretty sure he told Malfurion to take care of Tyrande. He loved Tyrande, but she didn’t love him. Simple as. He couldn’t let go of that, but he did love her enough to know that she would be happier with his brother, and let them be.
You’re actually a disgusting person if you think people who have gone astray don’t deserve love. That only drives them further away.
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If the only sex you get is the kind you pay for, that still counts as Incel.
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Don’t talk to her like that.
You have been nothing but disgusting yourself, everytime you post. You just love to spew garbage.
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