The New leader of the Forsaken

Exclusively. Dark Rangers were legitimately scary all-female operatives of Sylvanas. Then Danuser stuck his hands (and probably other things) into the lore.

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Zen please my dead brain can only take so much

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To be fair, Dark Rangers being exclusively women was always weird. Adding men to the ranks makes sense, since the rangers they were born from weren’t exclusively women - and they added male banshee models in Legion.

Nathanos, however, remains a problem for all the reasons y’all have already written.

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Gatherin Storm sets up Calia as the new leader.

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I don’t mind honestly. She’s an asspull for certain, but who isn’t at this point? The only Forsaken characters who received significant development prior to BFA were Sylvanas and Nathanos. Lillian wasn’t even a Forsaken until recently. Zelling died. Koltira Deathweaver was very much alienated, and who else do we have of note? Belmont? He’s not really had much in the way of development at all.

Honestly of those options I like Calia. She actually cares about her people. Honestly, that’ll be a nice change for the Forsaken.

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I’d rather get Silverpine Deathguard #256 , or any of the notable Forsaken npcs that blizzard condemned to doing nothing in favor of focusing solely on Sylvanas during Cataclysm, than that yellow glowing monstrosity in a dress. The only positive I can think of is that it may be interesting to rp opposition to Cailia’s rule which is likely what most Forsaken guilds will do.

P.S. My biggest issue with Cailia is that she’s so strongly associated with the Light and the Alliance when neither of those fit the themes of the Forsaken whatsoever. Then her appearance, being another racial leader that bears not even a passing resemblance to her people

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Both have an important impact on the faction’s backstory, which of course, they felt Forsaken by.

But now they’ve been forsaken by Sylvanas herself, and the forces that once forsook them now welcome them.

Maybe the Forsaken’s themes are changing.

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I’ll post later on, marking this. The reason why is because I need sleep first to actually be a functional human being.

Love you all! Prepare for 1,000 word sandwhich.

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I have no desire for them to.
I will give a longer response this evening. I have to make motors.

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That’s just not a good move. Maybe in a setting like a book series or TV, where the device is just to tell a story. But it seems piss-poor to do so in a video game, an RPG nevertheless, where players invest pretty heavily into the themes surrounding a character.

Taking what people enjoyed for the last 15 or so years and flipping them on it’s head and just saying "deal with it :sunglasses: " is uncool.

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just me coming in again to say gentarn should write the game!!

I’m pretty meh about Calia tbh, most of my dislike sorta stem from small petty things like oh look a new Forsaken lore character that looks nothing like the player character again. Do we have to keep Derek Proudmore? Go back to the ocean you nerd!!

As said already, I’d prefer something like the desolate council. Part of this is because I feel like a lot of representation a culture gets in this game is from their faction leader only. It’d be refreshing to see different aspects of the Forsaken people???

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All of this.

All storytelling mediums have their own unique challenges and limitations. In an MMORPG, the writers should be mindful that millions of people truly do inhabit the world they’re writing about in a way that film, comic, TV, etc fans don’t.

They’ve been acting like they’re writing for Game of Thrones or the MCU instead of World of Warcraft. They’ve destroyed entire capitals and surrounding areas where players have years’ worth of happy memories, ousted racial leaders and numerous important lore characters, and turned the entire premise of the faction divide on its head.

And I feel like they’ve been doing it in part because they think they can generate their own Red Wedding or Infinity War/End Game-esque social media engagement. Throwing shockingly over-the-top events into the game just to get that shallow, fleeting, “OMG can you believe Blizz WENT THERE!?” reaction on Twitter and YouTube.

RPGs are, at their soul, about what you BUILD, not what you tear town and throw away. I wish to god I had the words to convince Blizz of that.

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Find the issue with “I don’t want to change” in being a Forsaken is that, well, your main central figure for the past many years has noped on out of there and the new leader (like any in history) is going to look to make their stamp and push reforms.

it’s just a natural and expected cycle to have go down really.

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To borrow a phrase, there’s a lot to unpack here but I’d rather we throw away the whole suitcase

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This is a really big point, and the reason why I say that Calia should be involved but not the sole leader.

Everything about Calia is the antithesis of the Forsaken. In anything other than an MMO where the Forsaken are a playable race the idea of a new direction for the Forsaken is only logical. However, people have been playing the Forsaken for years specifically because they like the darker race of corpse eating zombies. To suddenly say “now you are Alliance Adjacent and are lead by the most light based light character ever” is going to make a lot of players justifiably OOC angry.

It may make perfect sense in universe but its a very poor decision out of universe.

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Personally I would have liked to find out in the Priest Campaign that Calia was a Forsaken all along, hidden away by an Alonsus who was afraid of what Sylvanas might do were she to find out there was a Forsaken with a better claim to lead the Forsaken than her. Further it would have been great if during the campaign she expressed the desire to help her people, to serve them as her father once did.

What would have been amazing is if Calia slipped away from Alonsus and joined Lillian during the Horde War Campaign, to not only learn more about the Forsaken through Lillian but also help her assist Zelling in adjusting to his new life. What if it was Calia that convinced Baine to rescue Derek?

How great would it have been for the Horde PC to have literally any interaction with Calia before she is shoved into a position of leadership?

None of this ham fisted light zombie nonsense.

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I can agree on this point, but I don’t like that she brought the undead Proudmoore with her. All I see is the next female character that will probably have a love interest in order to have a storyline.

Cole and I talked at length last night about where the storyline is going. He and Topsail might be doing a podcast on it.

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I mentioned it above but were Calia already a Forsaken (not a light zombie) and heavily involved in the Horde Campaign specifically with Zelling and Lillian and later the one who motivates Baine to rescue Derek I feel like it would not be as jarring.

I still dont want them to become involved, because I feel like their relationship would be more interesting as a friendship. However, this is Blizzard and that was never going to happen.

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I said it above, and I’ll say it again, and I’m glad to see so many people echoing my feelings now following the unfortunate discovery that presumably we will, indeed, be receiving the first “Light-raised undead” as the new Forsaken racial leader:

This is not what I, as a Forsaken player, signed up for.

It’s not what any of us signed up for. We want our spooky undead aesthetic. We want a Dark Lady, not a Light Lady. The fact that so many Forsaken NPC voice lines have, for years, been laden with the likes of “Victory for Sylvanas”, “Dark Lady watch over you”, “Embrace the shadows,” and so forth should be indication enough that our race is and should be the “dark” option.

Whatever plans Blizzard has for Calia in the future, at the moment this story direction is simply (to me) the latest example of how woefully out of touch they appear to be with their players, and how careless they’ve become with their storytelling. It has been a gut-wrenching ordeal to lose essentially everything about the Forsaken race that we’ve loved since 2004. Goodbye Undercity, goodbye Sylvanas, goodbye Blightcaller, goodbye shadows, goodbye dignity.

We are not helpless, abandoned puppies in need of a savior. We are Forsaken. We rose from the ashes of Lordaeron and rebuilt our kingdom with our Dark Lady and our people. Calia hasn’t done a fraction of what Sylvanas has. We certainly don’t need some insipid, Light-loving, Alliance-installed absentee monarch leading us. Not now, not ever.

Do not shy from dark paths.

#NotMyQueen

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