After a good morning’s rest i’ve gotten back up and decided to stow up to an hour to plug away at this topic and the idea of Calia becoming the Forsaken lead. That’s right folks, it’s time for another Mardecai essay. Wherein I rant about certain things involving the Forsaken as a race. Similarly you can also find me being a bit angered about the treatment on Tyrande and the Nelves.
Before I do this, however, I had also wanted to give a link where I talk about episodic content but I can’t find it sadly. A synopsis will have to do: Blizzard’s storytelling isn’t worth much in Battle for Azeroth because we only see the focal points. It’s like reading The Fellowship (LotR) without understanding the journey; you’re only going between The Shire, Minas Tirith, Helms Deep, Battle at the Black Gate and then Mount Doom. It doesn’t work within the medium.
But I digress - and should get back onto point. Calia herself had the ability to become a good Forsaken leader if she was properly represented and underwent development that is parallel to the Forsaken. She hasn’t, and likely won’t due to her current development, and her usurping the Forsaken leadership position will completely destroy the Forsaken in an attempt to change or “update” their racial theme due to a heavy lack of effort and finesse on Blizzard’s development and writers parts, showcasing using a sledgehammer to hammer a nail through a thin board.
Allow me to explain from Warcraft’s beginnings; well, since Warcraft Three and the plaguing of Lordaeron.
Calia Menethil had underwent the experience that a majority of the Forsaken have. She saw her homeland suffer and her people turned into rotting zombies. This is the only real part that she could successfully argue that connects her to the Forsaken. It does. However following that she fled her Homeland, leaving her people to rot and suffer and die from the Scourge, while she was mysteriously absent. Not even a letter or a mention.
As the Princess of Lordaeron was mysteriously absent all this while the Forsaken - her subjects, all of them until Cataclysm - were undergoing tremendous change and writing. The embodiment of the Forsaken had become it’s namesake; those who were raised and suffered through the Lich King’s tyrannical control as they were turned back onto their friends, family, and town. It continued until one by one they gradually broke free as the Lich King’s powers waned come Warcraft Three: The Frozen Throne.
And as they began to break free they started assembling becoming newly fashioned undead with free will. Under Sylvanas’ Leadership (addendum: please don’t focus on Sylvanas, though i’m going to argue for her as well.) they took back surrounding areas from the remnants of both Legion and Scourge in Tirisfal Glades. Granted the embodiment of honour and such from their actual lives dissipated along with them as they were to exchange it for a pragmatic sense of self-control. Their first, actual -real- act of becoming a ‘nation’ was executing Garithos and his ilk to take what was supposed to be given to him for themselves.
Yet even that wasn’t enough. Throughout the journey into World of Warcraft the Forsaken were in an incredibly dismal area. The Forsaken’s hold on Tirisfal Glades, Silverpine Forest and Hillsbrad Foothills was shakey at best. They fell in with the Horde - a cool relationship at best - because the Alliance didn’t respond and (probably) outright attacked their diplomatic envoys seeking peace or at least recognition that they weren’t scourge. On fronts of old they found old allies had turned against them - even own family members and such. Forsaken in name and in practice even moreso. The only thing that kept them running was incorporating Scourge blight and retooling it into the Forsaken’s hands so that they could survive. At all cost.
Their themes ran an undercurrent and gamut of pragmatism. But the most iconic of them is that the Forsaken are the dark shadow of Azeroth. The question that how truly dark and lost are they, and how far of a monster they’d go to continue surviving in a land that’s been hostile to them since their very inception as a ‘race’?
Despite the intention of trying to place Calia Menethil at the head of the Forsaken after Sylvanas Windrunner it’s done so horrendously that she has become the antithesis of the Forsaken instead. Trying to think of a better way to word what comes next…