Pyro, people have said hundreds of times why that quest isn’t the evidence you think it is, do you seriously need a refresher?
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But it very clearly is. Do explain.
Because Horde do it too.
In the Horde story that letter never even has the opportunity to reach Greymane, because the Alliance never find it.
It can’t be in both places at once, so the logical thing to do is ignore it.
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First off, despite there originally having been a zone order to the Broken Isles, when the game went live that wasn’t the case. IE, there is no actual reason to think that quest came before Stormheim. Additionally, even if the quest actually happens first, there’s no evidence that the information made it to Greymane before his attack, and neither is the information presented in the journal enough to justify his attack.
Secondly - The Horde PC can do the same quest and recover the same journal. There’s nothing that says which faction did it, and as such it can’t really be used as justification for Genn’s actions.
Thirdly, in order to even get that quest, the Alliance PC gets an auto-accept quest to kill the Forsaken survivors of the shipwreck. Meaning, that to even theoretically get the evidence you say justifies attacking the Forsaken, the Alliance PC needs to attack the Forsaken first.
Stop bringing up the quest in relation to Stormheim. At most it makes the Alliance look worse, and Genn says multiple times that he doesn’t know or care why Sylvanas is there to begin with, he just wanted to kill her for revenge.
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I’ll stop bringing up that quest when you guys stop trying demonize the pure, noble, goodness of Anduin Llane Wrynn.
Well. At least accepting the fact that he is your new Overlord is the first step toward healing!
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That isn’t what I meant at all.
Only to you and your loyalist crew.
And fourthly, right before Genn goes in after Sylvanas, he tells the Alliance PC that he has no idea what she’s up to: “It’s obvious at this point that the Horde wants something in Skold-Ashil. Unfortunately we still don’t know what they’re after.”
After you check out the shields and report back to him, he’s shocked and surprised: “Val’kyr, you say? This is worse than I had imagined. If Sylvanas is able to create more Val’kyr, there will be no limit to her armies! It seems the vault is her goal. We must stop her!”
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Well if you want to argue in favor of indiscriminately slaughtering defenseless sailors for no reason, go ahead.
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Yeah and I guess they just wanted a hug when they defenselessly sailed up to the shores of Gilneas.
If you want to argue in favor of whitewashing a character that’s murdered civilians as well, go ahead.
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I would expect that there will be some kind of defense for it. Eventhough in the game itself it paints Genn’s actions as not good and him wasting resources in his quest to settle a personal Vendetta and not caring whom he gets killed.
There’s a reason Sylvanas herself said that Genn would always be the one to push Anduin towards war. Yet Genn isn’t extremely presented as a major problem in the Alliance, the ways Sylvanas has been. just basically hinted that ‘oh he may have did a bad thing…ok moving on.’
The lore team forget this.
Spectral beings known as the Val’kyr found her soul there and gave her a glimpse of her people’s future. Without her to protect them, the Forsaken would be squandered by the Horde and eventually made extinct. (Pg 188)
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Sylvanas: Lies to and uses every faction she possibly can.
Forsaken: Praise the Dark Lady and her masterful chess game!
Sylvanas: Lies to and uses the Forsaken as simpleton puppets who dance at her every command, despite not valuing them at all as anything more than a shield to die for her so that she will not.
Forsaken: PRAISE THE DARK LADY
Blizzard: Lies to and uses every strategy they possibly can to hook people onto the story, including outright lying in promotional material, as the longer people hold on for updates on dangling plot threads the more money they can milk out of them each month.
You: Praise Blizzard and their masterful foreshadowing.
Blizzard: Lies to and uses the factions’ character rosters as simpleton puppets who dance at their every command, despite not valuing their character consistency or cultures as anything more than either plot devices (ie punching bags) for the “Horde is naughty and then sad” storyline, or idiot lackeys for the MoP 2.0 storyline.
You: PRAISE BFA! Sylvanas sucks and her fans do too! Weee!
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Blizzard: Uses books and promotional material since the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Eight proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Sylvanas is evil and only values the Forsaken as meat shields.
You: SYLVANAS LOVES ME.
There have been so many refutations made to the point you’re making here that at this point it’s not worth the effort to retype.
Also I don’t care if Sylvanas loves me. In fact I would prefer it if she put on stilettos and did some elf Zumba on my spine and head. What I care about is not seeing her tossed aside and villain-batted by writers who are too incompetent/powerless to at least make it somewhat enjoyable for Horde players to go through. I can’t remember the last time I’ve spoken to a single Horde fan on these forums, loyalist or rebel, who has generally positive emotions about the story. It’s anger, helplessness, and mistrust-induced apathy.
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That was beautifully put.
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Of course, I’m of the wavelength that I agree with Sylvanas’s direction in the story and think she is the most consistently written character.
On the other hand, I also happen to think this way without being a Blizzard shill and still consider the story to be trite garbage that belongs in a bargain bin if it were applied to a film or a novel. The consistency of one character, however much others may disagree with me on such, still does not rescue the awful storytelling.
I heartily agree with the second paragraph, though I’d offer some refutation to the first.
There have been more detailed breakdowns of Sylvanas’s character arc written by SF locals with far more experience with outside material (novels and etc.), but if you’re interested, I’ll offer an appetizer of an argument to illustrate my perspective on why I believe she hasn’t been written consistently, and only became “truly evil” by writer fiat rather than a natural progression of her character. (I’m also biased against her turning evil because it has destroyed the Horde identity to an extent that is far more dire than MoP, and carries with it awful consequences, but that’s not relevant to her consistency and the point I’m currently trying to make.)
Point #1: Sylvanas flip-flops between caring for the Horde and completely not caring for the Horde teehee she was evul all along.
Most compelling to me is the implication that Sylvanas not only lies to her followers and loyalists (true), but also to her advisors and closest confidants (Nathanos, Saurfang, etc. Less believable but possible, she’s lied to her own sisters), AND most damnable, she’s lied to herself, in her own thoughts, from a third person perspective, from WoW all the way up to BtS! I can’t list them all, but there’s so many character moments she has absent of ALL outsiders in which she admits to herself that she respected Vol’jin, respected Saurfang, cared for the fate of the Forsaken and the Horde as a whole.
Point #2: Sylvanas flip-flops between being a tactical genius and being a moron who acts entirely on impulse and emotional outbursts.
A case of Blizzard saying one thing and showing another. Same with Garrosh, Anduin, Tyrande, Saurfang, Baine, etc. We’re told Sylvanas has a Grand Plan, ohoho, but then Blizzard hands her the Idiot Ball when it’s convenient for the plot, or implies she’s only making a stupid decision because secretly she’s a genius playing 7494792829D underwater nude backgammon and we’ve all been DUPED, even though every aspect of her plan seems far overly complicated and irrelevant to her goal, and Blizzard should either be ashamed for shoving in so many plot threads and sacrifices that go nowhere and only service The Hype Machine, or they’re geniuses themselves and SOMEHOW, SOMEWAY, her plan and each thread of it will fall into place. (I doubt it lol)
Point #3: Sylvanas flip-flops between being Lawful Evil, Neutral, Chaotic, and everywhere in between depending upon which writer is writing her at the time and how cool they think child genocide is.
And here’s the crux of the issue. Many writers have many opinions of Sylvanas, of the Horde playerbase, and of what constitutes irredeemable evil. Don’t get me wrong, Sylvanas has been evil for a LONG time. But her evil has always felt like it had a Forsaken and/or Horde focus. She risks her own safety and the safety of her land to assault a non-Alliance, basically unassuming, walled-off kingdom on her Warchief’s orders to appease him. Garrosh wanted Gilneas taken out, Sylvanas used her own resources and “meat shields” (Forsaken) to do it. She fought ON THE FRONT LINES, negotiated a less bloody resolution with Crowley IN PERSON, and died for it. This brings up a character inconsistency: if Sylvanas is protecting her own skin, why would she do all of this frontline work less than a year after her suicide? If she doesn’t care about the Horde, why would she draw the ire of an (up until that point) totally isolationist nation which would have very likely killed itself off with the civil unrest brewing within its walls?
All I ask is that you reconsider. I mean, we can say this point is subjective, but Sylvanas really can’t be that consistently written if she’s the source of SO MUCH controversy with each side rarely bringing up the same quote/thought/action to back up their opinions. We see the same base-breaking inconsistencies in Jaina, who has been the subject of many forum slapfights. Why don’t people argue as vehemently as, say, Saurfang’s character motivations, or Vol’jin’s? People may express disagreement, sure, but Saurfang is (relatively) consistently written enough that his actual intentions and meaning as a character are rarely in question. Not nearly to the same level as Sylvanas.
EDIT: Hi Sam. ;^o
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