maldraxxi dont test stuff on civilians. Knows honor. Can do evil stuff, but also have stuff to balance that out.
Forsaken has been diet scourge
KT is Maldraxxi. Lol.
yeah like i said they can be evil at times, but you have others like draka and alexandrous, also i forgot the plague doctors name
I respect your honesty.
and I feel compelled to say that I explore my own childhood trauma of being emotionally neglected and experiencing my own family disfunction through Sylvanas and her own family, while identifying heavily with someone who “just wants to feel like they have a place in this world.”
But kinky sex is good too. 
I’m so glad you are working through your trauma like a healthy individual, that’s really nice to see honestly and I’m so sorry you’ve had abusive relationships with women.
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they used Kyrians to make abominations. They have all kinds of people locked in cages and they use other covenant people as test subjects. The Maldraxxi are not the “good” example you are looking for.
Those are jailer aligned maldraxxi who guess what are sylvanas aligned. You walked right into that one.
Plague Deviser Merelith. Man he’s a good old egg. Him and his Slimes. That being said, I love Maldraxxus. Its a nice mix of themes, with different sectors of the covenant devoted to specific functions of the whole.
It would be cool to see the Forsaken adapt some of the themes of the zone, even if they get to keep their awesome Gothic aesthetics. Hell, if the Runecarver actually is the Primus, Maldraxxus might actually be the afterlife needed to improve the Forsaken’s quality of life; fix the faulty staples holding their souls to their bodies; and deal with the reproductive and maintenance needs. They might even be able to give them some advances to help free and nurse back to sanity the scourge. Which is THE ideal way for them to stabilize and grow as a people.
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yeah… you got me… it all goes back to Sylvanas…
Though freud would probably say its all sex, there are lots of people who visit a Dominatrix or engage in Dom/sub relationships that are completely non-sexual… and Freud would agree it all goes back to the mother.
Chivalry in and of itself is chaste dom/sub goddess worship. Rooted likely in Templar divine feminine reverence, and worship of the virgin mary. In many ways, Sylvanas is an shadow version of that ideal. Nathanos seems to kind of screw it up because they have to ship someone all the time. But even their relationship seems to be a corrupt version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
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hes awesome.
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Oh yes I am super aware of all the concepts you just brought up. that’s what draws me to Sylvanas as well, because she personifies the Dark Warrior archetype of the Divine Feminine. Funny you bring up the Virgin Mary, there’s a lot of paralells to Sophism with Sylvanas’s “this world is a prison.” Jung and his archetypes are very interesting to me and he was a student and contemporary of Freud. I like to think that when the Blizzard writers conceived of Sylvanas they did intentionally give her Discordian atributes. She definitely comes across as some sort of nod to Discordianism, as the Goddes Eris. There’s a lot of Greek myth in there too, especially with her and Nathanos, like Artemis and Orion, Or Selene and Endymion, Orpheus and Eurydice.
I see you are a man of good taste.
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Though one can’t draw from any classical inspiration without transferring Jung’s archetypes, I think Sylvanas and her forsaken do a really good job of demonstrating the shadow and immature versions of Jung’s archetypes. If one is aware of them, roleplay as a Forsaken is a great way for a western male, with few rites of passage to identify and conceptualize (and ultimately deal with) developmental deficiencies.
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I was just was talking to a friend about this other day on how Sylvanas can personify BOTH negative and positive Eris.
“Negative Eris can be someone who protests at the power Pluto (Death) has over them, but still chooses to stay the victim and continue in the abusive situation. The polarity plays out as the victim/ savior dynamic and can be quite sadomasochistic. It is also reminiscent of the addict who will find every excuse in the book as to why they cannot cease taking their drug, no matter how destructive it is to them.”
“Positive Eris is the phoenix from the flames that escapes from abuse in the underworld and crowns herself queen. The crown symbolism is important. Eris is irreversibly wiser after her dark night of the soul. Like the tarot card the Queen of Swords, Eris has scars, is now skeptical about life and not as naive as when she first took a bite of Pluto’s forbidden fruit.”
Sylvanas’s writing, even at her most chaotic in BfA isn’t bad, it’s following a pattern. She’s at a crossroads, of being Negative Eris or Positive Eris, she can be both. They have had to have this knowledge of archetypes when writing Edge of Night. Sylvanas goes through a literal rebirth of the soul.
This is why I’m not ready to give up just yet. I’m ready for however they choose to conceptualize this archetype.
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You asked for it
-Rules over her people in a totalitarian, book-burning-style state and enforces the need to forget aspects of their previous lives before they were undead despite what her people actually want and even shows displeasure that her people assembled a civilian leadership council in her absence during Legion
-Slaughters her own people in the fields of Arathi, even the ones returning to her because she’s an emotionally unstable sociopath who can’t accept that not all the Forsaken are unconditionally loyal to her alone
-Withholds important information from other Horde leaders that they would naturally object to if they knew such as her plan to kill/raise the dead of Stormwind to serve her.
-Prohibits Baine, or anyone else, from cooperating with the Alliance in regards to resolving the potentially world ending issue of the giant sword that very recently impaled the planet and blackmails Baine into ceasing all correspondence with Anduin.
I think those are the pretty big points. Then again, this really wasn’t the point of what I was trying to discuss but BfA, and all lead-up to it, paints a pretty clear picture that Sylvanas is a self-serving, tyrannical, Alliance and Horde hating, supervillain who literally could not care less about the well-being of the planet, her allies, or even her own Forsaken so long as it suits her.
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you have no canon sources?
Where is your in-game, novel quotes? where is the actual in-game proof of any of this. You all can make me lists of your interpretations all you like I’m looking for actual canon. until then see my above response with actual sources and book quotes.
I think you are pretty spot on. You see the struggle between the two Sylvanases so often. Most recently in Three Sisters and No More Lies.
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I took 360 or so posts but finally something different about Sylvanas to read. I need to think about it more but both your perspectives are interesting @ Luxio+Mawthorne
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Before the Storm For example 1
“Once or twice, parqual had sneaked into his former lodgings, smuggling books into the undercity. But he had been caught once and admonished. His books has beeen confiscated. There is no need to remember the human history of this place, he had been told. Only the history of the undercity matters now.”
Chapter 12 page 149
Arathi
"The only thing I can do and still hang on to my kingdom as it is, "She said. “They were defecting.”
"Some were running back here, to safety. " He replied.
"They were, she agreed “But how much of that was fear? How tempted were they until that point?” She shook her head. “No, Nathanos. I cannot take the risk. The only Desolate Council members I trust are the ones who returned to me early on, Broken and bitter. Truly Desolate. All the others… I cannot allow that sentiment, that hope, to grow. it is an infection ready to spread. I have toi cut it out.”
Chapter 34 page 380
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those are good quotes. It’s hardly “book burning psychopath” it’s explained early in Forsaken society that there is nothing gained from the Forsaken seeing themselves as mortal “living” beings. There’s a great tie in quote from Edge of Night when Sylvanas recollects the first night of the Forsaken’s existence when they redefined themselves as different from the Living.
Now, as sudden as the last, a third memory. “Rightful heirs of Lordaeron!” Sylvanas called out, holding her bow aloft. Her forearm, still slender and muscular, was now a shade of blue-gray. Dead. The scene was very different now. This vision had the cold sheen of a memory lived after death. Before her waited a grotesque, quivering mass of corpses, their armor piecemeal, their bodies broken, the stench unimaginable. Their plaintive, desperate gazes reminded her suddenly of children. They disgusted her. But their need empowered her. “The Lich King falters. Your will is your own. Are you to be outcasts now in your own land? Or do we embrace the cruel cards fate has dealt us and retake our place in this world?”
Her questions were greeted with gurgles, then a rasping, almost desperate cheer. Bony fists lifted toward the sky. These poor people: peasants, farmers, priests, warriors, lords and nobles… they hadn’t yet come to grips with what had happened to them. But for somebody—anybody—to assure them that they belongedsomewhere was electrifying. “We are abandoned. We are… forsaken. But when the sun rises tomorrow, the capital will be ours,” she pronounced. And now they roared.
“But what of the humans?” a young alchemist asked as the din faded. Sylvanas recognized him from the previous night’s fighting. A cool intelligence flickered in his eye sockets: Lydon was his name. Already he’d come to embrace his situation, referring to humans as if they were a separate race; she made a mental note to make use of him.
“The humans will serve their purpose,” she answered, her mind already calculating. “They believe they are liberating the city. Let them fight on our behalf and spend themselves for our gain. They are”—she stumbled upon an analogy she’d used before—“arrows in our quiver.” Edge of Night page 3.
I know Droite will jump on this as proof that Sylvanas at that time only saw the Forsaken as tools, and while that is true, Sylvanas has come a long way from that point in WC3 to this point in Edge of Night and she’s come even farther from Edge of Night to Shadowlands. Character evolution is a thing.
The important take away of this part of the text is this line:
Lydon was his name. Already he’d come to embrace his situation, referring to humans as if they were a separate race.
The Forsaken have long struggled with how they define themselves, and even Sylvanas isn’t above and beyond this. She wants the Forsaken to embrace that they still are the people of Lordaeron and yet she also encourages the Forsaken to divest themselves of the past, what Parqual is saying isn’t an attack Sylvanas or implying she “burns books to keep the Forsaken ignorant.” He simply says that there is no use for a Forsaken to dwell on the past and that is a cornerstone of Forsaken Society, and as a Lordaeron historian he has personal feelings about that part of Forsaken Culture. Parqual’s opinion of Sylvanas at this point is of adoring admiration, his feelings about Sylvanas change later on when he realizes that she’s placating the Desolate Council with what they want to hear so that she can continue to retain power, which I was upfront about in one of my previous comments. He saw through her “people pleasing” But Parqual and his Menethil restoration beliefs would have caused a civil War in the Forsaken and he’s the reason the Desolate Council had to be killed so there’s a lot of layers to this story. He was the threat, that’s why he was a poV character in Before the Storm. He was the defector that got them all killed.
Parqual isn’t the only one who was asked as part of Forsaken Culture to give up the past. In Shadows Rising Sylvanas urges Nathanos to let go of the past too, in the necklace of hers he still wears. There’s an ongoing theme and it’s related to the Forsaken religion, The Cult of the Forgotten Shadow, the closer the Forsaken becomes to the Shadow the less they cherish things from the past. The naming of the “Desolate” Council means something too and even Sylvanas remarks on the name choice. Desolate means “deserted of people and in a state of bleak and dismal emptiness.” Ironically they named it that because they felt alone and abandoned without Sylvanas’s leadership. In the Cult of the Forgotten Shadow there is a tenant that says “A Forsaken who succumbs to despair and seeks no personal power has no reason to exist; he craves nothing, desires nothing, he sits alone and pines for his old life. To the cult, Forsaken who do not seek to better themselves might as well still be part of the Scourge.” that’s what the Desolate Council represented… and that’s why they had to die.
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