There is literally nothing wrong with redeeming Sylvanas

Lore Story Forum
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Literally everyone deserves a chance at redemption.

The thing that stands out, however, is if Sylvanas will be forgiven and if she will bepardoned for her crimes.

Ideally, there will be a few characters who are just too empathetic to simply let go of the fact that Sylvanas has likely been acting entirely by figurative and nearly-literal gunpoint. Anduin, Baine, Bolvar–you know, those types. The rest, however, will simply let that be that. Sylvanas, ideally, answers for her crimes. It would not be bad writing if Sylvanas actually does come around to her deeds and makes her choice (!) to face them head on with regret. It would be bad writing if she ends up karma houdini-ing out like Kerrigan did in Star Craft 2, and/or Blizzard thinks that her “dying” from a swift act suddenly makes up for everything she did. It would be bad writing if Sylvanas suddenly gets purified by the Light or some wank and becomes a hero. It would be extremely bad writing if she ends up like Grommash (Not Grom).

It would not be bad writing if Sylvanas comes to terms with her decisions and actions, and ends up betraying the Jailor. It would not be bad writing if Anduin manages to bring back the Ranger-General by a means no one else tried or bothered to do, and could only do in such a precarious manner and in such a precarious place. It would not be bad writing if Sylvanas genuinely has been trying to undermine the Jailor’s every action and motive without getting caught up until this point.

It’s the consequences. That is what ultimately decides if her redemption is badly written or not. People can be sympathetic. Their actions can be explained. But not everyone can be justified.

Which is why, ideally, Sylvanas still answers for her crimes. Whether she does so willingly or not is irrelevant as long as she does, and she is not lionized for it by the narrative itself. Anduin can have his own opinion, and even be wrong; the narrative itself does not have this level of personal freedom, and that fact should never be forgotten.

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the worst part of redeeming sylvanas is it means more cutscenes and screentime with sylvanas

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I disagree.

Anduin is not the character who should have this sort of effect on her. Nathanos. Lor’themar. Heck, I’d sooner accept Arthas/Kel’thuzad making her snap out of her Banshee Queen persona to realize she isn’t cool with what she has become, and then resumes being the Ranger-General.

Anduin lacks any meaningful connection to her to bring about that change, and to shoehorn him into the role only makes him more of a Mary-Sue. Or… Gary-Stu. Is there a gender neutral version of that?

Either way, I would consider it bad writing. Honestly, I thought we’d seen the worst with Med’an.

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That model though

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Besides that she commited a genocide against a playable race, sent them to hell and tortured their souls to forge them into weapons and more…
Sylvanas shouldn’t be redeemed and justified… and I’m also not interest in seeing more Sylvanas expansions.
Despite Blizzard’s efforts to make people forget about Teldrassil, it still happened and the architects of it should be brought to justice.

Also the worst part about a Sylvanas redemption is that she’ll still be painted as right and as having done nothing wrong, and this in relation to the Teldrassil genocide would send a pretty disgusting message not only about morals, but also towards the fanbase of that race.

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Oh my god, we WISH

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I see nothing wrong with Sylvanas redeeming herself. As long as it is acknowledged that everything she has done was wrong and she actually wants to atone for them.

Because Blizzard’s writers can range from terrible to complete hacks depending on which character they actually care about, they have a tendency to redeem people by just making the things they do not their fault.

A lot of people want Arthas to be redeemed because the Helm of Domination is what made him do bad things, Arthas is innocent please believe us. But this would be bad because it complete removes Arthas’ own agency in everything. He becomes a boring Saturday morning villain because now every decision he made was no longer his.

This is what I personally fear they’ll do with Sylvanas to redeem her.

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Anduin is quite literally a lot like how Sylvanas saw herself back when she was still alive–frightfully naive, optimistic, and most importantly: still alive.

It isn’t at all bad writing to have someone like her, who is constantly fixated on the moment of her death and rebirth, to have a clear goal in mind towards Anduin’s handling of events. The cinematic spells this out so clear and concisely that I honestly cannot understand how this isn’t apparent. She is all but outright called out on this by Anduin, and not once does she reject the notion or correct him.

Anduin is literally, in her mind, her at the exact moment where her life is forever changed. Either he proves everything she has done up until this moment is the natural course of things, or he proves that she was wrong and did have a choice once her freedom was achieved. That’s the narrative focus here, and that is not at all bad writing–subjectively and objectively.

It does, however, place it on one hell of a tightwalk. It takes good writing to make this work. It takes bad writing to see the options this brings, and squander it on shallow platitudes with a poor man’s Aesop. We’ll see where it goes.

In a way, how this storyline plays out will either confirm our fears beyond any pale or doubt (That Blizzard is and will always be incapable of decent writing an overall narrative arc) or will reveal to us that such a depressing fact might not be as ironclad or immutable as we think.

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I’ll give you that he’s alive. Otherwise, I don’t see them as alike at all.

Anduin came into power unwillingly, uncertain. Sylvanas was always confident from the moment she became the Ranger-General. Anduin cares about his people and even his enemies. Even when alive Sylvanas saw her rangers as, ‘Arrows in the Quiver.’

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Also the worst part about a Sylvanas redemption is that she’ll still be painted as right and as having done nothing wrong[…]

People need to realize that redemption does not automatically mean that someone is completely pardoned and re-contextualized to have been right and never did anything wrong.

I don’t see them alike as all.

I’ll admit a mistake I made in my point: saying she saw herself back then instead of sees herself back then. She clearly views her past self extremely negatively and blames herself alongside Arthas for what became of her.

Anduin is very much still a tool to her. She doesn’t care about Anduin as a person. She cares about his choice. She cares about if he can prove her being right or wrong. That’s her fascination with him. She clearly views him in the same vein she views herself back when she was still alive, because otherwise making the choice with Anduin into such a huge deal would absolutely make zero sense. Both narratively, figuratively, and literally. While Blizzard in the past has been known to make these kind of moves (Warlords being the most egregious example possible), these are ultimately different writers and I think we should keep this in mind.

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Just think of it this way;

The sooner she gets redeemed(and will likely die in doing so), the sooner we won’t have to see or hear from her for at LEAST the next few expansions.

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In the grand meta text, if she’s doing what it looks like, where she’s defying fate and striving to ultimately put man’s destiny back in his hands (high drama yuck) then, in the eyes of a cold, calculating judge, the ends justify the means.

But for any other observer, the price paid for this end result is much too steep and the methods employed were morally abominable. Redemption is subjective and not everyone is inclined to offer it.

If I bothered to give anything more than half a rat’s backside about this exceedingly HIGH DRAMAAAA bullflannel then I’d say that no matter who says what, I think she’ll never be ‘redeemed’. Not in my eyes, or a considerable amount of other people’s.

I frankly just want to be done with this story.

The damage is done with Sylvanas, they can’t fix her with the backdrop of BFA and any attempt to try and give her some of that good ol’ polish is… whatever.

She’s effectively dead to me. I stopped caring about her the milisecond she stopped being the plot engine that was used to explore the Forsaken story, because now all she is, is a window for the antagonist’s story to be observed. To be truthful? I don’t give any licks about the Jailer. He’s so boring. I dislike that he’s also the root of all evil too. He has no root in the Warcraft story, he’s just… a thing. And not even that sort of fun, new, “let’s try this out and explore it” sort of way, but like his real name should be John Smith and he needs an actual wardrobe. He had more personality to him when he looked like a long-lost wizard.

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But that’s how all redemptions work in WoW. It was the same with Grom and Illidan.

Well not really. If she gets redeemed and returns to the Horde, then we’ll have to deal with her a whole lot longer than if we’d just bring her to justice. I just don’t want any more Sylvanas expansions after this, and I don’t want her to be justified in commiting genocide against a playable race either.

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There’s NO WAY she’s returning to the Horde after this, let’s just make that clear. At MOST Nathanos will get cleared to join the Horde again and take her place, but Sylvanas is done. Her story has been expended and there’s nothing else to tell with her after this.

Again, she’s likely to sacrifice herself for redemption and become exonerated in her final moments. It’s totally looking to be a “sub-villain betraying the main villain at the last second” kinda deal. Anduin or something will eventually click in her brain that what she is doing is wrong and then she will sacrifice herself to sabotage the Jailer in some major capacity ultimately allowing us to claim victory against him.

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Has she been? Because it seems equally possible that she’s just convinced herself of that. Its just as likely that all the Jailor did was trick her into believing that the Maw was her destined afterlife, and thus the expectation is that any such system that would put her there is unfair and flawed. He did this through Sylvie’s Primes, who’s deal with her has always been too good to be true. Which would explain why Sylvanas’ seems fixated on the Arbiter system, and not the Jailor. By all indications so far, he just gave her a false motive to act as sh3 chose off of; a tactic she has many times she has used against others.

Sylvanas can be placed on a “redemptive path” certainly, but that doesn’t equate to redemption; and would require at bare minimum her twisted world view that has caused her to act this way to be shattered into pieces first. She cannot be both validated in that World View and placed on any such path, without validating the horrific actions she’s taken in response to it (and thus invalidating all her victims). And as you said, Forgiveness and Redemption are not the same thing. So there is that as well.

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It was the same with Grim and Illidan.

First of all: different writers. Secondly: Grom was not, by any means, made ‘right all along’. Grom was pointedly lionized by Thrall so the Orcs could have hopes of moving past their deeds and being able to once again be the noble clans they used to be. The narrative does not, in any way, portray Grom as someone who didn’t do nuffin’ wrong.

Illidan is such a colossally poignant counterpoint to your own that I’m a little confused. The only time the narrative ever makes Illidan out to be the “poorly misunderstood hero all along” was through the lens of a genuinely unreliable narrator: Xe’ra. Remember how Anduin’s viewpoint of Garrosh clashed so strongly with everyone else’s in War Crimes? That doesn’t mean the narrative claims Garrosh was just misunderstood. Xe’ra quickly revealed herself and her intentions, and wound up eating dirt for it. She grossly misunderstood Illidan, and Illidan promptly corrected her in the only fashion Illidan could ever correct someone like her. In the end, the only closure we have with Illidan that is anything close to genuine redemption is… Well. His brother and sister-in-law realize there’s a little more to him than they thought due to how one-sided their viewpoint on him was up until now. Yet even so, they make it quite clear that it does not excuse anything he did, and they firmly believe he made nothing but mistakes. They’re more thankful he was willing to not be petty and doom Azeroth over a personal slight.

Redemption is subjective and not everyone is inclined to offer it.

And this is why Anduin is the one attempting it. I can only see Anduin, Baine, and Bolvar (maybe) sympathizing with Sylvanas’ impetus while still clearly disagreeing with literally everything else. Tyrande? The Horde? The rest of the night elves and the Alliance? More than likely, they won’t. They shouldn’t. Sylvanas’ redemption doesn’t have to be, nor should it be, a carte blanche. If Sylvanas’ redemption is only known to a select few who choose to just let it lie and not make a whole big deal about it, then there is genuinely nothing wrong with that narrative endpoint.

We all agree that Sylvanas should answer for her crimes. We can all come together on this point. People can choose to not allow someone be redeemed in their eyes. I personally don’t allow most ‘redemptions’ in bigger media due to how they grossly oversimplify everything and try to carte blanche it all in order to move on with the narrative. It all comes down to execution.

And we all have every right to be skeptical and cautiously pessimistic about it.

That said, right now, Sylvanas rethinking her life choices isn’t bad writing. That’s… That’s just how people do. What IS bad writing is if because she suddenly has this moment, it means she’s scott free from consequence. Let’s just hope the writers’ heads aren’t nearly as far up their own backsides like a certain duo who wrote Warlords.

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Didn’t he decide back in BtS that she was beyond saving? Why has he suddenly changed his mind?

What makes you think Blizzard is trying to make people forget about Teldrassil?

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Yes, that is genuinely the point Anduin is making to her in the cinematic. “Who’s actually holding the gun here?” is a very valid counterargument to Sylvanas’ viewpoint. That is also, I feel, the pivot in the narrative.

This is where Sylvanas’ redemption can and should lie. Realizing she was completely and horrifically wrong, and choosing the right thing to do because of that.

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Because he’s got a lot of free time on his hands, and not even a bucket to go to the bathroom with. He’s gotta distract himself somehow right?

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Eh I’m not sure about this honestly. The writers always want to have their cake and eat it, so if they are going to redeem and justify Sylvanas’ actions, they’ll most likely also have her live through even more expansions and be in the spotlight for even longer.

The fact that Blizzard is trying to sweep everything Sylvanas did under the rug by redeeming her and justifying her actions now. The fact that they tried to remove every reference to Teldrassil from beta until everyone complained. That they wanted to sell us 8.1 as revenge for Teldrassil and that they are now telling us that the desire to bring Sylvanas to justice makes Tyrande “consumed by vengeance”, and that the only outcome for Tyrande is to forgive Sylvanas and lose her powers, or to die. The fact that is has never been addressed properly, neither in the justice department nor the resolution department, such as rebuilding the Night Elves after that event.