Undead Keep Getting Dumpstered

Or they could play three-way bumper cars with Dalaran too.

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Dalaran vs Undercity vs Ebon Hold. Who will win?! Tune in next week! :gift_heart:

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You’re assuming that she’s an equal partner in that relationship and that the Jailor’s not playing the crap out of her. Her using others and tools for personal objectives and then discarding them could not be more in character for her, so why would a apparent First One like the Jailor ever trust her.

If her afterlife she really saw was a lie (which seems very likely now), then the entire point was to give her a false motivation to give her a nudge in the direction convenient for another. Thus, orchestrating her assentation to Warchief and blaming it on the Loa (whether she wanted it or not) would be merely getting her to continue to move in that convenient direction; but with more power. This is actually a similar tactic to what she’s used against the Forsaken several times. Giving them half-truths and false motivations to act in ways convenient for her.

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That’s not what you asked for. You asked for the example on her lying in her innner monologue. I gave you a instance where she does it. That is a direct example of her doing so.

If you can’t trust a character’s inner dialogue, how can you trust anything in the story?

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You gave me a moment where she claims she didn’t want to be warchief and cursed Vol’jin and the Loa for making her it. Then quoted a really iffy Dev interview (that even the verbiage was weird and inconclusive) that you somehow believe is evidence that her internal dialogue is contradictory. When, in reality, it can absolutely be true that she didn’t want to be Warchief, cursed Vol’jin and the Loa for making her it, but still be willing to exploit the position for her own ends.

Sylvanas very well may not know who truly made her Warchief, and it really truly may be as simple as her being played … and the Jailor made her Warchief expecting her to continue operating in ways convenient for him. Just like she apparently has been since she was shown “her eternity”.

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Droite is utterly convinced they’re the Oracle of friggin’ Delphi when it comes to Sylvanas’ character development, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

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All of them will crash to each other and fall over the exodar

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Not at all, I’m just not like her apparent fans who went years deliberately ignoring any facet of her character that disagreed with their image of her. I fully admit that there were other sides to her, and other paths available. Most of them preferred to what was chosen. But, the one they took her down does work within major parts of her characterization; even if we didn’t know the destination.

Also, I don’t exactly see you bringing up anything concrete to argue against my points. That single bit of internal dialogue in BtS does not run counter to the Sylvanas of BfA UNTIL such a time where we know whether or not she knew Mueh’zala was behind Vol’jin’s death. Until then its perfectly possible she both didn’t want to become Warchief AND was willing to exploit it while she had it.

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They’d use it at all, which is the sad thing.

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No, you just chose to ignore Mediarama’s point about Sylvanas lying in her own inner monologue. More to the point, you uncritically eat up every retcon they serve up regarding her. Just because they hamfistedly “made it that way now” doesn’t mean “that’s always the way it was going to be,” which is usually the thrust of your arguments.

The objection I (and I think most others have) with your characterization is this smug insistence that there was never any other way for her to go, despite inconsistent portrayals of her character from heroic to shady and back again, from snark to dark and back. Just look at how she bounces from dark Cataclysm to snarky WoD to heroic Legion cinematic to questionable Stormheim back to heroic BfA cinematic to mustache-twirling BfA. That you buy Blizzard’s facile “it was all a lie!” explanation, plus handwave away absurd instances of “lying” like Mediarama quoted to you, makes your position smack of only believing what Blizzard says because it aligns with your personal opinion, and giving their shallow, baseless reason a pass due to sheer bias.

It’s incredibly annoying.

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No, I’m refuting it until we see evidence that she was indeed lying. Which Mediarama did not have. Outside of a single Dev talk that didn’t make it clear if Vol’jin’s death was HER plan, or THE plan. So, again, until such time it is revealed that she knew either the Jailor or Mueh’zala were behind Vol’jin’s death, then she is not “lying in her own internal monologue”.

She can simultaneously not know who made her Warchief; Hate being made Warchief; but still be willing to exploit the position of Warchief for her own goals.

EDIT: As for her Legion and BfA cinematics … yeah I can believe she wasn’t being honest in her big grand moments. She wasn’t trying to motivate forces to die for her by screaming “FOR ME!”, no more than she was leading her Forsaken prior to EoN shouting "Die for my revenge!; or building up her Forsaken in Cata screeching “You’re all my meatshield!!”

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Uh. Yeah I’m going to take that as a win. I’m not interested in having Sparkles The Good Christian Flesheater lead us around dream Lordaeron telling the Forsaken being Lordaeronian what the factions really about and the whole undead bit isn’t actually that relevant.

RIP Worgenbros on that note.

Everything about her is wrong for the Forsaken. Voss is better suited to lead by if any metric because at least she remembered to wear purple and be creepy.

Seriously this would be like if Me’Dan turned up to lead the Orcs and was just a human male model with the slightest twinge of green to his skin, wearing blue flowing robes with nary an animal pelt or spike in sight.

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Then why doesn’t she say this? Something like “Stupid Vol’jin, this was too early… well, I’ll have to accelerate some plans” or some such. If we’re reading in the omniscient third person, why wouldn’t she think what she’s actually thinking? It could have been easily shaded in appropriately vague terms that she’s displeased with being Warchief, but is still going to work with her own agenda, whatever it is.

Moreover, why is she bothering to show respect to Vol’jin in her inner thoughts if she’s going to just come out and say how stupid and useless everyone is in BfA? Her thoughts and characterization do not track. It’s authorial inconsistency covered by retcons and lying. The simple reason none of this comes up is that Blizzard hadn’t actually invented the Jailer at this point, and once they did, tried to backdate the plot by inserting nonsense retcons into the story (like her apparent meeting with the Jailer in EoN that’s never mentioned in that book, or any other media ever, until now).

Also, I like how you ignored how she screams “For the Horde!” in the BfA cinematic, in a line that got damn near every Horde player revved up. There’s no way to somehow twist that into a BS interpretation of selfishness without relying on the facile, ex post facto “oh she was lying” nonsense that Blizzard has spun out of whole cloth.

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There is a compromise in terms of whether or not Sylvanas was always meant to be this way, and it’s the most plausible in my opinion.

I believe they’d planned by Legion development to have her eventually go evil, BUT there was supposed to be a lot more time between that. I believe, as I’ve said prior, there’s a lot of evidence to showcase that we were meant to have four expansions between WoD and Shadowlands, and Sylvanas would have been a decent Warchief for at least three expansions before eventually, gradually, going full moustache twirling.

This is why in, say, the pre-BfA novel there’s a disconnect. Books do take a decent level of time to write, and they probably decided to just toss it in and stitch it together with the narrative they’d managed to craft from the pieces of their original plot. This is why we have the devs and writers trying to go back and retcon things to say she was always plotting, because they missed out on the time to have actual buildup and so need to fake it.

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Because she did say to herself what she was thinking. Even a third person reader doesn’t get more more then what the person is question is thinking.

Consider, if Sylvanas didn’t actually know that the Jailer and Mueh’zala were going to kill Vol’jin. Maybe she wasn’t in on that part of the plan. Maybe she didn’t know at that moment that it was Mueh’zala under the orders of the Jailer.

This would track with her inner monologue, in which she honestly regretted Vol’jin’s death, cursed Vol’jin for naming her Warchief and cursed the Loa for being behind it all, all without realizing that the Jailer was behind it all.

I believe that there is a misconception that Sylvanas has been “working for the Jailer” this whole time. I really don’t think she’s actually been working for him at all, but still has been dealing with him nevertheless. A classic “deal with the Devil” situation, where Sylvanas has been secretly making deals with him and the “Devil” finally came to collect his Due.

Just curious, how do you explain the BfA cinematic (and opening sequence), in that case?

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I think their original intent was to, over the course of the Broken Isles xpac, the Argus xpac, the Zanda/KT xpac, and then the N’zoth xpac, have her suffer a series of blows to her worldview that eventually just lead her to going bad in a much more believable way.

  1. Varian dying. Yet again she watches as someone she can respect dies horribly, and is then blamed for it.

  2. Helya implying the existence of the Jailer, plus the lamp being broken.

  3. She learns about the Shadowlands themselves.

  4. Open war with the Alliance.

This makes for a much better and more reasonable narrative. This is a woman who has struggled and striven, for years, to be free again, to have what she lost not just for herself but for her people. First she finds out that, in her PoV, if she dies she gets sent to super hell. Then she loses what she sees as a chance to control the val’kyr for good and save her people from said hell. Then there’s war with the Alliance… and then she finds out that even if this super hell is avoided, the NORMAL AFTERLIFE also literally dictates your destiny for you. And everything you do, every action you take, is weighed and measured and then judged.

Forget going evil, I’m amazed that she isn’t totally looney tunes.

Metzen stated that he wrote that years ago, and was surprised when he learned the Horde had attacked first.

I believe that it wasn’t meant as the opening for BfA, as in, Kul Tiras and Zandalar, but the expansion after BfA, which would have been N’zoth and Azshara and all the Saurfang stuff.

Alliance attacking first and forcing Horde out of Lordaeron makes way more sense as something that happens before Teldrassil.

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Metzen left in September of 2016, when Legion should have been in development, though. If he knew Sylvanas was supposed to turn evil, would he have made her look so good in the cinematic?

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Yes, because it wasn’t meant to have her initially seem like she’s going evil. I wrote a big old post on it all a while back, but essentially we’d have seen things slowly escalate. The Alliance are the aggressors, they attack first after an entire prior expansion of fighting over Azerite. Things were meant to seem like they were in equal measure in terms of war stuff, until the Burning.