It’s not your fault. Blizzard decided what was going to be in the book. I mean… maybe you were a little irresponsible with your creative license, choosing words that painted the events in a way that maybe they were never originally meant to evoke emotion… but if she doesn’t have to admit that, why should you?
She ate him out of love. It was an ultimate act of sacrifice. 
Golden wanted it to be heartbreaking and here we are laughing about it, I understand why she would be upset.
While reading the passage, all I could think about was how arbitrary the Arbiter’s definition of sin must be. If you could convince the Arbiter you did anything morally corrupt for the sake of love, that forgoes all structure of morality.
You can’t post these sorts of things and simultaneously try to present yourself as an objective, impartial source of information.
Some of the things you posted, particularly stuff regarding the “Varian killed the emissaries” are things that you would not have corrected had posters not explicitly asked you to clarify them. You would have left everyone with the impression that the book says something that it does not.
Would you have been okay with doing that?
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Consider this; the thing that got some of them to go full mask-off was the very reasonable statement that the diplomats did not return because the Alliance killed them.
Factually, we know the diplomats were sent out to the Alliance. They did not return.
Your “crime” was making the assumption that Sylvanas made, the very reasonable assumption that the icky walking corpses were killed on sight only a short relative time after a zombie apocalypse.
None of this is unreasonable. We’re clearly intended to take that away from it.
But no, maybe it was a murloc in the Wetlands, or an Arathi raptor, or they got lost and ended up in the Twilight Highlands where they roam to this very day!!
If they’re going to pounce on such a very slight thing, then they had bad intentions to begin with.
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That is unreal… because I hope you read it more for your own edification than for others.
I don’t see why the Forum should be “grateful” that you bought a book and read it. It is nice of you to share but expecting gratitude for it is a bit much. Some people will question your perspective, and they would have no reason to be grateful.
At the same time :
If anyone expected some purely objective notation of facts, than they were also expecting a bit much.
No one claimed to be some journalist or government watchdog with objectivity. As I said earlier in this thread, two people can read the same line and come away with different ideas.
Ren and others are posting what they want, how they want. It isn’t a concern if “people wanted” something else. Which is why she should not expect gratitude, either.
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At this point Ainhin this is where you would form your own biases abd preceptions by reading the book yourself and not relying on a third party reading of the story. To me it was clear Varian either had them killed or they were killed by untrusting Alliance folk, because they were undead, but that’s not good enough for you because you are looking for hope that’s not the answer.
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I feel the same way. Im only upset that Sylvanas in universe critics are vindicated, when in Dark Mirror, it seems that Nathanos sacrificed the romance they could have had to shield Sylvanas from accusations of nepotism. The feminist commentary about the kind of attacks women in power recieve when promoting a man, and the racist jealousy when that man is of a different race… now Lorethemar and the other rangers were just stating facts. 
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Honestly, if there was this much confusion about the contents of the book I would have manually typed out what the book says word for word. Yes that would have been annoying and taken a lot of time but I think that clearing the air would have been important.
Not the entire book obviously, but the relevant passages.
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Why does this upset you
You are coming across as extremely entitled right now, Ainhin. Over a pretty simple and easy assumption.
It actually used to be standard operating procedure when someone got a book early, at least on places like SoL
I was mostly disappointed with the story simply because Golden doesn’t address these issues at all.
Nathans doesn’t experience any xenophobia, despite being an outsider, he’s not only welcomed but immediately included. It’s everything you and I know is not true.
You want my honest take on the living part of Sylvanas’s life? i feel like Golden didn’t do enough to prove that Sylvanas earned the title of Ranger General or that she was actually a good pick, she got the job because of nepotism and her sister’s referal and they never really showed how Sylvanas was deserving of the title. I’m dissapointed that Nathanos and Sylvanas’s relationship had zero slow burn or zero conflict. It didn’t feel “mature” enough for me, Sylvanas felt like she was trying to step into shoes that were two sizes too big, and she never really fits into them, which is not at all what I pictured. I’m disappointed that my headcanons are better than Christies canon and to be honest I’m probably still going to continue to reject her canon for my own headcanon so an accurate depiction of thier relationship in the book is not important to me, what is important is the framework I can use to build my headcanons and write my fix it fanfictions.
She was too, tomboyish, too silly, too “i’m going to do this my way” too clumsy. She’s not the Sylvanas I know. She’s too much like Golden only knowing how to write Alleria.(And yes the big criticism will be that they just wrote Alleria and made it Sylvanas instead- some of the scenes like the BIG KISS was stolen almost verbatim from Alleria and Turalyon’s love story) It was not Sylvanas, not really, it’s Golden’s Sylvanas and you know what that means. The onky real Sylvanas when she was alive was when she was cold amd pragmatic but it feels like the only real thing about her is the tendrils of coldness and death that reflect the Banshee.
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So maybe if things like reading obvious and clear intent and making assumptions the author is clearly intending you to make are so abhorrent to you here, but they don’t do it over there?
Maybe over there is a better place for you.
Because it was written as though the critics were just spreading vicious rumors. It was portrayed that way for a reason. Nathanos, despite Sylvanas relentless flirting, kept their relationship mostly platonic, and she sexually harassed him because she knew it made him uncomfortable, but their romance couldn’t be fully realized in life because of their positions. This was essentially ret conned, the commentary rendered moot and disrespected, because Golden wanted to write a goth teen romance novel.
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the rapsheet Roux got was completely different than what Golden wrote. Roux’s dossier said that Nathanos was in love with Sylvanas who was his superior for a long time but didn’t show it because of thier professional power dymanic. Roux wrote Nathanos lamenting that he and Sylvanas spent a lot of time seperated and that they couldn’t share their romantic feelings in fear that her reputation and position of authority would be damaged.
Golden writes that they were romantically involved long before he joined the Farstriders and that she carried on an open romantic relationship with him despite the rumors after she made him a farstrider because she would ‘command their respect’ they would get in line or she would kick them out.
Like I said on one of my first posts about this book, there’s zero consitency.
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And, can we agree on one thing? If you are going to write a novel about Sylvanas Windrunner… shouldn’t you aim it at pacifying wounded Sylvanas fans?
I mean, if it was about Varian, I wouldn’t expect them to reframe Varian as an indecisive, coward who actually politically backstabbed his way to power.
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That would require Golden to have self-awareness in any capacity.
She quoted an Anduin quote she herself wrote to agree with a Ukraine Invasion Tweet that was saying how “Boomers thought that World Peace had been achieved between the Berlin Wall falling and 9/11”.
Her lack of self awareness and growth after decades of criticism is bewildering to me.
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This is someone excited for the book offering us lore as they went and joking with us over cringey bits.
This isn’t SoL This isn’t a wowhead article. This isn’t a Nobbel video. Calm down, be nice, or go find somewhere else to talk about lore. Your attitude isn’t welcome here.
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Another thing is, I understand that she can’t plagiarise other writers, even in the same franchise… but her retelling of existing lore feels like an episode of Drunk History.
You see what I’m talking about when you get to the WC3 retelling in the middle of the book. You’re just like dafaq that’s not how I remembered this?!
What she did the Arthas bits was the same thing she did in Elegy, it turned into a shock value fest where all she wanted was an emotional reaction. Elegy wasn’t a rational piece of history, it was emotional manipulation. Only it wasn’t enough, she called what Arthas does genocide (she doesn’t) but she goes into grim detail about killing innocents for cheap emotional payoff.
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Given her historical political takes and Roux’s being An Actual Leftist
I have a feeling Golden has contempt for Roux, both as a professional (given so many said her book slapped) and as a person (Lib Centrist contempt of Leftists)
But that’s neither here nor there
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