And it is very often only real in ones mind.
so you want the vindication to be a delusion?
Because culturally, Saurfang had been conditioned to believe that his worth, his honor, depended on dying a warriors death in a good war, which the story reveals to be a myth. This has a great deal of real world relevance.
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I love it when you talk Jungian psychology when it comes to Sylvanas 
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I would like to preserve the previous status quo. I have paid for this franchise for longer than my oldest child has been alive and I dont want it to be dramatically changed… particularly for what I view as a new philosophy that paints too much as black and white, places too much burden on the conscience of players, particularly of one faction, and/or throws away the very existence of those factions that provide a unique MMO experience.
The forsaken and Sylvanas depended on being objectively evil and subjectively vindicated.
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these two opposing truths can coexist.
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This can be applied to any character or faction.
Jaina if she had gone through with destroying Orgrimmar would be objectively been evil but subjectively justified, vindicated or whatever else you want to call it.
The best term I have for it is a valid motivation that convinces the audience.
Like John Wick killing like 200 people because one spoiled mob brat killed his dog.
Nobody watching that movie thought about “wow john chill, thats a disproportionate response”
My problem with Blizzard and this faction parity is that it isn’t a fair exchange and more often than not the Horde ends up with more.
Teldrassil and Undercity.
One is an entire zone and apparently most of its population.
The other is a single city.
Theramore and the Purge.
Again disproportionally different in scale and scope.
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You criticize “editiorializing” the events, but objectively, Jaina orders Vareesa to use her Silver Covenant (editorialized by me as thugs of the political authority) and the Alliance Champion (a member of a foreign military force, working with spies to shift the power of Dalaran to a potential ally) to imprison or kill all of the members of an ethnic group that had lived in neutral dalaran for 2 millennia. Vareesa orders all those who resisted this blanket incarceration in a magical medeival dungeon for demons pacified or slain (and makes clear she doesnt care which) she also orders those in the sewers killed. All of them. She orders their means of escape removed, trapping them in the city and suggests that you can just kill the dragonhawks. She also orders you to kill all shopkeepers who have not sided with the Silver Covenant. Not enemy combatants. Not even members of the Sunreavers. In the eyes of at least Vareesa, if you are not with them, you are against them. Jaina expresses that these were all the right decisions.
The purge was not simply rounding up the usual suspects for a line up. Can we be intellectually honest about that?
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She ordered the arrest of the Sunreavers.
They are a horde oriented, political group, we weren’t picking up random blood elf dalaran residents. We were picking up Sunreavers and yes all Sunreavers ARE blood elves but not every blood elf is a Sunreaver.
And this all happened because the Sunreaver group is responsible for
A) bombing theramore.
B) stealing the bell.
If these events did not happen or the sunreavers were not involved in anyway and there was still a purge then you would absolutely have a point.
This is like a criminal organization does something, police starts arresting its members and we decry the arrests as unjust.
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They were citizens of neutral dalaran, and ethnic Blood Elves, a race that had leadership considering defecting to the Alliance.
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Why do you call them neutral? They are a horde oriented group.
They are the silver convenant of the Horde.
These are not some random citizens. They are a Horde affiliated organization.
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Aethas Sunreaver, for whom the Sunreavers are named, was not a citizen of Quel’thalas but a citizen of neutral Dalaran. He was partly responsible for applying enough pressure to Lor’themar to offer what little human resources left in the blood elf population (at least partly mass executed in the dungeons of Dalaran after Kael’thas) to the coalition effort in Northrend. Lor’themar was rightly hesitant, because of Dalaran’s history of violent prejudice against the blood elves, but Aethas served Dalaran loyally in acting as an emmisary to the horde aligned Blood Elves. The Sunreavers were members of neutral Dalaran, who acted as a go between for members of the horde, serving in Northrend. They only fled to the Horde because of the Purge.
You keep insisting that all they did was arrest everyone… which is not much of a purge… even though that is objectively false. The shopkeepers we killed were not even Sunreavers.
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Since when?
Garrosh’s agents did those things, forget if it was an actual Sunreaver who was one of the agents or someone pretending to be one. But the Sunreavers as a group had nothing to do with those actions.
The worst you can hit the Sunreavers with is that Aethas found out about it while it was happening and was threatened into silence.
In the case of Theramore, if my memory of Tides of War is accurate, Thaelan Songweaver was a Sunreaver who Aethas sent to help defend Theramore who then betrayed Theramore. Still bugs me that the Alliance never got to kill that guy. He just vanished in the lead up to WoD.
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Thankfully, it is not this black and white, and that is what makes it so much better than Teldrassil.
Jaina siezes full control of Dalaran, by stripping a non-horde member of his power, and swears the Kirin Tor to the Alliance, because someone from within the city, presumably members of the Sunreavers, helped Garrosh obtain an ancient weapon that was previously in the hands of the alliance. It devolves into a pretty one sided civil war in Dalaran. I would make references to mostly peaceful protests.
The fact is, Jaina had decent reasons to do what she did, and it was still objectively a tragedy. The morally grey nature of the event is one of the things that makes it so much better. Your perspective and my perspective are supposed to exist in the same universe.
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Look the Sunreavers and the Silver Covenant are equivalent groups.
They are both affiliated with both their faction AND Dalaran, which is what gave Jaina the right to order the Silver Covenant about and to impose restrictions upon the Sunreavers.
Both groups were under her perview.
And I am stating this to only highlight that what Jaina did was within her legal right as the leader of the kirin tor to deal with an organization within her city which she viewed as traitorous at worst and questionable at best.
You make it seem like Jaina woke up one morning, decided to be racist and then went after the poor innocent Sunreavers who were just neutral and did nothing wrong.
That simply isn’t true.
The fault lies with Jaina, Garrosh and Aethas most of all. The Purge refers to the Sunreavers being systematically arrested and then removed from Dalaran rather than a mass slaughter. Did some Silver Covenants get too enthusiastic? Yes.
Is Jaina and Valeera responsible? Yes.
Did Jaina give a “Burn it” order like Sylvanas did? Absolutely not.
And so the two events are completely different from one another.
Aethas was a Horde member AND a member of the Kirin Tor.
He had to specifically form the Sunreavers and appeal to the Kirin Tor to regain admission to the city.
No problem from me but the simplest thing I could say is… Horde started it.
Horde always starts it. When Blizzard says there is a cycle of hate… Its entirely Horde’s fault! They are on their unicycle of hate going round and round while Blizzard struggles to name 3 characters that somehow did bad things to the Horde.
Ironically, Daelin being one of them and was unironically vindicated when every prediction he gave us in WC3 actually came to pass.
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Thus far, and to be clear it’s perfectly well written. I’ve my criticisms of Golden’s works but she’s never been bad at the actual act of story telling. I tend to just dislike the story.
But the question that hangs over this remains;
Why Now?
I said it before but it really feels like this was supposed to come out after Legion. To humanize her, recontextualize some of her crueler moments and generally just flesh our the character more before she takes on a more main spotlight protagonist role.
Having this all explained now is weird. Because the framing device is her awkwardly sitting down with Anduin, explaining her entire life story, in the Devil’s dungeon .
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The Kirin Tor sided with Aethas in Legion. They admitted that jaina was wrong. They gave Aethas back his position, and they let the Sunreavers (what ever is left) back into Dalaran. They still have not let jaina back.
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It simply isnt. But in a more complex way, it is.
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plus, for someone who loves Nathanos so much she can’t even remember that his hair is canonically auburn and not black. or maybe that was Golden just not giving a sh- to be canonically accurate when it comes to a character’s actually physical appearance. How did Danuser let that slide?
It seems like they didn’t even proofread Golden’s book that she had months extra to complete.
This novel is disappointing.