I don’t agree. It might be a good arc for a character in a book or a movie, but not for a faction leader (or even a racial leader) in an MMO, where real people have the storyline of their playable characters tied to her.
I submit that you think it’s fine because, as an Alliance player, you’re looking at it from a distance–the equivalent of seeing her as a book or movie character.
If Blizzard wants us to do that, they’re doing a TERRIBLE job of explaining to us that that’s what the Horde is.
Eh, that’s not really an Alliance perspective. This version of Sylvana’s means that if she gets her way, everyone dies. Her actions directly effect the Alliance, and the Alliance player. She moves both stories.
The Horde story is a wild roller coaster of “right and wrong”, and the Alliance story is literally “how best not to die.”
Maybe I didn’t phrase it quite right; you don’t really have investment in whether she’s a good leader or a bad one. How her character develops isn’t really important until and unless it turns out to be something that affects the Alliance.
Actually, even then I would argue we would, in the same way that it would impact the Horde if Anduin were manipulated by Genn, if he were still a Warmonger.
Her actions, her choices (I know, writers, but bear with me) impacted the the entire tone of BfA. She made it a War of extinction (or about as close as the two faction system will let her).
But what if it were opposite?
What if Genn convinced Anduin in BtS that the Horde could never be trusted, that they betrayed his father, and that war with the Horde was inevitable? What if he convinced Anduin that Horde would use Azerite only for harm, and that they needed to strike first?
Now the roles reverse. The Alliance attacks Lordaeron, butchers the civilians and reduces the city to Ash using either Azerite weaponry or the Vindicaar.
The Horde retaliates and attacks Teldrassil, and as they make it to the tree and into Darnassus. However, when they enter Darnassus, they find nothing. Arriving in the Temple of Elune, they find it rigged to explode with Azerite, Genn standing smugly. He mutters a cryptic “The Fallen Heroes of the Alliance send their regards” and is teleported out via Vindicaar teleporter, and it fires it’s cannon once again, igniting the Azerite. The Horde leaders are teleported to safety at the last moment.
In that scenario, every action of Genn Greymane would impact both the Horde and Alliance players. He would have been the one to set everything in motion, just as Sylvanas has.
What makes BFA so bad is its redundant.
If the “Horde Civil War/Soul-searching” plot hadn’t concluded a single expansion prior to Sylvanas being made Warchief, this could have possibly been tolerable. (There’d have been much better storylines to develop, but BFA would have been at least been unique if not for the Garrosh plot.)
Instead we got a single expansion without being villain-batted before Blizzard made one of the most evil characters on the roster into the next Warchief - suggesting the Horde was going to get villain-batted again, which wound up happening. Cata-MoP was the worst Horde story so far, and we’re now experiencing it again.
It doesn’t matter if they want to shoehorn in a plot twist like “Sylvanas was mind-controlled the whole time” or “Sylvanas’ plan was the only way to save the planet.” The Horde PCs, the Horde leadership, and the Horde military are complicit in actual acts of genocide and the targeted murder of civilians and children. For 10 months, we’ve been living in a story that’s destroyed the moral fiber and identity of the Horde.
This faction was supposed to be different than the rest of the fantasy franchises that treat monstrous races as irredeemably evil or stupid. The Horde races are supposed to have the same capacity for thought and emotion as the rest of the Tolkien/“Hero Races” that make up the Alliance. There’s supposed to be moral parity and ambiguity between the factions. Instead, we have the morally-pristine Alliance defending themselves from the masses of rampaging baby-burners and their Queen’s canonized intention to kill and enslave entire civilizations.
People can’t just forget that kind of experience because Blizzard wants to 180 the Horde into being “good again” or whatever the hell they plan to do.
They are actually doing a pretty good job. Sylvannus is hated because of her evils. She is the faction leader, thus her evils are on behalf of the horde.
But beyond that, parallels between her and Garrosh are grossly exaggerated. Her ambitions more closely shadow Ner’zhul’s, in terms of grandiosity in scope and scale. It is not as if what she is doing is unprecedented for a warchief, especially when taking into consideration the more prominant of horde evillains in cho’gall and gul’dan.
The Garrosh arc was not handled as delicates as it should have been, but it fundamentally worked. It worked because Thrall existed.
Garrosh was never the sole Orcish racial leader. He was a representative of the more radical and problematic side of their psyche. Thrall, meanwhile, represented the more reasonable side. The clash between these two figures had weight and meaning, and Thrall’s defeat of Garrosh (should have) represented the triumph of their bright future over their dark past.
Of course, WoW’s writers have completely failed to capitalize on this, because they still fundamentally view Orcs as antagonists in this story… at least until they can find a race that they view as even more antagonistic.
The problem with the BfA story is that Sylvanas is the entirety of the Forsaken. She is their best and worst qualities - her writing has been inconsistent enough to legitimately represent both.
Since BfA they’ve completely discarded her better side, of course, and doubled down on her worse side. She’s become “the Garrosh,” essentially, but Blizzard has failed to provide “the Thrall.”
Which leaves us grasping for “the Thrall” from a bevy of terrible options. Voss? She represents the values well enough, but they had to twist her character backwards to get her to that point, and she’s not a leader. Nathanos? He’s still in Sylvanas’s pocket. Calia? just kill me.
Of course, the most likely real answer, the dark and terrible truth, is that in Blizzard’s mind “the Thrall” is Saurfang. They’ve completely discarded the dignity of an individual race in favor of the “united Horde” narrative, and now the Forsaken’s recovery is going to be something that’s imposed on them by a damned Orc.
No–if they want us to embrace being the bad guys, then they need to stop selling the Horde as “guardians of freedom and hope.” They need to be consistent with their messaging in all their publicity.
This is an interesting thought. What’s particularly interesting is that you could make a case that Sylvanas was once “the Thrall” of the Forsaken, while Putress was “the Garrosh.” That’s one reason why it’s jarring (for some) to see her being switched over to being “the Garrosh.”
did he really say Wrathgate was her orders?
Wasnt that a coup against her?
Well, Alex implied it and then there was this interview where Danuser backed away from that with a mind-numbing dose of ‘teehee, who knows? wait and see’. Which probably translates to ‘Sylvanas is going to have been behind it, so Saurfang can have more pathos for his orcpain about her taking away his son’.
Though, admittedly, that did make recently creating a new Undead and listening to this intro again kind of unintentionally/painfully funny, I guess.
They explained his views in his leader short story.
Then why have the Horde rebel against their leader, while the Alliance spares the them with the hope of peace?
Which is going to make things even more hilariously silly when we have to remind him that Dranosh died before the Blight even hit the ground.
Or did he???
Yes, and it’s twice as bad in hindsight since Blizzard didn’t think they did a good job with it and so are repeating the storyline beat-for-beat in BfA. Garrosh died for nothing.
Garry was never hit with a villain bat. He was made out of villain wood. His first acts a character were whining, and then later trying to kill Thrall because Thrall wanted to be deliberate in his approach into Northrend, use strategy, and practice diplomacy when dealing with the Alliance.
Bad guys do bad things. News at 11. Sylvanas was never good either. This is a repeat of Garrosh, Fandral, Benedictus, Deathwing, the Burning Legion, etc in that bad guys are gonna do bad things.
I get the gist of what you’re trying to say, Sereven, but it’s weird that you use Garrosh’s whining in TBC as a villain trait.
Its weird that you would take that as me saying it’s a villain trait and not just me listing the first two things he does, with one of them being outright stupidity/villainy and the other being, well, whining. When your character’s introduction is whining and villainy, maybe your take being “He’s a good boi who means well” has zero grounding in reality.
And you know dang well, Sarm, if I said his first “act” as a character was trying to kill thrall, I’d get another pedantic response just as pointlessly tangential as yours telling me “Um, acktchually, he whined first”
Personally I would have gone with him sending off the horde player on a mission he wanted you to fail at the start of WotLK while he’s busy salivating at the thought of ambushing the alliance as his first bad act, but whatever.
Cool yeah. Add that. I wasn’t composing a comprehensive list. I just said the first things he did and they happened to range from neutral to villainy all on their own. Without me stacking the list. That’s it.
Well I said this in another thread but we should’ve killed Sylvanas back then instead of Garrosh. She is basically the Lich King all over again!