Sylvanas was an elf, descended originally from dark trolls. Unlike humans, gnomes or dwarves, not in origin Titan-forged constructs afflicted by the Curse of Flesh.
That said, I still have no idea what she was trying to do. My roleplay explanation since Teldrassil has been, and remains, “She’s clearly insane and out of control, and must be stopped.”
Yeah. Again, I like a lot of the ideas there and I still like the character. I just don’t like the execution. And most of the reactions to this character I think are due to not enough clarity in the actual game about, or just the story being way too spread apart on an irl timeline.
Sylvanas told us what she wanted in 6 words: “I will set you all free.”
If people still pretend not to understand that, I don’t know what to say.
Between “You just must think she’s sexy!!!” and “zombie woman bad” I just think people are throwing tantrums rather than paying attention to what’s actually there.
But I don’t blame people for feeling confused considering how much of these stories get told in books and stories outside of the game.
Sure, not defending the storytelling here.
And I guess that the unbelievable convolutions of some Youtube “lore experts” have not helped, either.
If you lay out the entirety of sylvanas’s story so far as a character she’s conceptually fine. It just all happens so slowly at a snail’s pace across multiple expansions that even people who would like this character end up wanting to shake her.
And I thin that’s in part due to some of the staff wanting to write a satisfying arc for the character and some just wanting her to be a flat character who lives in the basement. We kind of finally saw who won the tug of war here.
Well you see…she was a nobleman’s daughter who got tasty assignments in the military. She didn’t do crap assignments.
So…she never got brig duty. where the wise warden would explain in orientation the ways of the brig.
lesson 1. no is guilty here. just ask them…they were all innocent. Every single one /sarcasm.
lesson 2. the ones who could be innocent (or truly penitent of their crimes)…are our best behaved prisoners. they don’t plan to change the world. they don’t scheme. they ride out their time the best they can being good. They want to shoot for more points at next parole board review.
Uh she was freeing us from the evil patriarchy of toxic masculunity that is Arthas DUH
Steve Danuser can then continue to simp for her in his Nathanos form.
The forsaken has been reduced to some weird hive mind Kerrigan starcraft rip off that can only function with a queen they can simp for like Calia Menethil now.
You just have to accept the writing is fan fiction trash that undid 20 years of lore
Okay but in fairness when does wow ever focus on characters who aren’t nobility or affluent to some extent as their main recurring cast? 
This is funny and true.
This has intense “the all female ghostbusters movie and the last jedi is destroying western civilization” energy.
Tbh, the snail pace is a problem of the MMO genre, more than WoW specific.
FF14 is lethargic. GW2 is lethargic. RIFT was lethargic. Age of Conan was ultra lethargic.
A MMO is simply not a good way to tell a story.
It’s like LOTR were told in a hundred instalments, without any means to speed up the pace. “Gollum who? You mean that critter from 46 episodes ago?”
Why nobility has to be overthrown and the peasants unite and run the show lol.
They haven’t been doing a very good job , the nobles. time to let those who earned their jobs take lead. Mommy and daddy getting it on should not be a basis for power.
HAHAHA I will NEVER forgive what Disney did to Luke Skywalker, basically a man who found the good in his father a sith lord and turned him from the darkside but then becomes the man willing to murder a student in their sleep because they may of had dark side tendancies…
And the female ghostbusters was just poorly written. They need to really vet these writers and directors for talent first and politic beliefs second be it on whatever side of spectrum.
Medieval times were hard times. xD
#defiasbrotherhooddidnothingwrong
One reason Vanessa Van Cleef, after a rough beginning, is now one of my best friends. 
The Last Jedi did not destroy western civilisation, sure.
But the demise of western civilisation has made The Last Jedi possible.
How’s she setting us free by sending us to the Maw? Isn’t that even worse and more deterministic than what the Shadowlands would be without the Jailer?
For instance, the souls of Bastion, with the Jailer’s influence removed that Syvlanas had no part in remedying, can now choose to be themselves.
You know the weird thing is the Jailer’s plan kind of reminds me of a more murdery version of the Prothean’s plan from Mass Effect 3 that Javik was a part of. Ride out the Reapers in secret with one million people, wake up after the Reapers go home to sober up, rebuild the Empire and go around conscripting literally every race that has evolved to the stage of repeating firearms and toilets, research every possible way of killing things, build armies and navies. Rinse repeat for 50,000 years until the next Harvest.
The Jailer, stoking the fires of every conflict on Azeroth (allegedly) and funneling all souls from the dead of those conflicts to him in the maw is just the more Snidely Whiplash version as opposed to the Prothean’s banality of evil version.
It’s mostly a pretty selfish “I will sacrifice the few to save the many” because she believed that remaking reality would just erase the maw and how the whole universe worked. Though maybe she believed she could bring back those souls when reality was unmade. That part isn’t super clear.
That sounds like speculation and not something that was in the story that we all missed.