It has been bothering me for a while, why is he so important from a narrative point of view? Because I don’t really see it.
Why wasn’t he simply killed? I fail to understand why Sylvanas is so hell bent on keeping him alive and changing him. It’s not like she had any meaningful relationship with him, they barely started to interact in BfA, and she is acting as if she knew him for years, and was very persistent on showing him - of all people - her point of view, and offered him to join her. But Why?
If she didn’t hesitate to put the entire tree to torch after meeting her own reflection in Delaryn, why would Anduin made her hesistate?
Why is he so special? He doesn’t seem to have any ties to to death realm, he isn’t a super powerful Light user either - Velen would be much better candidate for that.
Nor he has any abilities other than goody-goody preaching.
Alliance wouldn’t lose much if he was killed - there is already a replacement in Turalyon to manage stuff. And his disappearance could make House of Nobles to return and flesh out Stormwind humans to be something more than Wrynn’s pawns.
So why again he is getting special treatment? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
If I was Sylvanas I wouldn’t even entertain myself with talking with him because he is just 18 yo boy, that doesn’t have experience matching hers, they don’t really have any ground to reasonably connect, he is overconfident in his beliefs and very preachy- so something that should’ve trigger her? Like “No boy that has still milk under his nose will lecture me!”
So I really don’t get it.
And for a Disclaimer - I really dislike Sylvanas, I am not defending her, but I just fail to see a point why Anduin is kept alive and shown to be the one to give her second thoughts.
Maybe I am missing something obvious, but for now it’s breaking my immersion a lot. Seriously Sylv, if you burned all the bridges behind, why do you care what some blondie kid has to say?
She probably did. She was present (via Alleria light induced flashback) to when Stormwind was re-built (when Anduin was a baby) because she was, when she was alive, an important representative from Quel’thalas in the Alliance before the Third War.
Her being on first name basis with Varian and their tentative warmness at the Broken Shore may have suggested that they were friends when she was alive. She did ask the Forsaken join the Alliance twice and was refused. It’s clear she still had a respect for the Alliance post death.
She trusted Varian. If you read Before the Storm she has a lot of thoughts on Anduin mostly about he gets under her skin, largely because he reminds her of who she was when she was alive. His naivety matches hers. The Legion story trailer sets up how Varian is learning through his son to trust the Horde, that is framed with Sylvanas as the centerpiece. Anduin has a long history of trying to have empathy for so called Horde villians such as Garrosh. He want’s a Horde pet project and Sylvanas may be that project. Her reminds Sylvanas of herself and that might be his way in.
Part of what makes this new dynamic interesting in Shadowlands is how in some ways her desire to change him into something more like herself is about burying the fact that he mirrors her in a lot of ways and admitting that she’s still that “fool” she saw herself as at the end of the day is the type of character growth that could redeem her.
I didn’t know that she knew Varian, ok that’s fair.
But she still had no chance to know Anduin, because he was born around the time she died/ was undead already.
So the only reason why she would know him is because he is son of someone she knew.
And even then - why bother with him? He is Varian’s son, but he is not Varian. If she is so devoid of emotions to the point she was plotting to kill her own sisters, and burned entire remaining population in Teldrassil after meeting her own reflection which entire purpose was to remind her of her younger days, when she was naive and devoted to the right cause, why stopping at him?
My guess is that Anduin is basically Sylvanas’s ideological opposite. Just killing or enslaving him won’t prove a point; if she can convince HIM of all people, then it reinforces that her point of view is the correct one.
Plenty of people were opposite to her in ideology, she didn’t hesistate to kill Saurfang, she was planning to kill her own sisters and she didn’t have a problem to kill Delaryn and put her through the same tornment that she went through.
You’d imagine that Delaryn would hold a much more personal weight than Anduin does.
But Let’s assume that he does join her - what gain is in there if literally everyone she met on Azeroth will claim that she is wrong and will attempt to kill her and Anduin.
She did sway Saurfang though, for a short time. But I dunno, trying to pin down Sylvanas’s characterization is like trying to pin the tail on the donkey laid out on a spinning Wheel of Fortune wheel. Are her sisters and Delaryn truly her opposites in a “peace and trust can work” sort of thing, though? Just being against who she is or what she’s done isn’t quite enough, in my head. They’d also have to be fully on the other end of whatever Sylvanas believes in. As far as I know, Anduin’s the only recurring name that actually does that, to a rather annoying degree.
Ignoring the fact that this thread will quickly devolve into Andiun whinging, I can explain a bit.
In terms of the narrative, Anduin has had the most consistent character arc of any character in Warcraft since Cataclysm. Pay attention to the books and unless the book is explicitly about someone else, he’s likely getting an arc in it. Fast forward to Legion and he was supposed to get an actual in game story arc but that was scrapped for reasons I suspect are related to stupidity. (This is also likely the same time they cut Sylvanas’ Legion arc, again I suspect for reasons connected to stupidity.)
Now as to why he’s so important to Sylvanas’ plan, that’s a question we likely won’t get until after the next patch where we see if Sylvanas did run him through not quite power slide style that did her in. The previous cinematic makes it clear that Sylvanas seems to really want to break him to justify to herself everything she’s done was alright because if she can break this good little egg, then it proves that everything she’s been doing is fine because anyone can be broken by this terrible universe they live in.
Why would she do that though? She already crossed plenty of lines? Why would she need his opinion to justify herself? A guy that is so clueless and naive on so many subjects?
This kind of reasoning just shows how emotionally unstable elves are and that they are stuck in teenagers mentality.
As for the first paragraph. He has been developed, yes but each character is meant to make sense to appear in certain circumstances.
I just believe Vol’Jin would be so much better choice for someone to focus on, and considering that his BfA questline was intro to SL, and he has strong connection with death realm already, and his story is greatly intervined with all what is going on in SL.
But they chose Anduin instead where he doesn’t make any sense in current setting.
What use would Jailer have of Him?
It was Vol’Jin who was obstacle to remove.
Maybe they finally decided just making Sylvanas a mustache twirling 8D Chess playing villain was boring and they wanted to bring her back down to earth a bit, and her having even a little bit of doubt is their method of doing so?
And she technically doesn’t need his opinion. She just needs him to break under it all like she did so she can tell herself “See, I was right.”
But she didn’t kill her sisters. she still had humanity left. That’s the whole point.
Anduin is the perfect mirror to reflect back to her her humanity. He has empathy. not many characters on either side of the Horde and Alliance conflict have the capacity to have empathy for Sylvanas, Anduin does.
There is no gain in keeping him alive, and yet she hesitates and part of that is a narrative choice that parallels Arthas. Arthas was faced with a vision of himself as a young boy and Arthas killed that boy as symbolism of him killing his own humanity, “Killing hope” and crossing the point where he couldn’t be redeemed. They purposefully created the same thing with Sylvanas and Anduin. If she kills him, that’s it, she’s past the point of redemption like Arthas was. But if she doesn’t she can still be redeemed.
The thing with Sylvanas is that we keep getting caught up in her mystery that we can’t take a step back and actually think about what she is doing. Anduin has always been a ray of hope for the Alliance lore-wise (despite everyone saying he’s a pansy). Sylvanas’s goal is to destroy hope. She was stripped of everything she loved, and she gave up hope of being able to return to her life when the Alliance turned her away because she was Undead. Now, she wants to kill hope in general. Her quote from the Warbringer’s cinematic “Can’t I?” in response to the dying night elf supports this. She continuously makes actions to try and kill hope. One is the burning of Teldrassil. She wanted the night elves to lose all hope because Elune, their God, did not save them while she committed genocide on them. Then, she kidnapped important leaders of the Alliance and Horde to try and demoralize their efforts. To kill hope. Now, she has Anduin, someone so devout in their beliefs in the Light, and she intends to show us that Anduin, a beacon of hope for the Alliance after the death of Varian, can be killed. She is killing hope. I hope this helps!
Edit: She is making a separate effort to make him come to her side by his own will to show that hope is going to be killed anyways. If he comes by his own will, that is an even bigger step in killing hope, rather than forcing him to whether he wants to or not. That is most likely why she is waiting.
Is he? I thought that he said that Sylvanas is beyond any hope. And that while Horde is a faction that can redeem itself Sylvanas isn’t.
Wouldn’t killing hope be easier if she killed him and sent his dead body to Alliance?
I don’t believe it would be neuance at all. It’s just pure stupidity on her part that shows that she never had a plan to begin with if she needs validation from Anduin, who isn’t tested or experienced through life like other characters did. But then we’re talking about a character who thinks that Jailer will bring a better system than the one that currently is.
She doesn’t need validation from Anduin. The Jailer wants him as a weapon and he’s ordered Sylvanas to make that happen, but she wants Anduin to choose this path because she wasn’t given a choice. It’s not ‘going in without a plan.’ she had a plan, The jailer’s plan, and up until this moment she had faith in herself to be able to do what she believed needed to be done but that requires doing to Andiun what Arthas did to her and she can’t muscle past doing that apparently.
You would think it would be as easy as killing Anduin to kill hope, she had that same idea when she tried to kill Malfurian to kill the Night Elves hope but then Delaryn proved that even if she killed all of them she couldn’t kill the spirit if hope, that’s a huge Battle for Azeroth plot. Would killing Anduin break the Alliance’s hope? probably not, they would mourn and find a new King. It’s not that easy.
as long as the spirit of hope exists, redemption is available to everyone. There’s a speech by Alexstrasza in the trial of Garrosh that says this exact thing. “no living thing is unworthy of redemption, it can choose light or darkness as long as it doesn’t choose darkness to the point where it threatens all life.” That’s the only moral framework blizzard has in it’s universe. Unless you are like the Jailer and you threaten all life, then you are a being capable of redemption. That’s the only moral argument one needs in this universe. Sylvanas is standing at that threshold with Anduin as the only thing stopping her from crossing it.
Technically, it’s true Velen would be just as good as Anduin but breaking Anduin is personal. The Jailor just needs a powerful weapon (supposedly of the light) but it was Sylvanas’ choice of who and if she can break someone like Anduin, it would mean more to her then breaking Velen.
Actually Anduin was born much earlier, shortly before Arthas became a Paladin because Arthas visited Stormwind at that time.
