This seems to be the understandable end-result of basing an entire playable race on a gimmick.
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If they had less of a focus on Syl and more emphasis on free will, our developing past blight happy fiends they would have been better prepared as a race for this expac with Syl gone.
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Having free will doesn’t make them special. Every playable race has free will. In the case of the Forsaken the only thing that makes it unique is in relation to the Scourge, meaning you’d just be kicking the can down the road until the Scourge wasn’t a major thing anymore.
Um … How does that help them reproduce? They obviously won’t be given a Valkyr for this.
I do not know. Something is still wrong. Corruption susceptibility? That is, we do not allow others to engage in necromancy, but our ranks are replenishing.
Well it’s an important aspect compared to the undead of the scourge, it’s what differentiates them from the mindless undead so it having more prevalence in their culture would have been good.
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I think the idea is that free will is supposed to mean more to the forsaken because a lot of them went through that period of total mind domination due to being former scourge. Getting back that control would / should feel a lot more valuable than if someone never lost it to begin with.
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Sylvanas redemption confirmed? I must have missed that memo…
And Sylvanas is no longer their leader. She is a former one, sure. But the current lead is Lilian with Calia advising her. So her being a huge villain in this expansion doesn’t ultimately do much storywise for the forsaken.
Not necessarily. It’s not like nobody knew how the Scourge operated; they knew that they operated by taking over people in some way and making them behave in a way that suits the Scourge. “Stolen lives” as Bolvar called it at the Wrathgate.
The fact that everyone values free will is one of the things that made the Scourge threat so insidious.
edit: to say nothing of the fact that the jury is still out as far as how much awareness is retained when someone is added to the Scourge. Most of them are called “mindless” which implies a lack of awareness. Awareness usually seemed to be reserved for high ranking generals like Death Knights or for people that Arthas had it in for like Sylvanas.
But the remaining living people didn’t lose that free will themselves. Having first hand experience of going through it is going to be more impactful, in my opinion.
I dunno. Some might argue that seeing friends and loved ones go through something horrible can be more agonizing than going through something horrible yourself.
It’s why truly evil villains are the types to go after the heroes by way of their families or companions. (Like, say, Sylvanas lol)
I’m not saying it couldn’t be traumatic for the survivors. I still think it’s worse to be the most intimately affected, though.
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I have to agree with Sarm, losing your free will and being forced to do awful awful things is a terrible thing to endure.
Assuming they had awareness while they were doing it, which we don’t know.
That being said, this conception of the Forsaken becomes considerably more difficult to fit in with the Horde. If they are completely free willed and are defined by their former lives they have no reason to be Horde. Even if you go with a “rejected by the living” trope they’d still more likely be neutral.
“They are super upset and traumatized by all the bad things that they were forced to do” has always rang hollow in light of all the things that they continued to do after regaining free will.
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Incorrect.
Incorrect.
Convert the Undercity into a Necropolis and move to Theramore.
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Brotherhood of rejects, more or less. People were justifiably terrified of the undead due to how recent those events were, and were mostly rejected by living humans. The way I see it, if you’re having your humanity denied and being labeled a monster because of your appearance, then your only hope is finding refuge with other monsters.
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This would require a rewrite of the Forsaken all the way back to their introduction in Warcraft 3. Them not being rejected by Garithos of all people really makes the whole “rejected by the living” narrative all the more dubious.
Maybe they could have been rejected by Garithos, making him 2 for 2 in the “ruining things for the Alliance” department.
Lots of stuff about the story are stupid, but that doesn’t make them noncanon. Doesn’t one of the Chronicles books summarize how they allegedly tried to reach out to the alliance to no avail, and only got into the horde through the tauren later?
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Sylvanas sent emissaries to Stormwind and didn’t hear from them again, so she assumed they were rejected even though we don’t actually know that, especially given other examples of the Alliance not rejecting the Forsaken (like at Lordamere Internment Camp and ofc Garithos himself). Why she thought this was a good idea after her actions in TFT is beyond me.
Given how far away from the Undercity she’d have to send them I think it’s probably more likely they just got killed by the Scourge or the Scarlets.
Come to think of it, a better explanation would probably be that the Forsaken didn’t realize the political distinction between the Scarlet Crusade and the Alliance and just assumed that they were the same organization when in fact the Scarlets hadn’t been Alliance affiliated since Alexandros was killed.
Even the Scarlet Crusade emissaries in Stormwind and Desolace apparently were unaware of the changed affliations of the Scarlet Crusade at the time of Vanilla so it would easily be believable that the Forsaken wouldn’t be aware either.
I suppose it’d partially explain it if it was dreadlord machinations between Balnazzar and Varimathras to maintain hatred and prevent reconciliation, but unless the game comes out and says something explicit along those lines, it’s nothing better than a “hey this could have worked.” And I don’t think WoW has any reason to revisit those characters again.
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