Yes, they thought that an undead shaman teaching Thrall how to be a shaman again would energize the Horde fanbase, but changed their mind to make Thrall a warrior in SL, so they just killed Zelling off.
No, I think Zelling was just there to move the plot where he did in KT, and also move Lillian’s plot. I don’t think he was ever meant to be that important, and I was glad when Nathanos killed him. I don’t think it was some contrived plot to turn Sylvanas fans against her, and if it was, they did a really bad job.
I’ll never understand how the fate of the Desolate Council wasn’t enough for that for any fans of the Forsaken who actually understood them. That was the greatest display of individuality and desire for freedom they’d had since Sylvanas took over and she stamped it out completely betraying their own ideology. They should have been pissed at her from then onwards.
I don’t play Forsaken so I make no speculation about why, but the Desolate Council seemed to be (overall) more popular with Alliance players than with Forsaken players.
Sometimes it comes off like Forsaken fans have sipped the same Kool-Aid as the actual Forsaken had in universe. That they’re too blinded by boobs to care about anything else.
My random guess would be alliance partisan players already thought the worst of Sylvanas before then, while forsaken partisan players were hoping “please stop ruining this character we liked”.
Not really surprising is it? Forsaken who want to rejoin their living families in the alliance or just lay down and die is hardly the concept most fans of the race subscribed to.
I think you’ve come into what was an otherwise good and productive discussion and started slinging veiled and not-so-veiled insults. Why would you want to derail what was a good discussion with more of the same partisan mudslinging?
More to the point, I don’t believe it’s hard to understand that players don’t actually want to be turned against their faction’s characters and so will resist attempts to do so.
Well I mean, you’re not wrong. What does Sylvanas have to do to be established as bad for her people? She literally killed a budding attempt at democracy. Something Forsaken should, theoretically anyway, highly favour given their free will and freedom bent. I’m not misunderstanding them am I?
I know I’m sounding a little snippy by hyper-focusing on this line, but I feel like this is the problem forsaken fans have with Blizzard. Why did the race and faction leader need to be established as bad to her own fans? That’s going to feel rotten, no matter what they did with Sylvanas.
Edit: lmao, the speed at which these three likes came in actually make me feel self-conscious about looking like part of a forum posse.
Edit: And a 4th before I finished typing the edit! Oof.
People aren’t approaching this story with some kind of critical, geopolitical, analytical mindset. People want to see their favorite faction look cool and enjoy playing it. Thus, being told by the story that they should now hate their leader is not going to be a winning formula pretty much no matter what.
It’s personal opinion here but having a detestable leader could work. The Forsaken could get their moment where they take her down like Caesar for betraying them all.
I think it’s very hard to read Zelling’s story as ending the way it did if you look at it from the start. His story is clearly going in the direction of him wanting to protect his family, regret that he is unable to do so as he’s dying, then willing to pay a considerable price to be able to do so: undeath. Even if his family no longer accepts him, he makes an enormous personal sacrifice to keep helping them, a poignant and very human story.
Then he’s killed to make a political point after he suddenly turns revolutionary in the space of maybe three quests? It absolutely reads like him being killed off because the story his character was originally meant to tell was no longer the story they wanted to write.
That’s arguably a problem stemming from giving her vaguely deniable villainous actions through the entirety of WoW. People like me see her as always having been bad and this just being the logical conclusion, others think it was out of left field and accept the explanations for her actions so they see it as character derailment.
And to follow up on this point, if this was the angle Blizzard wanted to go with the character, then I think more of an effort should have been made to keep her villainy “in-house”, so to speak. The whole Gilneas nonsense was bad enough, but combining that with Teldrassil was so over-the-top that now people rightly feel like the alliance is the one who deserves a Sylvanas kill over the faction and people she betrayed. From my perspective, it feels like they don’t get to “own” their own problem to solve anymore.
Honestly not a big lost as I prefer Blizzard take the rooster of the core races and give some development rather than introduce new gimmick character with 5 mins of spotlight before throwing it to the warp.
Forsaken doesn’t need more characters but actual focus on the few they’ve and their own story away from the Horde