My thoughts exactly.
People keep ignoring what’s right in front of them and prefer to make up theories that fly in the face of facts just so they can beat the horse.
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I am no literary scholar, but I recall self realization in this context is generally a step toward redemption.
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Very well then. Let’s remove any pretense at speculation (which is actually fun) and stick to the ‘disjecta membra’ of the narrative.
What we have stinks like week old cod.
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The writer already “redeemed” Sylvanas by splitting the blame.
There are 2 beings, 1 banshee queen and the other one is ranger-general. Ranger-general will walk away free and all the blames will be put on the banshee queen and Zovaal.
That is why on PTR, Sylvanas is free with full set of new armor and weapon and hangs out with the guys, like nothing happened.
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The REALLY bad part is that the Sylvanas redemption arc has been underway since July 19th, 2016 when Legion’s prepatch launched… From then to now we’ve all been on the Sylvanas wagon careening down the highway of player disappointment with no off ramps.
This terrible story actually took A WHOLE FIVE YEARS TO TELL… and it’s not even over yet.
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It feels like that writing game where you write a line and pass it to the next person who writes a line, then you fold over the 1st one and a third person writes a line, and so on…
Either that or they have series of jars with plot points and characters and they pull them out at random and try to force them into a story.
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i’m sorry for writing a bad story. or imagining it at least.
Isn’t this more like real life? With folks like stalin only vilified openly post humously.
While I can’t really critique Danuser for SOME things. Like people giving him crap for his little rp responses as characters. ( A lot of creative folks are guilty of doing that. It’s a fun hobby. Heck I do it ) I do have some issues.
He reminds me a LOT of a dungeon master in DnD that absolutely railroads the party. I’m going with DnD as a comparison here since if I’m not mistaken, warcraft was from a dnd game ( If I’m wrong someone please explain it, I don’t mind )
Normally in a good dnd game, the DM is playing with the party. Working together to tell a story. Danuser on the other hand wants it all his way or the highway. Where his mary sue npcs are just SO GOOD according to them when they are so not. This is also similar to when a dungeon master in a fight is trying to absolutely DESTROY you rather than make it fun or compelling. I suppose another comparison could be kinda when a game is trying to emulate Dark Souls difficulty or Bloodborne, without remembering those strong emotional beats with the music and how satisfying a victory feels. ( Ludwig in Bloodborne is still my fav video game fight period because it nails the hype )
Apologies I’m rambling just trying to describe how I feel with his “writing”. If this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Oops.
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Nope, that never happened, there was no blame splitting. There are no ‘two beings’. Watch the cinematic again, then watch it again and again until it sinks in.
Yes, initially when Uther looks into her mind, there are two beings. There is the Ranger General, and there’s the Banshee, and both refuse to accept the other. That division is what is keeping Sylvanas from waking. However, then Uther brings Sylvanas into his memories, and speaks to her there and tells her the truth. That truth being that the Ranger General and the Banshee are one in the same.
Sylvanas accepts this, she accepts that the banshee and her are one in the same. That’s why she wakes up at the end of the cinematic. She has accepted that she is the banshee, and that she must face the consequences for her actions.
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It does not matter if She accepts it. The story going forward is about Banshee doing all those atrocities and not the Ranger-general. She was being mind controlled, the story specifically establishes this to make sure the ranger-general can have a get away free card.
If you cannot see this you are the one that needs to watch the cinematic over and over again. That is the whole point of the Uther cinematic.
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Nope, that’s not how it works.
Absolutely no one wants to listen to her or trust her even after she wakes up. No one is seeing ‘ranger general Sylvanas’ as being different from the banshee. Absolutely no one.
As far as every major NPC is concerned, they’re one in the same.
And no, there was no mind-control involved at all. There is only one period in Sylvanas’s life when she’s been under the control of another, and that was when she was under the domination of the Lich King.
Indeed.
People seem to think that getting of free and ‘being one of the lads again’ is redemption, but there are levels to redemption.
She’s going to get martyr’d IMHO and go out as the savior of the universe, or very close to it. Which is disgusting and far more than she deserves, and is itself a form of redemption for the character
Sylvanas did nothing wrong.
I mean they kinda have to shoe horn in a redemption arc after they lied about not making a horde leader the bad guy again after Garrosh.
I actually loved BfA’s story (and the expansion overall). 
I have rarely felt as invested as I was rooting for Saurfang to win the civil war, and Jaina’s story Alliance side was an amazing closing arc for what she’s been through.
I suppose, though, that it’s true; Sylvanas was a casualty of BfA’s story.
This is part of the bad writing, as it was a pretty significant retcon.
Sylvanas was not responsible for the Wrathgate incident back in Wrath. It would have made absolutely no sense for her to have done so.
Her culpability in the Wrathgate was established by a heavy-handed statement made after the Burning of Teldrassil to justify her as the sort of character who would totally just do a genocide.
You sure about that?
The Blight was being developed under the command of Sylvanas and she was hell bent on getting revenge against Arthas for what he did to her. Many of the Forsaken had similar feelings, since they were only in that state because of him.
So she orders the Wrathgate to happen, and had Arthas been killed it would have been a ‘great success’. She could have justified her actions by saying: “Yeah, I did that, and we lost some soldiers, but the Lich King is dead! We’ve won!”
But he didn’t die, so she quickly pinned the blame for the Wrathgate on two patsies, Putress and Varimathras, the latter of whom started summoning demons when he realized that Sylvanas stabbed him in the back. The coup was probably legitimate, but committing an atrocity and then lying about it/trying to pin the blame on someone else? That’s totally her speed. She literally does that with Teldrassil, pinning the blame for the tree burning on Saurfang for his failure to follow orders.
I actually think all the Sylvannas developments are okay writing - not something I agree with - but that doesn’t make it bad.
However, the whole overarching plot of the shadowlands IS bad writing, probably the worst WoW has ever seen. We STILL have no details about the jailers overarching ambitions. Both plot and character development for characters introduced in BfA and especially Shadowlands have been terrible. One of the best (worst) examples of terrible plot and character development is throwing Pelagos into the role of arbiter when we don’t know very much of anything about him.
It’s been getting worse since Cataclysm.
I think it bottomed out in BfA and can’t get any worse. Remember Azshara and her little talking-head popups in Nazjatar? She’s supposed to be this ruthless, cunning, seductive queen and all she does is say “My army is infinite you will never defeat me!” like 47 times in 23 different ways.
Which is exactly what N’zoth said to you.
Which is exactly what the Jailer says to you.
Which is exactly what Diablo said to you in Diablo 3.
At some point, Blizzard was capable of nuance and character depth. That point is long gone.
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