INHALES
I do not like that woman Calia,
I do not like her holy paraphernalia,
I do not like her during Gilneas retaken,
I do not like her helping the Forsaken,
I do not like her new bizarre title,
I do not think her participation is vital,
I do not like her odd childish wonder,
Seeking her out was Lillian’s biggest blunder,
The Themes of the Forsaken her presence bends and warps,
That woman Calia, needs to eat a freakin’ corpse.
really apt way to put it.
i have seen some people who like calia because they feel she represents the lordaeronian component of the forsaken, though that wouldn’t be a new development or novel point of emphasis for her character.
Even that was basically a complete waste of a potentially cool mythological reference (they’re a common ghost archetype) in favor of what seemed like a weird fantasy monarchism plot no one wanted until they started walking it back.
I also know another great component to represent the lordaeronian forsaken.
The Forsaken that died in lordaeron.
Truly a wild concept.
I’d like for the Blizzard Creative Lead who thought that replacing the Seething Goth Elf Queen of Tim Burton’s Neitherworld with a Lite-bright sunday-school teacher with all the menace of a newborn puppy to step forward and explain themselves.
I mean, Calia has strong angel-adjacent vibes. She wouldn’t look out of place standing over the Nativity Scene.
So why did you think she’d look good standing next to Warcraft’s Beetlejuice, and that fans of that aesthetic would see your intentions and buy in?
I’m sure it’d go something along the lines of…
“Well, we felt it was important that the Menethil name remain tied to the Forsaken, so Calia being alive was never going to be a permanent state once she was reintroduced to the story. We knew as BFA closed that the faction war would be over once and for all, and that we needed characters that’d guide the factions towards peaceful co-existence. So, we saw an opportunity by making Calia into an undead, to not only reunite her with her people, but also act as a diplomatic bridge between them and the Alliance. As the Forsaken have a deep history of antagonism with the Alliance, we wanted an influential character to be spearheading the efforts for peace.”
So, reading between the lines, the unspoken answer is:
“We too lazy to think of a way for the Forsaken to still be the Forsaken without a faction war. Calia’s there because she never did anything wrong, so no one can lob the list of cool stuff the Forsaken did regularly at her.”
Alliance mains on the General Discussion forum will rush to defend her, but they don’t count.
The main pro-Calia posts I see always seem to come from blue background avatars. I haven’t noticed a lot of red backgrounds softening on her.
Note: I’m the weird grouchy outlier who doesn’t like Lillian Voss being in the Horde either.
I mean if she did this, I be all for her… it be like a G-rated version of D&D Pale Night!
However I know that would just tarnish what she is supposed to embody… a Priest of the Holy Light in the undead community. (Aside from being a Alliance peace plot device like mention)
Also I’m bias and like the priest of The Forgotten Shadow more than the Priest of Light
Never understood why, the Title the Pallid Lady when Pale Lady sounds better. (IMO)
i mean tbh i really love the forsaken for their creepy melting pot approach, having elves and abominations and leper gnomes (in the rpg, one of the heads of the apothecary society is a bubbly and cheerful undead dwarf!), but yeah i mean i think the human forsaken can lean into the lordaeron aesthetic all they want.
I liked that dialogue in a vacuum.
It’s an interesting concept that even if the Light brings one back to unlife, its still necromancy. Shadowlands thematically did great showing the different ways in how death integrates with different aspects of life. But that’s where the praise ends, really.
And then again, that’s on a vacuum.
When you have the context upon which this information is inserted… Things go sour real quick. Callia should have stayed in the alliance to be a representative of undeads in the alliance, not a representative of the alliance in the Forsaken.
I’m not a boney person main myself, but I main a DK so it’s still undead, just not Forsaken specifically and I don’t wanna touch Callia with a 10ft pole.
Come to think of it, not to derail the topic too much, but since there’s already a bunch of forsaken posters here, do you folks see DKs as some sort of cousins in undeath?
used to rp w/ an undead valkyr death knight, ‘skvedi thrice-slain.’ good times.
Thematically yes, we’re family. But you’ll find that a lot of Forsaken fans resent being pushed out of sight by Blizzard like an unwanted step-child the moment any sort of Undead Themes show up.
See, the Knights of the Ebon Blade have a habit of sucking up all the oxygen in the room whenever anything related to Death shows up, since they can serve as a cross-factional representation. Also all of their baggage and foulness was focused on attacking third parties such as the Red Dragonflight and Scarlets, instead of the Alliance and Horde.
That leaves the only representation the Forsaken can lay claim to, is being the token Frankenstein mad scientists, since all the other aspects of undeath are shared with the Knights, who always get selected first.
what you’re saying does make me think they’ve sort of monkey’s paw’ed us when it comes to calia; sure, she’s more palatable now because she’s less present, but her shifting into the background sort of accompanies the same thing the forsaken have had to do, especially as faction narratives have died down
Hmm thats a good point, havent thought abt it that way. Which is really a bummer, I think it would be cool to see the Knights and the Forsaken making operations together in the future because both are undead and thus resistant to void corruption. Between quests they talk about their own stances on undeath, how it has been going for them and badmouth Arthas.
Damn, I actually REALLY wanna see that.
If only the Alliance had a faction of globally recognized folkloric monsters with gothic horror vibes and their own unique connection to undeath and otherworldly powers.
A DK has been my on and off alt for a couple expansions now and is shaping up to be my main one for WW. It actually took me awhile to even try them as I stopped playing for awhile in Wrath where they were both hilariously broken in PvP and completely stole the Forsaken’s thunder in the story.
So I still had some lingering resentment toward them when I came back in Legion and only gave one a try in BFA. Unsurprisingly a person who loves undead theme stuff really took a shine to the undead themed class but even though I play a Forsaken one I see them as a pretty separate entity.
Idk they just kinda sit in their flying skull fortress brooding. They’ve a flying skull fortress and still have the audacity to be moody about it. The Forsaken on the otherhand are pretty manic and even the toned down ones tend to have a dry sense of humor. The Ebon Knights just strike me as grim men growling grimly.
“Suffer well”
Bro you can make corpses explode by thinking about it. Don’t cry to me if you can’t think of a way to amuse yourself.
I like the idea of a Forsaken Calia Menethil; it takes me back to when “Lordaeron belongs to the Forsaken” was the fandom’s hot button topic. Execution needed work, though. It’s like they designed the crusader queen every MHP dreamed would purge the Forsaken from holy Lordaeron but then made her the Forsaken leader. They were wise to lean into a council, because that character design alone precluded her from ever filling out Sylvanas’s leather pants.
Callia is really just a symptom of Forsaken writing since the start which is to say Blizzard even when they first made the Forsaken playable only finished them within the last 2 months of development
They were initially meant to be ‘The Scourge’ there was tons of people on the fence of making them ‘Good’ ‘In-between gray’ or just straight up Evil a lot of this came from the fact there was ZERO context for these playable Undead until The Frozen Throne came out.
By that point WoW was late in development and the dev team didn’t have a long enough time to start pitching the faction into a particular direction this has plagued the Forsaken as a playable race forever with Blizzard just constantly tripling down on conflicting themes and a very schizophrenic style of writing for them it got worse and worse particularly with Before the Storm and BfA where any shred of ‘good’ the Forsaken had was effectively annihilated
So Blizzard has to work up a solution the obvious one is a lore character in Callia a obvious replacement, however it becomes pretty clear even by Shadowlands that Forsaken players despise her so they shift to the Desolate Council and try to at least make it seem like not everyone is 100% with Callia we at least got guys like Belmont saying “She’s useful for appeasing the Alliance.”
The biggest issue I see with Forsaken at the moment is across the entire game they’ve never had a consistent idenity it’s constantly changed and a big part of this is how Blizzard writes factions is usually with a sheer lack of nuance it’s usually the ‘token’ character of that race is generally the faction as a whole in this case for most of WoW’s lifespan Sylvanas was ‘The Forsaken’
A character whose consistency at even being you know a real leader of the Forsaken has been turbulent since the start, I feel bad for fans of the Forsaken because in my experience none of them can agree on the direction of the faction because not even the writers can.
I won’t defend Callia but it’s not ‘her’ character that’s the problem really, it’s the Forsakens writing in general that is
They are an absolute mistake of a race that should’ve had more time to cook but didn’t and the results been 20 years of constantly trying to do something with them but all the cooks have something different in mind.
But what do I know I’m just a blue avatar poster.
Funny you mention the Ebon Hold itself. I really wish they had moved it to Khaz Algar like it was done in Legion so I could just use Death Gate on a 1min CD instead of a 30min HS and just jump from there, flying around (specially now with skyriding)
Anyway, yeah I can see how it must have been super annoying to get shafted like that in WotLK.
I think thats the point, though. Being overly grim. Welp I’ll just go back to the main subject before this tangent goes full ironic on its own subject.