Which WoW characters do you think had their deaths poorly handled? Maybe it was how they were killed. Maybe it’s how they were treated after, including in the afterlife. Maybe both. Here’s a list of the worst cases for me;
Helya; We side with the guy who screwed her over, kill her on his orders and afterward pretty much dance on her grave with him (even if she’d become a villain, that’s a bit much).
Vol’jin; Shanked by a no-name Felguard and dies even though he has stronger regeneration than the average troll and there’s several who could’ve cleansed his wound (looking at you, Liadrin and Dezco).
Kel’thuzad; Brought him back one more time just to kill him off and he dies begging. He also had his loyalty to Arthas and the scourge retconned (and randomly changed VAs halfway through the expansion)
Saurfang; Cheap-shotted by plot powers then got his soul made into an obsolete trinket by the person who spat on everything he fought for then killed him.
Arthas; Arguably Warcraft’s most iconic character had his soul reduced to a battery than vanished like a fart on the wind without any final words (he too was a villain, but much more iconic and it wasn’t even anything his past victims did that destroyed his soul).
Addendum: “Honorable” mention
Xe’ra; Major cosmic being reduced to an edgelord’s punching bag/jobber and one-shotted in an angsty-14-year-old’s power fantasy (even the Jailer got a boss fight). Then had pieces of her corpse used as a battery.
Do you think these fit? Which ones are the worst for you?
Saurfang the Younger: Poor guy didn’t even get character development before he was killed off. We saw him twice and the second time was just before he died horribly.
of the ‘death’ realm, system and cycle to be a unimaginative load of an absolute BS --especially in terms of the lore that had existed prior to the Shadowlands expansion.
Like an expansion to do with the theme of ‘The Afterlife’ – A symbolic gesture of the eternal & mystical, turned out to be entropic & rather robotic … They should had gone with the Diablo approach, where every soul is eternal and is either reincarnated with or without memory or put into a queue to be reborn over long period of time.
Heck even if it was ‘Slain in a weakened state in the Shadowlands returns you to the living plan without memory’ and wild gods / loa being slain in the pod would return them to living plane as a mortal with the ‘seed of potential’ (to become god-tier again) would’ve been fantastic.
I would had found that much more appealing, lore-enthusiastic, thrilling in potential and found sacrifice / concept of life & death more intriguing than what we were given with that expansion.
Helya is definitely the one person on your list that I feel bad for. She suffered because she refused Odyn, and she did not want to subjugate the Vrykul for Odyn’s purposes.
Illidan was powerful enough to fight off Xera’s advances, but Helya was not powerful enough to fight off Odyn’s.
I think she was done dirty. I am not a fan of the frat boy dude bro culture that gave rise to the Cosby Crew, and they seemed to make Odyn their self insert - drinking on the job, abusing women, acting sanctimonious while being self serving.
Helya deserves justice.
But I don’t think the rest belong on that list.
Voljin - had a lot of story and build up. The end of MoP hints that Sylvanas will be part of testing Voljin. I think the Rezan stuff and the Jailer/Muezhala stuff gives it more weight after the fact. Voljin’s death definitely felt cheap and rushed at the time and for a while afterward, but they helped give meaning to it after the fact.
Xera - tried to force herself on an unwilling person after her advances were rejected, and she got what was coming to her.
Saurfang - got what he deserved. Well, he deserved worse. Not only is he a genocidal butcher but he is also a traitor. He got off easy.
Arthas - the tears from the Arthas fanboys were glorious. Anyone who lamented the way Arthas was dispatched is good for a chuckle. He got off easy, as well.
Dying was fine, being brought back as some kind of Lightborn Undead and then her waltzing into the midst of the Forsaken going, “How do you do my fellow kids,” was just… cringe.
Admiral Taylor comes to mind. Started out as Nazgrim’s mirror, outlived his counterpart, then got jobbed offscreen as part of some weird necromancy subplot that never went anywhere.
Xe’ra was introduced to the story for no other reason than to shove a bunch of awful “Chosen One” nonsense down our throats. Her death, at the hands of the very person she was pushing for the position, was the best possible outcome. 10/10 no notes.
I’m still salty about Vol’jin. I don’t care if he becomes Loa of Kings. I wanted Warchief Vol’jin who could have been wisely leading the Horde right up to the present expansion.
Kel’thuzad, the writers brought him back one more time in shadowlands just to kill him off for good… as well as trashing his loyalty to Arthas and the scourge.
While not a major character, i’ll bring up Admiral Taylor. He was a good reoccuring character who i really thought was treated poorly especially in comparison to his counterpart. We quested with him in Vashjir in Cataclysm and then throughout Pandaria in MOP.
Then he dies in some weird half off screen moment in WOD. But his death and proper send off is pretty much invalidated and made meaningless because they made his ghost a garrison follower.
Please explain to me how his fate is being an easter egg in Revendreth and one sentence in ‘Sylvanas’, while duck mothering Lady Vashj gets to snake it up in the Skeleton War.
At worst Zul’Jin’s sin is the same as George Lucas’s;
The only possible reason to stick him in Revendreth was so he could bump into Kael’Thas, and they could have a mutual revelation about how asinine their ethnic strife was in the literal grand scheme of things.
But they couldn’t even manage that.
RIP Zul’Jin. If nothing else you’ll live on in our hearts as having the coldest raid boss line of all time;
I think if you want to argue that Zul’jin was badly written by being hit with the villain bat, then by all means, have at it, I think you have a fair point.
That said, if you want to argue his BC appearance was at all inconsistent with him ending up in Revendreth, I’d have to disagree. Blizzard had him utterly consumed by hatred and a burning need for vengeance that was so damning he had his own Loa slaughtered to empower his followers in an attempt to achieve his vengeance. He’d have doomed his own people if it meant getting his revenge on the elves and the Horde.
Revendreth was a good place for him, that considered, but him amounting to an Easter Egg when he could’ve been so much more is, I agree, a monumental waste of his appearance in the Shadowlands. It’s also rather contradictory to the idea that Bwonsamedi has been claiming all troll souls and bringing them to a specific afterlife just for them, ‘De Other Side.’
The Coilfang Naga, led by Lady Vashj, completely devastated the fragile ecosystem of one of the only regions in the fractured Outland capable of biodiversity.
Oh and one of their dungeons was called THE SLAVE PENS, in case we thought maybe they made up for their Captain Planet tier villainy with good labor practices or something.
They were of course led by Lady Vashj who gets to hang out with Drakka and Morgraine in Maldraxxus. Which is a place that’s so fun it’s center is a giant concert venue and they have a dedicated birthday blob named Kevin.
So she gets to go there. But the guy who was really mad about a buncha Fantasy Parisians so stuck-up they were banished across an ocean bulldozing his people’s territory for a wine bar / country club has committed mortal sins?
Vashj was arguably worse with approximately 0% of the reason to be so. Guess there’s no extenuating circumstances in Robot Angel Court. The bastards.
Problem therein is that Vashj wasn’t driven by hatred or vengeance. Her actions were absolutely awful, but she herself wasn’t exactly unhinged.
Honestly, typing it out makes it sound worse, really.
Regardless, Revendreth was meant to be a place where Souls consumed by Sin went, and Sin meant self-failings. Kael’thas’ pride, ambition, and greed were all examples of why he was in Revendreth. The fact he nearly doomed his people and his world wasn’t as big of a deal as was the root causes.
That’s what Revendreth exists to rectify, the personal failings of a soul that led it to commit heinous atrocities.
I used to be more sympathetic to the Elves. But after the Sylvanas novel I’m entirely on the Amani’s side.
Like Momma Sylvanas eagerly shows off severed troll ears to her children, but then Sylvanas calls them savages when they mutilate dead Farstriders.
And nothing summed it up more than the Amani fighting for their lives out here, and the biggest hardship the Windrunner’s suffer from it is nobody getting to go to their youngest’s piano recital or whatever because of it.
It was such a glaring display of sneering imperialism that I just assumed this would be revisited when Sylvanas is undead and now herself is seen as some inherently monstrous blight.
But it doesnt. So. I’m with Zul’Jin when his reaction was eventually just;
Tirion. If one character deserved to retire and ride off into the sunset it was him. Instead of got vomitted on by Krosus just to give us the ashbringer. I can think of a billion other far better send offs. But instead his death was just so… low. It was gross.
Seriously though Kel’thuzad should have survived and remained as a reoccuring villain.
WoW needs a rogue’s gallery. Characters like Arthas, Deathwing etc. are apocalypse tier threats we kinda have to deal with ny the end of their expansion.
But their lieutenants? They can and should be kept around.
Kel’thuzad would be the perfect super villain to turn up now and again. Never the headline show but him and the CotD could always pull up as a B plot in this or that expansion to give us some enemy variety.
Same with Queen Azshara, Denathrius, Gallywix, Vanessa Van Cleef, etc.
And then we could have some fun twist stories where we wind up working with Kel’thuzad. Because there’s an even bigger threat to Azeroth and if anyone’s going to conquer this world it’s him.
Wouldn’t that be cool? You see him and a buncha Scourge heavy hitters roll up and think the bastard must’ve joined forces with the Primalists or whatever. But then his minions join your fight and he’s just standing there going;
Honestly I’m kinda glad they just off’ed him. Because knowing Blizz he would’ve been villain batted for a dumb shocking moment that probably wouldn’t have gone anywhere.
Ideally I would’ve kept him on as Governor General of Hearthglenn and Crusader Lord of the Argent Dawn. Then have Hearthglenn serve as what Theramore should have been.
A human styled but multi-racial third party nation that refuses to get involved with the Horde and Alliance’s BS but is respected by both.
Seriously even under Sylvanas the Argents were respected enough that not only were they allowed to try to recruit people in Tirisfal, but the Deathguard actively send you over to Hearthglenn to be neighborly when the Battle of Andorhal reaches a stalemate.
This was such a cool little storybeat that went the way of the Dodo because Blizz wanted the boring old “Death to the Living” shtick.
Meanwhile in Cata WPL the Alliance forces are being led by a Death Knight, and the Forsaken are actively helping living humans establish a permanent settlement directly next to them.
That was really cool. Because instead of the conflict being a dumb race war it was entirely political and territory focused.
“Those foul Forsaken will never let humans reclaim sacred Lordaeron!”
‘Uh. Sir. It appears that Forsaken Apothecary is helping a human lumberjack’
“The bastards! They’re attacking civilians with spiders!”
‘Uh. No. Actually she’s helping herd them away. Now it appears she’s shaking hands with the lumberjack.’
“Oh. Well. I’m sure they’re secret evil lumberjacks or something. Why else would they refuse to serve with the Noble Alliance!”
‘… Can’t imagine why, sir’
