Sylvanas never struck me as a woman in need of defending. Hell she’s more of a ‘the best defense is a preemptive and relentless offense’ sort.
And that certainly won’t win you any friends but you can’t argue with results.
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Well, yeah. You had no indication because it wasn’t the case at the time. 
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This is a great question. The Sylvanas I was a fan of was damaged and ruthless but everything she did was for the Forsakens survival and freedom. Then we were told that that Sylvanas never existed. Becasue Blizz went that route, this blue eyed Sylvanas is a new character with the same name that we’ll have to get to know. But Blizz has already told us that when every core playable race was given a leader they could put their faith in and follow, to lead us into and through a dangerous world with the likes of Thrall, Cairne and Voljinn, that that Sylvanas never actually existed during WoW’s lifetime.
It’s like saying that the Thrall that cared so much for the Horde was actually hexed and plotting it’s demise the whole time. Then retroactively finding evidence to support it like putting Garrosh in charge in order to sabotage the Horde. Now they have “un-hexed” Thrall. We can’t say that we have the Thrall that we know and love before he was taken away. Becasue they established that that Thrall never existed. We’ll see who this new person is but as long as the old person wasn’t real, it’s a new person.
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I know exactly what you mean. Its just hard for me to get behind the suggestion that the Curse of Undeath is based solely on trauma. I have no doubt that trauma is a huge part of it but its just that, a part, an extra layer of suck added onto how the curse affects their souls and emotions. I feel that cdev has always left themselves a little wiggle room when it comes to this discussion. I would start these discussions about souls and curses and such and we would end the discussions with more questions than answers. Cdev would give us these little lore scraps and we would eat them up within seconds; by the time you blink we would have discovered contradictions, implications, exceptions to the rules, etc etc. It’s probably part of the reason why cdev don’t get involved on the forums.
In any case; I’m happy to get any kind of development in this regards. I think the soul split addition is pretty neat; it actually seems a bit worse than your basic necromancy. And just to reiterate my point; soul/spirit manipulation didn’t just pop up since Steve Danuser came on board. I will admit that Frostmorne’s ability to split souls is relatively new, but its not like they just dropped that it on us in the Sylvanas cinematic. It almost feel like you’re saying “Why didn’t cdev give us a clue before dropping new lore,” which is a none issue to me. I agree with the sentiment that there are lore points out there that seem like after thoughts/rewrote/sloppy, but the fact that the undead’s souls/emotions are affected by undeath isn’t one of them.
I too think this is a wonderful topic!
IMO ,the Sylvanas that did everything for the Forsaken’s survival and freedom died when EoN came out. There were a number of paths they could have taken Sylvanas before EoN was published. Cdev chose evil psychotic ex girlfriend path when it came down to what the Forsaken meant to her. She cared about the Forsaken, but in a crazy way. I’ve personally always looked at Sylvanas’ better traits as the Ranger General trying to emerge hence the “she cared” part; it’s instances like when she kills a small chunk of her people to purge dissent that the dark side of the Curse of Undeath shows up.
I have a feeling that the blue eyed Sylvanas was always present, hence all of the “you still hold on to morality” references. I just think it gets swatted down due to the ill effects of the curse/soul split.
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She’s not the character YOU thought she was. Many players, especially alliance side who had been subject to her cruelty for years weren’t surprised by any of her actions or the directions she took the horde. At most players like me were mildly shocked the horde supported her so heavily.
You had a character that tried to commit genocide against the worgen and somehow thought she’d be ok. If you want the blind truth, you look a whole lot like Sylvanas suddenly realizing the Jailer is a bad dude in the eleventh hour.
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Even on Horde side she was no Mother Goose.
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I liked her and the forsaken a lot in Silverpine. Top tier writing there. But that was back when the writers were willing to allow things like Garrosh calling her mean words and her taking a bullet to the head. Now it’s just cringe how much of a pedestal they put her on.
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Well, the one playing 12D chess, of course! Pikachu face
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It is for me, too. That’s why when people say Calia can’t ever lead the Forsaken because she hasn’t ‘suffered enough’, I literally don’t know what they mean. In fact there isn’t and never has been a prerequisite on emotional trauma required to be a Forsaken
Soul manipulation in general has been in the game since Gul’dan used it to open the Dark Portal. My point is that “soul splitting” in this fashion is new, something we didn’t see until we saw it happen to Uther in Afterlives: Bastion, and it generated tons of discussion because we had seen Uther’s soul in Wrath and Legion and didn’t know how he also went to Bastion, too.
Under the broad category of “soul manipulation”, the idea that it can be chunked out into fragments is ultimately something that has always been possible, but that’s because when it’s that broad, theoretically the only limit is the imagination of the writers. That doesn’t mean it’s established.
Before Cataclysm, the Forsaken were risen infected. After Cataclysm, they were also getting raised by the Val’kyr. It was a new way of doing something, not a previously established reality of the world.
I’m not looking at this story from the perspective of which characters hurt my feelings and which didn’t, but in how well I understand the character and why they are doing the things they are doing. I play Horde, but I usually still find Alliance characters compelling, even when they’re stomping my teeth in because I usually understand them.
I’m not interested in examining the story through the “cruelty” a fictional character has “subjected me to”, whatever that means.
“Oh, Thrall? No, he never cared about the Horde at all. He led them out of the camps because he knew that the humans would never finish them off there. He was leading them into a desolate land so they would be wiped out entirely” It’s that level of ridiculous.
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Comic book-tier “was actually mind controlled this whole time” writing. Maybe that’s where it’s coming from.
Do readers actually like when they’re being mislead about a character’s motivations because it’s surprising and unexpected? Weird.
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I think it’s a storytelling thing. Calia hasn’t been presented as cool at all. Somehow she supposedly defied the odds and made it all the way to southshore from Lordaeron city without being killed. That sounds like a cool story but we haven’t seen it. Every time she is presented, she’s making a fool of herself. When she was introduced in Legion, it seemed like she might be cool, because she was hanging out with a dead guy in a temple where dark magic was being practiced- she was a disco priest helping save the world from the Legion.
Instead of going into the crazy stuff she was doing with Faol for all that time since she was rescued and telling us something cool about that, they just made her this awkward character that didn’t understand her own motivations. Her “usurper queen” attitude toward Sylvanas made no sense. The way she was written was just… dumb. Kinda like how the way they wrote Sylvanas was dumb.
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Sylvanas seems less like a character and more like a plot device these days. She has no personality outside of what’s needed by the writers to move their “story” forward.
“Oh, we need somebody to burn down Teldrassil so we can start a war. Sylvanas!”
“Oh, we need somebody to side with the Jailer so he knows who to go after on Azeroth. Sylvanas!”
“Oh, we need somebody familiar with the Jailer’s plans to defect and give exposition to everyone else. Sylvanas!”
She’s a walking, talking McGuffin. She is whoever the plot requires her to be.
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To be fair who does feel like a character?
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There’s a lot to hate about Calia, sure. I think they’ve given her the bare minimum of an introduction through the Legion expansion and I think being Lightforged is just silly, but the Forsaken have trended towards the holy for a long time.
I personally wanted Natalie Sabine to come back and be a proper Forsaken and reground the Forsaken in their Cult of the Forgotten Shadow ideology, but that’s not looking to happen anytime soon.
What I’m hoping is they’ll flesh out the realm of necromancy to always be inherently dark and shadowy, and even someone like Calia has to straddle the line between Shadow and Holy. She was a Discipline Priest in Legion, after all, but that’s hopeful.
She’s a Menethil, and the Lordaeronian streak of the Forsaken has always been appealing to me. I want Ghost-King Terenas, but I’ll settle with Calia.
It will be interesting to see where they are going with this “new path.” That being said who says she’s not going to face justice? Maybe not in the standard judicial sense but Sylvanas has always been an interospective character and she will wrestle emotionally with the guilt of Teldrassil forever now. Self punishment is what I expect from her now that she feels the full weight of her emotions.
I hope we get more EoN, Sylvanas analysing and disecting herself as the monster she now knows she capable of being.
Like I said, it will be interesting to see where this goes.
I’m not. I have no investment in this iteration of Sylvanas. If she’s going to be so different from who she was while “incomplete” then I just don’t know anything about her.
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She’s not goibg to be that different. She’s just going to be able to feel things. She may be a bit softer, but as a lot of her critics point out she’s always been an ‘end justifies the means’ character.
Even when she was alive in WC2 Tides of Darkness she was described as being commanding. She’s still herswlf but can introspect on what she’s done and what she’s lost.
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What we know about a character isn’t what they think, or say or feel, it’s what they do. Everything else informs, supports, or undergirds it, but a character’s story is driven, ultimately, but what they do or don’t do.
I know Sylvanas as the shrewd tactician who uprooted Lordaeron from the grip of the Legion, who forged a pact with the Horde for the Forsaken when no one else would, struck at the Lich King (twice) and waged war on Gilneas, and doing it her way.
I remember her warts, too. I remember that she cast herself into oblivion, I remember that she let Godfrey get one up on her, and I remember how keeping Varimathras around ended up backfiring. That’s not even getting into any of the Battle of Azeroth stuff.
Right now, the hanging stink over Sylvanas is whether or not having her soul back fundamentally changes who she is. If we’re supposed to blame her less for things like what she did to Teldrassil and Derek Proudmoore, then that applies to everything.
She’s either different now, or she’s not. If she isn’t, then there’s no point of the re-unification. That is a different Sylvanas looking back on what another Sylvanas did, and we don’t even know if she’s going to even consider that to be person she is now, or would have been if she had been whole.
A more recent example of this was in End Game. Gamora dies. It’s sad. An alternate-timeline Gamora is brought in. This second Gamora is not the same that we spent two prior films getting to now and got to see develop. It’s not the same Gamora, because those experiences have been stripped away. The alternate Gamora has only heard about who the previous one was, that she supposedly loved Quill. She still made the same heel turn against her father in both scenarios, but that doesn’t mean she’s the same. I’m not interested in starting back at square one with her, so I’m more of less checked out of further Guardians films at this point.
Same with Sylvanas. We’re not growing further, we’re snapping back to square one. None of those things she did from WC3 'til now can be attributed to who this character is now because we have not only do we not know if she would do it again or differently, we don’t know how the character grows from those events.
I didn’t need or want the writers to make Sylvanas ‘softer’. I just wanted her to be understood and not be strung along since 2016 to find out who this person really is to find out she’s having a reset button pressed anyway.
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seh still teh same pursen siknce vanilla
girl taht make necbeard mAD
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