Why do you support Saurfang or Sylvanas?

Lore Story Forum
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From what I’ve gotten, people support Sylv because they don’t want a retread of MoP, they like her and don’t want her to get killed off, love the Forsaken and it’s dark fantasy, actually enjoy BfA and killing Alliance, see honor as a paltry virtue, they like being evil, or in protest against the Blizzard writing team currently ruining Sylvanas as a character for writing ger in such an intensely negative light.

People support Saurfang because theg enjoy the values of honor and tradition, want to be morally on par with the Alliance, seek justice, hate BfA but are fine killing Alliance if it’s morally suitable, sick of seeing Sylvanas as Warchief, and want their Vanilla/good Horde back.

And this is just from what i’ve glimpsed from here on the forums on other social media like twitter and youtube comments.

For example, i only support Saurfang cuz 1. I want the option to be a good guy and 2. I want either Vol’jin or Thrall to come back to balance the good/evil dictonomy within the Horde itself. Pretty much nothing to do with the old dog in particular other than to act as a story device to usher other characters back into the fold to balance out the morality center of the faction rather than being one extreme of the other. Maybe even get an oldish, newish, character introduced (his niece, Thura wielder of the axe of Cenarius) she’s existed since the book Stormrage, but has yet to show up in game.

I wanna hear more perspectives from both sides of the argument. I promise, i won’t bite ;)…maybe…

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I like both, doesn’t matter who wins I lose.

Sylvanas was not always pure evil. The grey zone was that the alliance was actually invading them seeking to wipe them out.
Saurfangs honor and horde honor are not pure goodie goodie lets be friends and BS either, he has no problem invading lands.

Horde have 0 context for anything they are doing. The war itself is “for azerite” and the tree was a whim as far as we know. Every dark act seems just for fun, while the honor is just shouting this is dishonorable.

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All of this?

My first foray into Wow was at the tail end of BC and the beginning of Wrath. My first character was a Blood Elf and all of my leveling done was in Northern EK. I remember falling in love with both the Blood Elves and the Forsaken because I’m a glutton for tragedy and who better represented the fate of both of the races than Sylvanas? She was the first racial leader I had ever interacted with when I found the locket in Ghostlands and made the trek through EPL and WPL to bring it to her (didn’t know there was an orb to port to UC, would have saved me from several deaths). I read up on her backstory in WC3 and was taken in by her “by any means necessary” sassy attitude towards building up and leading the Forsaken. I was so stoked that I joined during Wrath and would get to see her vengeance play out. Of course, Wrath didn’t quite play out the way I would have liked for Sylvanas. She was in ICC when he would die but it wasn’t really satisfying. In my opinion, both Sylvanas and Jaina should have been part of the LK fight. I think they both deserved that kind of closure but I digress.

So, I mainly support Sylvanas because she represents my original love for Wow and all the nostalgia that I hold dear. I support her because I absolutely do not want a cheap rehash of MoP, it just destroys my ability to ever fall in love with characters again because who knows who will be next? I support her because I hate that the devs have forced her into doing things that, while they make the most sense from Sylvanas out of all the options available, make her a major point of contention not just with the Alliance but within my own faction. I support her because I never cared about honor and I do like the darker themes. I support her because I do enjoy pvping and I thought that this expansion would allow us to indulge in that without shaming us. I support her because she deserves more than just becoming a low tier villain to build up a faction war that most people didn’t really want.

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I liked Sylvanas and Saurfang as characters before this expansion.

I liked Saurfang in part because of the pork speech. It was powerful and it resonated with me. I liked that he was strong, but he recognized the necessity of not just being a headstrong, rush in there warrior sometimes. And I liked the concept of him being the younger brother of Broxigar. The idea of living in the shadow of his brother’s final sacrifice. That he stood as a testament of the orcs’ steadfast desire to never return to what they once were and the need to fight back against oppression.

I liked Sylvanas because I found her a fascinating character. How aggressively she pursued what she wanted in life. How she took charge of her life after what Arthas did to her and embraced the Forsaken as she did. I like how she was willing to do what it was necessary to get what she wanted. And the quiet sentimentality of her character. The way she treated the player character as a confidant sometimes. How she clearly cared about Nathanos, but had a playful habit of getting under his skin. Arthas made her a monster, but she was never just a monster.

And I hate that BfA took everything I loved about both of those characters and threw it straight into the garbage.

So, right now, I don’t know.

I don’t want to support Sylvanas as she is now. I don’t want the Horde to be the villains anymore than most of you do. I hate having this narrative constantly forced on us. How the Alliance’s shortcomings are sanded away with magical water, character development, or just plain retcons. But the Horde’s shortcomings are flanderized to such extreme extents. I hate the idea of losing one of the last original Horde leaders we had as she’s beaten into the shape of a generic villain. I hate the idea of just sitting here and accepting the narrative that Sylvanas is bad and the only way to save the ~spirit of the Horde~ is to kill her.

In a two faction game, I am so tired of fighting my own faction more than I ever get to fight the Alliance.

And part of me feels like the only way to take back my agency is to spit in the face of the narrative path the game clearly wants me to walk down. The writers clearly want me to go “Sylvanas is bad and must die” and I want to resist that. Because up until this expansion, I never once thought that. And the only reason I think that now is because the writers are just going to keep ratcheting up the genocide and awful until everyone agrees with them.

I don’t like being evil, but I don’t like that I’m in this position to begin with. That I’m in the position where the writers think that they just need to keep killing off characters I like until I agree with them.

And maybe that’s childish. Maybe I should stick with Saurfang, play out MoP 2.0, kill another warchief, and pretend like justice has been served. We’ve killed the bad guy. What a great raid tier. How exciting is it to run through another Horde capital and kill characters I used to like distorted to the point I don’t even recognize them.

But I hate the idea of what that would mean. That that would mean another round of going ‘look, here’s the Horde, they’re clearly incapable of doing anything but failing without the masterful guiding hand of the Alliance’. How every “good” Horde character has to have a human friend or Alliance buddy to show them how to be good people.

I’m just so tired of all of this. As it stands now, I haven’t taken the Saurfang quest, so I haven’t sided with either officially. I was hoping that ‘screw all of this’ quest that was datamined was out there somewhere. Because ‘please delete this expansion and try again’ is the side I’m really on.

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Sylvanas. The whole point is that the enemy faction should be crushed - whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s the objective. Sylvanas is doing that.

Saurfang is a traitor, simple as that. Orcish honour is a cancer to logic and sense - okay to burn a tree, okay to kill lots of people, not okay to do ‘forsaken things’ (essentially). It’s mindbogglingly backwards. Not only that, but he is actively working alongside the alliance to harm the horde. wew

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I liked Sylv more than Saur, but not enough I’d betray one for the other.

BUT…I’m bitter about how awful the BFA story has been to everyone but Human fans. So to spite Actiblizz who seems to want us to hate her and wuv him, I’m supporting Sylvanas to the end 100%.

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my horde characters would probably pick n’zoth, but that will not be a problem because so far, i could not bring myself to touch my horde alts in bfa. is pretty horrible.

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I only asked why you support who you support, this is a neutral discussion, I’m not asking why you despise “traitor” Saurfang. I’m asking who and why you support either “muh Honor” Saurfang and “muh pragmatism” Sylvanas. There are hundreds of other threads where you can vent out your frustrations with Saurfang.

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I’ve done this enough so I’ll keep it brief.

On one side you have a compassionate Horde champion who wants to unite the world under just and glorious Horde rule.

On the other side you have a self-absorbed, maniacal tyrant that burns children alive for miscalculated psychological advantages over her opponents. (It’s also strongly suggested she wants to kill and raise all of us.)

For future reading:

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I dont want Sylvanas dead.
Its not fun if Horde loses every significant iconic character.

Hopefully she is taken captive and she stays there for a while.

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Yup. From forum regulars like you, Deathisfinal, Cursedwords. These are the vibes that I usually get from you guys. Feel free to tell me I feel I’m wrong.

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There are three primary groups of Sylvanas fans.

  1. People that somehow think she is doing the right thing. They usually do not have a strong or complete understanding of the lore and are a very small group of people.

  2. People that think she’s evil and like it, because they want to be the bad guy. Also a very small group of people, but not as small as group 1.

  3. People that realize and hate that she’s currently being portrayed as indefensibly evil and stupid, but want her to mature into a better character that fits the Horde while retaining her antiheroic qualities. This is the majority of Sylvanas fans. Naturally, they don’t gravitate towards characters (like Saurfang or Baine) that seem liable to kill her.

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You’re not wrong. At least for me, it is equal parts spite for the devs and love of the character.

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I played in Vanilla and what my impression of the Horde was their general code of tribal honor. The best analogy I can make is something like the Predator (1987, 1990) code of honor. We have our code of morality and that’s what I wanna stick with (unless they rewrite it). I think we have this whole issue because we have so many different groups of people of varying beliefs would eventually bring us to a clash. You can’t really tolerate someone else when their beliefs kinda go against yours.

So I’m sticking with Saurfang, he represents the old Horde to me. Sylvanus has become too much of a cartoon villain, and I was never interested in the Forsaken to begin with. Even if they were written better, I think they are just too ideologically different for me to support.

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Neither. They both suck equally.

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Saurfang’s sense of honor is whacky and inconsistent. You can’t send rogues to assassinate people, and then go into a psychotic depression when you axe somebody from behind. “I lost a duel to him, and now I stabbed him in the back”. First of all, Malfurion declined to duel Saurfang and Saurfang’s original intention was just to buy time- his “honorable duel” was a deceptive tactic in the first place.
I get his grievances over civilian casualties. That’s understandable. Even the grievances about collateral damage during Lordaeron.
The use of the blight and a little necromancy is fine with me though. I don’t want that to ever go away, it’s just part of the forsaken aesthetic, and is the way the undead do things.
Right now Saurfang isn’t a “traitor” to me, he is more of a deserter. His reasons for desertion aren’t bad ones either. But, I think allowing himself to be captured, instead of looking to the others in the Horde for help, was dumb.

My support for Sylvanas is complicated. The horde (especially forsaken) story and characters have been dragged through the mud several times over. My hopes are that it will play out that there was an actual necessity behind Sylvanas becoming the Warchief, and maybe some of the things she has done. I strongly dislike the implications of many of the alternatives.
Vol’jin being “tricked” by an evil entity to name Sylvanas warchief is stupid and degrading to shamanism and the horde. It’s just another suggestion that the horde does everything wrong… but thank goodness the alliance will save us from ourselves. I don’t think so.

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I’ve always made sure to state that I don’t want Sylvanas to die either, but I do believe like she needs have some kind of drastic punishment after this expansion that will ultimately change her for the better in some way. I always though incarceration or exile by the Horde’s own hands is more than appropriate, because 1. The Horde deals with its’ own problems, we do not need the Alliance to hold our hands and 2. We can preserve her for later in a story that can more properly benefit from her presence.

I just think she needs a break from the narrative for a bit, let the Horde get back on track and then come back later when the Horde character roster has gotten some time to fill up a bit. Y’know develop some old characters, introduce some new ones. Then later she can come back in a big impactful way, when all the hate has died down. Most of the hatred, imo, kinda just stems from hogging way too much of the spotlight off other Horde leaders and the writers being unable to risk putting work into different characters.

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You should probably have paid more attention then.

Because when you make a plague for the RAS in Vanilla Hillsbrad, Lydon tells you its what Sylvanas has in store for the living. His character is bemoaning that he can’t blight Hillsbrad soon enough the entire plague questline.

She also betrayed and murdered the last remaining Alliance army in Lordaeron before trying to kill off the rest of the Humans. Including Vanilla Hillsbrad.

She orchestrated Human experimentation. (Experimented on her own Forsaken too.) She force fed a young woman blight until she bled to death out her orifices and the only emotion she exhibited was pleasure her weapon was working.

She mocked the deaths of Horde soldiers in Pit of Saron.

She killed Forsaken civilians under the assumption that they could possibly be disloyal in Before the Storm.

Her own leader short story said she flat out didn’t care about anything except for killing Arthas and then returning to her afterlife. She was willing to let the entire Forsaken nation die to achieve it. The only reason she returned to them was because she learned her afterlife was damned to eternal torment. The story concluded with her viewing them as tools to protect her. She has no altruistic love for the Forsaken.

Vanilla-Wrath wasn’t as hamfisted with her evilness (she was more mysterious), but at least since Edge of Night, Sylvanas has been canonically “evil” by all conventions of evil. Sylvanas isn’t acting out of character in BFA. It’s just taking people a really long time to see her for what she is.

She’s a demented baddie that occasionally has feels for her sisters and Nathanos. She’s always been “bad” and any ethical, sensible character would feel safer knowing she’s dead.

Feel free to advocate for any character development you want. You’re a paying customers. But people need to stop acting like Blizzard is writing Sylvanas out of character. Since being raised, she’s always been amoral with only a few elements of her pre-undeath character surfacing here and there.

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In honesty?
I don’t care for either of them. If I had to choose, it’d be Sylvanas. I overall agree with the values that Saurfang attempts to try to represent, but I do not think he does so successfully. Despite the villain batting Sylvanas is completely in the right. She is just correct, there is no other way of saying it.

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Saurfang and Sylvanas did a great job showing how two sides of the horde can team up in the War of Thrones. Sylvanas taking hits to let people through. Saurfang sassing Nathanos and planning a flank. It was a glimpse of them learning from one another.