Im seeing ppl aceppting redemption for Arthas and even Garrosh lol…the gamer community is machist (sexist/misogynistic) and i dont think our wow community is different. Long live to Patty Mattson!
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Who says she’s hated? Sylvanas is the most popular character in the game.
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Some random takes of mine about why:
Arthas is a pretty cut-and-dry story about someone falling from grace and turning evil. His story played out a long time ago and, due to the game’s nature as an RTS, you aren’t really taking a ground-level view of what he does, so there’s more nostalgia and affection for the character. And while what he does is horrendous in-universe, you really only see the aftereffects of his stuff in WoW. Plus, people just plain like the Darth Vader moment at the end of Star Wars and probably want to see something like that.
Sylvanas, on the other hand, is somewhat all over the place in her characterization. Blizzard seemed to waffle back and forth on her being some sort of anti-hero, anti-villain, or just a straight-up villain while changing aspects of her character to fit whatever they wanted at the time. On top of that, her stuff is on-screen, especially the Teldrassil stuff, and emotions are going to be rawer in general because of how recent it is. It doesn’t help that her end goal is STILL really opaque and it’s probably leading to a lot of investment burnout when the audience is having difficulty following along with her the few times she does show up.
Also, up until recently, Arthas and Garrosh were just plain gone from the game once their stories ended.
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Well, she’s the most popular and i love her like other ppl, but i see a lot hate, hate that Garrosh/Arthas doesnt have…especially between lore nerds
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Because Sylvanas is all over the place.
Arthas and Garrosh had clear motivations for what they wanted to do.
Sylvanas? Not so much, we have been following her story for years and even more closely for the past 5 years and still… absolutely nothing.
We have no idea what she wants or why. Comics, books, podcasts, wiki pages are all useless and conflicting. “She wants us to be freed of death” um ok so why kill a billion Night Elves for?
“Oh because she had to kill a lot of people to break the machine of death!!!”
Which doesn’t make sense either because shadowlands is where the souls of the dead from the entire Galaxy? Universe? Reality? Whatever scope we are talking about its big.
So how many trillions upon trillions of souls do you think die in the universe? You think Teldrassil is even a blip on the radar?
I doubt.
So to sum up people don’t like Sylvanas is because she doesn’t make sense anymore.
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I undestand, but even a possibility of redemption for her ppl here goes crazy, i also see this on wowhead, the same ppl wanting Garrosh/Arthas redemption, doest make sense to me…
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because the factions on wow arent a hivemind and there are conflicting interests even between members of said faction, some forsaken hate sylvanas some doesnt now expand that thinking to everyone and you have a rough idea we as a fanbase are very divided, specially after the fiasco that was bfa.
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We followed Arthas’ descent from the beginning. We saw exactly what was on his mind every step of the way. We saw his first choices that started him down the descent to the villain he ended up being.
It has been four and a half years since Sylvanas became Warchief and we still don’t know the breadth of her motivations and won’t until 9.1 in the summer. We have pieces but so much of Sylvanas’ journey has been off-screen for an absurdly long time.
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So blame the writters not the character
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Lol the character is the product of the writers. How do you criticize a character without criticizing the writers? They are one and the same.
Sylvanas is a terrible character now, she had potential but its all pointless now. Whatever redemption they try to do won’t work. She isn’t even an interesting villain like Thanos was.
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In terms of why one prefers one character over another, that’s already been explained. Arthas isn’t particularly complex but he’s much more consistent and sensical of a character, and so to most people, more enjoyable.
In terms of the weirdos who ardently hate Sylvanas on alleged moral grounds but fantasize about an Arthas redemption arc in which the metaphorical sexual abuser returns to slap his metaphorical abuse victim around, yeah, they’re just freaks.
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Lol wait up. What?
If you’re confused about the second thing, a lot of people specifically enjoyed Sylvanas as a character early on because they identified with her as someone who had been violated but didn’t let it break her and kept rising up to challenge the one who wronged her. I’m far, far from the only person to make the comparison, or to have picked up on certain vibes in how the scene is written particularly in the novellization.
You don’t see many of em here but more people than you’d hope want Arthas to be redeemed and kill Sylvanas out of a sense of “poetic justice” not realizing the abjectly horrible message that would basically be sending, even if that aspect of her character isn’t much of a thing anymore. Those people just kinda have issues.
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Yeah, I’ve seen that pop up a few times on the forum. I think most of the time it’s just people not really thinking it through instead of anything malicious, but I remember one post in particular that had the idea that Arthas would earn his redemption by torturing Sylvanas which was 
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For you, she’s my fav character so far and i believe theres a lot of ppl that thinks like me, my point is about the ppl that doesnt like her, for me she’s a iconic character but the writters did a bad job on bfa making her commite genocide then in the next expasion gives her a redemption (that i accept bc i like her). at this point i just wanna hear the writters admiting that they made a mistake on bfa story and giving her a new direction =p but almost impossible
Arthas was only so evil to begin with, even up until maybe killing the mercenaries in Northrend and then taking up Frostmourne one could argue that killing people who kill others for money is still pretty morally grey, after that everything from patricide (killing his own father) and the genocides and atrocities afterwards were to a degree Nerzhul and Frostmourne’s influence until Arthas tore out his own heart and destroyed his own humanity and killed off Nerzhul. In this sense while one half of Arthas is entirely irredeemable the other half isn’t.
Garrosh got the villain bat in MoP and was not entirely irredeemable either, both of these you can argue like Kael’thas did what they did for a greater goal, even Illidan’s end goal somewhat justifies the means he took to get there. With Sylvanas her goal is apparently entirely selfish, she lied to everyone in the Horde INCLUDING the Forsaken she swore she’d always shelter and protect from the ravages of outside prejudice, but when the Forsaken were finally beginning to have that acceptance she went and killed them because they were no longer her pawns, just as she did to the ones in Silverpine who chose freewill. From the moment she’s been free of Arthas she has done nothing but kill, steal, and maim without conscious.
She’s a hypocrite, a mass murderer, and a narcissist… even before BFA all the way from Cataclysm to Shadow Lands she has committed numerous atrocities on the near genocidal level, redemption just isn’t fitting. One of the biggest problems in writing OP is letting one’s attachment to characters or lack thereof influence a character against their spine or character arc…and Sylvanas’ has been steadily leading to her doom for 10 something years.
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I don’t know about how Sylvanas was violated, if this was in one of the books that went over it in detail that’s the author’s problems. All I remember of Sylvanas before her Banshee days was this annoying NPC who popped up every once in a while in my undead campaign until I killed her. Kind of unceremoniously too to be honest, resurrecting Kelthuzad was much more of a bigger deal when I played that campaign.
The morality of this whole situation. Sylvanas has become pretty much like Arthas and she doesn’t have Frostmourne excuse that corrupted her mine through magical means. I really don’t agree with “crappy things happened to me so I can do them unto other people” if we applied that logic then Alliance could do until horrors on the horde with little moral issues.
It just doesn’t work that way.
So given that Sylvanas is now the new Arthas in actions I can totally see how he could play a role in the future when the bill for Sylvanas’ actions comes due. In what capacity I don’t know but there are just too many parallels to ignore Arthas at this point.
Sylvanas raised Andiun like Arthas did her. I can’t be the only one seeing this right?
I don’t think Arthas is really going to get redeemed, worst case he scoots over in his cell and says to Sylvanas “do you want top bonk or bottom bonk?”
Design wise she looks very cool and heroines spawned from tragedy is some of my favorite character building in storytelling. Maybe a bit edgelordy on my part but I really liked her origin. But if we wanted a more sympathetic Sylvanas BFA put the nails in the coffin with that expansion.
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Oh yes I remember that one shudders
It’s one thing to hate the character for what she’s done ( understandably ) but quite another to revel in excessive torture fantasies like this. That’s just sick.
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I feel a more fitting end would be either merged into a soul amalgam abomination with all the dead Night-Elves she killed or soulforged into a Stygian Maw weapon, those would be just endings in perfect proportion to the scope and nature of her crimes against the living.
I wonder what afterlife Arthas would be though? Is he going to be pre-frostmourne Arthas or will it be post-frostmourne Lichking Arthas?