“Hung up on the past” as if she didn’t commit genocide and knowingly send the souls of innocent people (including children mind you) to Super Hell to suffer for eternity. Like yeah okay…
That’s like writing a story where Hitler didn’t die and comes back to play a role, bro no. Everyone is just gonna see him as Hitler, the guy who committed genocide.
Yes. But it was so good.
She was so god forsaken good that she carried that burden for almost 2 decades. The Forsaken were among the most interesting races in the game in spite of that huge flaw… Because of that huge flaw!
The aesthetic isn’t enough to keep them going. The only thing that could replace Sylvanas is a renewed conflict with Gilneas. And that would not bode well for Calia.
That’s meaningless in this universe until golden gives it meaning.
If someone was like “Remember the quest in cata where we fly around Gilneas on bats and plague bomb everyone trying to escape the invasion?” I’d be like “oh… Huh. I forgot that one.” But I would believe it.
What did we think was going to happen when Sylvanas became warchief? That forsaken war was suddenly not going to include brutality that can only be avoided by escape on hippogryph back? I didn’t see any forsaken fans going “WTF? I can’t believe she would do that. The writers did her dirty” about using bio weapons and effectively salting the earth in Gilneas. Why are we to believe that is somehow less serious than Darnassus? At least they gave the citizens of Darnassus time to escape! Gilneans had to get rescued by the Night elves.
The biggest difference was that Alliance were allowed to feel morally superior and horde players didn’t have it shoved down their throats the whole expansion.
This is the problem.
Even Death Knights evolved past Arthur.
i feel like this misses the mark. in the first place, i definitely remember how weird questing for the forsaken in western plaguelands was around the time of cataclysm, where people were buried up to their necks and you were given… a shovel. i definitely remember spying on sylvanas in the gilneas cathedral and hearing ‘naw we’re gonna use the chemical weapons anyway’ after seeing what happened at the wrathgate, and knowing what those weapons could do.
and i definitely remember hearing a ton of ooc horde dissenters, even forsaken ones. teldrassil is also as an event tied into elf fatigue, tied into the grudges against shadowlands, tied into the nostalgia for the faction war, tied into the very last patch of dragonflight. i think if you’re waiting for the writers of the franchise to give sylvanas’ massacre of the elves meaning, well, you haven’t been paying attention.
all this does remind me of how annoying sylvanas was when she was around, too, inasmuch as she sucked all the air out of the writers’ room when coming up with ideas for the forsaken. the notion of a nation of zombies trying to find collectivization and integration into a world that fundamentally rejects them could have been so cool, but instead the entirety of forsaken identity has boiled down to being a bunch of goth simps. and now when they haven’t got a tall woman dressed like she came from a '70s fantasy paperback to agree upon, they feel fundamentally crippled lorewise. lmao sylvanas really wasn’t all that, in hindsight.
I’m still salty that they quietly memory-holed Lorthemar x Liadrin. It was the only ship for any Thalassian elf where the other party was another Thalassian elf, which was refreshing. I also admit to having a soft spot for slow-burn “We want each other but things are in the way” yearning.
Not to brag but I’m in that kind of relationship right now and it’s SOOOO tasty.
Especially since their other personality traits, like cackling mad science and twisted emotions, got sanded off and sanitized long ago.
I honestly don’t feel like this is the case. Most of the Forsaken aesthetic itself doesn’t seem that tied to Sylvanas. Like, all the banshees and dark rangers seemed like a calved off corner of the zombie race for the horny people to appreciate. All of the mad science, body horror, and gallows humor … none of that really applies to Sylvanas.
I do agree that Sylvanas was used as a focal point to tell Forsaken stories, increasingly so from Cataclysm onward, which is a shame. Prior to that, I feel like Forsaken identity was incredibly well written and expressed. I might even add that a huge part of the problem is that Anduin has to be the moral compass at all times and has basically overwritten the Alliance’s attitude towards the Forsaken. Even Genn’s!
Nah the banshee’s and Dark rangers are important parts of the forsaken and their identity
Maybe for you. To me they were completely peripheral to forsaken identity.
Forsaken identity for me was defined by the forsaken themselves through stories of the forsaken characters you interact with through quests.
i mean i agree in the most general sense, though if i’m being completely honest i don’t know how particularly unique i find a lot of the forsaken aesthetic these days; the cataclysm update of their architecture was neat but also just very tim burton to me.
and i think that’s sort of the issue. the actual narrative of the forsaken, which really was what made them more memorable than most fantasy depictions of undead in my estimation, was precisely the premise of their narrative. like honestly one of the most poignant stories from the early era of the game, i felt, was this two sentence line from dan golthas:
“When I clawed my way out of the grave, I thought my family would welcome me with open arms. Instead, they drove me out of the village, screaming in a language I could no longer understand.”
and instead of following up on that, we mostly watch the antics and hijinx of purple-grey thirst trap (i refuse to google if the phrase is hypenated)
Like yea, the mad science and body horror is fun and all, but an important part of the forsaken is that shared pain of rejection and the shared trauma of dying and being enslaved its a vital part of their culture. You can’t get that when you shave off some undead, just because you personally don’t like that, if you didn’t like them you didn’t like the forsaken as a gathering of undead of all kinds
i mean it’s one of the things i think is still pretty funny about the branding of the forsaken these days, tbh. they have lordaeron imagery emblazoned everywhere, which makes sense for them, but then they were * also led by an elf. kinda feels to me like how dark irons’ racial leader atm is a bronzebeard, which is also annoying as h3ll.
I never found it annoying at all, i like them being the literal melting pot, cause they are all equal in death, quite frankly idk how you can come out of the wc3 frozen throne campaign and dislike that the forsaken are a mish mash of undead
i phrased it poorly at first pass. the components of their national or political identity get/got subverted time and time again due to their collective identity mattering less than their leader’s identity.
for instance, no one in their right mind wonders what the ‘native ancestry’ of an abomination is, but it would be interesting to understand why an abomination (or banshee) would want to bear a lordaeronian crest
Because they like their found family? because the place that they have found uses that crest, what a weird thing to complain about people change nationality all the time
right, but the crest is political. even some of the living identify with it. i’m not trying to say something like ‘the forsaken shouldn’t have a connection with lordaeron,’ i’m saying ‘even things like the presumable friction which would result from being such a hodgepodge group don’t get paid attention to because the hot lady elf is doing hot lady elf things.’
like i think that, too, is the kind of internal dialogue which would help forsaken fantasy. sylvanas could just as easily have been a human priestess, or something; the writers could’ve done all sorts of stuff with the forsaken backstory. choosing a thalassian elf to lead a nation of primarily human undead is something which could’ve had more interesting implications, but that just didn’t seem to be what sylvanas’ story even attempted to address.