Blizzard clearly made Sylvanas the way she is now because they felt they needed to show they gave “woman power” in their games, as if they didn’t already. (They did, and those female characters are actually awesome.)
However when things like this are forced, as Sylvanas story arc clearly is, they never go well.
Recently I tried introducing my wife to WoW. We played new characters together and leveled up through Cataclysm as two undead. This got her interested in the lore and so we thought we would have a nice night and make some food, some drinks, curl up together and get her caught up on the lore.
After watching hours of Nobbel and others my wife has come to the conclusion she hates Sylvanas after really liking her when she played Warcraft 3. She confided in me that it’s obviously a pandering move, and that’s why it falls flat.
Blizzard way able to make likable, strong, role-model esque female characters in the past. Jaina, the old Sylvanas, Tyrande (Tyrande!!), half the dragon aspects, and more were all cool, fleshed out characters.
The reason why is because those characters were written as a natural part of the story, with no political boxes to check off, because anyone who’s old enough remembers none of this stuff existed back in 2004.
It’s like we’ve regressed instead of made progress with pandering, poorly written characters like Sylvanas. That’s the main point I wanted to make here. If you don’t read the rest of this post, at least read these last two sentences above.
I disagree. Unfortunately I think the current cdev leadership has an over-fascination with Sylvanas and she’s being thrust into Kerrigan levels of garbage writing. They are so disconnected with the playerbase they don’t see how disgusted with her character the average player is. Has nothing to do with pandering.
Well, tomatoes tomatos tbh. The point is they wrote Sylvanas thinking she’d be this super amazing character and also show everyone they have woman power in WoW (as if Jaina doesn’t exist) and they failed epicly. We actually agree, just not on terminology.
