And yet, neither they nor the BEs were allowed anything more than a Bit Part in his downfall. Hell, the latter were almost non-existent in that story, and the Forsaken were turned into a antagonistic force to stir up the Faction Conflict. So at least as far back as WotLK … Blizz did have a default tendency.
Then lets take it one step further than that. The MU Orcs were kind of just a bit part in the assault on Outlands in BC; and held no relevance in the downfall of KJ. The one who corrupted them and led to the destruction of their world. And in WoD, the MU Horde as a whole had very little presence. With the expansion largely being an excuse to continue that MoP era “Old Horde theme” … with very bizarre (or insulting) writing around what should have been the more sympathetic and nuanced Old Horde characters.
Frankly … I get the feeling that with them taking every opportunity to avoid building up with the Horde … they just don’t seem to enjoy writing it as a whole beyond when they need a convenient plot device.
i really think sylvanas and the forsaken were done dirty with not having direct participation taking down arthas, i mean maiev got to be on the dance floor when we were taking down illidan, why shouldnt sylvanas? because it was OOC?
Why weren’t any Worgen involved in the fall of Deathwing? Why were no night elves involved in Azshara’s defeat? Where were the Orcs when Gul’dan died? Why were none of the 3 horde races with major bones to pick with the Legion on Argus? The only 2 times i felt we had good representation in the villains defeat were Garrosh and Kil’jaedan in Burning Crusade.
Because blizzard does not care about actual racial narratives in WoW, they just care about their Uber-Narrative. I think they write a story or scene down once and don’t ever think “What about the players”? Argus is the single greatest example, where it was quite obviously written from the Alliance persepective, with only having Alliance characters in it (Ok, we had Liadrin walking in circles in the basement and Aethas tracking down a muffin thief, but thats it) and forcing horde players to sit through Alleria talking about how awful the Horde is (not saying its OoC, just that they shouldn’t force the players to have a character they just helped talk about how much they suck to their face)
The only reason she didn’t was because they were her sisters. If they were anyone else’s, she would not have hesitated for a moment. If it’s love, it could easily be construed as a twisted, possessive sort of love, or a more egocentric “If I do this and they hate me for it, I won’t get what I want” rather than thinking about how her sisters might suffer in undeath.
Anduin even points out her hesitation in the cinematic you mentioned as being rooted in her own doubt rather than any actual compassion for him. It’s because if he believes it, she can give up on hope, too.
Someone can still love and be evil. They don’t have to be bereft of all semblance of positive emotion to be a villain.
Sylvanas had a choice since she started the Forsaken. Experiment on living subjects to make a Blight that would kill the undead and the living? She smiles when a woman’s insides melt and she bleeds out of her eyes and mouth. Vengeance was her only goal and anything else was in the way.
She had a choice when the val’kyr joined. Raise the willing who want to join the Forsaken and be given a second chance. Those who have been wronged and seek vengeance. Instead, she raises anyone she can to bolster forces to use the Forsaken as her “bulwark against infinity” or however it’s phrased in that short story.
She had a choice when the Legion returned. Make good on her promise to the Horde to seek vengeance for Vol’jin (which turns out was manipulated into getting her into power, etc etc), or to commit her forces to get her into Helheim so she can try and enslave an ally against the Legion.
She had a choice in Arathi. She could have let them go and make it known that their fear was unfounded. That she values the free will of the undead, even if she disagrees with their decisions to rejoin the living and thinks it will end only in sorrow.
Every time, she chose the route that paints her as evil. Sylvanas is and always has been a villain, but now her villainy is pointed towards the Horde instead of its enemies.
I don’t think its realistic for Blizzard to try and focus on a racial narrative when talking about content that it intended to be done by everyone on both factions. Especially when dealing with really overarching evils like the Burning Legion that had an impact on everyone.
In the case of things like ICC, they did go with a racial narrative. Specifically, the human racial narrative because that was the narrative that Arthas and the Scourge was most strongly attached to. This is one of those cases where the Forsaken and Blood Elves membership in the Horde hurt them badly. This would not have been a problem if they were Alliance because it’s easier to have multiple racial narratives overlap if they’re part of the same playable faction.
It’s a good question. She was the Horde-side quest leader in the chase for Arthas, mirroring Jaina in the Alliance quests, so why did they decide to leave her (as well as Jaina) out of the big climax? I honestly don’t know the answer, and I’m curious why they made that decision.
Thanks! Dinged it last night. For some reason my new transmog is slower to update, though.
In the case of Sylvanas and the Forsaken? It’s because they make poor allies and nobody wants them around, and the feeling is mutual (Sylvanas also doesn’t want other people around.)
Turns out it’s hard to assault ICC as part of a large allied coalition when you have no allies and no desire for allies.
Thing is, I disagree. I think there is a disconnect between what is written and what people read into it. I think this is a consequence of the need to fill in parts because of the medium. The first problem is that an MMO setting provides less context and information than other media. The second is that an RPG encourages players to insert their own story elements. That is generally a good thing. But, when you combine less information from the writers and player insertions you get a wide variety of interpretations. This is painfully obvious if you look at any thread about her.
But, let’s look at some elements.
This is a perfect example. Is she really pragmatic? What makes you think that? What has she really done that is evidence of pragmatism? People tend to apply the pragmatic title to try and excuse bad behavior. ‘They did it because it was the pragmatic choice, not because they are bad.’ And that is largely what happened with Sylvanas.
Let’s look at examples.
Arthas. If she was really just a pragmatic person, Arthas would have been dead in WC3. She beat him. She had him dead to rights. A truly pragmatic person would have used an arrow designed to kill him. She didn’t. She used an arrow designed to paralyze him so she could take her time torturing him. That was all emotion, specifically anger.
All of her story up to and through WotLK was about finding away to get Arthas. All of her choices were about that aim. She was consumed by it. It was not pragmatism ruling the day. It was rage, anger. And what happened when it all ended and Arthas was dead? She had no reason to go on. She killed herself. That was certainly not pragmatism. It was all emotion.
Then when she came back she didn’t make choices based on pragmatism. She made emotional choices. Taunting Garrosh was not pragmatic, it was anger. Taunting Genn, again anger. Raising dead soldiers and sending them after the Alliance, not pragmatism. A pragmatic person would know that would risk getting other powers (Argents and Ebon Blade) involved (It is a huge plot hole that they didn’t especially since some of what she did directly effected Argent controlled areas).
Plotting to kill and raise her sister so she would have company was all an emotional choice. That had massive potential to create backlash. But she was all emotions.
Etc, etc.
Bottom line, Sylvanas is not driven by pragmatism. In the end, she is driven mostly by rage. Her anger is what drives most of her choices.
Except that is entirely in line with her primary driving characteristic, namely rage. She is angry. The world was not fair to her, so burn in all down. And leaving when they turned against her is exactly what you would expect of someone consumed by her anger. It is in character for her anger to be what makes her say something stupid that turns people against her.
No, she didn’t. She played the messiah figure, but only to use them. She directly described them as arrows in her quiver and then later as a bulwark. She was always just using them.
Look, don’t get me wrong, I understand where you are coming from. But, I think you have missed Sylvanas key character trait. It is very understandable. The media that we are getting the story from actively encourages us to ‘fill in the blanks’ in areas. And filling in those blanks in a way that makes the character more compelling is usually good. In this case, though, I think you missed the forest for the trees. Sylvanas choices have always been rooted in emotion, specifically rage. Her current arc absolutely fits.
There were interviews at the time that talked about how it would be impossible to get everyone who had a beef with Arthas involved. The choice to keep in simple and just have Tirion likely came down to production limitations, time constraints, encounter mechanics, etc.
I never gave Sylvanas much thought until she became Warchief. She was a good, tragic, and cool Character before that, but I didn’t really think of her. I liked Voljin, Cairne, Lorthemar, and the races in the Horde. She was just kind of the ruthless ride or die broad shooting from the passenger seat.
Then she became Warchief, and the Alliance attacked at Stormheim. I didn’t care about her in particular- I was infuriated at the Alliance and how Blizzard let’s them do all kinds of vile things without consequence. The Alliance must pay, as far as I am concerned, and Teldrassil was but a deposit.
I don’t care who the Warchief was. The Alliance just attacks as they fit, with no consequence. I demanded bloody satisfaction, and she delivered.
I would have loved if she was the Alliance’s Bane. An evil witch with no boundaries in defense of the Forsaken and the Horde. But, that was not to be.
I do like her more than I did pre Legion, though. Before Legion, she was barely on my radar. I am not fond of her story and character arc as of late, but I am more a fan of hers than ever before. She at least gave the Alliance a taste of their own medicine in the War of Thorns.
I get that, but the fact that they left out the two characters who had been the PC’s guides and who both had deeply personal histories with Arthas … in retrospect, it’s just a weird choice.
Pretty much every character that had a close relationship with Arthas was Alliance or Alliance-leaning with Sylvanas being the sole exception. Since she’s Horde, she can’t really interact with most of the cast that surrounded Arthas because they’re on the opposite faction and she has an antagonistic relationship with them.
They could have gotten more Horde involvement if they had gone a different, less Arthas-centric route with WotLK’s storyline but let’s be real here; WotLK was the Arthas show and that was what everyone wanted it to be.
They could have put aside their differences just long enough to deal with him, as it’s implied with other world-ending threats. The Wrathgate stuff might have made that weird, but they didn’t need to write that either.
That would have been hard, as the Alliance’s perception of Arthas was radically different from Sylvanas’
To the very end the Alliance hoped that he could be redeemed, and held fast to the belief that Arthas himself was a victim of the Scourge. They were obviously prepared to kill him if necessary, but only as a last resort.
Sylvanas not only wanted to kill him but wanted to make him suffer. She had no conception of Arthas Menethil The Paladin, she only knew Arthas Menethil The Death Knight. Her goals and the Alliances were the same only on the most basic level, in that both of them wanted to stop the Lich King.
That hope of redemption was already resolved in Icecrown questing when Tirion decides there’s nothing left of Arthas to be redeemed. The fight could have featured all three characters with different motivations toward the same end: Tirion - seeking justice, Jaina - putting him out of his misery, Sylvanas - revenge.
Tirion decided that, but the rest of the Alliance wasn’t there and clearly held out on the belief. It turned out to not be a totally unjustified belief either given that Arthas’ personality changed radically when the Helm of Domination was removed.
It’s a moot point anyway since the only NPC that traveled with us to the Frozen Throne was Tirion and he was just there to be in an icecube and break Frostmourne.
I will acknowledge that the presence of Bolvar and Terenas make it pretty clear that the fight was scripted assuming an Alliance raid.
I can admit you at least have tried to make a well-considered case against ‘pragmatism’ here. But you have taken that case and applied it more broadly against the original statement: that she is “written inconsistently.”
A character whose characterization changes drastically between different forms of media (and sometimes even within the same media), a character who has actually lied in her own internal dialogue, and a character who has needed a substantial amount of retconning to fit the present story cannot reasonably said to have been written “consistently”.
Whatever else is said about her and her character traits and interpretation thereof, however much time we spend mining particular quotes ad nauseam, I think the fact that she has been written in a very inconsistent manner is difficult to disprove. Even if you want to use the “everything was a lie” defense, again, why in the world would somebody lie in their own thoughts?
To be clear, I don’t have a problem with Bolvar or Terenas there. It would have been stupid not to have an alliance rep. I just find it disappointing that Sylvanas wasn’t, given that the entire playable race’s mission statement up to that point was about getting revenge against him.
It was a tad annoying that it seemingly got overtaken by the Ebon Blade in the final zone too. Which, fair enough, it was the shiny new class at the time. But it felt like it took the (relatively) more positive side of the forsaken and spread it around to be shared, leaving the actual race behind.