What was the state of the person when they died? Older? Sick? Damage from a fight? Not all of them would be equal to start with.
What happened to the corpse after the person died. Was there a fire? Chewed on by scavengers? Left in the elements? Or buried in a mausoleum and preserved. What happened between death and being raised Forsaken would matter.
How old was the corpse before it was raised? Remember, according to Blizzard the Forsaken are in “suspended decay.” They are held at whatever point the corpse was when it was raised. If a corpse was raised minutes after death it would be less decayed, and more durable, than one that was 6 months in the ground, or a year, or 5 years, etc.
And there are lots of ways to fight that don’t involve massive assault deep into enemy territory. And Garrosh also told them not to use the Blight. So, they could disobey him. They just didn’t when it involved them gaining new territory. Funny that.
They clearly showed more ability to command someone than just what a drunk can do. They raised people they just killed and then directed them at their friends. They also were shown raising them and having them stand in ranks and shout “For the Horde.” And they did those without any spoken commands or discussion. Just immediately directing them how and where they wanted. Those are just a couple examples. They clearly showed the ability to precisely and instantly direct the newly raised to do exactly what they wanted. That is not drunks falling for a trick. There is no explanation beyond they had complete and precise mind control over them for some amount of time after they were raised.
It was mind control. It was just temporary mind control.
I would have to dig up the original quotes, but pretty sure it was just join or die. Leave was not an option. Which would make sense because we see zero having left. Plus we later saw Sylvanas kill Forsakan because she thought they might be leaving.
There hands fall of if they clap too much, that’s canon
Yea, the job they were given was take the territory and they did.
Again not at all.
No, plenty of forsaken leave, Leonid bartholomew left to join the argents, Marshall redpath left and made his own movement though it was killed when it was announced they were gunna attack the forsaken, lilian voss left to go to do her own thing for a few years. Leaving has always been a choice.
That is not actually what they said. They said they were controlled. They could be directed. They were saying the Forsaken do believe in free will.
Players generated an idea that Forsaken morality was based on the idea of free will. This idea started a bit into Vanilla and just kept going. Blizzard started embracing it later. Cata content reversed some of that. It caused player outrage. Blizzard came back and said, no they really do care about it. They only control them for a little while right after being raised. After that they have a choice, serve or die.
Blizzard’s explanation for the Forsaken is “suspended decay.” They stop deteriorating when they are raised. They don’t decay any more as long as they are undead. They can be damage, but they don’t decay. How decayed they are when they are raised is locked in by the magic that raises them. Whether that is a new corpse or an old, weathered, and barely held together one, it is locked in that state.
Golden can bite my boney posterior. If the Forsaken fell apart as easily as she wrote they do, then they wouldn’t even have a standing army. Just the absolute worst writer Blizzard could ever put on a project involving the undead since It’s very clear she doesn’t care for the concept. She enjoyed writing about Arthas, Sylvanas, and Calia. But let’s remember, they’re all basically whole and could be mistaken for living people with enough makeup.
When it came to writing the rest of the Forsaken, she turned her pathos meter up to 17 (The dial only goes to 11) and basically wrote them as the most pathetic and pitiful creatures on Azeroth so the reader would feel sympathy for the poor things. Extremely lazy research and writing for someone who literally worked for the company that made the IP, and bereft of even a minimal amount of critical thinking.
Oh i don’t like it, golden absolutely canned the forsaken and turned them into sad suicidal weirdo’s. It was kinda just gross misery p*rn, But ulitmatly regardless i still see necromancy and alchemy as the forsaken’s future. Now the living can either get on board and have a say or not. But any story that ends with “and then the forsaken decided to die off as a people” is just not acceptable
We don’t have to worry about that. The Forsaken aren’t going anywhere, no matter how much the Alliance partisans assure us they’ll be gone in just a few years after the next expansion, or maybe the next, or maybe the next. Ignore them, they’re just saying it to get a rise out of you.
Despite ruining the Forsaken’s nuanced place in the story, it’s very clear that the people who wrote them in Cataclysm all the way to BFA do like the concept of the Undead. They just preferred to write the Scourge themes and motivations instead of the Forsaken as Metzen had conceptualized them. Which was a broken people who would rally around vengeance against their former Prince and create a new “culture” as they adapted to their new existence and place in the world.
The Forsaken had so much potential had Metzen not just handed them over to the Scourge fanboy writers. I mean, they were Lordaeron, the Kingdom that agreed with Dalaran to keep the Orcs alive in the camps instead of slaughtering them like Genn and the Gilneans wanted. There’s bad blood but shared history there that should have had it’s moment to be resolved. The former jailers were now the ones asking the former prisoners for protection and aid. If they wanted the Horde to look inward and come together, I’d rather have that kind of reconciliation, rather than a madman Warchief no one wanted needing to be disposed.
But we didn’t get that. We got Kosak turning them into Scourge after his Scourge toys were “resolved” in Wrath, and then Golden grabbing the chain and yanking it all the way to the other side, where they’re all miserable mopey children who are afraid to move for fear of falling to pieces.
We’ve been ripped apart by Blizzard, but then so has everyone else. The Gilneans are so abused, if they were real then Blizzard employees would have been arrested for animal cruelty. It’s amazing that there are still fans of the Darkspear Trolls after what they’ve gone through. The Kaldorei used to be contenders with the Scourge, Alliance, and Horde, but now look at them. Look at what they did to a people who ruled a whole half of a continent just a scant few years before the game started.
Remember who the real enemy is. It’s not red or blue, but the awful writers of yesteryear and their bootlickers who defend bad product.
They needed the horde and the horde needed a foothold in the Eastern Kingdoms and the fact that Undercity existed protected Darnassus until the War of Thorns.
Not only that but this would not be the only thing that comes from a Golden novel that the game thoroughly and painstakingly pretends was never written
I think the one thing implying decay at all is Velonara’s rant in legion and it really is more an expression that she’s horrified at one of the hunters’ fascination for undeath
You’d think with how often that’s happened, someone would have wizened up and told her to change course or be dropped off at the next harbor.
To be fair to Velonara, she did subtly appreciate his attempt at courtship, and the rant was more that she couldn’t reconcile with the idea of having a relationship with a living man while undead. He was a goth boy, but she was like the goth girl that digs an open grave just to sleep in it. It just can’t work, no matter how much poetry he could write for her.
The lands blighted by the Forsaken are their lands to keep because no one, not even the Forsaken themselves, are capable of actually living there. The New Plague does not spread blight like the Plague of Undeath did, it renders the land completely uninhabitable to the living and the undead alike.
First off: It is literal mind control. They have complete control of them for some amount of time. They are quite clearly puppets. Just because it is temporary does not mean it is not mind control.
Second, even if it was not technically mind control (again it is) if it was effectively mind control it would be the same thing.
To be as fair to her as possible, even when first reading the book, I felt like that was only aimed at a small portion of the Forsaken population. I don’t think she meant for it to be the majority of the Forsaken.
Though I agree she laid it on way too thick and did not give enough representation to make it as clear as it should have been that it was only a percentage of the population that were in that state. As is obvious since some people did not understand that.
It always bothered me that the Forsaken story in Wrath involved purging their most militant, power hungry members in Varimathras rebellion and that somehow lead to them becoming more Scourge-like in Cata.
They should have become a more heroic (though still dark) group. The group trying to make the world better, whose touch of darkness let them do the tough, but necessary, things others wouldn’t or couldn’t. Which is what I felt like Vanilla held a promise for. Sadly, that did not fit with the new more edgy, now with more spikes, Horde of Cata. So, we didn’t get the dark heroes the Forsaken could have been.
I’m torn on this one, because I feel like I see what Golden was aiming for with this description, and I do like the concept if not the execution.
What I think this was going for was a theme of ‘the undead do not not constantly grow like the living do, so every minor injury must be manually fixed instead of naturally healed over time’ - as in, a human clapping does shed some of our skin cells, but we don’t care because it’s a negligible amount and it grows back without us having to think about it; whereas an undead does not passively grow more skin cells, so every bit lost to the friction of everyday life is permanent and they need to find another way to repair their minor but slowly-accumulating damage.
I think that’s a pretty cool aspect of an undead’s everyday existence to explore, but I think the fun lies in seeing what their answers are rather than wallowing in the existential horror of entropy. It’s been long enough since the Forsaken were raised that I expect they’d be accustomed to the mad alchemy, the fleshshaping, the trading of body parts, etc, and treat them as daily facts of (un)life rather than fresh horrors.
(I have not read the book myself, so I only have this forum to interpret how the idea was presented, but that seems to be most players’ impression from the text.)
Nah it’s cool actually the Forsaken figured out a solution. The side effect is, predictably, a monstrous rampaging goo kaiju you’ll have to then put down with an airforce like in a Godzilla movie.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
See I got the concept but it’s just kind of absurd. The Forsaken can regenerate themselves through eating the dead, and more permanent injuries need limb replacement.
If they were all falling apart gradually from the friction of everyday wear and tear then first gen Forsaken would be completely useless if not paraplegic by now. Which they self evidently are not as there’s plenty running around in combat shape.
It’s just Golden not really thinking an idea through. My head canon is an undead cannot cannibalize their self to a state superior to how they were when they were first raised. So if you were already old or decrepit or became particularly mangled while being turned then you’re kind of screwed. Theoretically you could replace your body parts, or get a black magic glow up ritual if the boss has a crush on you, but that’s going to be out of reach for most people.
So that’s why Forsaken players give Sylvanas so many Love is in the Air cards every year!
I wonder if Forsaken write to the Chief Apothecary every year like he’s Santa? “I want a six pack, and giant arms that can bench press a tauren, and laser eyes, and…”
Body building in Forsaken society is a very literal pursuit.
“Alright saved up three years now for leg day”
What I thought was the most interesting idea from that book was a blacksmith being given an artist’s arm. Because that suggests there’s some kind of scarcity in the Forsaken body shop department. This dude is hammering steel and your giving him drama kid strength?!
It makes sense though as, particularly if you were preparing for war, you’d want your best bits avaliable for your frontline soldiers.
So is there a corrupt system there where the wealthy Forsaken get the best parts and the common folk get the leftovers?
We also know from one of the later books some Forsaken look borderline human if not for the glowing eyes so is there like a pretty privilege discourse there? Or is it the reverse where undead not missing their lips get side eyed because rot is the new hot?
And like - what do abominations do beyond stand there? They have aspirations. Are people like friends with them?