I feel that Calia is brought up too often solely in connection with the Forsaken leadership question. While this is certainly part of what is relevant about her, it leaves out a big chunk of Calia’s origin as an undead: The Light and the Naaru.
The Naaru Saa’ra didn’t just ressurect Calia, she was also a mentor figure to her in Before the Storm. When Calia had dreams that duddenly made her question her role in the world, after being fine with it for years, she went to Saa’ra for guidance. And the guidance that this Naaru gave her was was promted her to engange in the acts that led to her demise.
Her ressurction itself is strange as well. It’s a bit hard to believe that the Naaru would just offer to ressurect her because she was such a nice girl, and totally discount the influence the potential heir of Lordaeron might have on the future. We can’t forget that the Naaru act mostly on the basis of light-given visions, which might be imperfect, but not useless. And while it seemed like Calia chose light-made undeath over a full ressurection, this decision might have been foreseeable, or even more or less subtly manipulated.
Of course, all of that wasn’t necessarily Saa’ra’s plan. But Blizzard did sandwich this act between Xe’ra’s forceful acts shortly before, and Yrel’s destructive conquest shortly after. I’d say even if everything here was entirely benevolent, and not manipulative at all, Blizz certainly wants us to have our doubts on that front. And if they want us to have doubts, they want to do something with them, to either confirm or subvert them, both of which would require some story around it.
That’s why I find it almost unavoidable that Calia will have some role in a future plot surrounding the role of the Light. They didn’t just raise her as a normal Forsaken, they tied her deeply to the Light and the Naaru.
She might become just another villain. If they go with “both extremes, Light and Void are eeevil”, Calia could just end up a recognizable villain on the Light side. Her association with the Horde might just have been so that the Horde can have a throwaway Light character they don’t care too much about, while the Alliance gets to pretend they care about Turalyon. And there is of course some potential for redeeming the poor Naaru puppet, when we confront her with the way she has been manipulated, and… dare I say it? Forsaken.
If they go the more subversive route, they could have a plot where we fight the Light extremists, and we become suspicious of Calia and Saa’ra, just to uncover that Saa’ra really is a good guy, and that there are factions within the Naaru, that see things differently than Xe’ra and her ilk(as always, the same link to the same interview where one dev mentions Naaru possibly having different goals and methods). Calia would then be used to distinguish the ideology of the “good” Light users from the bad ones.
Her character isn’t much of an impediment for either of those, since undead Calia is a bit of a blank slate. Courteous and friendly, but not exactly warm, while comeptently caring for (and maybe about?) others. There is a lot of room for additional definition here.
And there is also another important connection I hadn’t mentioned yet: Her family. Calia had a family, a husband and a child, and instead of definitively killing them off, Blizz left the door open for them to be alive somewhere. A fact that seems to have been taken up by the Scarlet Brotherhood somehow, who claim to have the living heir of Lordaeron in their care.
I just have no idea how to tie that in with her position as an undead and possible Naaru pawn, really. So I’m open to suggestions.
That’s all I wanted to say for the moment anyways. I feel that this, much more than the Forsaken leadership, is at the heart of what the devs want to do with this essentially new character. And I’s like to hear some more thoughts on that. Else they would already have rushed her into the leadership position.
