Well, I suppose her reliving the atrocities she committed from the Ranger General’s perspective is punishment enough.
It’s actually not far from what I wanted from the soul- splitting twist: Remorse. Whether it’s true justice or not is debatable, but I’ll take it.
Not good enough she should be damned to feel all the pain suffering and agony she inflicted upon all her victims for all eternity
Good thing you guys aren’t prosecutors LMAO
Or judge and jury…holy moly…
Just to remind that Forsakens have same fate, a bit worse even. Undeads loose full identity and leader Sylvanas. Blizzard here try to balance it around UC=Teldrassil. Unsuccessful for me.
Forsakens lost … the city, and 2 characters (Sylvanas and Nathanos).
But according to Blizzard Lordaeron can be restored, and both lost characters will get redemption.
And most important, destruction of the Lordaeron, was according to the Horde plan. It was the victory of the Horde players.
Night Elves lost - almost entire civilization, their entire location (with 4 cities) and 2 chars (Sira and Delaryn) plus many others in Darnassus. According to Blizzard their race is nearly wiped out. Also Teldrassili will never going to be restored. Sira and Delaryn, will also not going back.
And most important, the destruction of the Teldrasill and genocide of the Night Elves, was a victory of the Horde. The victory of the Horde players again.
And finally - Forsakens were aggressors while Night Elves were victims.
So no. Those 2 are not equal. Not even close.
Ranger General Sylvanas thinks her crimes are unforgiveable. I tend to agree. So let’s just leave her in Revendreth where they promise not to neither forget nor forgive them, but to eventually move beyond them… And most importantly, where we don’t have to see it or argue about it ever again.
So, their capital, their leader and their second in command.
Sylvanas’ plan*. That’s not exactly the same thing, especially now that we know that virtually the entire 4th War was nothing but a gigantic trap she had set.
Again, no, that’s on Sylvanas. Hell even Nathanos was kinda reluctant to set the tree on fire.
But at the end of the day the Forsaken’s worst loss was their identity really They were mainly about two things : being unconditionally loyal to Sylvanas (their leader and savior, who gave them purpose and created them as a faction) and rejecting everything they were in life, forging themselves new identities in Undeath. In BfA they lost both. I think the whole story with Calia Menethil was the ultimate humiliation and drove the final nail into the coffin.
There’s even that dialogue in Orgrimmar in which an Orc asks a Forsaken if he’s upset about Sylvanas leaving and he answers something like “Were you upset about Garrosh ?” like what the hell is that comparison, why would a Forsaken say that…
I’d say ingame the Kaldorei suffered the hardest blow, but in terms of narrative and player experience, the Forsaken did
Sorry for Godwining this, but Hitler as a child (basically when he was pure) would probably think his crimes as an adult are unforgivable too…but I’m pretty sure no jury on Earth would ever condemn child Hitler to the same sentence and punishment of his future adult self-counterpart for the crimes that…he didn’t commit, yet. This is actually a common theme in a lot of books and movies about time travel, nobody has the right to punish a character in the past for the bad actions and sins he/she will commit in the future.
So for me if the Ranger-General eventually goes in the same afterlife or get the same harsh punishment of the Banshee Queen (since they are reunited, now), it isn’t fair for the Ranger-General, like at all…
Good thing no one is talking about that here then. The acts have been commited. And they shouldn’t be forgiven. The reunited Sylvanas still includes the person who did those things. And while we may argue if this more or less new person is the one who should now suffer the punishment for those acts… well, we don’t really have to go there, do we? We have magical redemption land that can use all the magic needed to punish what still needs to be punished and teach what still needs to be taught. Wrongs have been commited. “Evil Sylvanas” still needs to learn her lesson, which might include accepting some punishment. And “Good Sylvanas” needs closure to stop torturing herself with what the person that is a part of her did, which might include experiencing carthatic punishment. Remember, the idea behind Revendreth was supposed to be that everything that happens to the souls there is for their own good, and with the new regime in charge that’s where it’s supposed to return to. Let the experts like the Accuser work that one out, we don’t have to solve the moral problems that magic created, we can leave it to magic to eventually solve them offscreen.
Anything else would be the devs trying to sell us on an answer to highly complex hypothetical questions, with their usual sledgehammer delicacy. And that can only divide.
Yeah but it doesn’t work like that. Current Sylvanas is Good Sylvanas + Bad Sylvanas. Would that reunited, balanced Sylvanas have commited the atrocities Bad Sylvanas did ? Apparently not. Punishment is only justified when given to someone who can be held accountable for their actions. If restored Sylvanas wouldn’t have done what Bad Sylvanas did, then any form of punishmment (or redemption process) is unfair all things considered.
But that’s just detached moral talking. Doesn’t make the Kaldorei’s desire/need for justice less justified of course.
…yes, that’s exactly what I said.
Now here is the point where people will disagree. Even if I’m not the same person I was 10 years ago in any relevant sense, and might never do the things I did back then now, I think it wouldn’t be unjust to attribute guilt for things I did then to me right now. There are quite a lot of books about the philosophy of identity and responsibility, and magic certainly doesn’t make these questions less complicated. And the philosophy of punishment is another topic once again, with quite a few ideas about its justification, which don’t always reference the culprit “deserving” what’s coming to them.
But luckily there is no need to define one position as true over another. That’s why Revendreth would be so great here, because we can disagree without Blizz giving us an answer. They don’t have to say that the “new” Sylvanas deserves suffering. They would be saying that the “new” Sylvanas can use the help that the sin experts in Revendreth can offer to deal with the sins she feels are hers, as well as the treatments they can offer. And people can fill in for themselves how much of that would be punishment for “her” sins.
Blizzard opened a philosophical conoundrum here that they can’t hope to answer satisfactorily. So they shouldn’t. Especially when they spent quite a lot of time introducing the perfect plot device to finish the story while still leaving the answer to these questions to the consumer.
Edit:
And if you are wary of the existence of “sin experts” in Revendreth knowing better than you… Well, I’ll agree that undermining and removing this system could have been an interesting story in its own right. But that’s not what we have done. We have fought the abuse of the system and restored it to working order. Stating that it’s unjust in principle now would be undermining what we did in the Shadowlands even more. We can’t save the narrative by introducing new contradictions.
I would say revisiting the “justice” of Revendreth could be a nice idea for a future Shadowlands story… but considering most of us probably don’t want to revisit that place any time soon that might not be such a good idea as well. So let’s just put a bow on it and leave it at that.
Actually if we go with a famous Star Wars comparison, Sylvanas should just be redeemed, and forgiven…because it was actually the little sliver of the soul of young Jedi Anakin Skywalker who eventually “convinced” Darth Vader that he had chosen the wrong path in the dark side of the Force all the time, and it is this little sliver of Anakin who lets Darth Vader take revenge on the Emperor (the Jailer in the comparison), so that he can kill him in order to save his son Luke.
And when Darth Vader dies, his spirit manifests itself in the good side of the Force as Anakin, and he immediately gets to stay alongside his former mentors Obi-Wan and Yoda, despite all the evil Darth Vader had done against them.
But to be fair in order to be judged equally, and achieve true justice, the two sides should just be split again after the Jailer is dealt with, and both judged accordingly to their actions…in fact, sending both of them to the same punishment, there’s also the risk that Sylvanas could even become a martyr for the people (both in-universe and the playerbase), sort of like according to the Bible, Jesus Christ willing chose to bear the burden of all the (original) sins of humanity on his own shoulders with his own death despite He himself was innocent.
The good part only ever deserved a good afterlife like Ardenweald, it became evil mostly because of undeath. If Sylvanas had survived her first “encounter” with DK Arthas, she would have likely joined the Blood Elves (not sure still as their Ranger-General or not), and even with the amount of moral grayness the Blood Elves had back then in BC, she would have never stooped herself so lowly as the Banshee Queen did later, the fact that she was turned into an undead and initially forced to serve Arthas changed her psyche completely.
Sure, but in such situation you didn’t have your soul splitted and then restored, you merely underwent natural evolution. 10 years later you might have completely different values and opinions, but you never were in “half command” at any given moment, not even 10 years ago. You changed gradually because you’ve learned things, you’ve reflected on YOUR past actions. That’s on you really, from point A to point Z.
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but I don’t think Revendreth is the benevolent self-help afterlife you voluntarily join because you want to be a better person. Revendreth is where sinful souls (not half-souls) go so they have a shot at being redeemed and “cured” from the sins that brought them to do evil stuff during their lifetimes. None of those souls are judged for things they did while being mindcontrolled or soul-splitted, I think…
Take Genn Geymane for example. He’s really not without flaws, he’s prone to anger, but still he would never, say, launch an unprovoked violent attack on a civilian Horde town and slaughter innocent Orc children. Now let’s say he gets his soul splitted, leaving only Bad Greymane in charge, and he does what I just described. Then we beat him, restore his soul and poof, the Greymane we all know is back. What do we do ? Do we send him to Revendreth ? What for ? Regular Greymane is a decently functional balance between good and evil. So sending him to Revendreth won’t “fix him” : he doesn’t need to be fixed.
That I agree with. If I’m being honest, Shadowlands people are douchebags. I’ve said that to myself multiple times while playing through the storyline. Best example being Bastion of course, where the systematic memory-erasing is obviously horribly wrong. We eventually come to realize that, basically acknowledging that well, the Forsworn were right, but still we kill those who refuse to join us under a reformed regime.
I’m not saying I know what the good narrative solution would be for the Sylvanas problem though. I don’t - they’ve gone too far in their nonsense to reach a satisfying conclusion now. I only challenge the idea that “retribution” would be morally justified here. I also happen to find the topic quite interesting.
And I don’t think see why that would make a moral difference. If the problem is attributing the deed to someone who hasn’t done it… well, it’s a question of how you define the person who did it.
Going by the Accuser… it pretty much is, though. The means of redeeming a soul may most often be through pain, but the goal is redemption. And that’s the regime we helped to get their power back. Just think of how we are to help Kael’thas - without torturing him. I don’t think it was presented very well, but they obviously tried to force some arc for Kael in here, where he learned the foolishness of vengeance, by the will of the Accuser. That’s not just torturing it out of him. That’s helping him overcome his faults.
Any soul that isn’t qualified for other realms may end up there. Some of the sins on the sinstones are pretty small, still they landed in Revendreth (e.g. “He meant well, but there were consequences.”). So I don’t see why the soul-splitted couldn’t fit there, if they have sins to work through. Sure, suffering pain isn’t nice, but getting cured by it is. And we are talking about the eternal soul here. The Accuser for example might have had many sins, but what we learn weighted most on her mind was the accidental murder of her own daughter. Revendreth helped her work through that as well.
But even if it wasn’t spelled out until now… they could do so in a single line without contradicting anything they set up, couldn’t they? I certainly got the impression that Revendreth was for therapy as much as anything else, in the supposedly noble version of it that we were trying to fight for. Or do you see anything about the behaviour of the “good” Venthyr that contradicts that?
Well, Sylvanas seems to think she needs to be fixed and she needs to pay. I don’t find it unfitting of her to think that. And I wouldn’t find it unreasonable of a Genn in a hypothetical scenario like that either. As long as he feels he is damaged goods, he could never be right for Bastion, as long as he is weighted down by guilt, no matter if it “makes sense” he could never live for the fight in Maldraxxus, and so on. If Revendeth (also?) has a therapeutical purpose, and everything we saw from the Accuser suggests that, there is nothing wrong with putting a soul split victim there.
Well, I’m not arguing for retribution. I’m arguing for leaving it open and letting the consumer think what he may, be it retributive, rehabilitative or whatever he may want to insert there for himself. Revendreth can include punishment, it can include redemption, and it can include restoration. But whatever it means, it can take ages to get there, so we can just leave it at that.
Why would we, though? Anakin becoming a force ghost isn’t exactly what sells the character or the movies. It’s certainly not a plus, and I don’t exactly agree with a “all is forgiven” message in that case, either. Not to mention that it doesn’t really fit later force ghost lore that well. That the StarWars trilogy were great cinema doesn’t mean that everything about them was great. And if they had spent time establishing a soul purgatory, I’d have argued for sending Vader there as well.
Why, though? It’s one soul. Why can’t that be judged as it is, if any soul can? We’re dealing with suppoedly super wise beings that judge that stuff, with much more information about the souls than we have. They know better than you.
Well in the situation you described, you ARE the one who did those things 10 years ago. It’s just that you wouldn’t do them again today. Saying you’re “not the same person” you were 10 years ago because you evolved as an individual doesn’t mean the same as being literally a different person than the one you were when your “good soul” was forcefully taken from you.
It’s fantasy so it’s hard to give it the proper perspective. I think the real life example closest to the soul-split thing would rather be a murderer suffering complete amnesia and having absolutely zero recollection of who he is. That’s not exactly the same situation but to me it would trigger a somehow similar unease when it comes to charging the guy with murder.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying Venthyrs are sadistic torturers whose goal is to punish to no end, they’re obviously not, their mission is noble. But they welcome souls whose lives were significantly tainted by sin and bad deeds, to the point where those sins make up for a considerable part of their identities. It’s not about having a “bad side”, everyone has a bad side, everyone has flaws and sins, yet not everyone is eligible for Revendreth. The only difference is that Sylvanas had her bad side expressing itself in full command due to external factors.
That’s another debate then… You’ll agree with me that one can feel guilty without it being justified. I’m not sure the choice of your afterlife destination should be based on irrational guilt, or even based on what you feel at all, because then the Arbiter would be useless right. This is how I view what reunited Sylvanas says when she goes “What I did is unforgivable”.
The key word is “responsability” I think. Revendreth as a therapeutical process as you call it only makes sense if there is something to heal. Having both a good and a bad side is normal, it’s not something you’re supposed to fix, it’s not something that should prevent you from going to Bastion or Ardenweald. Actually letting go of your negative feelings is something you can do in Bastion for instance, we’ve seen the process ingame
Why, though? What’s the thing that makes me responsible and that doesn’t make Sylvanas responsible? What makes me the same person I was 10 years ago? Body? Memories? A narrative? My soul? A causal chain from one to the next? That’s a damn hard philosophical question, and most possibilities don’t help much in explaining why you could blame me, but not Sylvanas.
A person with her brain did it. A person with her memories did it. A person that is an essential part of her personal story did it. A person whose decisions were part of the causal chain of her decisions did it. A soul that is part of her did it. I actually find it hard to formulate in what way she didn’t do it.
I guess we would have to assume something like this:
Ok, let’s try to work with that and compare to the 10-year change. We changed, so by premise 1 our soul must have changed. Our soul changed, so by premise 2 a new person was created. Let’s say the change was our responsibility, so we is responsible for the actions of we2. Not because they are the same, but because we1 created we2. Stange, but anyway, that’s not where we wanted to get to. What we wanted was we2 being responsible for the actions of we1.
So this doesn’t really explain the difference in the 2 cases. There must be something wrong with the premises, if there is supposed to be one. What, though? I think premise 3 has to be relatively on point, if we want to stress the importance of outside influence in the Sylvanas case. So it’s probably 1 or 2 that have to be amended. How, though? If the person isn’t the soul, we need a more complex relationship between them to explain why changing the soul would change the person. And if a change in the soul isn’t a change in the person it’s not clear why the changed Sylvanas wouldn’t be responsible. So… any ideas? Maybe changing the soul could change the person, but changing the person would not necessarily change the soul? But that would also only make a difference if we assume that what we ascribe responsibility to is the soul, and not the person, wouldn’t it? I’m not sure that feels right to me, either… I mean, if a soul can fit persons with quite different characters, I’m not sure I’d blame the soul over the characters… It would fit the idea of different multiversial versions of a character sharing the same soul, though… which never made sense to me, either…
I’ll leave it at that for now. But what I hoped to show was that this really, really is neither easy nor obvious. You’re arguing for something that seems obvious to you, because your intuition tells you so, but it’s not that easy to actually bring that into a logical form that isn’t contradictory or has consequences that feel wrong, like absolving the repentant sinner of the sin entirely.
Actually this makes it a bit easier in one sense: Some premises aren’t up for discussion. Souls are a thing, we don’t have to argue for or against their existence. And souls have to be part of the definition of personal identity, since it is an in-universe fact that changing the soul changes the person in some relevant way. Most theories of personal identity we would argue about in philosophy don’t apply here, and we don’t have to worry about them. We know that the person Sylvanas isn’t just a product of Sylvanas’ body or anything like that.
And having been the Banshee Queen that did all those things is not something that’s part of the identity of the reunited Sylvanas? Accepting that, as well as the sins that evil Sylvanas commited, as part of her, was a major point of her cinematic. She feels, and maybe she is, tainted by that. So… I don’t think I understand the distinction you are trying to make here. And like I said, there are sinstones in Revendreth for people who were always trying to do the right thing.
Revendreth isn’t just for hardcore sinners, and hardcore sinners don’t necessarily go to Revendreth (waves to Emeni). Revendreth is where you go when your soul isn’t welcome anywhere else.
…I don’t understand your point here. Why wouldn’t your irrationalities be relevant to where you fit? And why would the Arbiter be useless, if they took them into account?
Feeling guilty for a genocide seems like the kind of trauma you’d need to fix, though. Something that would drag you down quite a bit.
Shouldn’t it? I don’t think that’s as obvious as you might feel it is.
Just like we have seen in in Revendreth. Indeed, when visiting Revendreth, Kleia and Pelagos notice how similar the realms are in that aspect. Revendreth is the one that focuses on dealing with sin and guilt, though. It’s not unreasobnable to assume that many would have to go through Revendreth for the raw stuff and personalized confrontations with their inner demons before they’d be ready for the homogenized meditative way of Bastion. As long as you’re carrying your deep emotional wounds with you, you might as well be another angry Uther.
IF anyone deserves justice it is the Forsaken. They lost their land, their identity and their leaders. A wound that can never heal. Blizzard owes us a big victory where we can reclaim what was ours and destroy the alliance for good.
They are still present in Lordaeron, even if weakened…
and apparently if Tyrande (and not the new Arbiter) soon judges Sylvanas and she will declare she’s innocent and/or forviges her and does not execute her om the spot, I guess Sylvanas could return to the Forsaken after all…I mean, if even Tyrande will declare that Sylvanas is innocent or forgives her for Teldrassil because of renewal, why not the rest of the Horde as well? 
It begs the question of a Delaryn / Sylvanas interaction, now.
They are one of the same now, only one is an undead night elf ranger and the other is an undead high elf ranger.
At the start of the expansion, I was very pro kill Sylvanas, but now that Blizzard have returned the “Sylvanas” that I loved back in 2009, in some way - I’m a little conflicted. This Sylvanas is the reason why I leveled my Blood Elf Hunter during the Legion and TBC timewalking
Blizzard keep dropping the “We haven’t forgotten Delaryn.” First in Ardenweald when we meet the spirit of her lover and then in the Sylvanas/Uther cinematic.