Slands was widely derided for it, and at the very least, Sylvanas did show remorse after she got soul patched, which - I would note - is more than Jaina has ever done for the Purge. To date she has shown zero regret, including in her dumb soul vision quest in BfA where it showed her ‘mistakes’ and the Purge was entirely absent, indicating she holds and held no guilt over it whatsoever.
Once again, since it apparently got missed: A Horde character making a peace offering for this little flavour stuff is fine, but it to build peace they actually have to, you know, recognise their wrongdoings.
I don´t think it was really great from any perspective, and it´s an example of weird way Blizzard does the theme of forgiveness. In BfA, the one Sunreaver that is still angry at Jaina (who is a leader of enemy nation at that time too) serves as a villain to the good guys who are saving Baine. You don´t see Jaina expressing regret afterwards, instead she touches a bicep saying how peace can be achieved now because they´re different.
Same goes for Tyrande, whose wish to bring the woman that genocided her people to justice is portrayed as wrong because she should choose renewal instead.
Then, when we go back in time and look at War Crimes (written by one of current narrative team members), we get a message that “everyone has done bad things, and executing this war criminal would be bad”.
Cool message, stops working when you read what trial the author used as basis for his crimes (many of which were created directly for the book and were not present in the game): https://twitter.com/christiegolden/status/443042929511510016
Right now we live in a world (well, at least our part of the world) where evil deeds of the past are often called out and there is a push to fix them, or at least make some form of penance to nations and peoples that had to go through oppression or, unfortunately, were genocided. In real world, nobody sane expects them to forgive and forget what happened to their ancestors, let alone themselves in some of the more current cases.
But not Blizzard, for Blizzard, something that happened 10 (Purge of Dalaran) or 2-3 (Teldrassil during 9.1) years ago is in the “don´t seek justice, don´t be angry, forgive and forget” territory.
It doesn’t help that Elune says Tyrande has to choose between vengeance and renewal right after pulling a https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButThouMust on her.
Long after Tyrande was pushed to accept renewal over vengeance though, which adds further weight to the idea that Blizzard believes that it’s the responsibility of the wronged to forgive and move on.
Maybe we’ll get to see Jaina show remorse later down the line, but it looks like Blizzard is starting off by having the wronged party do the forgiving and the forgetting, like with Tyrande. Alternatively, since people barely make a fuss about Dalaran compared to the fuss that is made over night elves, there’s a chance that Blizzard will move on without even acknowledging the purge for another five to ten years.
I’ll agree with Syelia, it’s an extremely strange theme that feels uncomfortable when you consider external factors, such as Blizzard’s own wrong-doings and real life geopolitics. But if Blizzard’s going to insist on tarring the Alliance with that brush, I can accept them tarring the Horde with it too.
You clearly haven’t RP’d with the Dalaran community, then. But I do agree that a lot more people make a fuss about Teldrassil than Dalaran. It helps that it’s a more recent event and was also more shocking when it happened.
Not that I’m a Horde player but I have wished for Jaina to stay in Thros or executed for her crimes against Kul Tiras since BFA. One heartfelt cinematic does not make up for the political and diplomatic hydrogen bomb that is her career within the Alliance and Blizzard’s extremely bad way of her atoning for anything.
I have said it more than once and I will say it again:
Jaina’s story was concluded in BFA.
She should have died in BFDA.
Not because of fairness.
Not because she’s been around since wc3.
Because it would have been fitting. She had only just managed to fix her past and put things in to order. She has just managed to cripple the Zandalari warmachine and murder their leader.
In her arrogance and drugged from all the arcane power, she momentarily fails in her judgement and decides to take on the adventurers- The same ones who destroyed argus the unmaker an expansion later, mind you -, and gets killed.
Alliance gets the victory they deserved but it comes at a terrible price. Jaina’s death opens up paths and storylines for other Alliance characters and could allow her mother and brother to have a shot at Alliance politics and storylines, whereas they are now thrown aside.
In this setting they should at this point. The cast of lore characters and “faction” NPCs is so bloated that chopping off the heads of 80% of them wouldn’t impact the story whatsoever. Both Legion and BFA offered a great opportunity to cull the cast to a manageable number of, lets say, 8 lore characters. Hell both Anduin and Sylvanas should have been murdered in their respective raids, then at least we’d attribute a bit more to the Jailer than him getting mugged by 20 murder hobos at the end of his multimillion year 4D chess plan.
Jaina is just one of the ones who served her purpose and her role as Lord Admiral is negligible. I’d rather have seen her mother going into vengeful tidemommy mode and wish death upon the Horde after her daughter getting ashed in the raid than for Jaina to linger long into Shadowlands as part of the Justice League of Azeroth.
Similarly Talanji should have died instead of Rastakhan, thus giving us the much advertised God-King committing to total war against the murderers of his heir, instead of the dumb buffoon we had to cooperate with, but I digress.
I guess I just don’t find “an Alliance character had a questionable/bad plotline (that people dunked on), so a Horde character should get one too (and people shouldn’t be able to complain about it” to have any particular merit.
It’s that sort of dumb thinking that had Vol’jin die in Legion. The Alliance lost a leader, so Horde has to lose one too.
Aethas’ complicity in the sunreaver conspiracy to use dalaran’s neutral veil to steal a powerful weapon should at the very least have seen him stripped of leadership for being unable to control his own organization. He’s suffered no consequence, had a chance to correct the record and chose silence.
He’s not an innocent party in this ordeal and an “I should’ve done better” apology music box is a small gesture.
They just wanted vol’jin out of the way to move forward with Sylvanas’ garrosh 2.0 story arc. Killing both faction leaders at the broken shore (with a slight delay) served the narrative purpose of showing the demonic threat.
The idea that both factions have to lose a thing and make matters even doesn’t work in the light of the horde’s consistent gains of territory, only dialed back with the loss of undercity, now “fixed”, and the reverted conquest of ashenvale and darkshore.
Let’s not forget Aethas to be the second most cowardly Elf after Darkhan Drathir for not only keeping quiet about Garrosh’s infiltration through Dalaran but also not even telling his Regent Lord about it as it might have been a crucial information to bring to the table. Unless I missed something, he never came clean about it did he? Plus right back in Legion I think him or his Sunreavers once more endangered Dalaran?
It was eventually revealed that his uncomfortable shifting during the Isle of Thunder event was supposed to be a reference to the bugged out scene demonstrating that Aethas, while a Kirin Tor loyalist, did find out about the heist and didn’t know “nothing”, but he wasn’t an active participant in the deception like in Jaina’s accusations.
Yeah I knew about that nugget of information, I just left it up there because it may have been brought up again during the Garrosh Trial or much later in Legion when he asked to be brought back to Dalaran.
But Aethas knew and kept his mouth shut then got all uppity that the consequences of his actions had dramatic shifts all the same. I don’t dislike the story here, just the guy and lack of decent follow-up bar “Let’s forgive each other.”
But I do agree that a lot more people make a fuss about Teldrassil than Dalaran. It helps that it’s a more recent event and was also more shocking when it happened.