That’s true. As i said, the arch about her realising just now that the Jailer would act this way is incredibly dumb.
I disagree there.
Until BfA, she was never irredeemably villainous (not more than any average Forsaken character), and having her dying as such would’ve served for nothing other than to create another expendable Gul’dan that appeased temporarily a collective that would simply turn towards another target of the opposite faction once it was done, and would leave an entire chunk of both the narrative and playable segments in a “Now what?” situation with little room to develop going forward.
So… Sylvanas redemption starts with noticing that the guy that’s obsessed with domination might actually want to dominate? Golly gee wilikers! What are they saying? Sylvanas isn’t evil, she is just too stupid to fathom? I guess that’s one way to start the redemption arc…
Oh well, let’s just hope her days as a regretful hero are numbered.
I very much prefer the Garrosh cinematic. That one was just as stupid, sure, but at least it was a very classic Blizzard kind of stupid. “Orc goes rawr rawr!” is nice to see after years of “Orc goes regretful and contemplative, aww aww…”
Sylvanas to Anduin: Serve, or be made to serve!
Jailer: haha guess what, you will all serve me!
Sylvanas: what?! noooo! Totally didn’t see that coming…we need to stop him!!!
But not because of the reasons you listed, but because at least they seemed fully committed to the character involved.
If Garrosh was to spend his last days as a prideful jerk, let his last remnants go down as such. At least he was spared of having the sort of rehashed plot Uther and the rest had.
Lets clear up a few common, most likely deliberate, misconceptions.
Sylvanas was working with Zovaal, but she never served him like a slave. She always stood by his side in SL, indicating this is a partnership rather than servitude. When she said “I will never serve,” this means she won’t kneel like a slave. She’d work with him, but never serve him. Like how she said she’s “never relinquish my freedom by shackling myself to you fools.” when Varimathras extended the offer for her to rule the Plaguelands beside his brothers. Zovaal is different in this regard because he likely convinced her that she would help set people free.
Zovaal claims the power orb from the Arbiter and returns to his full strength. This means he’s one of the few WoW villains to have major successes in his in-game plots and is now likely making his way to the Sepulcher.
Sylvanas did turn on Zovaal, but this does NOT mean redemption. She still did very bad things, even if she believed she was working with someone who desired the same freedom she did. She was deliberately left by Zovaal to be left to our mercy, as a whole. Not that when she turned on him, Zovaal remarked “Pity.” It seems that for a moment, he was regretful of her turning on him.
Another note, it seems that he returned the missing piece of her soul to her body, which resembled that same crystal from when Kingsmourne was forged. Which begs the question: who did Zovaal have forged into Kingsmourne?
Not knowingly, I guess. But her stupidity in not seeing the obvious with Zovaal is kind of the point of critique here.
No. But Blizzard pulling some “it was always her incomplete soul acting, and now she is a whole peron once again”-stuff out of their butt pretty much is confirmation. You don’t do that if you don’t want to shift her character in a more humanized direction. And that’s the start of an redemption arc.
I’m pretty sure when Blizzard wrote the original story in Warcraft III or even in Cataclysm, the thought “but it’s just half of Sylvanas” never entered their heads.
Steve Danuser will retcon everything for the sake of retconning.
That still means the majority of her soul is guilty. Plus it’s the common theory that Zovaal returned the piece of her soul to her as a punishment, that the piece that was still the Ranger-General will now be forced to live with the horrors her shadowy half committed.
Sadly that’s how cults work, and that’s how REAL cults work. You’d think they’d know better, but circumstance and deception does that. It’s saddening how REAL this actually is. She sees a figure who (she presumed) has suffered like she has, who is much like herself, and how the world itself is suffering. She would naturally empathise with them.
I’m laughing so hard right now, this is just the worst cliche type of story telling I’ve seen in a long time. It’s now so painfully obvious that we will get a “sylvanas redemption” arch, and that she will sacrifice herself in the end to “save everyone”.
Is anyone actually taking Shadowland’s "lore"serious at this point?
Or complicit at least. Is that a “majority” thing, though? If they took out her conscience, is the rest of her guilty of acting unconscionable? Not all parts are necessarily made equal, and lacking one part may excuse the rest.
I don’t care about Zovaal’s intentions. What matters to me are dev intentions. The devs don’t want to torture her, they want to tell her story.
Well, this is fiction, not reality. It doesn’t matter if it is based on reality, if it doesn’t seem believable to the viewer.
The note left with this cinematic points at a partial redemption in the form of having Sylvanas draw the line over having the entire cosmos enslaved or destroyed by Zovaal.
I agree that this isn’t the same as turning her into a full blown hero, but it’s definitely a step opposite the villain direction.
However you want to take it, and however you want to measure this “redeeming” route, is entirely up to you.
But the obvious intention Blizzard had here, was to make a minuscule backpedalling regarding her overall villainy.
I don’t know if that’s the case.
After all, she acted against the Jailer before being fused again with that thing.
I honestly don’t know how Blizzard writers intend on having said soul shard affect her. It’s not as if she didn’t already have her shades of grey (before some were turned pitch black in BfA).
“She began acting good because she was whole again” isn’t really the case if her act of goodness comes prior to the whole fusing bit.
I don’t see why that would change anything. Especially since her “good act” was also framed in entirely egoistic terms. She will not serve. Others might, but not her. That’s not exactly a statement of compassion and fits well with the lack of it she might have had before.
Well for me, it actually is believable because it has happened in reality, minus the cosmic force stuff, but for the reasons I listed above.
But I am sure we can all agree that the devs do not deserve the death threats they’ve been receiving over this. Criticise it if you don’t like it, but people can go too far, and that makes me liking this more justified: that it’s upsetting these people. I assume we can agree on this?
Oh, and that goes for ANYONE that even thinks a shred of anything that resembles “Well if they made a story I liked, they wouldn’t receive death threats.” If anyone on these forums even had an inkling of a thought like that, your complaints are no longer valid. You deserve every unhappy thing that comes your way.
Well, you’re putting a lot in there the devs haven’t yet. We haven’t seen Sylvanas’ programming, nor have we seen cultlike structures. The novel might change that, but for now any parallel is pretty much your head canon.
This has nothing at all to do with the discussion at hand. No, I won’t make obvious denouncements of iRL violence whenever I discuss a fictional topic. That’s stupid.
Because the first step in the whole humanising process, was taken prior to the fragment bit.
She spoke against him (as in “You already have what you want dude! Let them be!”), when Zovaal forced Thrall, Jaina, and Bolvar to kneel.
She glanced worriedly at Anduin when he spoke about dominating the cosmos and destroy reality.
And she made up her mind to attack him when he mimicked Arthas regarding the serving part.
Blizzard may still want to double on the whole soul bit to further said take on the story, but the redemption wasn’t signalled through the fragment plot device (we barely had the time to experience its effects beyond changing her eye colour). It started much sooner.
I’ll repeat, that i don’t know what will the purpose be with the whole fragment thing. But my point is that if people want to look at forms of redemption, writers somehow decided to start signalling such even before the event that you say that should’ve or would’ve kickstarted it.