Sylvanas & Zovaal are Narratively Nonexistent

[Hiyorin-argent-dawn (Hiyorin)]

In this I talk about narrative driven villains. Not force-of-nature villains like for example Deathwing and G’huun who are there mostly to shout and wreak havoc. Obviously this is all also my own personal opinion and I am in no way trying to say that this is the only correct train of thought.

Also of course, spoiler warning-ish, since I talk about things presuming you know everything we know up to this point in the current story in WoW.

So!

Look at a few of the ‘greatest’ villains in WoW, big or small. They are usually pretty awesome. We’ve a few long running ones, Kel’thuzad for example. And those who are now gone, like for example Arthas or Garrosh.

These villains all have one great thing going for them in that we know a lot about them, and we get what makes them tick to a certain extent. This is one of the most important things to make a good villain. We need to understand them. We need to see their journey. We need to see their motivations. And, if we’re lucky, we need to get a little bit of their personality.

Author Ben Bova said:

“In the real world there are no villains. No one actually sets out to do evil. There are no villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds. There are only people with problems, struggling to solve them.”

To use the examples already cited: Kel’thuzad, Arthas, Garrosh, all of these three people, are people. One of the things that always drives me narratively is that villains are people who had one bad day, who made just a few too many bad decisions at pivotal moments. The moment a narrative villain fails in this, they lose us as an audience.

We’ve been dealing with Sylvanas and her glorious purpose for quite a while now. And we still don’t really know anything. If we focus on the warchief ‘arc’ as one continuous story, we are now in act 3. We are actively in the climax of the story. And we still don’t know anything about what exactly she was really planning. Or wanted, generally.

Equally mysterious is Zovaal. The large mumbling default-human-character-creator-template with a skin condition. What does he want? What has he been doing, for that sake? What are the things he is using and obtaining?

Should I even care?

I don’t know if I should. I’ve not really been given any reason as to why I should.

Sure the Blizzard writing team has tried to motivate us to take them down. Sylvanas performed genocide. But villainous acts without any purpose or motivation behind them doesn’t inspire a great narrative. It actively fights against the narrive. It merely inspires me to question. And in a mystery story this would be great if it stopped at that. But it doesn’t, does it? I can’t solve a mystery when every time I try to ask about it the reply is to provide me with another mystery. This is not a sustainable narrative.

The point I am trying to make here is that when youin a narratively driven setting fail to make your villains more than anything for your hero to overcome, you lose out on what a great villain can be. A wonderfully nuanced and beloved driving force of your story.

I am going to out myself with the surface-level anime nerd card here but look at this quote from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. In which the villain of Part 4 introduces himself to one of our heroes;

“My name is Yoshikage Kira. I’m 33 years old. My house is in the northeast section, where all the villas are, and I am not married. I work as an employee for the department stores, and I get home every day by 8 PM at the latest. I don’t smoke, but I occasionally drink. I’m in bed by 11 PM, and make sure I get eight hours of sleep, no matter what. After having a glass of warm milk and doing about twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed, I usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, I wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning. I was told there were no issues at my last check-up. […]”

There’s more to it but this is enough to make my point about narrative driven villains as people. These little details serve to make Yoshikage Kira not just a villain, but a person. We understand what drives him. What he enjoys. We understand that he is not just some hurdle for the protagonist to pass over. He is a character with motivations that drive him.

Nothing drives Zovaal. Nothing motivates Zovaal. He is a force-of-nature villain given to us in a story that demands to be run by a narrative-villain.

And because nothing drives him, nothing can drive Sylvanas. A character whose motivations we’ve been waiting to explore for the last half-decade. Motivations which we now know, here at the end of the line after all these years, are nonexistent.

[Zarao-colinas-pardas (Zarao)]

Both Sylvanas and Zovaal have been treated not as characters per se, but as plot devices .

This is tougher to see for the latter, but regarding the former, Sylvanas has been the prime example of something that starts and stirs a story, without ever being actively part of it.

Neither really qualify as actual “villains”, because seldom are they even treated as characters. Only recently have we been given the beginning of an arch for either, as most of their role prior could be summarised into: “This thing makes stuff happen”.

[Adítu-magtheridon]

You make a few very good points and I absolutely agree.

I’ve said it before, to me a story is interesting when the heroes are allowed to have flaws and the villains’ motivations make sense. The line that distinguishes one from the other is indeed often thin, one wrong decision is enough, one problem too big to overcome so it makes them resort to doubtful means. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And the former hero becomes a villain. Which we can hate for the bad things they do, but we still understand what made them do it. As you say, they are people.

And if they don’t have deeper motivations, well, at least make them compelling. Kel’thuzad wasn’t exactly that deep either but he was fun and had a morbid charm to him.

Zovaal has none of that. He’s just uninspired and boring, popped out of nowhere with no backstory apart from “he was always behind everything , okay???” When he gives the impression that the reason why he wears no shoes is that he wouldn’t know how to tie them. And the constant mumbling is indeed annoying xD.

As for Sylvanas, we don’t even know who she is anymore at this point. You’re quite right, why should we care for these characters? I certainly don’t.

[Darvingar-silvermoon (Darvingar)]

To be fair, we know so little of Zovaal that it is hard to determine why he wants to rule all of reality.

Considering it has basically been confirmed that he was the Arbiter, I imagine he too found life-eath cycle unfair. He could not control people’s fate, only send them to a location based on what fate they “chose” for themself, which they did not even really choose for themselves. I guess he thought reality would be better if he could control how people’s lived their lives, thus allowing him to end all sin and disparity.

[Linma-argent-dawn]

Don’t think of people better than they deserve. The Jailer said nothing exact about his plans. And as Hiyorin so well stated, they matter even less since we’re still gonna stop whatever they are. And even if we do suppose this, who set the definitions of sin in the Shadowlands in the first place? I mean, look at Garrosh. In his own eyes the only thing he did wrong was losing his fights. Even embracing the Old God wasn’t on his sinstone, but wrath itself somehow was. And don’t even start with Kel’Thuzad. This system was beyond logic from the start, so what’s the reason to care of anything aside from state of the few (more or less) alive people on the stage?