The problem of Sylvanas Windrunner, and how to fix it

Lore Story
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(Note: This post will contain spoilers for the Sanctum of Domination end-raid cinematic! Go watch that first before reading.)

There’s been a lot of talk about how unsatisfying the Sanctum of Domination end cinematic has felt, in particular a PC Gamer article on the subject. Since the start of Battle for Azeroth, the story has, in my opinion, been quite a mixed bag, even if I enjoyed it overall.

I play World of Warcraft for the lore and for the story, first and foremost, and I will admit that I have been feeling a bit frustrated at the slow pacing of Shadowland’s story so far. This patch is following almost the exact same story-beats as Patch 8.1, with a bigger, secondary villain defeated, only to be tricked into empowering the bigger bad.

This feeds into, what I feel, is the central flaw of Sylvana’s character writing: blizzard are trying so hard to make her this morally grey, complex, multi-layered villain, that it ends up muddying her central character motivations and leaves her holding the idiot ball. She wants to “set us all free”, giving us a greater choice over our own destiny? How do we have a greater choice by being harvested by the jailer, judged to be sent to the maw no matter what? How was burning down Teldrassil supposed to give everyone more control over their lives, instead of just powering up the jailer?

I get that Sylvanas is being written with the mindset of “The ends justify the means”. But this still doesn’t solve the problem of “What does she want out of her partnership with the Jailer?” While I hope some of this will be revealed in the coming weeks, I propose a simple solution that could fit in with all the existing cutscenes, with minimal, if any changes.

Give Sylvanas a God Complex. Make her a straw-Anarchist, showing how death is inevitable, and that happy endings are impossible. She would view the different afterlives of each covenant as being fundamentally the same, despite their surface level differences, where each soul is forced to fit in neat little boxes and expected to behave however the Arbiter thinks they should.

She could see the Jailer as doing just this. The Jailer proves there is no hope, no real happy endings, no good or evil. There is just death, and so breaking the cycle of judgement is a necessary step toward a future of no gods, no masters. But, of course, the Jailer lies, manipulating her to make him the new ruler of the universe, serving his lust for power by enslaving everyone.

By focusing on Sylvanas’s nihilism, it would be easy to discard the jailer’s actions through conformation bias, constantly telling herself that it will all work out in the end. But, of course, it won’t, and she’s been played like a fiddle for yet another god-character, just as she was made to be a servant to the Lich King. Thus, she turns on the jailer in a moment of realisation, even if she knows it won’t do anything. She retaliates because it’s what the action represents, not the outcome.

And in the end, perhaps even she can’t escape the ideals of hope.

Thoughts on this fan theory/attempted re-write? I’d love to hear them!

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As far as I’m concerned… too little, too late. You can’t just shove in an explanation years after the events and expect it to have much, if any, emotional weight. Everyone already has their opinion of Sylvanas. No cinematic, and certainly no line in a novel right now, can change that. It doesn’t matter if it is factual in the fictional world, it feels true. There certainly were some ways to make Sylvanas an interesting villain protagonist. But not while witholding us her motives for 5 years or so of story development around her.

I just want them to end this plot and move on. Cut your losses, don’t invest any more. It failed. It will not become less of a failure if they spend more on it.

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I appreaciate the effort put (gj), but i feel that you are trying way to much to make sense of her narrative arch when its obvious we’ve had several iterations depending on who was in charge of the narrative at any given point.

They seem to have settled with an “almost but not quite” villain camp with her, that even if indeed caused her to hold the idiot ball of not realising Satan wasn’t to be trusted, at least leaves her a step ahead of the pit they threw her into in BfA.

Still, i think that there is no easy way to fix the situation left behind, and we are to assume that she was indeed fooled by the Jailer (we can rationalise it by assuming she was played by her own ego, that the Jailer held a bargain chip against her, or whatever, but the point remains).

Taking the above into account and to put it short, the only “fix” i see for Sylvanas character right now is to accept the arch was a mess, and give her the mercy kill in a way that doesn’t taint further those narrative segments tied in any way to her persona.

Personally, i think that a Vader sort of situation would be the best: it removes the character from the setting, but in a way that doesn’t completely trash on its legacy.

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Mate, as usual fans come up with quite eloquent and intelligent theories… it’s just Blizzard that doesn’t.

We have had numerous suggestions here on the forums and on other platforms on how to tackle the story but they just ignore us.

I mean even the biggest Sylvanas supporters (like Pyromancer) who would over theorize everything and find some hidden sense in every little detail, gave up. He literally screamed when he saw the cinematic. Yes, we all know he used to stretch some theories to absurd levels but his reaction is quite telling.

I want to believe that they’re simply clueless and don’t know what they’re doing anymore, but I can’t understand how.

I mean they literally have an army of experienced writers who are paid to expand and bring the WoW story to life for us. If an ordinary player can come up with something better than this, I’m inclined to say this is all intentional.

There’s no way the story is this bad unless they’re trolling us.

Sylvanas needs to go before they mess with her even more. Let them extract whatever info they can from her and put her down.

Or have the stones to pull a “it was all a void nightmare” scenario, because we would all be grateful for it.

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Everybody hated this idea so bad, now all would hope it’s official actually :sweat_smile:

Let’s face the hard truth. No writer - even the most talented one - will ever be able to erase the mistakes of the story from the Retail canon.

i.e. Even if I’d personnally love to return in the game to see a rebuilt subcontinent of Quel’Thalas and awesome lore in a future expansion, it will always have the sour aftertaste in mouth that all this cr-p happened already in the background.

ClassicPlus Universe is the only decent outcome that can happen to salvage Warcraft lore. Only to the extent they learn from mistakes or they just stop trying themselves and they just hire new persons to handle it.

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I’m almost certain this is not only incompetence, but arrogance on the devs part. They had a ton of feedback and chose to completely ignore it and go with what they feel is right for the game.

Now I’m not saying they should listen to every dumb idea that players come up with, but when an overwhelming majority of your customers say you lost it, it means you lost it.

When the most anticipated cinematic is downvoted into oblivion and you resort to unlisting it to save the appearence, it means your view of the game is not only very unpopular but also damaging to your product. Their arrogance is going to cost them.

It’s an idea but I don’t see how that would be any different from the “it was a nightmare” scenario. Like you said, you can’t undo what has been done. Restarting the game is probably a good idea, but with a whole new map and story.

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I don’t think the story needs to be re-written or changed or anything.

It’s Blizzard’s story and theirs to tell, so we should let them.

Then there’s some fun to be had with regards to speculation and theorizing what might happen, and that’s all fine.

But I think one should be careful not to try and force Blizzard’s hand.

I mean, if we just want Blizzard to tell the story we want to hear, with the characters behaving as we think they should, then we could just write our own fan-fiction.

I think it’s better to let Blizzard tell the story they want to tell, and then we soak it up as best we can, and if there’s something we don’t understand or can’t make sense of, then we can talk about it and discuss it and try to grasp the meaning of it.

So rather than concluding there’s a problem with Sylvanas and thinking about how to fix her, I think it’s better to consider that there’s something about Sylvanas that you can’t make sense of, and then just discuss and talk about it like any good ol’ book club would, in an effort to try and understand it.

Especially as the story is ongoing it feels a bit silly to try and do a running editorial and review all at the same time.
Doing a post-mortem on Sylvanas now is a bit silly. It’s more sensible to do it on Varian Wrynn, for example.

Just my thoughts. :slight_smile:

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If I could, I would. I can’t. I don’t want to hear the grand stories Blizzard has to tell right now. I want them to stop. And I’d be happy if they would, and went back to small stories no one has to care about to enjoy the game.

As it is today, following the story is pretty much non-optional. You are bombarded with it in unskippable dialogue and grand cinematics. Indeed, it actually wrecks the places you might have liked before, to replace them with nothing. So yeah, I have a great interest in telling them what to do - and more, what not to do. If they get the impression that my continued enjoyment of the game hinges on them never rubbing Sylvanas in my face again, that’s a win as far as I’m concerned. And if they don’t replace that writing with anything else, that’d be another one.

The motto is “gameplay first”. That doesn’t lend itself to especially artful stories, so stop pretending, Blizz. It’s not working for me, and many, many, many others.

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Why not just the latter? I mean, I’m totally for criticism and constructive complaints. But from your own enjoyment’s sake, aren’t you more interested in hearing a story you haven’t told yourself?

Speaking for myself, then I’ve certainly got a list of issues with Blizzard’s story-telling, but I don’t think I want to move into the realm of trying to tell them what they should do. That feels like it just ruins the experience for me if they then go and do exactly that.

The twilight fanbase sort of did it proper, I think. Some liked the idea of another kind of story and just went and did their own fan-fiction and found enjoyment in that. But the half measure where people just sit and grumble about why the story isn’t like this and that…it doesn’t seem very fulfilling.

It’s just my thoughts though, nothing more. :relaxed:

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Depends on the author, really. And the constraints they are working under. Blizzard’s writers under their current constraints? No, thanks. The less impactful the story they tell is on my game experience, the better. So yeah, telling them to stop is my main concern. Look at my first post in this thread, that’s pretty much what I was doing.

But if they don’t stop (which I know they won’t), I’m still interested in damage reduction and telling them which stories I’d find less harmful. Sure, they won’t listen to that, either, but it feels better to say it where someone might hear. It’s certainly more fulfilling than being annoyed in silence.

This isn’t a novel, though. It’s not a story. It’s a game. The story is just one part of it. I’m not playing for the story, else I would have quit. If it were a novel, I wouldn’t be around to complain about it anymore. The comparison goes nowhere.

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Most of the issues people have with the current story, aren’t about its content (or wouldn’t be as serious).

They are about how it was handled: consistency, timing, pacing, originality, etc.

Even if people still disagreed with it to some extent, the complaints would’ve been largely quenched if at least people were signalled that the narrative was treated respectfully and in a way that at least attempted to have certain degree of quality.

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Really? I would say the overwhelming number of complaints seem to focus on Sylvanas and how she behaves, because people just don’t like her for one reason or another. And that definitely just focuses on the contents of the story.

I mean, Legion and Shadowlands have very similar story-writing. Structurally it’s a lot the same. The production quality is likewise the same as well.
The only difference is the actual story. And people just seem to like one story and not like the other.

That’s how it appears to me at least.

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How she behaves due to the inconsistency of her character arch (either suddenly turning full villain randomly or suddenly being redeemed), the timing her attempted arch had regarding those that surround her (after an EXACT same arch that played out not long ago), the way the story made the rest behave in regards to it (NEs, Horde, the rest of protagonists,…), etc.

The content itself wasn’t the issue.
Mist of Pandaria shows that, regardless of its flaws, this sort of story could’ve been done more satisfactorily.

This time, they screwed it up big time. And it has nothing to do with the content, but the context of it as well as its handling.

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Debatable. I’d say that Sylvanas has always been a divisive character that players have had strong opinions about and an emotional response to. A bit like Garrosh, but more disliked.

Jumping to conclusions to conclude that Blizzard screwed up and here’s the proof… I don’t know…
I think Blizzard are quite aware that they’re writing a character that people generally won’t like. That’s the story they’re telling, seemingly.

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Maybe it is just me but for me the sylvanas story is not broken, in fact the story is fantastic.
Sylvanas is all about free will, she was resurrected by Arthas and compelled to betray and kill her own people.
After Arthas died and she tried to kill herself she got a glimps of the shadowlands and found out that your free will again is taken away.
though her methodes are wrong and she committed horrendous crimes, i am very curious how this story progresses.

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I concur. So you’re not alone. :grin:

And I’m also very curious about how the story is going to progress. I feel like the writing is on the wall, but it’s exciting to see how Blizzard will get her from A to B, so to speak.

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I…really don’t need to comment on that.

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What was terrible about Sylvanas development is that she realizes only after the point of non return that the huge death guy with runes all over his body, master of the Lich King, ruler of the Maw with a nickname which totally talks about freedom is just trying to remake things with him at the apex.

Then any character development is shut down by the big guy giving Sylvanas back her soul so ppl can finally say: “You see? Sylvanas isn’t bad she just wasn’t whole!!!”. And there are already ppl coming back defending Arthas too. This will be World of Lame Redemption Arcs.

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Isn’t it a bit of an assumption that a split soul means a split personality?

Because I certainly don’t draw that conclusion.

I just see The Jailer giving her back her mortal soul.

It doesn’t change who she is. It changes what she is.

Time will of course tell, but it seems a bit premature to bash the story for a conclusion that isn’t even established.

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By what we’ve seen with Uther and what Blizzard said about the new Mournblade soul-splitting mechanic we can make that assumption unless we are proven wrong.

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