Following the Developper Preview i watched some of the broader community reactions and something kind of struck me. The casual audience member has absolutely no chance of following the story. Here on the Story forum we’ve speculated pretty extensively, dug through hours upon hours of interviews, gone through most of the extended media, but was it ever even eluded to what he aims to achieve?
To elaborate by “What he means to achieve?” i mean his ultimate goal, what is the objective of him reshaping the fabric of reality? What is the endgame? What is the flaw(are the flaws?) he seeks to fix? What motivates him so fiercely he would turn on the other Eternal Ones?
That’s not just a problem for the causal audience. No one has any idea. Blizzard seems to think that witholding vital information that is needed to actually understand the stakes of the story is the same as preparing an interesting twist. Either that, or they have lost all understanding of what the player actually knows and what they don’t, since everyone in the Blizzard office has known for years. We’ve mocked them for months on that issue. It’s storytelling-incompetence either way.
And remember, we don’t even know the version of his plans that supposedly convinced Sylvanas to follow him. We have 3 main characters this addon. Anduin, who is not acting, but just being acted upon, Sylvanas, whose motives we don’t know, and the Jailer, whose motives we know even less about. That’s not “a story that’s just too complex for silly little me to understand”, that’s just a failed story.
To be fair this is more of a jumbled mess of sequential events than a story. It’s kind of wierd, when you actually think about the sum total of the 3 main characters doing things. (Basically just the 20 or so minutes of cinematics, for all intents and purposes)
Well, that’s worse, isn’t it? BfA certainly tried to be a story. And that story is the one we still want explained, considering it all hinged on Sylvanas.
his going to re-write reality so all will serve him … whats so hard to understand the jailer clearly think that a reality where people have free will is a flawed design by the first ones and wants to correct that by enslaving everyone to his will
Yup. And that’s all there is. Not what he thinks is flawed, no reason he would want anyone to serve, no mission he has. We know one part of what he doesn’t want. We don’t know what he wants.
Maybe maybe not but considering most of his forces are willness husks and he considered the lich kings failures because they didn’t just mindlessly carry out his will it would seem to me that mr generic boss wants to take away free will
That’s no motivation in itself, though. And without that, there isn’t much of a character. It also certainly isn’t what he sold Sylvanas to make her into Miss Genocide 2019-2021.
It’s actually the exact opposite of what he sold her.
But yeah, maybe that’s really all there is. Maybe the writers think villains don’t have to have deeper motivations anymore. They just have to be enough of a world-ending thread to motivate us to stop them.
Well, they don’t need deep motivations. Sargeras killing everything, because he feared one kind of corruption and falling to another isn’t deep, but it works just fine. But “I want to dominate, because I want to dominate” is just nothing at all.
She was always evil even back in classic when she was developed the plague to kill everyone who stands in her way and was only allied wit the horde out of convenience if anything all the jailer did was allow her do more evil stuff then the forsaken would have been able to on their own
and i’m not saying he has much of a character to beginne with you can write a master planner that is somewhat believable but they have to be somewhat foreshadowed first like Sōsuke “Everything that happened was me” Aizen of Bleach
Besides, why does he have to unmake reality to achieve this goal when his domination magic is so terribly strong already. Guess he’s too lazy to enslave the universe in a traditional way.
Sargeras wanted to remake reality, too. Once every planet had been destroyed and the Void Lords had no way to manifest in the physical universe anymore to consume it, he would have remade EVERYTHING. And no, not only for the Burning Legion and his demon followers. For the normal races that were destroyed too, like the ones on Azeroth.
Also unlike the Jailer it’s not specified if Sargeras would have ruled over this new version of the universe free from the Old Gods and the Void, or not…
think his plan was more to kill everyone then hope life would spring a new once he had the titans are more like demi gods then actual gods most life they create is ironically only life because of the old gods corrupting it
Either way, Sargeras’ character is clear enough. A creature of order, and a crusader against anything disorderly, found a bug in the system, that made him want to take any measure necessary to fix it. He also became infected by the magics he had fought before, further twisting his reasoning. Not a complex or very relatable character… but understandable enough to work as a big baddie in the background.
So this is more of a “duh, of course it’s a horrible story” than a “duh, his reasonable intentions are obvious”? Well, in that case I guess I can agree…
She was an anti-heroic character, from the Horde perspective, whose trustworthiness was always on the questionable end, but by the same token her Forsaken were a force to be reckoned with, which offered a large foothold in the Eastern Kingdoms. On top of quite consistently getting stuff done.
The question everyone is asking is what could the Jailer have offered her, which she would deem so important to not only bombard Kaldorei into the dirt, but also breach the tennetns she herself built the Forsaken around. What would be so great and important that she would join up with the literal embodiment of everything she hates? (Blizz draws attention to this through the likes of Voss) There are certain ways to manipulate smart characters, within a narrative, but it’s kind of above the weight class of what Blizz has ever showcased, in terms of storytelling ability. (especially over the past few years)
Back to the topic of his thread it’s the question of “What is the Endgame?”. With Aizen the question of what he’d do after he invaded the Soul King’s Palace never came up, because it was outside the scope of the story, which was anchored, int he Audience’s investment, in Ichigo’s hometown. That problem didn’t come up until Yhwach, who was also generally considered a lacking character by the people critical of that time.
Pretty sure Sylvanas though the jailer would help her create a reality there people was free to choose their own fates to break the system the decides which souls go where ironically she was helping the very guy who was once in charge of that very system
Pretty much this, yes. The Jailer made Sylvanas believe she would end up in the Maw when she wouldn’t have and told her that the only way to prevent this was to “break the system” so that everyone could decide for themselves. Plus, he obviously had a piece of her soul which made it impossible for her to grasp the evilness of her own actions to achieve that goal. She was his pawn all along, as confirmed in the interview, and didn’t know it. His endgoal was always the exact opposite of what he promised her, namely no free will for anyone, and she only realised this when he said the word “serve”.
Bad story is bad
the jailer clearly think that a reality where people have free will is a flawed design by the first ones and wants to correct that by enslaving everyone to his will