How dare you?!
That is our word!
My point was merely that sometimes it’s not the story that’s a mess, it’s the reader that fails to make sense of it.
And there can be perfectly legitimate reasons for that.
Is WoW basic storytelling? Well yes and no.
There are layers to it.
And in my experience players tend to go about it in a completely wrong order.
If you watch Bellular or Pyromancer or Accolonn or any of these lore-savvy content creators, then they sort of establish the methodology that everyone uses – with questionable success.
They speculate about future events. If the WoW story is a manuscript and we read and understand page 1, 2 and 3, then we should be able to predict what happens on page 4, 5, and 6 – because there should be a certain logic and consistency to it.
So how do you go about doing this speculation somewhat successfully? Well you have to understand all the lore and the laws and rules of this fictional universe in order to reason the logic of the story events as they unfold.
But that’s an impossibly difficult task for most players who naturally complain that in order to understand the story they need to read a bunch of novels and lore compendiums and short stories and so on!
And it doesn’t work. It works for Bellular and Pyromancer and Accolonn who do it out of an interest and curiosity for the lore alone.
But as a method to understanding the story and extracting any kind of meaning from it, it is absolute poop.
What I would advocate is that players forget about WoW when they look at a WoW story. Just view it as a story.
For example, if you watch The Lion King, then at some point during the movie it probably dawns on you that it’s quite similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – just with lions.
And once you make that discovery, then it’s easy to see the story for all it is – minus the twists and changes that Disney have made to it.
And from that point it becomes easy to extract all the symbolism and the deeper story message. And even though it’s a children’s cartoon, you’re basically extracting Shakespearean levels of meaning from it.
WoW does it all the time. Every story Blizzard writes takes inspiration from religion, mythology, or classic literature.
Once you deduct what it is by looking at all the hints and clues you’re provided, then it gets so easy to unravel it and analyze the symbolism and message and intent and so on. And then you can always work your way backwards to make it fit within a WoW lore context – which is much easier once you get the story context.
Once you understand that the story inspiration for this guy:
Is this guy:
https://starwarsblog.starwars.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/be-more-vader-tall-1088x816.jpg
Then it all makes so much more sense.
And once you understand that the story inspiration for this story:
Is this story:
Then it’s so much easier to see the WoW story for what it is.
Most players just go about it the wrong way by trying to analyze the lore as their first step.
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No. And disappointed Jailer didn’t just end her existence. But redemption arc is all but inevitable really. Blizz has no guts to actually kill any main characters.
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She isn’t really complex though. And I don’t think it is a ‘lack of understanding her character’ because a lot of people probably do read a lot of literature, and probably have seen truly complex character writing (I still don’t know how Dostayevsky managed to write ‘The Brother’s Karamazov’, a ‘Whodunnit’ where actually know ‘whodunnit’ right from the start, and still make it a convoluted, intricate story! )
Sylvanas isn’t like that.
She’s actually quite basic, in that she follows basic fiction tropes that you can identify along the way.
In life she was the “Warrior Woman/Amazon” type. There wasn’t much more to her than that, because we hadn’t seen much more of her yet. Yes, She has a Human Boyfriend. Because that is -So- original for an Elven woman. I mean it’s not even original for a Windrunner.
So She dies, and becomes the Banshee Queen.
Her trope turns into the ‘Woman Done Wrong’ thing. Again, a massively used trope, which is probably easiest just to say “Watch ‘Kill Bill’ that’s Sylvanas”. It’s that kind of complexity. This continues through TBC, to WotLK.
Now that is where it should have ended. They had a perfect moment, which should have been a cinematic, the perfect ending to WotLK, even after Arthas’ death. They could have hit the real ‘sweet spot’ with her writing.
Think of it like the graphic novel, later film “The Crow”. At the end, he’s killed all the baddies, he’s avenged all he can, there is nothing more he can do, to avenge what happened to himself and his wife. His existence is bereft of purpose. So what happens? He just stops. He ceases. He finally gets peace, and ceases to exist. (Actually not a bad metaphor, as he too is a vengeful undead killing machine.)
That would have been some beautifully told story.
Then we have Cata. What is the point? She has nothing to exist for? She doesn’t owe the Horde anything, heck, she doesn’t even owe the Forsaken anything. This is usually when people go “Ahah, but the Maw” and I’ll on to that in a bit.
She exists in Cata to basically just highlight how ‘eeeevul’ the Forsaken can be. Blighting Gilneas, Killing Liam. She’s nothing. You get one good bit of personal exposition of her on horses in Silverpine, but what she is basically doing is just telling you her backstory. It’s not adding anything. It’s basically “This is what happened to me in WC3 up to WotLK”. We kind of know that story, and she keeps going on about horrible, and tormented being Undead is, whilst creating more and more undead!
So OK, at this point she is the Abused turned Abuser archetype. Fair enough. It is a psychological condition that occurs in real life, so sure as heck can exist in a fantasy world.
Then she suddenly flips, at the end of MoP at Siege of Orgrimmar, she taunts Lor’themar that she could raise his dead Rangers into undeath. Right, at this point she is making no sense. Is Undeath a torment, or is it not? Does she still care about Quel’thalas, or does she not? They’re not sure where to go with her.
Then the War Crimes Novel, it suddenly turns out she -does- care about Quel’thalas, because she is oh so happy when Lor’themar addresses her in Thalassian. Equally she also seems not to care about her only remaining blood relative, because she plots to murder Vereesa and raise her as Undead. But sure. That’s a Torment, right?
At this point she doesn’t have any complexity. They’re just having her do things one after another, without those things actually making sense.
It’s not that WoW Players ‘Don’t get’ her subtle plan. Because there is no subtle plan.
In Legion she is just ridiculous. “I am the Warchief of the Horde, I could lead the Horde, or I could just not bother, cut a deal with an entity that is even more batguano crazy and blatantly obviously mental evil than I am, and leave the Elves to pick up the slack and actually fight the Legion…”
Which she does! Even Heath Ledger’s ‘Joker’ (Still the best depiction) had more depth and complexity than this!
BfA She is ridiculously cartoonish. “Ahah, I have cunning plan, cunning plan has worked, I am on the very cusp of ending the Faction War and securing Kalimdor for the Horde…” “What’s that you say, random Night Elf who I have never met and don’t care about’s opinion? Bad things happened to me when I was alive? OMG I Completely forgot that narrative, despite spending the last 14 years tirelessly banging on about it, Grr, How dare you remind me! As my vengeance I will undo all of my plan! That’ll show you!”
Then later. “Oh, no, was totally my plan all along, lol, I’m freeing us all from a prison, by allying with a guy who runs a prison. And wants us all to be in his prison.”
That is not a -Complex- character.
That is too many writers having a stab at writing her, and in the process making her a laughable cartoon clown villain.
At this rate we just need the Scooby Gang to turn up and pull of her mask and go “OMG, It was you, Steve Danuser, all this time!”
That…ain’t…complex writing. That is incompetent writing.
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sure, but this time it’s not one of those occasions.
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In my honest experience, then the vast majority of those who criticize the story for being bad, their criticism reflects more on their own lack of understanding than the quality of the story.
I mean, what lies at the core of most people’s criticism is that they don’t understand.
Then there are a few players who do understand the story and who still criticize it as being bad. And that’s fair criticism.
But those players are few and far between.
I liked her quest chain and story in warcraft 3 and undercity stuff.
After becoming warchief, it slowly went downhill.
In BFA, IT deep dived into trashcan.
In shadowlands, i don’t even know anymore.
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I liked that she was this woman with a secret agenda it always felt like you had 3 factions in game you had horde, alliance, and you had forsaken. of course we know forsaken are part of horde but i dare say it was a loose relationship. just helping the horde out to further the cause for the dark lady. and to summ it up she inspired loyalty in her people the forsaken which was good enough.
But know with the jailer and this whole nonsense about death and all that its all blown out of proportion and after all her war crimes she may get a redemption… I would have liked it if they just killed her and thats it.
That’s spot on. Well said.
On the other hand there are a lot of issues that come from the delivery of the story in game and as much as I would like to pretend there’s some hidden genius somewhere underneath the poor delivery, I just can’t because there simply isn’t.
The problem around here is that much of the criticism does not come from the right place so to speak. I mean this thread is a perfect example of how some people regard this situation, “Sylvanas is bad forever and I hate everything related to her”. You won’t make these people see any other perspective aside their own.
But it’s nice to see people who get it every so often. Makes coming here and reading some opinions, at least, worth it.
Yeah WoW is definitely pulling in different directions.
On the one hand it wants to present a focused narrative with a clear story message.
On the other hand Blizzard wants to sell a lot of novels and comics and compendiums.
It definitely doesn’t make it easy for the players and often it seems as if the issue is the sheer volume of story material that exists. It becomes overwhelming as players desperately try to make sense of all of it at the same time. The focus on the single story narrative is completely lost in a desperate attempt to tie it together with all the lore and have it make perfect sense.
The era of the RTS games accomplished it a bit better, I think. The campaign style of story delivery really kept the narrative focus.
And players hadn’t really gotten themselves caught up in this idea of needing to know all the lore in order to understand the story. You could just play Warcraft III and appreciate the story, even if you didn’t understand the lore behind it.
The story came first and the lore was second. Today it feels more as if it’s lore first and story second. Lots of YouTubers will talk for ages about lore and explain it all at length, but literally no one talks about story or tries to explain that.
It’s an unfortunate trend.
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I used to love her as well, but as more and more screen time she gets the less I like her, I just dislike that last 2 expansions were focused a lot on Sylvanas.
I always liked Jaina for this, I always thought that Sylvanas was just no reachable after burning the World Tree, at that point she became a “baddie” to me, and it’s hard to change my mind about it.
But I’m open to different possibilities, I hope we will realize that maybe she wasn’t selfish after all, I really dislike selfish people so I will have a hard time.
All of this is my opinion.
I would also like to apologize to you, Jito. I once said some hurtful things to you because I was mad about the game and saw you enjoying it and I just went all mad on you…I really had no right to do so, I really hope you will be able to forgive me one day.
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Only on R34
It’s a big fat no from me
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“Imprisoned for ten thousand years. Banished from my own homeland. And now, you dare enter my realm?! You are not prepared!”
I see it all happening.
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By the way, imagine the Jailer’s face when Sylvanas went back there because she was shot in the back by some Gilnean noble she raised for absolutely no reason 
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She died like 3 times in the most stupid way possible
-
Slides into Arthas sword
-
Random Gilnean guy ambush
-
Suicide
And yet comes back each time more stupid than before.
And the new cinematic is my proof. I rest my case 
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ME! ME! ME!
MUH KWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN!!!
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