Why is Blizz butchering Sylvanas?

Community General Discussion
1

Hello,
I am an ancient hard core raider who quit WoW in 2007 (when it became too easy).

I have recently returned for the storylines.

I’ve always admired how Blizzard had created some awesome characters. Jayna and her decisions is one.
Another is Sylvanas.

Now, it just happens that Sylvanas (Jayna too) are truly among the most beloved characters, because they are “real”. Like grown RL people, they take decisions and immediately things go south. They fall 100 times and get up again to fight in the next day.
Sylvanas has a terrible, painful personal story. This is why a lot of people cannot truly hate her. She’s become hardened and ruthless because of how many beatings she suffered when she left room for caring and emotions. It is like (un)life keeps punishing her hard, every time she tries being good and show feelings.

Past Blizzard narration made her an especially rich, complex, problematic character, someone who real people could sometimes even relate to (when life is hard).

But now, “suddenly” (it’s a while), Blizzard is making her a farcical, grotesque caricature of a basic, flat, boring, “100% brainless evil” bad boss.

If they really want to take her out of the game, they should at least bother creating a crescendo of situations and decisions, as they did in the past. Cause => effect => cause => more effect.

But no. One day she gives free will to the new Forsaken, she spares her sisters, she defends the right of her people to live in their own land. She intelligently and “nicely” recruits additional people and kingdoms to her cause.

Then she suddenly gets retconned to be somehow behind Wrathgate. To consider everyone as “arrow for my quiver”. To treat allies as a bully boss. A cynical dictator. She burns Teldrassil with no second thought, grimacing at the fallen Night Elvess talking with her.
Sylvanas, a former Rangers general with vast experience at dealing with people, soldiers and leaders, suddenly becomes dumb and treats the other Horde leaders like they are irrelevant mosquitos. Like she suddenly became the typical, third world, self made, corrupt dictator.

I can totally agree some major “Horde shakeup” would spice the story, but that should come from struggles, from shades of grey and effects of causes. Not from making Sylvanas the next Ragnaros: “I AM BOSS YOU DIE!”.

This is very disappointing, especially for someone who can barely stand how oversimplified and shallow WoW gameplay has become and is only here for the story.

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Their story telling has been awful this expansion. The reasons to go to war with the Alliance were so bad. They could have done so many other things to make it believable.

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And I’m tired of everyone being demanded to be some cross breed of Sun Tzu and Mother Teresa so…down with Saurfang, down with Baine. Sylvanas’ cynicism will be the end of the Alliance’s arrogance. Takes fire to fight fire and she has always been like this in the background for so many expansions now.

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I object. She’s been doing stuff in the shadows since Legion with Helya and other things. Just because we don’t see her motivation doesn’t mean that she’s a badly written character. We will find out much more in 8.1.5 and afterwards when things start moving and she gets the dagger. For now it SEEMS like she’s just “oh look guys I’m bad” and that’s exactly what blizzard are aiming for to keep it a mystery. And many people have expressed their dislike with Garrosh and they even said she isn’t another Garrosh which further proves that we are yet to see more interesting things about her.

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I hope, really hope that Blizzard are aiming at mystery and not just at making her the next raid boss and take her out of the game.

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Have to agree with this one. Really hope that Sylvanas is being controlled by some Old God or something and the last tier we need to free her from the corruption.

Really hope we don’t get another Garrosh 2.0 and Siege of Underc…Orgrimmar.

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:smirk:

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Because they likely want to kill her off but face the problem of her being too popular to do so without a storm over it. So they’re assassinating her character as the expansion goes along, similar to what they did with Garrosh so they can kill her off later and get away with it.

Make no mistake this will be a MoP 2.0 story, that said, morally grey as they like to use is how you could describe her in the past, they’ve switched her from morally grey to cartoonishly evil.

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I agree with you. However it’d be a brutally idiotic decision. Imagine this, Sylvanas is one of the TWO WoW statues that Blizzard are selling. For $350 none the less.

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because they are setting up talanji as the next warchief, sylvanas will likely get some redemption story and either sacrifice herself or just retire like thrall.

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I’d hate for her to be the next Warchief. She’s a nobody, a total newcomer, as far as the Horde is concerned who is bound to Bwomsamdi thanks to her Father’s pact.

I know we don’t get to choose our Warchief’s but that is truly an awful choice. I know some seem keen on her. I like her character but she’s no warchief of the Horde.

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Except that she was always evil? Since Classic, she carried out experiments on the living and waged war on the Humans of Hillsbrad which she deemed an “infestation”. In Cataclysm, she became even more cruel and insane when she basically had Gilneas entirely drowned in Blight and vowed to exterminate the Gilneans, when she erased Southshore from the world, and when she exploited the frenzy of the newly-raised troops in Andorhal for her own gains, treating them like additional fodder.

Sylvanas was always evil, but with no Warchief to restrain her (like Thrall and Garrosh did by sending orcish envoys and troops to keep her under control), she can be evil and get away with it, whereas before if she did evil things, she would do them from the shadows and suffer diplomatically with the rest of the Horde.

Even in Warcraft III, she had no problem with backstabbing her most trusted allies and using people as mere pawns for her game, as was obvious with Garithos. And she certainly didn’t kill him because he was a racist (as if Sylvanas herself were any better, she is incredibly racist and pretty much looks down on the living, seeing them as restrained by the shackles of mortality).

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The thing is, Either this is how they suddenly made sylvanas this expansion which is very very bad story telling.

Or they’ll eventually reveal that she was under the influence of the old god and void and all that, which is why she became like this.

Either way, I don’t see a good lore coming out of it.

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My IQ just dropped to 0 watching this.

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It feels way too obvious to me. Way too easy , she is bad" concept. It almost feels like she is possesed by something or someone. Idk. I dont like her character in bfa either.

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Well this will be an ‘intelligent’ discussion.

Not actually, look at her past actions, actions you clearly dont know about. There’s a lot of story hooks that have not been resolved/explained that might explain her end game a lot better.

Sadly, some key lore is now held in books.

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Haven’t you realised yet? It’s because of Anduin. Blizzard is focused on making anduin " The great king" by butchering core wow characters…

And also, the ones responsible for awesome story are gone or their way of thinking have dropped.

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They dont want us to feel bad when they get rid of her, in this or future expansions.

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I’ve played Warcraft 3: RoC and TFT and have to disagree with you. She’s been evil ever since the beginning. When she was high general and was asked about sending sacrifice squads at the scourge, she responded with “they’re just arrows in the quiver”(comics). She kept that same mentality through death and didn’t turn 180.

She was responsible for the Wrathgate 100% because she ordered the plague to be made without notifying the Horde.

Adolf Hitler lost many of those he held dear at very young age, took a lot of beatings from his hot-tempered father, lived as an orphan in poverty, etc. He was shaped to be a dictator and a mass murderer. Does that mean people shouldn’t hate Hitler because he’d been through a lot? No.

When did she ever try to do any good or selfless act? In your mind? Her motto in W3 was to do things in her own way, not the good way. She’s done nothing in WoW but to make more people suffer. Even in the “three sisters” comic she was planning to kill her own sisters and raise them, so that she can get happy.

The problem I find with Sylvanas fans is they keep pretending that Sylvanas is a kind and smart character when she really isn’t. Wrathgate shows her idiocity, her death by Godfrey shows her idiocity, use of no tactics other than her overpowered blight shows her idiocity, and so on. If you love a character, love them as they actually are, not how you think they are.

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Yea as others have said, Sylvanas was always on the evil side of things, before she became warchief, it was mostly all from the shadows or sidelines. Now when shes in the spotlight we all have to witness what she can really be capable of.

All in all, BFA storyline could have worked better if it happened after cata or something, back when people kinda cared about the faction conflict, doing it right after Legion was kinda bound to fail. Seeing as how we just worked together.

Also, isn’t this posted in the wrong section?