#felweaver

MANDATORY DISCLAIMER #1: I haven’t played any of the quests; all of the following is based on the video and hearsay.MANDATORY DISCLAIMER #2: From the moment I met the character as a baby belf returning a lost necklace found in the Ghostlands, I have fucking loved Sylvanas Windrunner, Banshee Queen, fallen Ranger-General of Silvermoon, Dark Lady of the Forsaken.  Fight me.

-----

I think Blizzard does not understand the difference between a tragic character or a sympathetic character and a morally grey one.

Many actions of the sin’dorei are morally grey.  Blood elves, as a rule, are very much about the end justifying the means, which isn’t exactly a good philosophy but is certainly an efficient one!  They do what’s necessary to survive and protect themselves, and they’ll sort the ethics of it out later.  They don’t explain themselves, they don’t whine about their lot (but they do get even) and they never apologize.  This makes them not always the nicest people but they’re hella interesting, which is why I love playing them!

Warbringers: Sylvanas seems to try to justify the Banshee Queen’s actions by explaining her history.  She was hurt, she was violated, she was traumatized -- and so now, she hurts and violates and traumatizes others.  It’s undeniably tragic.  It’s darkly beautiful, the way they portray it... and it's reasonable character progression, in that people who have suffered violence often go on to inflict violence on others in turn.  But it’s not grey.  She doesn’t help or save or protect anyone by murdering night elf children.  It doesn’t bring the sin’dorei who were lost back.  It doesn’t avenge herself on Arthas, who’s been gone these nine years.  It’s not even revenge, because she’s not hurting the people who hurt her! It doesn’t accomplish anything.  There’s no end which justifies these means.

(I mean okay, if you wanna be That Guy, you could argue that night elf children grow to be night elf warriors and thus Sylvanas was justified in killing them before they could kill her.  But A, gross, and B, that explicitly isn’t the argument the video makes.)

Sylvanas is a deeply flawed, tragic, gorgeous character.  And her current actions could be described many ways, but grey isn’t among them.  Murdering innocents for the sake of pride and self-gratification falls squarely in the Evil row of Ye Olde Flawed But Still Pretty Useful D&D Alignment chart (I’d go for Neutral over Chaotic, but she’s definitely not Lawful).  And unfortunately, while this choice is potentially Very Interesting from a character progression/overall storytelling perspective, it’s really shitty for all the players and player characters who now are obligated to endure the consequences of Sylvanas’ evil actions!  

Which brings me to the other thing I don’t think Blizzard understands: that people get invested in their player characters, and they don’t like being railroaded into being the bad guys.  We saw it before when Garrosh was Warchief: our characters were obligated to do awful things to advance in level (i.e. if we wanted to play the game), and while as roleplayers we could maybe handwave that our characters didn’t actually do that in-character, it’s really shitty that that was our choice: ignore the story that was given to us, or accept it and accept that our characters were really awful people (and awful in ways that weren’t of our choosing.  Astoreth Duskflame-Firewing herself was Lawful Evil for the first several years of her existence, but that was MY choice, not Blizzard’s, and that’s a significant distinction).  

Meanwhile Alliance players were free to embrace their story, and many of them held it against Horde players whether we chose to incorporate it or not.  And it sucked!  It sucks being greeted by your opposite-faction friends with “so, how are you enjoying being evil?”  I don’t enjoy it, if it’s not my choice!  It sucks!  And it’s stupid and it should stop!  

And it’s why I have really conflicted feelings about this video.  I now understand why Sylvanas is making the choices she does -- I don’t agree with them, but I understand them.  What I don’t understand is why in the everfucking hell my or any other Horde would go along with them, aside from “just following orders”, which is a shitty excuse to do anything up to and including genocide.  Sylvanas might think that since Silvermoon was scourged and burned that she’s justified in doing the same to Teldrassil, but my equally patriotic blood elf is going to be like the fuck are you doing fuck no we’re BETTER than that what the fuck -- and the game isn’t going to give her the choice of not doing it.  

The really disappointing part?  This railroading was totally avoidable.  The Gilneas quests back in Cata are a perfect example of how to avoid this.  The Horde and Alliance got totally different versions of the same events -- one highlighting the viciousness of the Gilneans in slaughtering Forsaken (and, if not making them the bad guys, at least making it clear that peaceful coexistence was never an option), and the other featuring Sylvanas as a cartoon villainness hell-bent on plaguing the world.  Those quests were FANTASTIC because they supported each faction’s perspective on events, and let your character feel like their choices were at least justified, if not ideal -- and a mature viewpoint will recognize that the truth of what happened in Gilneas is probably found somewhere between the two party lines, and the story leaves plenty of room for that.

Well as part of Flames of War’s Siege of Tirisfal event, he’s currently home recovering from torture by the Alliance so he wouldn’t have been at the final battle itself to see events unfold.