Why torture Derek?

[Cerus]

Cuz Horde, being evil is what they do.

Since the actions of the individual determine the entire factions morality the Horde has nothing on the Alliance. Arthus was as bad as they come, slaughtered countless innocents and tried to take over the world. Let’s also not forget that he is the reason Sylvanas is how she is. Torturing her repeatedly after all. Alliance fanboys....

[Pigglix]

TBH, i believe Derek is a sleeper agent aswell and Baine had two purpouses:

1) to deliver Derek and make Jaina to believe its Derek.

2) If the plan goes wrong and Derek fails to kill any prodmoore, Sylvanas can blame Baine for his treacherus act against the horde.

So, if this is the way i believe it is, thats the reason why she openly tortured him, so she would have a way to safe deliver the "bomb" and have a scapegoat if things go wrong.

[Al Gorefiend]

Cuz Horde, being evil is what they do.

Exactly. Don't crush my #factionpride

[Skulltaker]

I'm not kidding, for what purpose? Let's recount some of our previous feats of convincing people to switch sides and join the Forsaken voluntarily:

1. A guard captain who's friends we blew up in front of her eyes
2. An admiral who's grave we robbed but switched sides off-screen with no issue, collected from the same place as Derek
3. A special Scarlet agent, the most anti-undead group out there, trained to kill undead
4. The people we committed genocide on because one bitch gave our glorious leader lip
And countless nameless henchmen we killed before they joined.

Clearly Derek was told what happened to Daelin, since he brings it up to Jaina afterwards as part of the 'lies' the Horde told him that Baine dispelled and it's not like being anti-Jaina or Katherine didn't have a massive Kul Tiran segment, including among the Kul Tirans we already raised. He might have been a bit more amenable to convincing without frying him with beams, something we didn't need for people we'd wronged far less.

So the question I pose to you is this, why torture Derek instead of manipulating him?

Heroic Mode: You can't use 'because it's evil', though it's true.
Mythic Mode: You can't use 'bad writing', though it's also true.

- She longs for a release from Undeath, and tries anything that might make her 'feel' again.

- She seeks revenge for the wrongs she suffered and inflicts as much pain as she can towards those who she percieved wronged her (which, at this point, includes everyone with a heartbeat.)

- Because she can.

- Her capability for reason is failing her.

- She, again, underestimates of falsly guesses, what her enemies reaction is going to be.

[Psykho]

They tortured him so Sylvanas would know who could go against her amount her race leader, and so he could look more vulnerable and be deliver to Calia and finish what Sylvanas tried to do during that Lordaeronsurviver / undead meeting.

The flaw there is that Sylvanas probably still thinks Calia is rotting in some Alliance Graveyard, no one has ever even fathomed that an undead could be raised by the light, and the Alliance doesn't exactly have wide access to Necromancer(especially ones that don't have a hidden agenda), so odds are even if she planned to see if any of the others betrayed her by freeing Derek, she probably believed Jaina would take him straight to Boralus, not to the only person her meat shields would fathomably betray her for, and who could potentially undo any mind control or hidden suggestions Sylvanas may have implanted

- - - Updated - - -

- She longs for a release from Undeath, and tries anything that might make her 'feel' again.

- She seeks revenge for the wrongs she suffered and inflicts as much pain as she can towards those who she percieved wronged her (which, at this point, includes everyone with a heartbeat.)

- Because she can.

- Her capability for reason is failing her.

- She, again, underestimates of falsly guesses, what her enemies reaction is going to be.

That last one makes some sense partially due to Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, sure she can guess how her allies might react a good percentage of the time, but not the people ruling the other factions whom she doesn't interact with as often, she's hasn't especially been shown interacting with Greymane or Anduin beyond a few encounters

[ashblond]

Because that is what horde does. And Sylvanas likes SM.

[Justpassing]

Why not?

[Cizr]

Maybe Sylvanas thought that breaking him through torture is safer than just manipulating him. Even Lich King was torturing his prisoner to make him switch sides.

[VladlTutushkin]

TBH, i believe Derek is a sleeper agent aswell and Baine had two purpouses:

1) to deliver Derek and make Jaina to believe its Derek.

2) If the plan goes wrong and Derek fails to kill any prodmoore, Sylvanas can blame Baine for his treacherus act against the horde.

So, if this is the way i believe it is, thats the reason why she openly tortured him, so she would have a way to safe deliver the "bomb" and have a scapegoat if things go wrong.

Which is almost exactly what happened with Baine and Jaina in Cata (pre MoP). Sounds kinds redundant to repeat same plot especially since Horde seems to hate that “repeat of MoP” so much. And that will send Jaina into “hate Horde” overdrive again after we just dragged her out of that.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

Her manipulation tactics usually involve "your family and friends will never accept you, you're an abomination to them now." Apparently Jaina's very accepting of the undead, which struck me as very odd, particularly after her trauma with Arthas. It seems that Sylvanas was banking the whole time on Jaina actually accepting Derek as an undead, in spite of that being rare among humans. This rules out isolation as a conversion method, so torture seemed necessary.

On a related note, was it actually torture? I mean obviously it was causing him a lot of pain, but I thought they were using mind-control beams rather than the more conventional "hurt him until he breaks".

[Super Dickmann]

- She longs for a release from Undeath, and tries anything that might make her 'feel' again.

- She seeks revenge for the wrongs she suffered and inflicts as much pain as she can towards those who she percieved wronged her (which, at this point, includes everyone with a heartbeat.)

- Because she can.

- Her capability for reason is failing her.

- She, again, underestimates of falsly guesses, what her enemies reaction is going to be.

She's basing her whole plan on them accepting Derek which as @AwkwardSquirtle says, is already bizzare. I'm not going to rule out that she has brain rot, it would solve a lot of plot points, but the others I'm not convinced by. Sylvanas was never shown to give an iota of a shit about personally fucking over any single Forsaken. Even this she outsources. I'm not doubting her ability or willingness to torture, but the efficacy of torture in this case. We know it's torture because he's moving in agony and we're never shown that mind control requires that much effort to pull off. After all in this patch and previous one she freely uses enslaved undead like geists, ghouls and skellies.

Jaina being tolerant wouldn't necessarily fail the plan automatically if he were convinced compared to how it would instantly fail it if he were tortured. This is because then telling him that she ended up getting Daelin killed would actually be convincing rather than something he's told while being fried by beams.

[Florena]

I don't think anyone was actually looking for the heart until Garrosh's people found it. Who would be? Certainly not the Pandaren who controlled the Vale.

- - - Updated - - -

Her manipulation tactics usually involve "your family and friends will never accept you, you're an abomination to them now." Apparently Jaina's very accepting of the undead, which struck me as very odd, particularly after her trauma with Arthas. It seems that Sylvanas was banking the whole time on Jaina actually accepting Derek as an undead, in spite of that being rare among humans. This rules out isolation as a conversion method, so torture seemed necessary.

On a related note, was it actually torture? I mean obviously it was causing him a lot of pain, but I thought they were using mind-control beams rather than the more conventional "hurt him until he breaks".

I think it's less that she's accepting of the undead so much as she's accepting of her brother. When she first sees Derek she flips the **** out and it isn't until he speaks she calms down, and even then it's not like she lets him come walk around Boralus freely.

[Goblinounours]

The Horde Thrall started is about honor, it's about making a home for people who can't find their place anywhere else in the world.
A lot of the Horde's people left their home behind, because it was destroyed by the manipulations of the Burning Legion. In a way, that description also fits the Forsaken, since the Lich King was created by Kil'jaeden, and the Scourge was to be Archimonde's tool for their invasion in WC3.

Those who think the Horde is evil don't understand its history. The Horde is not about war-crimes.
Yet, with Garrosh and Sylvanas, it feels like it's all the Horde is about. It feels bad to be Horde, right now.

In BFA, the Horde players (and the Forsaken) are sacrificing their values, only to chain failures after failures.
• We had Teldrassil in our grasp, we could've held its people as hostages, but Sylvanas was somehow triggered into burning the tree, forgetting the whole point of the attack on Darkshore, and giving the Alliance a golden opportunity to mount a counter-attack. That was the dumbest strategic move in the history of Warcraft.
• It's always been the pride of the Forsaken to let the newly risen undeads have the freedom to choose what they do (though most of them join the Forsaken because undeath has a strange warping effect on the mind, and because they quickly figure out that they won't be accepted anywhere else). It's even the racial ability of the Forsaken players to use their will to break out of some control-effects! But for some reason, Sylvanas is now ignoring this, and she's sending Horde soldiers as cannon-fold against Alliance soldiers, and raising them all as skeletons, leaving them to haunt the plagued lands in front of the ruins of Lordaeron City.
• We spent pretty much all of our 8.0 War-campaign trying to find Marshal Valentine, who's killed almost as soon as he's raised into undeath, without Horde players even being able to interact with him.
• Horde players are 100% un-aware of that, but Sylvanas recruited San'layns (blood-elf vampires from ICC) into the Horde. Guess what, they're gone now, the Alliance rekt them while we were searching underwater for the crappy Marshal.
• We gained the Kul'tiran sea priest Zelling, and he ends-up executed in 8.1.5.
• We stole the Abyssal Scepter in the sea priest monastery near Boralus, destroyed one ship with it, and the Alliance was immediately able to take it back and use it as a diversion to launch the attack on Dazar'alor. In the end, the Horde is even forced to destroy the scepter.
• The Zandalari king Rastakhan gets killed by the Alliance, despite him having the beginning of something interesting going on with Bwonsamdi. Meanwhile the Alliance 'lost' Gelbin Mekkatorque, but we all know that we're going to Mechagon in 8.2, so chances are, Gelbin will come back half-mecha-gnome. Jaina is a boss too, but she recovers from her wounds as soon as the raid is over, like nothing happened.
• Meanwhile, 75% of the major Horde NPCs besides Sylvanas and Nathanos are either so furious that they're flagged as traitors or they're bidding their time until they can join a revolution to dethrone Sylvanas, just like with Garrosh. As she was part of that revolution in MoP, Sylvanas should know better than starting the war-crime game.

And now, with an insane amount of luck, we found Derek Proudmoore, we raised him into the undeath and the Alliance still manages to get him back almost immediately after?!

Truth is, we're all expecting/hoping for Blizzard to reveal to us that Derek actually is a sleeper agent, or that he will be so badly received by the rest of the Alliance that he'll go crazy and murder someone like Katherine Proudmoore, simply because it would be really REALLY REALLY dumb to have yet another plan of the Horde flop hard on the floor in the same expansion. It's getting unfair and unfun to play the faction of bad guys who looses at every turn.
*cries* I need a win, right now, ok?

Most people are also expecting Sylvanas to end-up as a boss for both the Alliance and Horde players, because it's getting harder and harder to see how she can get out of this. It would take a deus-ex machina level of story-writting for her to find redemption after what she did in BFA.
As for me, I'm somewhat expecting that all those small choices we get as Horde players (to help Saurfang or not, to warn Nathanos of Baine's actions or not, to tell Gallywix about the goblin working with the gnome girl from Before the Storm in Tanaris or get the bird mascot) will be used like some kind of statistic Telltale-style at one point by Blizzard to show us how many Horde players sided with who and to decide what actually happens in the finale of the expansion. Like, does Saurfang manages to free Baine and mounts another revolution against the warchief? That's the most likely scenario to me, but it would feel TO MUCH like MoP, to a point where it would be ridiculous.

If it turns out the majority sided with Sylvanas, though, maybe Blizzard will have the warchief catch Saurfang and put him in a cell or execute him, and carry on with her plans, and MAYBE she'll get a huge win on the Alliance (that would be refreshing).
But still, I'm seriously not looking forward to such a conclusion, especially because I loved Sylvanas' character from Warcraft 3 to Legion.

[Florena]

The Horde Thrall started is about honor, it's about making a home for people who can't find their place anywhere else in the world.
A lot of the Horde's people left their home behind, because it was destroyed by the manipulations of the Burning Legion. In a way, that description also fits the Forsaken, since the Lich King was created by Kil'jaeden, and the Scourge was to be Archimonde's tool for their invasion in WC3.

Those who think the Horde is evil don't understand its history. The Horde is not about war-crimes.
Yet, with Garrosh and Sylvanas, it feels like it's all the Horde is about. It feels bad to be Horde, right now.

In BFA, the Horde players (and the Forsaken) are sacrificing their values, only to chain failures after failures.
• We had Teldrassil in our grasp, we could've held its people as hostages, but Sylvanas was somehow triggered into burning the tree, forgetting the whole point of the attack on Darkshore, and giving the Alliance a golden opportunity to mount a counter-attack. That was the dumbest strategic move in the history of Warcraft.
• It's always been the pride of the Forsaken to let the newly risen undeads have the freedom to choose what they do (though most of them join the Forsaken because undeath has a strange warping effect on the mind, and because they quickly figure out that they won't be accepted anywhere else). It's even the racial ability of the Forsaken players to use their will to break out of some control-effects! But for some reason, Sylvanas is now ignoring this, and she's sending Horde soldiers as cannon-fold against Alliance soldiers, and raising them all as skeletons, leaving them to haunt the plagued lands in front of the ruins of Lordaeron City.
• We spent pretty much all of our 8.0 War-campaign trying to find Marshal Valentine, who's killed almost as soon as he's raised into undeath, without Horde players even being able to interact with him.
• Horde players are 100% un-aware of that, but Sylvanas recruited San'layns (blood-elf vampires from ICC) into the Horde. Guess what, they're gone now, the Alliance rekt them while we were searching underwater for the crappy Marshal.
• We gained the Kul'tiran sea priest Zelling, and he ends-up executed in 8.1.5.
• We stole the Abyssal Scepter in the sea priest monastery near Boralus, destroyed one ship with it, and the Alliance was immediately able to take it back and use it as a diversion to launch the attack on Dazar'alor. In the end, the Horde is even forced to destroy the scepter.
• The Zandalari king Rastakhan gets killed by the Alliance, despite him having the beginning of something interesting going on with Bwonsamdi. Meanwhile the Alliance 'lost' Gelbin Mekkatorque, but we all know that we're going to Mechagon in 8.2, so chances are, Gelbin will come back half-mecha-gnome. Jaina is a boss too, but she recovers from her wounds as soon as the raid is over, like nothing happened.
• Meanwhile, 75% of the major Horde NPCs besides Sylvanas and Nathanos are either so furious that they're flagged as traitors or they're bidding their time until they can join a revolution to dethrone Sylvanas, just like with Garrosh. As she was part of that revolution in MoP, Sylvanas should know better than starting the war-crime game.

And now, with an insane amount of luck, we found Derek Proudmoore, we raised him into the undeath and the Alliance still manages to get him back almost immediately after?!

Truth is, we're all expecting/hoping for Blizzard to reveal to us that Derek actually is a sleeper agent, or that he will be so badly received by the rest of the Alliance that he'll go crazy and murder someone like Katherine Proudmoore, simply because it would be really REALLY REALLY dumb to have yet another plan of the Horde flop hard on the floor in the same expansion. It's getting unfair and unfun to play the faction of bad guys who looses at every turn.
*cries* I need a win, right now, ok?

Most people are also expecting Sylvanas to end-up as a boss for both the Alliance and Horde players, because it's getting harder and harder to see how she can get out of this. It would take a deus-ex machina level of story-writting for her to find redemption after what she did in BFA.
As for me, I'm somewhat expecting that all those small choices we get as Horde players (to help Saurfang or not, to warn Nathanos of Baine's actions or not, to tell Gallywix about the goblin working with the gnome girl from Before the Storm in Tanaris or get the bird mascot) will be used like some kind of statistic Telltale-style at one point by Blizzard to show us how many Horde players sided with who and to decide what actually happens in the finale of the expansion. Like, does Saurfang manages to free Baine and mounts another revolution against the warchief? That's the most likely scenario to me, but it would feel TO MUCH like MoP, to a point where it would be ridiculous.

We'll see what happens. On the one hand it feels like the other shoe is about to drop and this is 'the Alliance's turn' to be on top. On the other hand, 8.2 is focused on Azshara so IDK how much time they'll actually have for a horde/alliance story there when they have to build up towards her raid without making her feel like a footnote after being teased for so long. Plus the have the mechagnome place.

[The Stormbringer]

because in addition to being evil, sylvanas is also chronically arrogant and suicidally stupid.
i mean, she RUSHED ARTHAS and his endless army of the undead.

lets face it, her employment as ranger general probably came the way it ended, with her getting on her knees asap.

WC3 canon is the one I'll always keep in mind, though. She was fighting off waves of attacks and the Scourge just finally managed to take her down.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

I think it's less that she's accepting of the undead so much as she's accepting of her brother. When she first sees Derek she flips the **** out and it isn't until he speaks she calms down, and even then it's not like she lets him come walk around Boralus freely.

Yes, but the target of her anger isn't that he's an undead monster like those that were there that day in Stratholme, and what Arthas would over time become. It's that she thinks Sylvanas is using him as a weapon.

"So tell me Baine, is he the Banshee's puppet? Crammed full of blight? Is he the bomb this time?"

There's no mention of his undeath. It's so strange. Almost every other person we've seen cannot accept the undead at first. She wasn't present in Before the Storm for the Alonsus Faol reunion. She should be repulsed more by her brother's skin being used as a puppet for some foul force (and that's ignoring the fact that it's weird that she recognises him at all). Humans HATE undead, and Jaina has more reason to than most.

[Florena]

WC3 canon is the one I'll always keep in mind, though. She was fighting off waves of attacks and the Scourge just finally managed to take her down.

Yeah. Though, it's not like Sylvanas hasn't had a lot of things explode in her face.

Missed a chance to kill Arthas because she wanted him to suffer instead of just doing it, allowing Kel'thuzzad to save him.
Just let Genn limp away injured instead of finishing him off.
Didn't stick around to make sure Saurfang finished off Malfurion.
Shot in the back of the head by Godfrey.
Betrayed by the Trollbane the Forsaken resed.

Those last two I suspect may be part of why she resorted to torture here to try and bend Derek to her will, as forsaken having free will has bit her in the ass before and she didn't want Derek to not go along with her plan and backfire on her.

[Skulltaker]

She's basing her whole plan on them accepting Derek which as @AwkwardSquirtle says, is already bizzare. I'm not going to rule out that she has brain rot, it would solve a lot of plot points, but the others I'm not convinced by. Sylvanas was never shown to give an iota of a shit about personally fucking over any single Forsaken. Even this she outsources. I'm not doubting her ability or willingness to torture, but the efficacy of torture in this case. We know it's torture because he's moving in agony and we're never shown that mind control requires that much effort to pull off. After all in this patch and previous one she freely uses enslaved undead like geists, ghouls and skellies.

Jaina being tolerant wouldn't necessarily fail the plan automatically if he were convinced compared to how it would instantly fail it if he were tortured. This is because then telling him that she ended up getting Daelin killed would actually be convincing rather than something he's told while being fried by beams.

Well, I don't like conspiracy theories, but a lot of plot points make more sense if Sylvanas is either posessed in some way, isn't actually Sylvanas, or went insane.

If I assume that the current storyline is not simply the developers trying to further flesh out the Alliance as 'good' and the Horde as 'evil', and that the writers actually know what they are doing, these are the conclusions I've come up with.

At least to my understanding, Sylvanas has never been a 'good' character, nor was she morally grey. In DnD terms, she was lawful evil. She made use of terryfing weapons, shock tactics, willfully accepted the destruction of healthy land to make it more appealing to the Forsaken. Ends over means. But in BfA we see a rather drastic change in her character. I wouldn't put it beyond her to strike first, it's a sound tactic. But actual genocide out of spite is something different. Same goes with killing your own troops with plague and raising Forsaken against their free will.

These are all actions that one would associate with the Lich King, someone she despised like no other, for good reason, since he took everything from her.

Then, there is the theory that she has learned a great secret, and works on a plan that will ward off some great catastrophe, but that direly begs the question, why isn't she telling anybody else?

She has tried (and failed) to lay a trap for Alliance leaders several times now, and failed every time. Sometimes due to luck, sometimes due to inept underlings, and so on. Why she'd assume anybody would fall for a clear threat like this would be beyond me. I don't hold her in high regard, never have, but she's not that stupid.

Which leads me to believe that her antics, right now, are nothing but a plot device, to stir emotions for poor Derek Proudmoore, so we, the players, will feel stronger for him when he gets 'Lightforged' in the future. Because as of now, he's noone to us, and there's no reason to relate to him or feel sorry for him.

As for him being convinced, I highly doubt that he'd believe anything the Horde would tell him. He's probably not aware of the entire situation, but even if he'S only half as clever as the rest of the human leaders he'd figure out that he's beeing manipulated, and even if he blamed Jaina directly for their fathers death, he'd never act out of spite while his Nation's under threat by the bitch that just condemned him into undeath. For him to get anywhere near Jaina or his mother he'd have to learn about what Sylvanas and her underlings have been up to recently. Of course, being Forsaken might make him more bitter, agressive, but then the questions would be what his target could be? A lucky assasination atempt on Anduin? Doubtful, since he's the Lights number one guy. Sending undead after him is like attacking Hell with icicles. Any other Alliance Leader? One's a popsickle right now, the others are to much on their toes to lower their guard around anything that spent time near Sylvanas. Which leaves Katherine, and he has no reason to attack her, even if he'd be full of hate, since she didn't wrong him.

[Veluren]

I feel like it wasn't going to work anyway, even not being suspicious of Derek, Jaina still sent him to Calia to get the help that he needed, if Derek was "programmed", then whichever Naaru is going to lightforge him would probably get rid of that.

I feel like Sylvanas wasn't considering the factor of Calia and LF Undead at all with what she was doing.

[Florena]

Yes, but the target of her anger isn't that he's an undead monster like those that were there that day in Stratholme, and what Arthas would over time become. It's that she thinks Sylvanas is using him as a weapon.

"So tell me Baine, is he the Banshee's puppet? Crammed full of blight? Is he the bomb this time?"

There's no mention of his undeath. It's so strange. Almost every other person we've seen cannot accept the undead at first. She wasn't present in Before the Storm for the Alonsus Faol reunion. She should be repulsed more by her brother's skin being used as a puppet for some foul force (and that's ignoring the fact that it's weird that she recognises him at all). Humans HATE undead, and Jaina has more reason to than most.

She is angry that her brother is being used, that's her first reaction to assume that he's being used as a puppet against her.

I'm not so sure I agree Jaina should be 'rawr me hate undead' either. No she wasn't at the reunion but she DID for many years advocate peace with the horde which included Forsaken. She teleported Varian out of the Undercity. Of course she's anti horde right now, but when has Jaina ever demonstrated a distaste for free willed undead? She also doesn't start to calm down until after he starts speaking showing that it is him inside that rotting corpse. If she had run over to that ship to give Derek a hug at first sight I'd agree with you.