Calia will ruin the forsaken

[Jackstraw]

When did that Light Brainwashing happen? First time I hear about it.

This is a pure assumption. Just because she is not moping in a corner going "What joy is there in this curse. Woe is me", does not mean she is not suffering the same effects that the others are feeling. Her body is not decayed (yet), but neither is Sylvanas'. For all we know she might be in constant agony and only puts up a brave face.

Clamping both together since it's the same answer: in Before the Storm, the Naaru Saa'ra who Calia constantly meets in her dreams nags her with - I found - borderline manipulating tactics to prepare her for the service she'll do for the Light, so that she could be freed from the terrors still haunting her since the Lordaeron undead invasion.

Now for a quick "Light and its agenda" tangent:
Anduin of course does not want Calia to participate in such a delicate meeting.
The situation is tense, a war is brewing, there's unresolved conflict from what went down in Stormheim, and in such a landscape the last thing this meeting needs is for the heir of the previous royal family to be present, more so if it bears the same name of Sylvanas' butcher and tormentor.
Or at least her first tormentor.

Anyway, Anduin's stance changes the moment the Light ensures him it would be ok. His mind however keeps telling him this is wrong. And for good reason.

So then Calia participates in the meeting, reveals herself, Sylvanas opts for eliminating her and shoots an arrow, Calia's Power Word: Shield vanishes right before the arrow strikes her and the arrow kills the Menethil.
Anduin then performs the resurrection, but the Light takes over and Calia returns "as the Light and she herself would have her be", quoting Saa'ra.

Here we get two most interesting parts:
One, Calia would not have wanted to be any sauce of undeath any day of the week. In BfA she rejects the Menethil name, and throughout the novel she gets flashbacks of undead claws tearing at her.
Two, the nature of Calia's undeath has nothing of the tormenting nature that bounds the Forsaken because the source is different.
"Anduin watched as everyone responded to Calia’s—what? Resurrection? No, she was still dead. Dark gift? That wouldn’t be accurate either, because it was the Light that had been present today. There was nothing of darkness in this undead woman."

[Super Dickmann]

No, not really. If she spared him and he tried to stab her later she could have killed him with almost no repercussions because as others (and you) pointed out he was a massive jerk and most likely had no true loyalty of his troops and people they protected. But again we just HAVE to bend into pretzel to excuse her murdering of living Lordaeronians because reasons.

This is so tiresome. Also thats the reason you guys wholeheartedly DESERVE Calia.

That he would betray her is self-evident and not based on his personal failings. His personal failings mean that we as the audience know that he would cheat her, but anyone with similar political motives would also turn on her. The idea that she should keep a pinkie swear and leave him and his troops within the sole fortified position in the area because if he goes back on her and immediately drives his army after them or, even better, gathers up a larger force to wipe them out she can go out is braindead. Disregard Garithos' personality, disregard the qualities of his troops who, despite only him being mind controlled and everyone in this thread talking about how he's a super racist or whatever, still worked under him to protect a dreadlord in the mission immediately before this one. The fact that the messengers were killed and Stormwind and Lordaeronian's policy was still the removal of the Forsaken without them having any knowledge of what happened to Garithos shows that this was always a zero-sum game. And in a zero sum game, the leader who lets an enemy and his troops go out of a pinkie promise and ends up without a base and with a larger force gunning for them is far more amoral than one who breaks an alliance of convenience with someone everyone knows wouldn't hold his promise anyway and who, even if they were an angel, have incompatible political goals.

It is completely inconceivable to me how someone could play WC3 and Classic WoW and come out with the conclusion that there could have been peaceful coexistence between undead and humans in Lordaeron. Total annihilation of the other faction within Lordaeron was always the only possible outcome to this conflict. It really shows 'how far we've come' that people retroactively apply this weird logic of "humans and Forsaken can exist peacefully together, hold hands and hug their old family" (which is basically a deranged lore-blind retelling of the Orc story) to the older lore where the only believable reaction of a human meeting a Forsaken resulted in the death of one of the two.

It's the same reason that while citing it before I really dislike that Shaw is like "Garithos deserved even worse than getting chowed down by ghouls uwu" because it's so blatantly writer moral standards kicking in rather than an in-character choice. Say what you will about Garithos, but any living Lordaeronian would much prefer he be in charge there than an undead force and as already covered, hostility towards the undead is not some kind of beyond the pale irrational position but a completely understandable reaction to them, both in what the undead were immediately associated with and how they're perceived by the followers of the dominant religion. Even disregarding that, coexisting with a people with a reduced empathy with none of the needs of life is a huge hurdle to overcome. The retcon of undeath to a purely cosmetic feature and the major existential conflict over who gets to own Lordaeron between the living and the dead being reduced to something that can be resolved by people holding hands for a few hours because 'we're all the same really " is cancerous. Almost as cancerous as the resolution of that conflict takes place as backlash over Teldrassil and Sylvanas, and has jack to say about how the living or dead inhabitants treat the loss of the kingdom around which their story has rotated for fifteen cunting years.

I think a better word than 'omnicidal' is 'expansionist'. The Forsaken of WoW Classic are evil, but they're not expansionists. The orcs, in contrast, aren't evil, but they are expansionists. The orcs are constantly pushing the borders and seeking new territory. That's why Garrosh has to force/threaten Sylvanas into attacking Gilneas, but when Sylvanas does attack, she goes all out with the Blight.

I agree with your latter take, but not about word choice. I specifically use omnicidal because the argument made is that the Forsaken's goal was to wipe out all life which was never the case for the playable Forsaken faction, only fringe figures that you kill. The Forsaken are completely morally bankrupt, but their territorial claims are strictly around Lordaeron and a big part of their story is based around how they don't want to push their luck because they're such shitheels that if they gave the world too much of a reason they'd unite to take them out. The orcs (always) and the dwarves (Vanilla) are expansionist, but this isn't a bad thing for the narrative, much like the Forsaken's evil isn't.

Garithos was neither a good commander nor a good man. He was a swine. That much I never disputed. But that does not necessarily keep him from honoring his word to Sylvanas. But again, I don't mind that she killed him. I just shine a light on the hypocrasy of murdering his troops and then expecting help from humans.

As said, we know for a fact that there was absolutely zero chance for Garithos to allow an undead state to exist outside his door and Sylvanas's brain rot woul have had to extend to her BFA incarnation's level to allow him and his troops to occupy Lordaeron Keep while she fucks off into the wilds because otherwise she'd be breaking a promise. Sure, Garithos was human, but he was representative of an entirely different group than Stormwind. Killing one group of humans who are a direct threat to you and then contacting different humans for support doesn't make her a hypocrite. She's a hypocrite for different reasons, but they're separate political entities and the circumstances are different too - different kingdoms, a position of an established power vs. a claimant, etc.

You missunderstood my point here. For the Forsaken to become her own little cult and army that would sacrifice unlife and rotten limb for her she needed to be the ONLY ONE they could turn to. She had to destroy their hope that they could return to human civilisation, because then they might have left her and the power she gained from their adoration would evaporate. Once they were indoctrinated enough to drink her bathwater, she could act more freely, but until then she always had to make it look like everyone was out to get them.

Which admittedly many were, but after her massacre of the troops and then the following experiments on humans she obviously had it coming. It's the same thing I keep saying for the whole Stormheim story. If you have slaughtered innocents on a scale that she has then you are simply no longer in the position to cry foul and play the victim card.

But you need to consider this: Why do the humans have no reason to trust the undead? Because Sylvanas never earnestly tried to give them one.

The humans lived through a zombie apolcalypse, that claimed two allied kingdoms and effectively destroyed the Alliance of Lordaeron. Of course they will kill shambling zombies knocking at the doors or found strolling through Lordaeron, sentient or not. Sylvanas needed a sponsor like the Death Knights found in Tirion or she needed to approach the humans herself. Sending emissaries was either woefully stupid or a planned sacrifice to demonize the humans in the eyes of the Forsaken.

Sylvanas didn't give one dusty fuck whether the Forsaken were suicidally loyal to her or not past their utility in killing Arthas prior to Edge of Night. This is the case regardless of whether you apply pre or post BTS undead canon. The idea that Sylvanas would send messengers to a kingdom that wasn't aware of what happened to Garithos so that they could be killed and she could tell the zombies that she just got on her side that no one liked them, while she was still politically isolated is absolutely preposterous. It's Snidely Whiplash-tier nonsense where she'd be more committed to dicking over these people she doesn't know than her own desire for survival or the effectiveness of her quest for revenge, and this is all if we ignore the fact that Chronicle states in plain text that she sent the messengers for the sole purpose of getting help, not some kind of 6D underwater backgammon where she purposefully politically isolates herself so she has to beg orcs on another continent for help.

There's nothing morally flawed with killing enemy combatants, which Garithos' troops were, especially not ones you're engaged in a zero sum contest of survival for. Not doing so is morally derelict as well as suicidal. Experimenting on people is wrong, but again, no one was even aware of their human experimentation at that point - the Lordaeron reclamation movement, the stance towards the undead to be destroyed and Varian's attacks on the Forsaken in Wrath later all occur well before any awareness of either the extent of what the RAS was doing or what happened to Garithos. No one was motivated by what happened there, they wanted to wipe the undead out anyway and as you point out, they have very solid reasons for doing so. Her own people told her to go fuck herself, let alone humanity, which has endless amounts of reasons to oppose the undead by nature, motivating them far more than any action. Even in the nu-undead canon, most of the people Anduin encounters don't reject the Forsaken based on their deeds - after all they're all functionally retarded flower children abused by that meanie Sylvanas who would never hurt a creature of god's kingdom without her, but based on what they are and what their state entails. And those are average dudes, not the Church doctrine (torch the undead) or the reclamation groups like the Scarlet Crusade.

I didn't even think of the possession angle and I think that is what she should have done, if she was serious about her interaction with humans.

Possession in general was a massively underused plot device. The Banshee Queen sure didn't use all that many banshees. Undead quests where you get a banshee into possession to take over an enemy officer and learn their plans/put them into a trap or send fake intel. Paladin quests where you discover a possessed official and exorcise him, destroying the spirit. Nada. The closest we got to that was those Wrath quests with the Banshee that possesses the Vrykul and that's an Ebon Blade questline. But then the Ebon Blade are basically diet, universalist Forsaken, so there you go.

Maybe it is, or maybe Garithos actually liked what he saw in the power of undeath and would have joined Sylvanas as her general. For someone like him that does not seem so far fetched. He is obsessed with power and has no problem having his troops die for him. He could have been a valuable ally if she showed him the possibilities, of course only until he betrays her along with Putress because just Lordaeron is not enough, he wants to rule all of Azeroth.

This is of course just theory based on his character traits and actions, it lacks evidence just like your theory does, because it never came to that point.

I purposefully didn't base my argument on Garithos' personality to avoid this kind of situation. While Garithos is obviously a massively flawed person, the political reality would have been the same no matter who was in charge. Garithos was just such an obvious representation of why this would go tits up that he argues for himself. He isn't really the deciding part - any Lordaeronian commander would turn against the Forsaken for the same reasons Stormwind and the Scarlet Crusade end up doing so. He could've turned or been assassinated or possessed or what have you, but his unit would if anything be more of a threat to the undead if they were led by someone who wasn't so abrasive to his allies.

Topic aside, I actually don't think Garithos would have joined up with Sylvanas no matter what happened. He was a dick, to say the least, but he was also full of himself and outside of mind control he never took crap from anyone. He was weak to mental powers and not that bright, so if anything I see a scenario where Garithos and his troops survive would end up with Balnazzar picking him as his puppet instead of Saidan Dathrohan. This alternate Garithos would after all command not just humans but support from Khaz Modan and the human capital and through him Balnazzar could lobby the Alliance and dwarves into his fight with the Scourge, while preparing a much larger scale version of what Varimathras and Putress ends up doing.

Acting evil and acting rational is not mutually exclusive though. I remain unconvinced that this was her only option, especially when you yourself say that she wanted to ally with humans. A rational leader would have made use of the situation through diplomacy and trickery not with wholesale slaughter and then hoping that the humans won't find out. And a smart leader would have found a way to communicate with the remaining humans without putting her people in obvious mortal danger.

I don't discount that she could've offed him because he annoyed her, but in the situation she and they were in, holding to the deal would be tantamount to suicide. She'd be at his mercy on the topic of sending messengers and he's not really the guy for it. While I like the possession plan and might I add to it, having Varimathras be the one to inhabit him would also improve her PR by having the 'she works with a demon' card off the table, this is also contingent on everyone else being entirely alright with an undead force, including Garithos' troops. I take the piss out of them being lemmings that'd follow him in defending a dreadlord, but if we applied logic here I don't think others would take the idea of cohabitation with undead on board even if it was given by humans. After all, the only reason Lordaeron was subverted was because of the human Cult of the Damned.

[ulululu]

She is not even a forsaken but rather lightforged undead. She suffers none of the downsides of being undead and seems to be a special snowflake that was invented as anti thesis to what Forsaken actually are.
She is technically an alliance character with zero connections to the other horde leaders. Like she is literally on BFF status with both Anduin and Jaina.
The Forsaken are all about melancholy and shadows. Calia is fully absorbed with the holy light.
Being a Forsaken means you are rejected and cast out. Nobody rejected Calia. Infact she was welcomed with open arms by her friends in the alliance.
Lilian Voss is in my opinion a much more fitting candidate for leadership and I hope Blizzard will not just hamfist her onto the forsaken without any ingame connections for Forsaken players on her side.
Leave your 2 cents if you want to.

Well comprehended, opening argument "she's not even a forsaken (...)", what a substantial, qualified assessment.

With such an argument opening a debate like this we could totally end this just by saying: "Well, pre-trump USA had already ruined themselves, same goes for the forsaken."

[Muxtar]

Well comprehended, opening argument "she's not even a forsaken (...)", what a substantial, qualified assessment.

With such an argument opening a debate like this we could totally end this just by saying: "Well, pre-trump USA had already ruined themselves, same goes for the forsaken."

But she is indeed not the Forsaken. Who forsake her? She was killed and ressurected by the light, not by necromancy. She has nothing the usual Forsaken have except of the fact she she is not living person.

[Jackstraw]

But she is indeed not the Forsaken. Who forsake her? She was killed and ressurected by the light, not by necromancy. She has nothing the usual Forsaken have except of the fact she she is not living person.

Lad couldn't tell a comma from a line and did a whoopsie. Tends to happen when discussing such topics.

[Trumpcat]

I thought the "Banshee Queen" repeatedly treating them as a resource and ultimately calling them nothing already ruined them.

[BrintoSFJ]

I don't know if it is possible to ruin forsaken any more ruined they already are. I mean. they are basically sylvanas' toys who follow her every command(pc aside). I am not sure how can anyone ruin that!

[tommyhil622]

Its interesting how some people are ready to give the "wait and see" benefits to Sylvanas who works with a dude that pretty much tortures EVERYBODY he can get his hands on until they are insane from agony and then smashes them into weapons or binds to slave-army service... And people still claim that he might be "actually the good guy". But when Light fucked up Draenor everybody assumes that everything Light related is 100% evil and has some malicious implication.

Unfortunately that’s the natural thing some people are drawn to based on their real world inclinations. The light must be bad or doesn’t exist. Usually people with that sense of moral ambiguity wish to avoid morality by denying its existence even in fiction.

[Mehrunes]

It is in fact not immaterial and I think I pointed this out to you before already.

Even if word of the slaughter did not reach the Alliance at all, Sylvanas was very aware of what she did. So her "motivational speeches" of how humans will never accept them and kill them on sight was nothing but a bunch hypocritical lies. No shit they will hunt you if you betray and slaughter them! She decided to make the humans her enemies to have something for her people to fear and prevent them from turning to anyone but herself for help.

So the point that she started the bloodshed is not immaterial to the discussion, it just is not the reason for the Alliances killing of emissaries.

Ah, so it's not immaterial, as long as you blatantly ignore the reason this tangent was brought up in the first place like you just did? As well as ignore the very chronological issue here, as your second paragraph simply repeats the "humans will obviously hunt the Forsaken given the betrayal they have no way of knowing about" as if this could somehow solve the logical problem here? Fascinating. Not surprising in the slightest, but fascinating.

That was for the simple reason that the Alliance just went through a bloody zombie apocalypse. You try going through that and afterwards not assuming every undead is a monster to kill before it comes and eats your face. Something Sylvanas was most definately aware of and intentionally used for her fearmongering.

Never mind that Anduin flat out apologized to her for that and condemned the Alliance's actions, robbing you of any ground here.

simple letter sent how? with an emissary? like she did? kek, you neven explained anything, just throw a bunch of fantasies

With an undead pigeon of course.

[Nerovar]

It's the same reason that while citing it before I really dislike that Shaw is like "Garithos deserved even worse than getting chowed down by ghouls uwu" because it's so blatantly writer moral standards kicking in rather than an in-character choice. Say what you will about Garithos, but any living Lordaeronian would much prefer he be in charge there than an undead force and as already covered, hostility towards the undead is not some kind of beyond the pale irrational position but a completely understandable reaction to them, both in what the undead were immediately associated with and how they're perceived by the followers of the dominant religion. Even disregarding that, coexisting with a people with a reduced empathy with none of the needs of life is a huge hurdle to overcome. The retcon of undeath to a purely cosmetic feature and the major existential conflict over who gets to own Lordaeron between the living and the dead being reduced to something that can be resolved by people holding hands for a few hours because 'we're all the same really " is cancerous. Almost as cancerous as the resolution of that conflict takes place as backlash over Teldrassil and Sylvanas, and has jack to say about how the living or dead inhabitants treat the loss of the kingdom around which their story has rotated for fifteen cunting years.

This is honestly such a big deal and I can't fathom why this didn't draw any attention because to me this was one of the major story lines I was invested in since WC3. Lordaeron should be such a big deal in the Warcraft lore for both the Forsaken and the living humans and yet all we get is "I guess the city is gone now. What a shame". It's completely insane to me how BfA managed to simply cut off all these plot threads that have festered and grown for decades for a cheap cinematic in which Anduin looks sad and Sylvanas looks smug.

I think it will take a few years until people can truly appreciate the amount damage BfA has done to the Warcraft setting. It's insulting and bewildering to me.

[Ardenaso]

a crypt fiend #3424234234 who had free will is more Forsaken than Calia

[Raisei]

As said, we know for a fact that there was absolutely zero chance for Garithos to allow an undead state to exist outside his door and Sylvanas's brain rot woul have had to extend to her BFA incarnation's level to allow him and his troops to occupy Lordaeron Keep while she fucks off into the wilds because otherwise she'd be breaking a promise. Sure, Garithos was human, but he was representative of an entirely different group than Stormwind. Killing one group of humans who are a direct threat to you and then contacting different humans for support doesn't make her a hypocrite. She's a hypocrite for different reasons, but they're separate political entities and the circumstances are different too - different kingdoms, a position of an established power vs. a claimant, etc.

I am not disagreeing that Gari most likely would have attacked them later on. But it is just a "most likely", we have nothing to back this up. Hell, maybe 2 weeks after the day he died he would have been executed for his conduct with the Blood Elves and someone else entirely would be in charge of what was left of Lordaeron? We just don't know and excusing Sylvanas slaughter party with it being "most likely" the right choice feels off. And again, I mean this only in regards to the troops. They are not responsible that this dighead was giving the orders.

The hypocrasy was meant a bit differently. She goes ahead and kills a few hundred humans, then sends emissaries to parlay with other humans, those emissaries get killed because duh. Now she has the gall to claim that humans are after them when in fact the first act of agression towards humans was her own. Yes, the two things are not related from the side of the humans of SW, who don't know about Gari, but from her perspective it is immensely rich to massacre one group of humans and then make it look like the humans are the ones not accepting the Forsaken.

Sylvanas didn't give one dusty fuck whether the Forsaken were suicidally loyal to her or not past their utility in killing Arthas prior to Edge of Night.

I feel they would loose a big part of their utility if they weren't suicidally loyal to her. In fact they are only useful to her if she can control them fully. Hence why Varimatharas and Putress had to go.

This is the case regardless of whether you apply pre or post BTS undead canon. The idea that Sylvanas would send messengers to a kingdom that wasn't aware of what happened to Garithos so that they could be killed and she could tell the zombies that she just got on her side that no one liked them, while she was still politically isolated is absolutely preposterous.

She also sacrificed Forsaken to test her new blight. In this case she would have done so to fuel her propaganda and bind the Forsaken to her. Both actions serve to give her the weapons to kill Arthas. Her making sacrifices of her people for that seems completely in line with her character. But no, I would think that she was more ambivalent in this matter.
If the emissary gets killed she can use that for propaganda, if he lives and delivers the message she can use that to maybe get into relations with the humans. Both options serve to strengthen her position, but she was most likely aware that the latter option was far less likely.
If she really thought zombies would get an audience to deliver a message and staked her future on this then... well... that is plainly stupid and that is one of the few things I don't think she is.

There's nothing morally flawed with killing enemy combatants, which Garithos' troops were, especially not ones you're engaged in a zero sum contest of survival for. Not doing so is morally derelict as well as suicidal.

That is just not the case here. They were not enemies at this moment in time. They were (uneasy) allies and Sylvanas betrayed them. Betrayal is always morally flawed.

Experimenting on people is wrong, but again, no one was even aware of their human experimentation at that point

True but not the point. It's not about people knowing that she has done these things, it is about her being aware of what she has done and then crying over people attacking her and the Forsaken. In Stormheim it was especially glaring, when in the later novel she is blaming the Alliance for Genn's attack while she was absolutely aware that the only reason for it were her own past actions in Gilneas.
It is the same in this case. She commits crime after crime, murder after murder and when people attack her for it, it is them that unjustly deny the Forsaken their place in the world. It's the victim card and she playing it is the peak of hypocrasy.

Possession in general was a massively underused plot device. The Banshee Queen sure didn't use all that many banshees. Undead quests where you get a banshee into possession to take over an enemy officer and learn their plans/put them into a trap or send fake intel. Paladin quests where you discover a possessed official and exorcise him, destroying the spirit. Nada. The closest we got to that was those Wrath quests with the Banshee that possesses the Vrykul and that's an Ebon Blade questline. But then the Ebon Blade are basically diet, universalist Forsaken, so there you go.

It probably because the ability is too strong and there is very little defense against it. So it was mostly phased out of canon. Much like the demon ability of taking the form of other races. It was used once at the start of Legion so the Illidari could show off their 45 second cooldown ability and then never again (apart from the Rogue questline where it was used cleverly) or Murozond who has all the powers of Nozdormu to control time but chooses to just spit fire at us, while WE use time magic.

Topic aside, I actually don't think Garithos would have joined up with Sylvanas no matter what happened. He was a dick, to say the least, but he was also full of himself and outside of mind control he never took crap from anyone. He was weak to mental powers and not that bright, so if anything I see a scenario where Garithos and his troops survive would end up with Balnazzar picking him as his puppet instead of Saidan Dathrohan. This alternate Garithos would after all command not just humans but support from Khaz Modan and the human capital and through him Balnazzar could lobby the Alliance and dwarves into his fight with the Scourge, while preparing a much larger scale version of what Varimathras and Putress ends up doing.

I admit my prospect was unlikely. Though I feel that the character traits you speak of are present in several Forsaken and other undead. Kel'Thuzad for example, who was a flunky to the Lich King. So I wouldn't say it is an impossible thing to happen.

I don't discount that she could've offed him because he annoyed her, but in the situation she and they were in, holding to the deal would be tantamount to suicide. She'd be at his mercy on the topic of sending messengers and he's not really the guy for it. While I like the possession plan and might I add to it, having Varimathras be the one to inhabit him would also improve her PR by having the 'she works with a demon' card off the table, this is also contingent on everyone else being entirely alright with an undead force, including Garithos' troops. I take the piss out of them being lemmings that'd follow him in defending a dreadlord, but if we applied logic here I don't think others would take the idea of cohabitation with undead on board even if it was given by humans. After all, the only reason Lordaeron was subverted was because of the human Cult of the Damned.

It is very likely that this would have happened with the players we have, but if we exclude Garithos from the equation (by killing him silently) I am not so sure anymore. The Horde after all accepted them (when they found or rather tricked the Cows to speak on their behalve) to a point. I see no direct reason that this could not have happened with the Alliance. They just needed a sponsor (Sylvanas could probably have just asked Vareesa) and the Forsaken were after all Lordaeronians.

Obviosuly the way they were then presented in WoW they would never have fit the Alliance, but that is aother matter.

- - - Updated - - -

I thought the "Banshee Queen" repeatedly treating them as a resource and ultimately calling them nothing already ruined them.

Not if they enjoyed it

- - - Updated - - -

Ah, so it's not immaterial, as long as you blatantly ignore the reason this tangent was brought up in the first place like you just did? As well as ignore the very chronological issue here, as your second paragraph simply repeats the "humans will obviously hunt the Forsaken given the betrayal they have no way of knowing about" as if this could somehow solve the logical problem here? Fascinating. Not surprising in the slightest, but fascinating.

It is fascinating indeed how you can see the letters I write even make out paragraphs yet complete and utterly misrepresent what I am saying. Not surprising, but fascinating.

Never mind that Anduin flat out apologized to her for that and condemned the Alliance's actions, robbing you of any ground here.

And Anduin would probably apologize to Baine for every burger and steak he ate in his live. Come on... This is the guy that took responsibility for Arthas actions and pushed them on the Alliance even though the Prince of Lordaeron was mind controlled by a former orc Warchief trapped in an armor from hell, with a sword that ate his soul.
Anduin is just the kind of guy that will carry the weight of the world if he thinks it will help others. In this case the Forsaken and their human relatives.

With an undead pigeon of course.

Because the Forsaken had no flying creatures right? Do you need a link to the WC3 units or would this much fact overload your sarcasm gauge?

[Jackstraw]

Because the Forsaken had no flying creatures right? Do you need a link to the WC3 units or would this much fact overload your sarcasm gauge?

There is so much to unpack in your reply I'd need to answer after work. But this?

Are you suggesting Sylvanas should have sent a message with a bloody gargoyle towards Stormwind? Or Ironforge?
The thing would have never gotten over the Wetlands without being gunned down since, you know, gargoyles were part of the Scourge war machine until previous tuesday.

The point is not that there was no way a messenger could have delivered the message. The point is that anything remotely undead was burned or butchered because the Eastern Kingdoms got ravaged by an undead army.
As absurd as it sounds, some intel from the Scarlet would have helped heaps. I guess the later split of the Argent Dawn and their cooperation with the Forsaken for their operations in the Plaguelands helped in this sense, but I should check my lore on that.

[omeomorfismo]

Because the Forsaken had no flying creatures right? Do you need a link to the WC3 units or would this much fact overload your sarcasm gauge?

kek, now sending a gargoyle or a frost wyrm should be better than an undead emissary
omegakek

So were friggin GHOULS, and it did not bloody stop her sending those. A gargoyle could have dropped a message over an Alliance town at least, plus they are not sentient, so loosing them should be preferable over a thinking being.



That is exactly the point I keep being smacked with: "There is no way for her to deliver a letter."

omegakek^2
again the find the letter in the middle of stormwind->trust the words written->doesnt take as a nuts who found it

[Raisei]

There is so much to unpack in your reply I'd need to answer after work. But this?

Are you suggesting Sylvanas should have sent a message with a bloody gargoyle towards Stormwind? Or Ironforge?
The thing would have never gotten over the Wetlands without being gunned down since, you know, gargoyles were part of the Scourge war machine until previous tuesday.

So were friggin GHOULS, and it did not bloody stop her sending those. A gargoyle could have dropped a message over an Alliance town at least, plus they are not sentient, so loosing them should be preferable over a thinking being.

The point is not that there was no way a messenger could have delivered the message.

That is exactly the point I keep being smacked with: "There is no way for her to deliver a letter."

[Super Dickmann]

This is honestly such a big deal and I can't fathom why this didn't draw any attention because to me this was one of the major story lines I was invested in since WC3. Lordaeron should be such a big deal in the Warcraft lore for both the Forsaken and the living humans and yet all we get is "I guess the city is gone now. What a shame". It's completely insane to me how BfA managed to simply cut off all these plot threads that have festered and grown for decades for a cheap cinematic in which Anduin looks sad and Sylvanas looks smug.

I think it will take a few years until people can truly appreciate the amount damage BfA has done to the Warcraft setting. It's insulting and bewildering to me.

It's kind of a feat in and of itself that Blizzard turned one of the most long running and emotionally invested aspects of the franchise for both factions, that being the conflict over Lordaeron into a meaningless footnote. Even more so as the entire basis for the Forsaken's disembowelment is founded upon their Lordaeronian identity and how it's what they 'really' are, only for there to be zero focus on their reactions to losing their home, zero opposition or reaction to either the person who invaded the place or the woman who dropped plague on it. The thing to replace it pits two groups that have no prior interaction or emotional heft with each other, the Forsaken and the Night Elves, at each other for a completely limp narrative. In BTS, every aspect of the Forsaken/Lordaeronian conflict besides that they could bond over their shared identity was axed. Yet at the end of BFA, even this wretched narrative beat had no pay off and no focus. Not even those focused upon during it - Anduin and Sylvanas care about it or reference it ever again. Hell, the only reference to ever come of it is a throw-away line by Chadwick's squad in Zandalar. The Lordaeronian Forsaken presence amounts to fighting in Darkshore, which they have nothing to do with, and loitering in Orgrimmar. Calia takes over off-screen and there's not even a single sentence covering how the Forsaken react to it or what living Lordaeronians think about what is something that was impossible until five minutes ago. The more I think about it, the worse it gets, which might as well be the BFA tagline.

I am not disagreeing that Gari most likely would have attacked them later on. But it is just a "most likely", we have nothing to back this up. Hell, maybe 2 weeks after the day he died he would have been executed for his conduct with the Blood Elves and someone else entirely would be in charge of what was left of Lordaeron? We just don't know and excusing Sylvanas slaughter party with it being "most likely" the right choice feels off. And again, I mean this only in regards to the troops. They are not responsible that this dighead was giving the orders.

We know for a fact that every other human party with zero knowledge of the Forsaken's actions took a 100% hostile position to them. To say that the guy who, again, would put Kael and all other blood elves to death over the business with the naga, would probably not hold his word to the zombie once he has everything he wants from her and his troops control Lordaeron Keep is self-evident. To gamble on his better angels when the best case scenario for leaving him alive is that he lets the Forsaken loiter in the wilderness until reinforcements arrive and the worst is that he immediately attacks them once he musters the troops would be a pretty terrible deal. The troops are not morally responsible for Garithos being a dick, but killing hostile combatants is a given. Ditto, we're not talking about defenseless civilians here, we're talking about armed dudes who are perfectly capable of engaging the undead in battle.

I feel they would loose a big part of their utility if they weren't suicidally loyal to her. In fact they are only useful to her if she can control them fully. Hence why Varimatharas and Putress had to go.

She also sacrificed Forsaken to test her new blight. In this case she would have done so to fuel her propaganda and bind the Forsaken to her. Both actions serve to give her the weapons to kill Arthas. Her making sacrifices of her people for that seems completely in line with her character. But no, I would think that she was more ambivalent in this matter.
If the emissary gets killed she can use that for propaganda, if he lives and delivers the message she can use that to maybe get into relations with the humans. Both options serve to strengthen her position, but she was most likely aware that the latter option was far less likely.
If she really thought zombies would get an audience to deliver a message and staked her future on this then... well... that is plainly stupid and that is one of the few things I don't think she is.

The retroactive 'Sylvanas planned everything around controlling the Forsaken even though we know from her own mind that she only cared about Arthas' takes are deranged. They become even more deranged in the context of Putress considering that he had a large enough constituency to oust her from the city and that in the very next expansion after she supposedly consolidates social control over the Forsaken on the basis of banning all mention of Lordaeron (despite doing the exact opposite in game, but nevermind), virtually every named character she raises either turns on her with at least a small force at their beck and call or is a member of an established organisation like Stillwater but still turns on her. Or that Sylvanas killing a criminal with Blight is considered an attack on her people, presumably the same way giving a criminal the electric chair is a form of persecution of one's own group.

Sylvanas was not ambivalent on the matter of the messengers. She is described by the omniscient narrator as 'desperate' and what happens immediately preceding it is that she asks the blood elves and they reject her as well. This is not an object of debate, it's what the narrative states in black and white. If we pretend Chronicle doesn't exist, that still doesn't help push this topic because the whole reason she's asking for support is because the Forsaken as is aren't fit for purpose and even if they were all 100% fanatically committed to her out of desperation and not because of agreement with her public, but not private position, as is actually the case, they'd be unable to achieve her goal of getting at Arthas and she'd be wiped out without outside help. She sent a zombie to bring her message because her kingdom is a kingdom of zombies and because she has no alternative people to send, not because she had a wealth of other options but while 'desperate' she deliberately took a shit move that would have resulted in her and her troops being wiped out so as to ensure support she already had among the same constituency that would have been wiped out as a result of that shit move. What the fuck would a Sylvanas only concerned with killing Arthas care about whether the Forsaken can team up with humans or not? Surely acceptance by humans of her and them is advantageous because it means a larger group would be able to go after Arthas. Of course, this is all irrelevant, because acceptance by humans was never on the table.

That is just not the case here. They were not enemies at this moment in time. They were (uneasy) allies and Sylvanas betrayed them. Betrayal is always morally flawed.
True but not the point. It's not about people knowing that she has done these things, it is about her being aware of what she has done and then crying over people attacking her and the Forsaken. In Stormheim it was especially glaring, when in the later novel she is blaming the Alliance for Genn's attack while she was absolutely aware that the only reason for it were her own past actions in Gilneas.
It is the same in this case. She commits crime after crime, murder after murder and when people attack her for it, it is them that unjustly deny the Forsaken their place in the world. It's the victim card and she playing it is the peak of hypocrasy.

Once again, people who had no knowledge of any of these acts had as their official position the destruction of the Forsaken and the reclamation of Lordaeron. We factually know this to be the case. Sylvanas could be eating babies on a conveyor belt and I'm sure someone will come up and explain to me how she was totally doing this in five minutes, and it'd still have just as much relevance to the human response because the human response was independent of any action the Forsaken took one way or another. Her position that the conflict was a zero-sum war of extermination between those engaging the Forsaken and the Forsaken themselves is objectively correct for the entire course of the narrative up until BTS. Had she acted on a different assumption, she and they would have died. And while we can argue that them being gone would be good for the world, it'd not be good for them and quite obviously the Forsaken would act in the interest of their own self-preservation. In turn, Genn is entirely emotionally justified to attack Sylvanas when he did, that doesn't mean that he wouldn't be a huge villain to them given that he cut off their chance at staving off death permanently and tried to assassinate the Horde's head of state during an invasion by Satan over a harm to a third party he didn't even know about. People can take issue with each other for perfectly valid internal story reasons and indeed them doing so is the basis of all good storytelling. A character or faction, heroic or villainous, only needs to be motivated and understandable, not sympathetic or in the right out of story to function in their role. The Lordaeronian humans acted in character by trying to kill the Forsaken and their grounds make complete sense, ditto Sylvanas killing people who are hostile to her isn't some grand crime, but basic self-preservation. The humans are generally good, the Forsaken generally evil, but what matters is that their reasoning is coherent and the things they take issue with are things that these groups would take issue with, rather than being sanitized or forgiving each other inexplicably because they're both 'good', which is the foundation of the two Mists expansions and every acceptance of taboo groups like warlocks, death knights or void elves.

It probably because the ability is too strong and there is very little defense against it. So it was mostly phased out of canon. Much like the demon ability of taking the form of other races. It was used once at the start of Legion so the Illidari could show off their 45 second cooldown ability and then never again (apart from the Rogue questline where it was used cleverly) or Murozond who has all the powers of Nozdormu to control time but chooses to just spit fire at us, while WE use time magic.

It would make Illidari a bigger deal, ditto paladins could actually get to detect undead. It's not that hard to write around, but it's one of the less glaring but still annoying failures of the expansion that the races didn't actually get to show off their gimmicks against each other that much. Even the warfronts are fairly limited in that regard when they could've been the place just for that. Only a few of the war campaign questlines, mostly Alliance-side, do this.

It is very likely that this would have happened with the players we have, but if we exclude Garithos from the equation (by killing him silently) I am not so sure anymore. The Horde after all accepted them (when they found or rather tricked the Cows to speak on their behalve) to a point. I see no direct reason that this could not have happened with the Alliance. They just needed a sponsor (Sylvanas could probably have just asked Vareesa) and the Forsaken were after all Lordaeronians.

The Alliance have directly suffered from the undead and have specific hangups with them - both because again, objectively the undead are different from the living and have many positive traits of the living suppressed and negative ones expanded. This is still the case per the Bolvar DK story, even though BTS spaces it entirely in favor of them being reskinned humans. On top of that and that the Light treats undeath as damnation, you also have refugees from a place where the undead were just killed and you pretty much have to take the zombies at their words that they're still themselves, honest, after having just lost a kingdom to a subversive undeath accepting cult. None of these factors are there for the Horde, and the Horde have both a realpolitik reason to accept them - a foothold in the Eastern Kingdoms, and Thrall projection the human issues with orcs onto the Forsaken as a persecuted people. The Alliance accepting the Forsaken and undead in general has always been bad and the removal of their faith and dislike of shifty magic has made the faction uncountably boring as a result. Back in Vanilla, humans distrusted Arcane, the idea that they'd accept the living dead would be absolutely batshit.

[Jackstraw]

So were friggin GHOULS, and it did not bloody stop her sending those. A gargoyle could have dropped a message over an Alliance town at least, plus they are not sentient, so loosing them should be preferable over a thinking being.


That is exactly the point I keep being smacked with: "There is no way for her to deliver a letter."

Mate.
"ghouls" are basically playable Forsaken, glorified zombies. I'm guessing one of them was sent. The line "there's no way for her to deliver the letter" is due to the fact that the message would inevitably get lost.

I see now I worded it poorly: a vector could carry the message. The message could not conceivably get delivered.

Small edit:
Even slightly amicable messages towards the undead would inevitably trigger ptsds regarding the Cult of the Damned.

[Syegfryed]

This is honestly such a big deal and I can't fathom why this didn't draw any attention because to me this was one of the major story lines I was invested in since WC3. Lordaeron should be such a big deal in the Warcraft lore for both the Forsaken and the living humans and yet all we get is "I guess the city is gone now. What a shame". It's completely insane to me how BfA managed to simply cut off all these plot threads that have festered and grown for decades for a cheap cinematic in which Anduin looks sad and Sylvanas looks smug.

Lordaeron was axed down rly hard to give Stormwind focus, nobody gave a fuck about stormwind before, it is a lame city with boring story compared to other ones, in fact all other cities went down so stormwind could shine, stormgade, guilneas, its a shame, the "jack of all trades city that want to be better at everything" is not rly a good narrative, hell, even The alliance symbol with lordaeron crest was better.

Every living human should fight for Lordaeron, especially from stormwind, after how Terenas and lordaeron helped the wyrms and stormwind as a whole, without then the kingdom would sure be absorbed by others.

I think it will take a few years until people can truly appreciate the amount damage BfA has done to the Warcraft setting. It's insulting and bewildering to me.

you can see things going downhill with WoD, but Legion truly start the clowfest with vol'jin dying by random felguard#1453 with plotdeviced fel poison, but BfA got the cake.

[VladlTutushkin]

@Super Dickmann

“And in a zero sum game, the leader who lets an enemy and his troops go out of a pinkie promise and ends up without a base and with a larger force gunning for them is far more amoral than one who breaks an alliance of convenience with someone everyone knows wouldn't hold his promise anyway and who, even if they were an angel, have incompatible political goals“

You mean like Anduin who sacrifices his allies, endangers his faction while it dies by a “thousand cuts” and gambles future of his people for the sake of “peace”?

Also, the lore in a sorry state now because writers couldnt decide on a direction to go and allowed their biases and in case of Danuser their thirstiness for undead waifu to dictate the lore.

Now you reap what you watched for years, yes sure, Alliance was destroyed by lore long before but your turn is now. Enjoy. Now we will watch.

- - - Updated - - -

Unfortunately that’s the natural thing some people are drawn to based on their real world inclinations. The light must be bad or doesn’t exist. Usually people with that sense of moral ambiguity wish to avoid morality by denying its existence even in fiction.

Often mora ambiguity is just a last resort of a coward who cant face the consequences of their actions or bear responsibility for their decisions and mistakes.

[Nerovar]

Lordaeron was axed down rly hard to give Stormwind focus, nobody gave a fuck about stormwind before, it is a lame city with boring story compared to other ones, in fact all other cities went down so stormwind could shine, stormgade, guilneas, its a shame, the "jack of all trades city that want to be better at everything" is not rly a good narrative, hell, even The alliance symbol with lordaeron crest was better.

Every living human should fight for Lordaeron, especially from stormwind, after how Terenas and lordaeron helped the wyrms and stormwind as a whole, without then the kingdom would sure be absorbed by others.



you can see things going downhill with WoD, but Legion truly start the clowfest with vol'jin dying by random felguard#1453 with plotdeviced fel poison, but BfA got the cake.

God, how I wish Stormwind got nuked/blighted instead only for the humans to retake Lordaeron.