Shadowlands Sylvanas and Anduin cinematic.

[Super Dickmann]

I just want to point out how in Christianity God is infallible... except he is also a huge hypocrite at times and its just written down to “he is God he do what he deems necessary”.
But take Greek or Norse mythology/religion and you will learn that Gods are not just falliable but also are massive dickheads. Odin and Zeus alone are worse then Odyn from WoW or Titans and so on. Hades IS just a “magical warlord” in the end and etc. Infallibility of Afterlife is only a concept in Christianity and maybe Islam. Otherwise it is indeed just a “kingdom” ruled by death deities of various moral standing. And you can and WILL be screwed out of it by other gods if they really want to. And to add to it - whole Afterlife system worked since forever so eh, guess it wasnt bad. Plus Forsworn is a relatively new thing and began with Bluether arrival. Then also “moral code” for not getting into Maw is very simple one and EVEN if you really screw up you first go to Revendreth and you might “fix” your mistakes and earn a new Afterlife. Which btw makes WoW system of Aterlife almost laughably lenient. You literally can atone after the fact even if you are a mass murdering maniac like Arthas or whoever that was who blew up planets. Why Sylvanas went into the Maw? No idea. My guess? Jailer. He spotted her on the Icecrown and was like “Bingo! Arthas just died but a better tool made its way to my hands...”

Oh, no, obviously a ton of mythological gods were assholes porking their close relatives and passers by and screwing over mortals to terrible afterlives for minor inconveniences. Ditto defiance of the gods and karmic punishment there for is as old as time. But the Arbiter as an infallible decider of where you should go definitely owes a lot more to the Abrahamic religions, while the individual afterlives are all over the place. Combining the two as Blizzard have is why we can even discuss the realms and why I'm leaning to reform being the angle they're going with. The rules for not getting to the Maw meanwhile are arbitrary in the sense that A) Someone can just throw you in there if they feel like it, like how the Kyrian do it, B) If you go to Revendreth, itself arbitrary since people like KT, the Margraves and Vashj don't go there despite having a list of crimes longer than the bible or just being evil pieces of shit, ultimate decision is left to whether Denathrius wanted you to go to the Maw or not. That it has been working for as long as it has is mostly in the sense that nobody was aware of it up to now and those that were (The Light, Legion and Void) didn't give a flying shit about mortals being dicked out of a nice afterlife.

@Arrashi

The electrostimulation will be left to a short story.

[Aucald]

Let's pivot away from discussing real-world religion and return to the topic of the Sylvanas and Anduin cinematic itself.

[kaelix1]

Whatever it's her motive, pure or not will never justify the evil she did, she is evil pure and simple, everything she did was her own choice, trying to change the 'system' will not wash all her blood she has on her hands, at this point no way in hell i see a 'redemption arc' from her, best case scenario after we kill her she goes where garrosh or kael is

[Nerovar]

Pointing out how being sent to an eternal afterlife based on a finite lifespan which will be decided for you on the basis of rules you have no way of knowing before you die where your fate will be administered by fallible dickheads isn't baseless whining - less egregious variants of it are sticking points for some of the world's biggest religions. It's the "Hand the keys to Satan" part of her position that's so stupid that even the narrative is aware of it and has Anduin call her for along with the fact that she has no program. As even if you take Satan out of the equation, you either have, like @Melusine brings up a situation without consequences where people like her, Arthas, Krastinov etc. can get away with whatever they want or someone will have to make the determinations.

Now that we see all the pieces falling into place, I really struggle to understand the thought process behind this story. They've changed the concept of the Shadowlands as a sort of purgatory linked to Azeroth mirroring the Emerald Dream from which souls would eventually move on, pretty much all the afterlives of the different races and religions, the Lich King and everything regarding his creation, Dreadlords, Spirit Healers, Scourge (especially architecture) etc. - they've scrubbed away many of the remaining mysteries of the Warcraft universe and for what purpose exactly? Just so they could basically (retroactively) turn Sylvanas from an obscure faction leader into one of the biggest, most important characters of the entire Warcraft universe with some kind of 'I'm going to break the wheel' motivation?

This feels completely insane to me. It's like they tried to create a mystery box and accidentally locked themselves in it.

[Frozen Death Knight]

I think Sylv do not want a world "free of consequences". She just doesn't want a world where 2 years of bad actions leads to eternal damnation. In Sylvanas' case, she was a Ranger all her life, and she probably believes (true or not, we don't know yet) that her "short" passage to the dark side because of the Lich King has damned her forever (Edge of Night stuff). Doesn't mean she means that a Kil'jaeden-level of bad guy should be able to chose to "live" peacefully in the afterlife.

A reasonable explanation. A shame that she didn't even bother bringing that up in the conversation with Anduin. Would have made her speech at least have some coherent line of thought. It would have also made for a pretty interesting dialogue where Anduin has to come to terms with how Sylvanas and other Forsaken are possibly damned for all eternity in the Maw or some other dark place in the Shadowlands because they got slaughtered by the Lich King and raised into undeath, regardless of how virtuous they were in life. At least then there would something for us the audience to understand what she even means when saying that everything in life and death is pre-determined.

Sadly we didn't get that.

[Super Dickmann]

Now that we see all the pieces falling into place, I really struggle to understand the thought process behind this story. They've changed the concept of the Shadowlands as a sort of purgatory linked to Azeroth mirroring the Emerald Dream from which souls would eventually move on, pretty much all the afterlives of the different races and religions, the Lich King and everything regarding his creation, Dreadlords, Spirit Healers, Scourge (especially architecture) etc. - they've scrubbed away many of the remaining mysteries of the Warcraft universe and for what purpose exactly? Just so they could basically (retroactively) turn Sylvanas from an obscure faction leader into one of the biggest, most important characters of the entire Warcraft universe with some kind of 'I'm going to break the wheel' motivation?

This feels completely insane to me. It's like they tried to create a mystery box and accidentally locked themselves in it.

I genuinely think the Sylvanas thing is more of a side-effect and the product of her being a massive marketing draw. This is her third motivation in as many years - in BTS she was going on about raising Forsaken out of Stormwind and ruling the Horde going forward, in the comics and BFA she was going on about how everyone would serve her and how she was death and now she's a Final Fantasy villain engaged in an angle the writers really aren't equipped to handle, much as I've been pleasantly surprised by the Shadowlands-exclusive stuff up to now.

The main thing is that the writing staff want to put their mark on the story. Like Metzen spaced the entirety of the WC2 cast to make the orcs about Thrall, Kosak threw Thrall under the bus to build up a more militant Cataclysm Horde and the tol'vir, draenei, Legion etc. were changed for what would suit the story at the moment. The new guys want to do their own story and use the old toys for it to maintain some connection. It's no coincidence that the entire insufferable Unifaction cast following you into the Maw and even Bolvar are unceremoniously punted into a corner until max level while the story largely gravitates around the new zones. Their passion is with this new setting they've made and it shows in the gulf in quality between the Shadowlands leveling and covenant content compared to the war campaign.

[InfiniteCharger]

The problem with the so-called "motivation" of Sylvanas is that what happens in the Shadowlands historically stayed in the Shadowlands. People who died didn't report back that "things are unfair" in death. That was never an issue that living folks ever cared about. They mostly cared about dying with the assumption that death was final and the end of mortal existence. Whatever happened after was irrelevant to most mortals. Trying to make mortals care about what happens to a soul after death in the realm of death lacks any real meaning for a mortal. This is the whole problem with the Shadowlands as a story because living beings shouldn't be there and what happens there shouldn't be their concern.

Sylvanas as an undead shouldn't have any more insight to the realm of death and how it works than any other mortal. Because she is a mortal soul after all trapped in the mortal realm by powerful magic. Making her someone with so much knowledge of the inner workings of how the death realm works makes no sense. And again, why should anyone living care regardless? Her existence and the existence of all undead are an abomination technically and already is a flaw in the machinery of death in the first place. By all logic, her soul should be trapped there never to return and that should have happened with the breaking of the helm of Damnation as the ultimate symbol of the powers keeping her soul trapped in the land of the living...... Everything beyond that is just a contradiction in terms, including the idea that killing more mortals will "fix" the machinery of death and mortal should be OK with that explanation.

[Nerovar]

I genuinely think the Sylvanas thing is more of a side-effect. This is her third motivation in as many years - in BTS she was going on about raising Forsaken out of Stormwind and ruling the Horde going forward, in the comics and BFA she was going on about how everyone would serve her and how she was death and now she's a Final Fantasy villain engaged in an angle the writers really aren't equipped to handle, much as I've been pleasantly surprised by the Shadowlands-exclusive stuff up to now.

And yet Sylvanas is positioned as the be-all and end-all of this expansion (and also the previous one). I think it's really to overestimate the role Sylvanas played in BfA and Shadowlands.

The main thing is that the writing staff want to put their mark on the story. Like Metzen spaced the entirety of the WC2 cast to make the orcs about Thrall, Kosak threw Thrall under the bus to build up a more militant Cataclysm Horde and the tol'vir, draenei, Legion etc. were changed for what would suit the story at the moment. The new guys want to do their own story and use the old toys for it to maintain some connection. It's no coincidence that the entire insufferable Unifaction cast following you into the Maw and even Bolvar are unceremoniously punted into a corner until max level while the story largely gravitates around the new zones. Their passion is with this new setting they've made and it shows in the gulf in quality between the Shadowlands leveling and covenant content compared to the war campaign.

I agree with the "putting their mark on the story" aspect. It just feels to me like they desperately want to tell stories that aren't really rooted in anything Warcraft and instead try to push their own stuff that is at best tangentially linked to very obscure parts of the existing lore. They did this in previous expansions to some degree like making an entire expansion out of the Pandaren character from Wc3 or turning the Tomb of Sargeras (which used to be a few small islands that were raised from the see very recently) into a continent with a perfectly preserved Elven civilization Maiev somehow overlooked in Wc3. The difference was that in past expansions those places were actually used as a canvas to explore pretty down-to-earth Warcraft stories like the faction war in MoP or the Burning Legion in, well... Legion.
Shadowlands wouldn't even be recognizable as a Warcraft story if you took away the Maldraxxus architecture they "borrowed" from the Scourge. It's like they designed their vision for a story without concerns for continuity and then tried to squeeze it into the existing lore.

[Eapoe]

Anyone who's thinking this hints at lol-redemption is fooling themselves. If Anduin, the god boi-king needs to be tempted with something, that something is inherently evil. Otherwise he'd already be doing that himself, with his holy bones guiding his actions. This story beat exists only to drive the point that Sylvanas is the Satan to Anduin's Jesus some more. We're at "directly ripping off the temptation of Christ" stage of the shit rehash.

Meanwhile, he openly supported Alleria and Turalyon torturing people, innocent people who were starving, in an attempt to find Sylvanas when Jaina told him about what they were doing.
Anduin isn’t as black and white as you made him out to be.

[bagina]

And yet Sylvanas is positioned as the be-all and end-all of this expansion (and also the previous one). I think it's really to overestimate the role Sylvanas played in BfA and Shadowlands.



I agree with the "putting their mark on the story" aspect. It just feels to me like they desperately want to tell stories that aren't really rooted in anything Warcraft and instead try to push their own stuff that is at best tangentially linked to very obscure parts of the existing lore. They did this in previous expansions to some degree like making an entire expansion out of the Pandaren character from Wc3 or turning the Tomb of Sargeras (which used to be a few small islands that were raised from the see very recently) into a continent with a perfectly preserved Elven civilization Maiev somehow overlooked in Wc3. The difference was that in past expansions those places were actually used as a canvas to explore pretty down-to-earth Warcraft stories like the faction war in MoP or the Burning Legion in, well... Legion.
Shadowlands wouldn't even be recognizable as a Warcraft story if you took away the Maldraxxus architecture they "borrowed" from the Scourge. It's like they designed their vision for a story without concerns for continuity and then tried to squeeze it into the existing lore.

Nothing about Legion is down to earth xD. But I agree that there should have never been an expansion about the afterlife.

[Nerovar]

Nothing about Legion is down to earth xD. But I agree that there should have never been an expansion about the afterlife.

Well, no. I agree. It was a poor choice of words. I meant more that it was 'rooted in Warcraft history'.

[Super Dickmann]

And yet Sylvanas is positioned as the be-all and end-all of this expansion (and also the previous one). I think it's really to overestimate the role Sylvanas played in BfA and Shadowlands.

Sylvanas's actual screentime in the launch content consists of like 5 minutes and in the cinematic that this topic's about, Anduin, the author's mouthpiece for all that is good, tells her she's a patsy of a new character. A new character who's outfit and base she's in and who the entire rest of the expansion revolves around the machinations of. Her motive has switched three times and she experienced no coherent character development or had any identifiable motivation except as a blunt instrument. I don't doubt the writers love her - even the most banal comment about Sylvanas generates massive publicity from those even tangentially interested in the story. But they aren't invested in her characterization. Her collective appearances in expansion launch cinematics are less than the time spent on Saurfang's story in just BFA or Jaina's in the same one. These are characters the writers have a clear route they want to take them on, no matter how shit that route is, Sylvanas is a glorified plot device. I might be wrong and they could be pivoting in the direction you say, but everything in Shadowlands points to a situation like in BFA - Sylvanas as a hype generating tool to move attention to characters and concepts they do want to feature but don't think they'd be able to sell on their own.

I agree with the "putting their mark on the story" aspect. It just feels to me like they desperately want to tell stories that aren't really rooted in anything Warcraft and instead try to push their own stuff that is at best tangentially linked to very obscure parts of the existing lore. They did this in previous expansions to some degree like making an entire expansion out of the Pandaren character from Wc3 or turning the Tomb of Sargeras (which used to be a few small islands) into a continent with a perfectly preserved Elven civilization Maiev somehow overlooked in Wc3. The difference was that in past expansions those places were actually used as a canvas to explore pretty down-to-earth Warcraft stories like the faction war in MoP or the Burning Legion in, well... Legion.
Shadowlands wouldn't even be recognizable as a Warcraft story if you took away the Maldraxxus architecture they "borrowed" from the Scourge. It's like they designed their vision for a story without concerns for continuity and then tried to squeeze it into the existing lore.

I mostly agree with you aesthetically speaking, though I'd bring up that with said past expansions, many of these concepts have been hollowed out over time. They're using Azeroth as a backdrop to tell a story in a radically different setting. Some of this stuff is just nostalgia wank. Sylvanas, like you say, has basically fuck all to do with any of this and is just there for the name value. Jaina, Thrall, Baine and the rest have absolutely nothing to do in this story and criminally boring. Draka is a non-character The Jailer is the same kind of non-entity Satan figure as Sargeras, but with zero of the thematic connection. The realms themselves have no prior setup. But others are a mixed bag - Uther's story and Bastion in general hit the same thematic beats as the thing with Xe'ra and Illidan, only much better and Uther himself works off of the baggage that the Arthas story still has. Kael'thas and Kel'thuzad's datamined story hits upon a link that when the writers first had the chance to do they completely wasted, what with the blood elves having zero role against the Scourge and Kael'thas and Vashj themselves being punted off as raid fodder.

That and speaking personally I've mostly enjoyed the Shadowlands-specific story and the older returning characters. I genuinely couldn't give less of a shit about any of the cast we brought with us like a hunchback's conjoined twin. So if their goal was to make me care more about the new and old than the present, then mission fucking accomplished I suppose.

[Varodoc]

Why don't Sylvanas and Jailer just kill Anduin? He'd return to the Maw anyway, plus he wouldn't be erased from existence as he's a living being (only dead people are erased if they are cut down in the Shadowlands). This way, if by chance Anduin somehow broke free, he'd return to Azeroth as undead, which would pretty much kill off the Wrynn dynasty (as undead can't reproduce) and cause massive repercussions in the Alliance. I know they want to turn Anduin into a weapon, but they can do the same thing if he's dead. It's a win-win situation.

Sylvanas and the Jailer are fools, their plan will 100% backfire, and then they'll regret not taking drastic measures with Anduin. Absolute amateurs.

[loras]

Why don't Sylvanas and Jailer just kill Anduin? He'd return to the Maw anyway, plus he wouldn't be erased from existence as he's a living being (only dead people are erased if they are cut down in the Shadowlands). This way, if by chance Anduin somehow broke free, he'd return to Azeroth as undead, which would pretty much kill off the Wrynn dynasty (as undead can't reproduce) and cause massive repercussions in the Alliance. I know they want to turn Anduin into a weapon, but they can do the same thing if he's dead. It's a win-win situation.

Sylvanas and the Jailer are fools, their plan will 100% backfire, and then they'll regret not taking drastic measures with Anduin. Absolute amateurs.

Maybe that is still their plan: Do some magicky thing to him, then kill him, then send magicky undeaduin back.

Death and life work strange there, it might be required for the process.

[Vakir]

Apparently it's due to living having more anima than dead. There's a corpse that gives a quest starter for Ven'ari in the Cauldron that states this and also implies we aren't the only Maw Walker.

It's a shit justification, but there it is.

Agreed by the way that the new stuff is leagues ahead of the old without all this damn baggage and dead end characters. WoW is in dire need of a soft reboot.

[Cherry123]

god sylvanas master of persuasion, who tells a good guy to be bad guy.

[Melusine]

I think Sylv do not want a world "free of consequences". She just doesn't want a world where 2 years of bad actions leads to eternal damnation. In Sylvanas' case, she was a Ranger all her life, and she probably believes (true or not, we don't know yet) that her "short" passage to the dark side because of the Lich King has damned her forever (Edge of Night stuff). Doesn't mean she means that a Kil'jaeden-level of bad guy should be able to chose to "live" peacefully in the afterlife.

No, she specifically mentions that we are bound by some other forces in the universe. We have no choice in what we are. It's easy to look at that in retrospect, and see, because people like to blame the events that shaped their lives on other people, whether true or not, but the fact is, every action has a reaction. To put as an example, that deals directly with Sylvanas, she CHOSE to burn down Teldrassil. No one had a gun to her head, or put any amount of duress on her, at all. She could look at that action and blame her compulsive nature on Delaryn for enraging her, but that's a façade.

She isn't trying to fix an inherently broken system, though. She wants a system that works in HER interests. Big difference.

[Soon-TM]

The entire conversation felt so forced and out of character. Like Anduin and Sylvanas are just stand-ins for the players and Blizzard.

They probably realized that their plot can't stand on its own within the established Warcraft universe which is why they have to push these cringe forced exposition dumps.

The whole scene reminded me a lot of a writer being interviewed about the major beats of his/her latest work. I was half expecting to see Andy dressed like a journalist, that's how far-fetched the whole thing felt.

Besides, the whole story of SL so far... I don't like the word, but it looks very, very nerdy. Chances are that WoW (or any MMO, for that matter) isn't the best means to convey a story such as SL's, with its deep theological and ethical implications. I mean, we all probably love to discuss religion, ethics and philosophy in general, but we certainly won't with folks like Lady BBQ and blue Satan around. It's a perfect example of pegging a square box in a round hole.

Who knows, maybe some other MMO will avoid that particular pitfall, and will be able to discuss morality, religion and ethics while featuring a deep, even if entertaining, story. But Danuser & co. are clearly ill-equipped to deal with it.

[Jessicka]

Sylvannas just became Sarah Kerrigan.

[VladlTutushkin]

Oh, no, obviously a ton of mythological gods were assholes porking their close relatives and passers by and screwing over mortals to terrible afterlives for minor inconveniences. Ditto defiance of the gods and karmic punishment there for is as old as time. But the Arbiter as an infallible decider of where you should go definitely owes a lot more to the Abrahamic religions, while the individual afterlives are all over the place. Combining the two as Blizzard have is why we can even discuss the realms and why I'm leaning to reform being the angle they're going with. The rules for not getting to the Maw meanwhile are arbitrary in the sense that A) Someone can just throw you in there if they feel like it, like how the Kyrian do it, B) If you go to Revendreth, itself arbitrary since people like KT, the Margraves and Vashj don't go there despite having a list of crimes longer than the bible or just being evil pieces of shit, ultimate decision is left to whether Denathrius wanted you to go to the Maw or not. That it has been working for as long as it has is mostly in the sense that nobody was aware of it up to now and those that were (The Light, Legion and Void) didn't give a flying shit about mortals being dicked out of a nice afterlife.

@Arrashi

The electrostimulation will be left to a short story.

Also from latest interview:
> World of Warcraft fans will be well aware of the controversy around Sylvanas.
>
> The mighty Horde warchief and ruler of the Undead has sprung from evil act to evil act – despite previously being considered one of the good guys.
>
> So is she actually a baddie now, or are her ruthless manoeuvres part of a brilliant scheme to save Azeroth?
>
> “She’s always been a very interesting character. She has a lot of history," said Sarah Boulian, Senior Level Design at Blizzard, speaking to The Sun.
>
> “And a lot of motivation for why she does the things that she does.
>
> “I think players will enjoy getting to know more behind why she’s suddenly gone dark – or the perception that she’s suddenly gone dark.
>
> “I think there’s a lot there to explore and to learn about her.”
>
> Blizzard's Patrick Dawson continued: “There’s people on this team that are still Sylvanas loyalists to this day.
>
> “Even despite everything that she’s done.
>
> “Going forward, I do think she’s a very nuanced character. It’s not just that she’s straight up pure evil.
>
> “She has motivations, she has reasons, think about those things. Think about what she could be after, what’s she going for, what’s her end-game, what’s her goal?
>
> “And I think we’re all very committed to giving her a satisfying culmination of this story, no matter what that happens to be.
>
> “So stay tuned, stand by, you’re gonna see some fun stuff in Shadowlands.”