Or maybe it's as simple as Blizzard doesn't bother keeping track of their own lore anymore?
What's to interpret? If she didn't know about Putress' plan it just paints her as an incompetent leader, which she is not. Afrasiabis is right to set the record straight.
"Why does the interview statement bother us in December 2018, even though it was described in Chronicle months earlier" Because Chronicle explicitly states she was in fact betrayed by Putress and Varimathras, and this interview says it was under her orders. We're bothered that they're retconning one of the most iconic cinematics and storylines of Wrath of the Lich King. The maybe in Chronicles is if she knew about it beforehand, not if she ordered them to use the plague on the Horde and Alliance.
Creating the Plague and using are 2 different things. No one is question her involvement on the CREATION of the plague, people are complain in saying dat Wrathgate was HER doing which we all know is was not and sudenlly Afrasiabi says it was her.
If Sylvannas is corrupted/influenced by the Old Gods, assuming she is of course, and especially since she has the Spriest artifact in the next patch, does that not conflict entirely with her very nature of being immune to any and all corruption because she is the Banshee Queen/undead? That also begs the question 'If she isn't corrupted has she lost her mind/turned evil in her pursuit of immortality?'It annoys me how they just rewrite lore for the sake of a nonsensical/confusing story when they don't divulge the changes until after the fact, like 'she was never immune herp derp he just said that to cover our asses back then'.
My guess is that the story, being as complex as it is, gets twisted from time to time even within blizz itself. My guess is there was some mix up.
The only people shocked about this reveal are the Horde players. Alliance players always saw Sylvanas for what she was.Me and my Alliance toons are just going to keep eating popcorn while we watch the Horde implode on itself... again.
I guess Saurfang will be pretty happy to know that Sylvanas is responsible in a death of his son.
I'm playing through Silverpine again and thought it amusing when Garrosh of all people deeply frowned upon Sylvanis raising dead humans to replenish the Forsaken, considering how far he was willing to go towards his own goals in the end. I really don't think Sylvanis is "being controlled" by the old gods so much as probably "being manipulated". She's doing what she wants to and has been given a platform to carry out her will without as much interference (outside a coop, which they are building towards). She sought out ways to save the Forsaken with the LK's former Valkyrs. She sought out more powerful Valkyr in Stormheim and was denied. I see her going down a couple possible paths here... - topple Bolvar and take the lich crown for herself - could pull her out of Horde leadership if the crown does Lich Queen things to her. I could see nathanos taking over the Forsaken in her place and I doubt he'd do more than bite his tongue during a coop without direct orders to do otherwise. - Strike a deal with Gorak Tul (Drustivar boss). He's shaping up to be Helya 2.0 anyhow and has a knack for staying alive...ish. It seems less likely than the first idea, but she's a pragmatist. No angle should be discounted if it has any merit towards reaching her goals. - Capture/kill and absorb Bwansamdi like the trolls were doing. That seems rather extreme considering who she wants to ally with, but again, she's considering the survival of her race and that's what gives her meaning right now amidst her pain.Wanting to be a master of death limits her options to the major death power players and the voljin questline narrows it down a lot. With so few willing to help her, it stands to reason that she stands to gain from overwhelming, controlling or absorbing the power from others who DO have the power she wants. The old gods might get involved if the coop leaves her without options, like they did the Azshara, but if I'm honest, I'd like to see her dethrone Bolvar and take the crown, only to lose her grasp on the Forsaken long enough for new leadership to take over the Horde. Given her now elevated disposition, she'd likely let the mantle of warchief go willingly, while becoming one of the greatest threats Azeroth has ever seen.
I wish someone would reach out to him and get him to confirm if he stands by what he said or if it was just him misspeaking.
Why are people upset? Because most people havent read Chronicles or any other book from Warcraft, because most people only get their lore from game, most people have not played Warcraft 3 and fully understand the character of Sylvanas or many others after SO many years of interacting with them. To an extend, these are the same people who claim to be playing Horde because they dont like to play the "good" faction of humans with pretty face and prefer to be with the "misunderstood monster looking faction" yet they most likely play a blood elf. Most players, specially horde, I can say are in a vast majority completely clueless about the background of most characters in this game, most end game raiders/pvpers have no clue about the lore and just play the game and go to horde because thats where the biggest amount of raiders/pvpers are at, the damage has been done already thanks to Blizzard inability to balance racials, there is no turning back from that without some drastic changes, yet this reason gives those players a sense of pride to be horde, clueless about where the new... Thralls' horde came from.This is why when news about something that affect drastically the story we are being told, and when news of a horde character such as Sylvanas start to come out since they are developing her character by having her have the spotlight all for herself, people become outraged, lack of knowledge. Of course you also have some others that are simply just delusional in the way they think about a character, but what can you do about it? Those are true fanatics, which in a way is proper considering how Sylvanas keeps her people in check and under her thumb.Needless to say, this can also happen with the Alliance playerbase, but more often than not is with the horde since well... lets be honest here, its the fourth time this kind of stuff happens with the horde and thats only counting within the timeframe that World of Warcraft has been out, if we were to include the previous horde... yikes.Edit: And for the record, if they were to make Sylvanas a new Kerrigan it would be quite dissapointing, also she certainly is a liked character with a large amount of players behind her, and getting rid of her in the same fashion as they did with Garrosh would be just as dissapointing; I hope they have something interesting planned for her, but I certainly dont want her to be Illidan 2.0 where she was just misunderstood, or Kerrigan 2.0 because she died and saw something or whatever and because of that she will guide us and defeat the void lords and becomes the new messiah, or remain in power with a split horde who clearly does no longer want her to be in command. I want her to transcend the Horde but not become a massive and pivotal character for the ongoing story, you could compare this idea to what happened with Tirion after Wrath or even Wrathion after MoP.And hopefully, just hopefully(not even close of happening, I know), the faction war moronic idea that keeps being ignited by the storytelling team simply due gameplay purposes finally ends or changed to at least two different factions such as the Light vs Void.
If people are just NOW discovering she authorized the creation of the blight, between wrath and cata, I don't think people were keeping track of what happened lol. There are entire questlines dedicated to the forsaken making the thing in wrath, and its used in cata.Also in saying that, they may as well leave sylvanas to look stupid, because lets be honest, if she thought varimthas was NOT going to betray her, I don't know how anyone can trust her judgement of character
I kinda feel like people are conflating Wrathgate and Battle of Undercity too closely. They are absolutely linked, yes, but Sylvanas could well be responsible for the first without being responsible for the second.Although I think perhaps Wrathgate is more a case of Putress stealing her thunder.
Afrasiabi may say that he's been writing Sylvanas' actions since 2006, but there's still some changes that are hard to swallow for a forsaken player.We've always been told that when a forsaken was being raised, it was critical to leave him free will. If that newly raised forsaken wants to join Sylvanas' army, fine. And they usually do because being raised to undeath has a strange effect on the mind, it pretty much makes you stop carring and feeling. But some forsaken decide to go alone, like Lilian Voss (who took 8 years to decide to join Sylvanas' forces), and that's fine.But now, Sylvanas suddenly sends Horde troops to die in the front lines at the Battle for Lordaeron, reanimate them as skeletons and leave them to wander aimlessly in Tirisfal.Then, she reanimates Derek Proudmoore with the intent of torturing him to turn him against his own family.That's out of character. That goes against the values of the Forsaken.It's Garrosh all over again. It's as simple as that.Garrosh was honorable during Cataclysm. People tend to forget that. Go play the Horde ending of Stonetalon. The guy killed one of his generals for nuking civilians, and quoted a lesson on honor that Saurfang taught him.And the next expansion, he goes on to nuke Theramore and starts chaining war crimes after war crimes. Had they managed to make it all seamless, I actually wouldn't have minded, until he blew up the Vale of Eternal Blossom into the Vale of Eternal Sorrow.You wanna know why Horde players are mad? Because Blizzard is doing Garrosh 2.0, even if they don't realize it yet because they have their collective heads in their &^%$#.It's easy to play an Alliance character and be like you're on the moral high ground when your faction isn't the one that's being butchered on an altar.The Horde used to be an honorable faction back when Thrall was there. Then Blizzard got that idea of playing musical chairs with our warchiefs every two expansions, and made us constantly look like the bad guy, even when we were not (like at the Broken Shore when the Horde got blamed for king Varian sacrificing himself by jumping on a felreaver).
She's a sociopath. Was... was that ever not obvious? Pragmatism is often mistaken for evil by those who see themselves as righteous. The truth humbles. The whole truth humbles everyone. If you feel vindicated, you are either heavily self-justified or just aren't looking very hard at yourself. The horde standard is honor and shame. The alliance standard is more about guilt and innocence. That's why the Horde can feel good doing things the alliance frowns on and vis versa. Anduin is a bridge builder, so he spoke to Saurfang with horde values in mind. His dad was more old school Alliance and judged the horde as guilty before Anduin helped broaden his horizons. The forsaken are the only faction that don't really fit either value standard and have a very "grey" and self-centered morality. The question here is, will she go full psychopath when she gains the power she is now so desperately seeking? I'm guessing the forsaken exist after this xpac as a playable race, so something will "save" the forsaken from dying off completely. She's already "died" a couple times now, so its hard to believe she's end up "dead" in the end. It should be very interesting to see how we get from here to there.
I think whoever is Warchief after Sylvanas need to be one for more that just one expansion. Maybe even until WoW is dead
From the first time I saw "The Wrathgate" I always thought that Sylvanas was much more involved in it than everybody new or what was clearly shown. Because of one thing - during bombing Lich King said only one thing - Sylvanas, and I thought maybe he knew/understood more than others.From the start of WoW Sylvanas never cared about the living, at all. Maximum was - she used Horde (living beings) as something to protect her and Forsaken, nothing else. So it always made sense that she didn't really cared that both Horde and Alliance suffered at Wrathgate, since it didn't give (shouldn't give) one faction advantage over the other - both lost. So Forsaken should be OK, at least better chances than with Civil war among them.So from the WotLK I thought, that she probably knew, or at least suspected, what Putress and Varimatrass are planning. But making it into Forsaken civil war was not something she or Forsaken would benefit from. She clearly knew about Blight production and planned to use it against Lich King as an upgraded version of poisoned arrow, so to say. And if she is as cunning and tactical with complete disregard for living as she was portrayed - it made sense to suspect that she just stayed out of their way, knowing what would happen, and knowing that Horde/Aliiance would take care of Putress and Varimatrass "for her" after that. Similar in "Before the Storm" - she didn't openly confronted those who disagreed with her, she set them up, they run/deserted, and only after that she dealt with them.Was she planning to kill all of the Alliance and Horde who died at Wrathgate - I think she didn't care, and still doesn't care about "suffering of the living".And now, in BfA, with all her actions - she clearly show that all of that is almost a certainty.
Also Also, for us to get the ability to make undead elf characters, etc, it'll likely involve Sylvanis raising more and more different races of dead bodies. She was limited to human corpses for the most part before which limited us in what an undead body type looked like.