We've now had two of the Warbringers animated shorts. Much as Illidan's Harbingers short worked its way into the game during the Demon Hunter starting experience, Sylvanas' one was a central plot point in one of WoW's biggest moments.
So what role do these three women play in the upcoming story?
We'll start with Sylvanas, whose actions are the most recently impactful. To me, this animation shows Sylvanas truly going over the edge. I realize it might be overly generous to suggest that Sylvanas wasn't past the point of no return way back in Cataclysm, when she started raising humans from the dead to swell her ranks (a point that Blizzard seems a little ambivalent about - they claim that these new Forsaken still have free will, and yet I cannot for the life of me imagine that on the battlefield, a soldier who literally just fell in battle fighting the Forsaken is suddenly going to turn on their comrades of their own volition.) Still, the sense I got was that Sylvanas was deluded about what she was doing - not that she wasn't doing evil, but that she honestly thought she was doing the right thing for her people.
But the callous cruelty of the burning of Teldrassil does not have any of the hallmarks of a "I did what had to be done" moment. She is being sadistic, plain and simple, and has really stepped over the line into pure villainy.
Is she beyond redemption? I think that if Blizzard wants to tell that story, they're going to need to do some very hard work to rehabilitate her. She needs a moment where she answers for what she has done, and I don't know if she can be Warchief anymore.
In fact, one thing we need to figure out is why the hell the spirits told Vol'jin to put her in charge.
In all honesty, I do think the Horde needs to really think about abolishing the office of Warchief. It seems to me that an empire with one absolute ruler whose will cannot be questioned is a pretty terrible way of running things.
But as Warchief of the Horde (for now,) Sylvanas is obviously going to be playing a rather central role in an expansion that will at least be starting with a conflict between the two factions. Especially now, after Teldrassil, everyone in the Alliance hates her, and I think a fair number of Horde members are wary of her.
We've seen Jaina come to terms with the fact that her dream of peace - of Orgrimmar and Theramore being allied neighbors - is just not happening. Now, however, she has to go home and face what she did. Her sacrifice of her father in the name of peace really seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It was the hard thing, the painful thing, but we're often told that that's exactly the sort of difficult decision that will make things better in the end.
But Daelin's death did not solve the problem. Her thanks for that sacrifice was the destruction of her city. She didn't only sacrifice her father, though. In turning her back on him, she also sacrificed her homeland, a country that could not understand why she did what she had done. Now, after the Horde proved itself to be exactly the kind of hateful monsters that her father meant to protect her from, Jaina has to return to Kul Tiras, repentant.
Yet with that determination comes power. It's not clear exactly how much of what we saw in her Warbringers short was literally true, but at the very least we do know that Jaina has raised her father's flagship to serve as her own vessel.
Let us not forget that Jaina might be the most powerful mortal mage on Azeroth, and when fully unleashed, she is a force of nature (small spoiler for BFA, but in the Horde's intro scenario to Zandalar, which takes you first into Stormwind on a prison break, if Jaina catches you she can kill you with a snap of her finger.) Now that Jaina and the Alliance have both aligned at the same time against the Horde, it's something team red should be worried about.
Finally, there's Azshara.
Azshara has only appeared in-game a handful of times. But her influence is immense. She was the Empress of the ancient Kaldorei empire. She aided the Burning Legion in the War of the Ancients. And when that ended, she was transformed by the Old Gods into the first of the Naga, who have ruled the world beneath the waves ever since. She was potentially more powerful than Archimonde ten thousand years ago, when she was still a mortal.
We know that Azshara is going to be a major villain in BFA, announced as the boss of the expansion's first major raid (like Gul'dan in Nighthold.)
Now, while I'm going to have to toss out any theories that she was behind the burning of Teldrassil, it's clear she has a lot of plots going on, conspiring with people on both Kul Tiras and Zandalar. The Naga have a slightly larger presence in Kul Tiras questing, though primarily it seems as if they're behind the scenes.
What is her aim here? Is she merely an opportunist striking while the Alliance and Horde are in their bloodiest war yet, or is there something else going on?
Azeroth is deeply wounded, and this might be the prime opportunity for the Old Gods to infect her with their corruption. Might Azshara be providing a smokescreen for them to do their work? Could her behind-the-scenes plotting in the two new continents be itself a ruse to distract from the Old Gods' true plot?
We don't know who the final boss of BFA will be, and while my money is on N'zoth, I've also been wrong the last two expansions.
These shorts don't necessarily lock in the most important people in an expansion, but I am curious to see if there's an real connection between these three. Sylvanas and Jaina are both people who suffered tremendously and lost people they had tried to protect. Azshara lost everything, but all due to her own wicked deeds, and she was able to parlay that into a new position of power.
The Alliance/Horde plot is one I'm less invested in, partially because I know that there's a certain degree of balance required. The Horde can never succeed in totally conquering the Alliance for the same reasons that the Alliance can never succeed in dissolving the Horde. And as long as Blizzard keeps writing it this way, the Horde is going to keep being the aggressor while somehow still claiming thinly to be the real good guys.
That's why I'm way more interested in what Azshara is up to, and what we'll see when it comes to the plots of the Old Gods.
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