Sylvanas and the Wrath Gate

In a recent interview with Alex Afrasiabi, WoW's Creative Director, he responded to players finding Sylvanas' even darker turn to be out of character by pointing out that she ordered the Wrath Gate incident.

For those of us who remember it (the quests that followed were broken by Cataclysm's revamp, so they were only available during Wrath) that's a pretty shocking reveal.

Here's how it played out back then: Quests in Dragonblight ultimately led to the cutscene as they do now, but afterward players were sent by Alexstrasza to bring Saurfang his son's armor and Varian Bolvar's shield.

The Alliance was sent on a diplomatic mission to Orgrimmar (along with Jaina, who was still a staunch advocate of peace between the factions) while the Horde went back to talk with then-Warchief Thrall.

What they discovered in Orgrimmar were Forsaken refugees and a city on lockdown. Sylvanas was in exile after Varimathras and Grand Apothecary Putress had kicked off a coup in the Undercity right as the Wrath Gate incident went down. Sylvanas had fled with her life and those who were loyal to her.

Both factions then besieged the Undercity - the Horde attacking its front gates and the Alliance assaulting the back-door sewer entrance. The Alliance mission was to find and kill Putress, discovering many of the Apothecary Society's horrors along the way. Meanwhile, the Horde made for the throne room where they confronted Varimathras, who was attempting to open many portals to the Twisting Nether to allow the Legion to invade.

After both fights were complete, Varian, disgusted by what he found in the Undercity's Apothecary Quarter, charged into the throne room and declared that he could not abide by the Horde's tolerance for these atrocities - prisoners kept in cages and murdered with blight, horrifying carrion worms bred in the sewers, and abominations being manufactured from the bodies of the dead. Considering Thrall responsible - he was Warchief, after all - Varian attacked. It was only when Jaina froze everyone in place and then forcibly teleported the Alliance forces out of the city that the battle was over, but the war that wouldn't end until the Siege of Orgrimmar had basically started.

Up until this point, Sylvanas seemed to have plausible deniability. She was clearly tolerant of her apothecaries' heinous actions, but the attack on combined Alliance/Horde forces at the Wrath Gate seemed plausibly against her wishes given that they culminated in a coup against her. Varimathras had a clear motivation to stab her in the back, and Sylvanas does not seem likely to condone the use of her throne room to summon in the demons of the Burning Legion.

It's possible, of course, that Afrasiabi merely meant that she had ordered the development of the blight, rather than telling Putress to kill Horde soldiers, which makes her culpable if not precisely responsible.

If she did order it, though, what was the motivation? She did have to flee into a brief exile after Varimathras took over the city. Did Varimathras take advantage of the situation and attempt to outplay her?

Or is it possible that Sylvanas outplayed everyone?

Varimathras was Sylvanas' chief lieutenant prior to this, but he was a demon and she had to assume he was always plotting to betray her. Is it possible that she orchestrated all of this to give her an excuse to destroy him? It seems a risky ploy, though. Was she relying on both factions attacking his loyalists? Was the coup merely a way to filter out any potential traitors? Sylvanas clearly fears betrayal - see her massacre of her own people in Arathi Highlands - so maybe this was effectively a big purge.

Still, I worry that this development - which feels suspiciously like a Retcon, regardless of what Afrasiabi claims - robs Sylvanas of her nuance. Especially as a racial leader, Sylvanas is most interesting when she has redeeming qualities to off-set her villainy. That moment of vulnerability in Undercity, not to mention drawing a line between what is acceptable for the Forsaken to do versus what is not, makes both Sylvanas and the Forsaken more interesting. It's part of why the whole "Burn it" moment felt so jarring - we had expected Sylvanas to be a bad person, but not so unambiguously evil.