I want to like Sylvanas. I really do. I normally love villains especially if they have a gothic theme a about them. Plus, I love archery. A gothic themed undead archer with villainous tendencies? In theory, Sylvanas should be everything I could ever dream or ask for. But that’s not the case. I want to like Sylvanas, I really do, but she is so unbelievably bland and badly handled.
Sylvanas is possibly one of the weakest and least dynamic major lore characters of the Warcraft franchise, and it is a WASTE. I want to say they would take this opportunity in BfA to rectify it and give her actual growth as a character but given their track record, that’s probably not going to happen.
Sylvanas has been put time and time again in what should be character developing events, but she has nothing to show for it. She has shown no growth, and doesn’t doesn’t learn or change throughout WoW. Not even the events of Wrath of the effing LICH KING did anything for her character. She got like one short story about it and a quest, I think? That entire expansion following Sylvanas just screamed wasted opportunity. She’s still the same bland two dimensional character she was since Vanilla trying to give the illusion of being a three dimensional character. It’s frustrating. The only time I’ve ever seen her display actual growth was in WCIII. God I miss WCIII Sylvanas.
Her entire character really just feels so shallow. Like she relies mostly on her gothic themed aesthetic, PTSD and the occasional sneer for a personality. Even when she’s shown in the books or comics to have some thoughts and emotions that show some sign that she’s capable of thinking beyond herself, she never expresses it or shares those thoughts with another which means that they just exist in a vacuum playing absolutely no part in her actual story except to pry some artificial sympathy from the reader. It begs the question, if Sylvanas has a sympathetic thought, but no one is around to hear it, did it really happen? You could take all of those moments out of her entire story and absolutely nothing would change. It makes her seem robotic. Like a one-track mind she’s not capable of venturing beyond.
Now they have the opportunity to make her a compelling villain but the development seems to be surrounding Nathanos of all freaking people, and given how they absolutely wasted her potential in Wrath which was supposed to be a golden opportunity to develop her, I’m afraid they’re just going to axe her like Vol’jin and Garrosh.
Wolfytot 