As we’ve mentioned before, Blizzard is releasing a series of short animations to tie in with the upcoming Battle for Azeroth WoW expansion. We’ve already seen the one dedicated to Jaina and now Blizzard has released one for the Warchief of the Horde herself- Sylvanas Windrunner.
I love how we went from Jaina being somber, ominous and dramatic to Sylvanas committing actual war crimes. I feel like we missed several steps here. The short has this “victim of abuse becoming an abuser” theme and while I don’t necessarily dislike it, it’s hard oversee the fact that Sylvanas is quite literally missing the forest for the world-tree standing in her way.
The internet at large seems divided on this one. It was received much more negatively than Jaina’s short, with a lot of people declaring no further support for the Horde. While I kind of understand the sentiment, I just want to point out that we’re not at fantasy Nazis just yet. Unless you consider burning Teldrasil tantamount to book burnings? I mean, books are wood after all. Ok, maybe we ARE at Nazis now. Yikes.
At the same time I don’t necessarily think fantasy Nazis are such a bad idea, but the internet seems to disagree with me on this and I understand that, because nobody wants to play on the side of the Nazis, that’s sort of the point of simplifying an antagonist to being literal Nazis.
In any case, just one short to go now. Hopefully no war crimes in that one.