Characters / Warcraft Sylvanas Windrunner

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Sylvanas Windrunner

The Banshee Queen, Dark Lady, Warchief

Class: Dark Ranger

Voiced by: Piera Coppola (English/Warcraft III), Patty Mattson (English/World of Warcraft), Vangie Gunn (English/World of Warcraft singing voice), Laurence Bréheret (French/World of Warcraft since Legion), Larisa Grebenshchikova (Russian/Warcraft III), Elena Solovyova (Russian/World of Warcraft)

Fantasy Sarah Kerrigan.

"The capital city is ours, but we are no longer part of the Scourge. From here on out, we shall be known as the Forsaken. We will find our own path in this world, dreadlord... and slaughter anyone who stands in our way."

The Banshee Queen of the Forsaken. The Ranger-General of Quel'thalas, the high elf homeland, during the Third War, she led the defense against Arthas and his Scourge onslaught. Her valiant defense was crippled after a succession of battles, and in the sack of Silvermoon, the elven capital, Arthas had her dragged before him, tortured horribly, and, despite her demand for a clean death, murdered. The angry Prince then defiled her spirit and raised her as an undead banshee. A slave in mind and body, Sylvanas was turned against the defenders of her beloved capital. For her efforts she was eventually rewarded with a return to her mortal body, and became one of Arthas's lieutenants in the months between the fall of Quel'Thalas and Arthas's return to his ravaged homeland.

During the months after the Battle of Mount Hyjal, the Lich King began to weaken, and many of his undead servants were freed from his dark influence. Sylvanas, one of these, leaped at the opportunity to betray Arthas as part of a Legion-sponsored coup, but refused to join the Legion in ruling what was left of Lordaeron. With the aid of her freed undead fellows, she led them in a series of brutal battles against both undead forces led by Legion-allied Dreadlords. During this she first allied with, then betrayed, the bigoted and corrupt human warlord Garithos. With no other allies and learning that the living humans of the Alliance would never accept "abominations" like herself, she eventually applied for membership of the Horde for her Forsaken. Despite being reluctantly accepted with great suspicion, she hasn't really shown any real hostility towards the Horde. She also sponsors the Blood Elves' membership.

Since Wrath of the Lich King, things haven't gone well for Sylvanas. Her second-in-command, the Dreadlord Varimathras, staged a coup with the aid of Sylvanas's own Royal Apothecary Society. They kicked her and her subjects out of the Undercity, started summoning demons, and worst of all, the Apothecaries launched a surprise attack during the Battle of the Wrathgate in Northrend which killed a large number of Horde, Alliance and Scourge forces. While Sylvanas was able to retake the Undercity, she has since been looked upon with even greater suspicion and hostility by everyone; the Alliance are more certain than ever the Forsaken are a dire threat, while the Horde blames them for restarting war with the Alliance and killing allied troops.

Despite needing to regain the trust of her allies, Sylvanas is doing little to alleviate those fears in Cataclysm. She is not a fan of new Warchief Garrosh Hellscream, and goes against a number of his direct orders. Also, with the Forsaken unable to repopulate by normal means, Sylvanas has allied with Arthas's old Val'kyr servants to raise new soldiers for the Forsaken, using the corpses of their enemies. In Legion, she joins with the rest of the Horde in aiding the Alliance against the Burning Legion's return, personally fighting alongside Varian Wrynn upon the Broken Isles.

In Battle for Azeroth after discovering Azerite, Sylvanas marshals the Horde to go on the offensive. Initially targeting Stormwind, she changes tact and leads the Horde against the Night Elves of Kalimdor in the War of Thorns while the Night Elf forces are spread thin. This ends with the Night Elves displaced from Kalimdor (for the time being) which falls to Horde control, Malfurion badly wounded, massive loss of life on both sides and the destruction of Teldrassil. In retaliation, the Alliance besiege Lorderaen to take it back form the Forsaken. During these events, Sylvanas started to take herself and the Horde down a darker path, starting with raising the Alliance dead against their will and using the Scourge plague Putress and Varimatharas used at Wrathgate. Disgusted with her actions, Saurfang leads a rebellion against her rule consisting of most of the Horde's living Forces and The Alliance. Calling her to Mak'Gora, Saurfang exposes Sylvanas's true uncaring nature to the world, and most of her Loyalists abandon her causing her to leave the Horde.

With nowhere else to turn, Sylvanas enacts her plan by attacking Icecrown Citadel, usurping Bolvar of the Helm of Domination and piercing the veil between life and death leading to the events of Shadowlands.

---

A-I

• Aborted Arc: When Vol'jin was made Warchief, Sylvanas remarked how she had no intention of taking orders from a troll and planned to give him a hard time. Her insubordinate attitude became a moot point since the next expansion that featured the two of them began with a friendly interaction between the two, Sylvanas reluctantly, but ultimately obeying Vol'jin's command to not let total annihilation befall Horde forces on the Broken Shore and carry Vol'jin to safety in tow. Later on, a dying Vol'jin names her as his successor, and she reluctantly accepts the role to avenge him.
• Affectionate Nickname: She refers refers to Nathanos as "My champion".
• All for Nothing: Yet to be seen how "for nothing" it is leading to, but Saurfang exposing her true intentions to the world have set her back horribly and made her Azeroth public enemy number one.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's never made clear if Sylvanas is aware that Kel'Thuzad, who is one of the people she vehemently hates, was one of her allies during her parternship with Zovaal.
• Anti-Hero: Pre-Cataclysm, She seems to genuinely care about the Forsaken (weither it's true or not is somewhat Depending on the Writer) and tries to do what's best to ensure their survival, but her methods to ensure such a thing tend to be very morally questionable. Her actions get more and more questionable in Cataclysm, to the point she really verges on Nominal Hero, but unlike Garrosh, she has yet to actually make the transition to true villain. Come Battle for Azeroth however, the Burning of Teldrassil may very mark the start of a transition as it parallels Garrosh's destruction of Theramore.
• Armor-Piercing Question: She gives one to Saurfang when he strongly objects to the idea of starting a new war against the Alliance in the novella A Good War:
  Sylvanas: If I dedicated myself to peace with the Alliance, would it last a year?
  Saurfang: Yes.
  Sylvanas: How about two years? Five? Ten? Fifty?
  Saurfang: [hesitates] We fought side‐by‐side against the Burning Legion. That creates bonds that are not easily broken.
  Sylvanas: Time breaks every bond. What do you believe? Will peace last five years or fifty?
  Saurfang: What I believe doesn’t matter, Warchief. What do you believe?
  Sylvanas: [Detailing the history of mistrust and atrocities committed by both sides]... I believe that there will be no permanent peace with the Alliance—not unless we win it on the battlefield on our terms. And believing that, answer this, Saurfang: what use is delaying the inevitable?
• The Atoner: Following the restoration of her soul and the Jailer's defeat, Sylvanas is sentenced to rescue every soul condemned to the Maw so that they may all face proper judgment in death. Sylvanas sadly, but resolutely, accepts this as the price of her eventual redemption.
• Ax-Crazy: Annihilating Teldrassil in a fit of vindictive anger after a mortally injured Delaryn points out that she couldn’t destroy hope, along with relishing every second of showcasing this pointless, barbaric display to the dying woman definitely raises a major red flag regarding her mental state.
• Back from the Dead: Three times, sorta. First time was her raising as a banshee, second time was her suicide after the downfall of the Lich King (and subsequently meeting the Val'kyr, who raised her), and the third time, her Val'kyrs' sacrificing themselves to raise her again after Lord Godfrey shot her in the head.
• Badass Boast:
  Sylvanas: I've walked the realms of the dead. I have seen the infinite dark. Nothing you say. Or do. Could possibly frighten me.

From Warbringers: Sylvanas:

Delaryn Summermoon: You can kill us, but you can not kill hope.

Sylvanas: [whispering to Delaryn before setting Teldrassil on fire] Can't I?

• Bad Boss: In Before the Storm, she went out of her way to be as confrontational and antagonistic to all the other Horder leaders as possible. She also killed the members of the Desolate Council who stayed loyal after she ended the meeting.
• Bad Future: The End Time dungeon reflects the fate of some of Azeroth's heroes should the Hour of Twilight come to pass, and some become echoes of time, forced to relive their last moments forever. Sylvanas is one such hero, and you can fight and slay her echo.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: She's became the one thing she fought against in Arthas in many ways. Ever since Cataclysm she has been resorting to raising the dead, making use of ex-Scourge Val'kyr, resorting to Cold-Blooded Torture on underlings who fail her and continuing to use the Forsaken Blight developed by Putress, which wouldn't be out of place in the Scourge's arsenal. For all that she hates Arthas, she has begun to act more and more like him with each passing expansion. Garrosh of all people once asked her what exactly separated her from him, and it's a bit telling that she simply responded that she served the Horde. In the Battle for Azeroth expansion, the War of the Thorns Sylvanas launched against the Night Elves has numerous parallels to Arthas' war against Quel'thalas, with the invading commander forcing the defending commander to watch the destruction of their capital.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: And how. Arthas put her through the ringer, killing her, making her undead and forcing her to raze her homeland. Her exploits as an undead have seen her Jumping Off the Slippery Slope more and more. Being reminded of the first traumatic milestone by the dying night elf commander Delaryn Summermoon who took pity on her for no longer being a fellow heroic elven defender who fought to the end, and told that hope can never be destroyed, instead provokes Sylvanas to do similarly to what had been done to her by Arthas, by forcing the night elf to watch as Teldrassil was incinerated with the civilians still within.
• Berserk Button: Despite her stoic facade, bring up this issues in front of the Banshee Queen at your own risk.
  • Betrayal of any kind. Vereesa's refusal to go along with her plan to kill Garrosh result in a roaring rampage against the wild life of Darnassus. Some of the Desolate Council's attempt at defecting to reunite with their loved ones led her to kill them all.
  • Being reminded of her past heroic life, death and being raised by a banshee by Arthas.
  • Hope. In Before The Storm, she considered hope the number one enemy to the continued obedience of her Forsaken. Come Battle for Azeroth, after she has conquered the night elves defending Teldrassil, the dying Captain Delaryn said that she can't kill hope, along with the aforementioned point about her past life as a hero which only served as a painful reminder of how Arthas crushed any hope Sylvanas had left. Sylvanas immediately switches from occupying Teldrassil to burning it to the ground just to prove that she can as had been done in the first place to her and her doomed homeland by the future Lich King. This button ends up being her downfall as Warchief, as Saurfang needling her about it during his "Reason You Suck" Speech causes to roar out her true feelings about the Horde as nothing but useless tools, and she's too wound up to back down and actually doubles down on it.
• Big Bad Ensemble: In Battle of Azeroth with N'Zoth and Queen Azshara.
• Big Damn Heroes: In the Sunwell Trilogy, Sylvanas jumps into the fight against Dar'khan near the end.
• Break Them by Talking: Her "Go to" method of breaking her enemies. Sylvanas just can't help herself and just has to have a cheesy "The Reason You Suck" Speech all the time.
• Broken Bird: From being cursed to undeath in her failure to protect her own homeland to being forced to destroy it against her will and going straight from viewing her undeath as a curse and a source of mistrust to viewing it as a necessary evil after witnessing The Nothing After Death to the point she will raise legions of undead to form a colony, and in her view, spare them... well, suffice it to say she's been screwed up by the whle experience. And that's even before her reunion with one of her sisters that gives her the first feeling of hope and love she's felt since she was alive, only to lose it when said sister turns her back on her after disagreeing with her plans.
• Cain and Abel: Played with. In the Battle for Azeroth expansion, Sylvanas still leads the Horde while her sister Alleria is firmly on the side of the Alliance.
  • More explicitly seen in the Three Sisters comic, where Alleria gathers all three Windrunner sisters on a journey to retake their old family stronghold, Windrunner Spire, and to see if they are still a family or not. On their way to their old home, eventually Alleria and Sylvanas turn against each other, both going One-Winged Angel and declaring that the other is no longer the sister they once loved and adored so much, but they are stopped from fighting by a crying Vereesa before they come to actual blows.
  • Played straight in the Battle for Azeroth expansion after the Battle for Lordaeron Alleria had an arrow drawn and nocked against Sylvanas and Sylvanas mocked Alleria and was willing to have her killed in the Blight bombs she'd left in Lordaeron.
• Casting a Shadow: In Battle for Azeroth, Sylvanas has been demonstrating more uses of dark magic than ever before, a power neither Jaina nor Thalyssra have ever seen before. This new dark power lets her easily overpower Saurfang and even lets her claim victory against the Lich King.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: In the aftermath of the Broken Shores quest, she and Nathanos Blightcaller engage in this, along with some Ship Tease at their being a Battle Couple.
  Sylvanas: I've gotten far more kills than you, Nathanos. You're slipping!
  Nathanos: I'm your champion, Dark Lady. It's my job to make you look good.
  Sylvanas: A champion at making excuses, it would seem!
  Nathanos: <mutters>
• Co-Dragons: With Denathrius to the Jailer, herself being a Dragon with an Agenda.
• Cult of Personality: Made the entire Forsaken race one centered around herself, by telling them she's the only one to care about them and all the livings want them dead (for good), which is why she kills every Forsaken that had a positive interaction with their living relative in "Before the Storm", because it means some Forsaken might start doubting her.
• The Cynic: After being killed and resurrected as a banshee, Sylvanas has taken a cynical outlook upon the world. Unlike most of the Horde leaders, Sylvanas believes that honor is a suicidal path for the Horde and that peace with the Alliance only delays the inevitable war between them due to old, unforgotten hatred. The concept of hope personally offends her as it's the complete antithesis of her worldview.
• Daddy's Girl: The Sylvanas novel depicts her as having been much closer with her father than her mother. While her mother Lireesa was stern and demanding of her daughters, her father Verath was much more understanding and openly affectionate. After their deaths, she's able to hold her emotions in check when examining her mother's body, and only breaks down crying when she sees her father's.
• Dark Action Girl: Female, evil (as of Battle for Azeroth), and most definitely capable of kicking ass.
• Depending on the Writer: Various aspects of her personality vary on the writer:
  • The Sunwell Trilogy has her have a positive relationship with Lor'themar, while In the Shadow of the Sun has their relationship as more strained.
  • In the game she was remarkably stoic even when Genn foiled her plan to obtain more Val'kyr which was her most important goal. In the novel Before The Storm and the Warbringers cinematics, she was much more thin-skinned and easily offended.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life:
  • Most of her efforts from Cataclysm onward are trying to survive and achieve immortality, but beyond that she has little plans for herself or the Forsaken. After being made warchief, however, it seems as though she has found that purpose, as she strikes a balance between the "peace-at-all-costs" Thrall and the overly bloodthirsty Garrosh. At first.
  • Shadowlands reveals that after the reveal of what the afterlife held for her in "Edge of Night", Sylvanas came to view life and death as horrible unfair. She views joining the Jailer as a way to finally fix the cycle and make the universe a more fair place, regardless of the cost, only to be kicked in the dirt by Zovaal in Sanctum of Domination's patch 9.1.
• Disproportionate Retribution: This tendency and Moral Myopia majorly erode her standing with the Horde and her fans.
  • During the Gathering, most of her Forsaken actually ran back to her and only few attempted to defect. Despite this, she killed all of them, even those who were loyal to her. Like poor Vellcinda.
  • In the aftermath of the War of the Thorns, Sylvanas is confronted by the dying Delaryn Summermoon, a Night Elf commander who calls her out for everything she's done and everything she is now, before telling her that hope is unending and she can't do anything to that. This causes her to have a flashback to her death at Arthas' hands and her failure to protect Quel'Thelas and its innocents. Her response to this was to show the already dying woman in the worst way possible that hope isn't immortal by ordering Teldrassil's razing, condemning anywhere between eight-hundred to a thousand noncombatant civilians to death and effectively making sure peace between the Alliance and Horde will likely never happen without one side's destruction before declaring herself "enemy of life". The way she mocks the now broken Delaryn as the life fades from her glossed over eyes implies she saw it as a merited rebuttal.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: She is not at all amused by Anduin trying to reach out to the last shreds of morality still haunting her.
• Do Wrong, Right: It's later revealed that the reason Sylvanas took issue with Garrosh bombing Theramore wasn't that it was unethical or cowardly, but because it was poorly timed in her opinion.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Her sisters, even if she loves them in a rather twisted way. Specifically, she wants to turn them undead so they can always be together, apparently not realizing or caring that they have lives of their own or that their children might not react well to their parents being turned undead.
  • Nathanos as well. He was her friend (and possibly romantic partner) in life and willingly joined her as one of the undead. In Shadowlands it's revealed that Zovaal didn't tell her that he had been slain and she finds out months after the fact when Tyrande gloats about killing him (likely after the point he had been "processed" in Torghast). Sylvanas, despite being deep in her role as the villain at this point, still expresses genuine despair at finding this out, and this serves as one of the first things that chills her loyalty to the Jailer.
• Dragon with an Agenda: In Shadowlands. The Jailer is her benefactor, but true to her independent self, she is not under his thrall.
• Everyone Has Standards: Similar to Garrosh, she is disgusted by Gallywix due to his greed, pettiness and decadent lifestyle, and detests his pleasure palace, admitting to herself that it's one of the last places she would want to be in "Before the Storm".
  • Given her previous enslavement, Sylvanas is not exactly fond of Dominion Magic which robs individuals of their free will. This is what finally causes Sylvanas to realize Zovaal isn't exactly the cosmic savior she thought he was.
• Evil All Along: Shadowlands reveals that she's been aligned with the Jailer ever since Cataclysm and kick-started a new war between the Horde and the Alliance in order to give him the souls of the fallen in exchange for power, with all of her positive character development being retconned as being nothing but an act on her part.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • The part of the original plan for capturing Teldrassil was to spark infighting among the Alliance nations. She believed that Genn Greymane would disapprove of the Alliance freeing the night elves homeland before Gilneas and the ensuing arguments would cause the Alliance members to leave the faction to protect their individual countries, allowing the Horde to negotiate a peace with each of the individual members until the Alliance no longer posed a threat. However, during the attack on Darnassus, both Anduin and Greymane realized what her game was almost immediately and Greymane proudly remarked that he had no problem with helping the night elves free their homes first, especially after everything they've done for him and his people.
  • Her stated reason for attacking the Alliance and Teldrassil was fear that the Alliance would eventually use Azerite to create weapons, shifting the balance of powers too far in their favor, leaving the Horde powerless. Up until she started making them, Anduin's reaction to the Azerite was to ask how it could be used to help people. Her speech to Saurfang about how peace with the Alliance wouldn't last long rings a tad hollow when she's the one who called off the Humans-Forsaken meeting in Before the Storm.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • She is at her pettiest and most evil in Before the Storm. The novel took pains to show that the Desolate Council posed no threat to Sylvanas and was as toothless an organization as it gets. As such, her slaughter of them all served no purpose other than petty punishment for those who dare hope for peace with the living.
  • In the same novel, she took great pleasure speaking with the Forsaken who were turned away by their living relatives and reaffirmed them that no one loves them as she does.
  • She changes her plans to occupy Teldrassil into burning it down because Delaryn calls out her cruel behavior and causes her to have a flashback to when Arthas killed and raised her, and her insistence that hope couldn't die. All that death, all the destruction, all done out of petty spite and impulse. Then again, she might have believed herself to be making a valid point as Arthas had done exactly the same to her so long ago, and if hope truly couldn't die, well, it had a funny way of making itself known to Sylvanas.
• Evil Laugh: Subverted. Sylvanas has never been shown to laugh at all, and the one time she does is in front of a concerned orphan.
• Expy:
  • Warcraft's version of Sarah Kerrigan. One of her Stop Poking Me! quotes in Heroes of the Storm lampshades this.
  Sylvanas: I thought I was the only one who was murdered by a cruel man, raised as a powerful and horrible abomination, subsequently crowning myself queen and dedicated my subjects to orchestrating my vengeance... But then I met Kerrigan!
  • Her being an archer heroine who was once looked-up upon, and who got resurrected as an undead, who also raises and commands other undead, makes Sylvanas extremely similar to Blood Raven/Moreina/The Rogue from Diablo. This was also lampshaded in Heroes of the Storm, with Blood Raven being one of Sylvanas' skins.
• Face–Heel Turn:
  • Was once the former Ranger-General of Quel'thalas, first raised as a Scourge Banshee by Arthas, then she regained her free will and remained a shady, morally questionable character who did whatever was necessary for her faction to survive... only, as of Battle for Azeroth, to have all but finally made the jump into full-blown villainy by waging an all-out war against the Alliance, aiming to kill one of its most prominent leaders, and cemented it by burning Teldrassil to the ground, all out of spite just to prove to the dying Delaryn Summermoon that life and hope can be destroyed for good. Then again, she had just been painfully reminded of the moment her own hope had been crushed by Arthas as mentioned, so Delaryn's proclamation that Hope Springs Eternal felt like a lie.
  • By the end of the expansion, she's proven herself to be in service to a god of death who wants everything to be slain to grant itself powers, she seems to be implicitly embracing her role as "Enemy of all life", and now that includes the Horde as well as the Alliance, only her loyalists seem to escape her plans — for now.
• Fallen Hero:
  • By Battle for Azeroth, she has solidified into this status. Before, she was the Ranger-General of Quel'thalas who defended her homeland and people until her last breath against the Scourge. Even when she became an undead Banshee with dubious morality, she still defended her new people (now known as the Forsaken) from great threats and a world that distrust them. But as years went on, she became colder and more ruthless in her agenda that many started comparing her to Arthas and Garrosh. This culminates into the Burning of Teldrassil, where she takes the role of Arthas destroying a homeland while making its valiant defenders watch to inflict pain and suffering. She even later raises some of them into her undead servants.
  • The Sylvanas novel reveals that she was actually a pretty nice person in life, and fiercely protective of her sisters and little brother. When Arthas killed her Frostmourne stole part of her soul, leading to her descent into villainy.
• Fatal Flaw: Hair-Trigger Temper and pettiness. Her sense of superiority makes her abandon her plans so her enemies will suffer more. In Warcraft III, she would have killed Arthas if she hadn't decided to make him suffer first, giving Kel'thuzad time to rescue him. During the War of Thorns, she abandons her plans to occupy Teldrassil and instead razes it along with hundreds of civilians because of a minor slight by the dying Delaryn. Resurrecting Derek Proudmoore with the intent of brainwashing them to kill their family eventually leads to most of the Horde leadership turning against her. Finally, at the end of the War Campaign, a minor injury causes her to blurt out that she doesn't care about the Horde at all and has been using them for her own goals.
• Fate Worse than Death: Originally Sylvanas saw her status as an undead to be a curse, a special torment beyond the peace of death even after regaining her free will. Fully subverted later in her "Edge of Night". Sylvanas gets a good, long look at what awaits her in the afterlife. It is horrific, complete with And I Must Scream played straight as her soul is torn to pieces by Shades and other unspeakable horrors. She realizes that being undead is a fate not worse than death after all.
• Flanderization: She already showed signs of becoming (more) evil in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, but Battle for Azeroth really hit her the hardest, making her lose whatever redeeming qualities she had before (as well as a good share of her brain cells). She is no longer subtle in her methods, has abandoned her principles, and now acts more or less like Garrosh, with the addition of musing poetically about how all life must die and hope is a lie. Somewhat Justified in Before the Storm, where it is shown that exposure to Azerite causes visions (in Sylvanas's case, visions of conquest) and magnifies one's character traits in general — she's high.
• Forced to Watch: Arthas sired her as a banshee so that she could watch him bring ruin to Quel'Thalas firsthand. She later does this herself to Delaryn Summermoon and other dying night elf sentinels, as she orders Teldrassil to be burned down. Sylvanas even raises Delaryn into undeath later as a Dark Ranger.
• Forest Ranger: In life. In undeath she became a Dark Ranger.
• Four-Star Badass: She was once a Ranger-General of Silvermoon, military leader of all high elven forces. Her achievements in the military campaign have begun ever since the Second War, where she personally participates in the defense of Quel'Thalas, and again in the Third War where she led from the front lines. Even in undeath, her fame as ruthless and creative military leader lives on, as she is known to achieve success more than failure, she personally still leads her forces in the battlefield on occasion.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Nobody in the Horde really trusts or likes Sylvanas, and her faction joining the Horde was an alliance of convenience at best. Nowadays, she shares the role with Gallywix, though Sylvanas is the more disliked of the two.
• Freudian Excuse: She may have become like her former archenemies Garrosh and Arthas, her murder and being raised as a banshee forced to raze the homeland she failed to defend would warp many people's sense of morality. And that's even before witnessing what may be Warcraft's version of hell.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Of the red variety.
• Happily Failed Suicide: "Happy" is a bit of a stretch for who we're talking about, but after seeing the Maw with her own eyes after taking her own life, she was very eager to accept the deal to escape and never go back.
• Hated by All: After accidentally outing her true nature to the Horde, she's taken Garrosh's place as the most reviled being in Azeroth.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • After the death of the Lich King, Sylvanas seems to be turning the Forsaken into Scourge 2.0. She even laughs when Garrosh calls her out on her hypocrisy. Later on, especially during the War of Thorns, she takes on many of Arthas' methods, including using the Scourge plague and raising her slain enemies into undeath.
  • Also sort of a Motive Decay, given that she's dabbling in necromancy to raise more people into the condition she once considered a curse.
  • Edge of Night suggests that, after the Happily Failed Suicide noted above, Sylvanas may no longer view her condition as the curse she once did. She saw what was on other side waiting for her, and she didn't like it.
• Hidden Depths: Zig-zagged. A lot of things can be said about Sylvanas, but she is surprisingly more loyal to the Horde than people give her credit for which is astonishing considering how the relationship between the Forsaken and the rest of the Horde is an alliance of convenience at best. She has never shown any intention to have the Forsaken break away from the Horde nor outright betray them, while Lor'themar was only a hair's breadth away from having the Sin'dorei defect to the Alliance. Also, Sylvanas has never shied away from a battle that involves the future of her people.
  • On the other hand, she's also known for being perhaps one of the shadiest leaders of the Horde, often go behind the rest of the Horde, and previous Warchief's back when she needs to accomplish something to serve her self-interest, but interesting enough and arguably many of her ambiguous deeds benefit the Forsaken, and sometimes extend to the rest of the Horde as well. However, she can often be callous when it comes to the lives of non-Forsaken Horde members. In the Pit of Saron instance during Wrath of the Lich King she orders a number of Horde troops to attack Scourgelord Tyrannus, who promptly kills them all without breaking a sweat, and all Sylvanas has to say is to call them "pathetic weaklings". Quest text from later in the instance has her remarking that she will have to send one of her dark rangers back for more "fodder". This attitude is coming to the fore again in Battle for Azeroth.
  • When Sylvanas is made Warchief, she actually takes the job fairly seriously. She includes Varok Saurfang as one of her top generals and they fought well together, which is more than can be said about Garrosh's tenure as Warchief. The Horde also openly answers her call to defend the Undercity from the Alliance, as most of the Horde races are present to defend.
• Hope Crusher: Doesn't believe in hope, as she has been all but continuously deprived of it since the moment Arthas murdered her, mutilated her corpse and raised her as a banshee under his thrall. Defiantly proclaiming that one can never kill hope as you lay defeated by her hand is one way to trigger her into doing something to drive home the opposite as had been done to her in the first place. Indeed, a quest added in 8.1.0 titled "The Day Hope Died" covers her death, undeath and destruction of her hometown. She already had her own hope crushed for good in the first place, in other words.
• Hope Spot: In War Crimes, she emotionally reconnects with her sister Vereesa. Sylvanas is planning to turn her undead like her, but it ends up being moot because Vereesa decides she can't go through with the plan to murder Garrosh or abandon her sons, anyway. Sylvanas ends up taking it pretty badly.
• Horse Archer: In Cataclysm, where her appearances in Gilneas and Forsaken leveling zones feature her like this.
• Hypocrite:
  • In Tides of War tries to get Lor'themar to offer her support against Garrosh's plans for war while forgetting that she blackmailed him into helping him against the Lich King in Shadow of the Sun.
  • In Hillsbrad Foothills, we're taught one of the most important laws of Forsaken society: stripping away another Undead's free will is a crime worthy of immediate execution. Come Legion and Sylvanas's drive for her own immortality and the sake of proliferating the Forsaken leads her to attempt for forcefully enslave the queen of Val'kyr to serve her, an act that would decidedly strip away her if not her free will, then at least her freedom. The minute someone calls her out on this by comparing her to the Lich King, Sylvanas ignores it with the justification of it being for her people. Later during Battle for Azeroth, she goes and digs up the body of Derek Proudmoore so she can make him a tool of hers, only to get furious when Baine frees him, the very thing Arthas did to her.
  • Sylvanas claims that the other factions/races judge her and the Forsaken for what they are, and not for their actions or contributions, only to then turn around and commit monstrous war crimes under the justification of it being to save her people. This hypocrisy is proven to be even bigger in Before the Storm where she kills a council of Forsaken that were trying to mend relationships with the living, all because in her mind, it would risk her losing her people.
  • Constantly complains that her people are unfairly treated by the other races, but has no qualms ruining the lives of other people for almost no reasons at all. This extends to even her own people. She'll act as their champion all the time, but the minute any undead disagree with her or desire to move away from her actions, she has no qualms trying to kill them. This also flies in the face of her claim to value free will as a result of what the Scourge forced onto them.
  • Her speech to Saurfang in A Good War about how peace wouldn't last forever and that the Alliance would eventually come after the Horde would hold much more weight if she wasn't responsible for half of the reasons the Alliance wants the Horde gone with their atrocities (such as enslaving and lobotomizing members of the Alliance — despite (then) Warchief Thrall outlawing slavery in the Horde) and if she hadn't been the one to call off the Human-Forsaken meeting in Before the Storm.
    • Likewise, that Sylvanas (former Ranger-General of Quel'Thalas) tells Saurfang (former member of the Old Horde, who tried to invade/genocide Quel'Thalas) that old grudges can't be forgotten (while she leads the Forsaken: i.e former member of the scourge, the undead who killed her and massacred her people), is a bit hard to believe.
  • Her calling out both Saurfang and Baine for betraying the Horde comes off as this after it is revealed that she never cared about the Horde and was, all along, using the Horde as pawns to start a war and cause as much death as possible in order to increase her powers.
• Irony: Or perhaps symmetry, and her wanting to prove a point. Her rebuttal of Delaryn Summermoon's Hope Springs Eternal speech from the "Warbringers: Sylvanas" cinematic with the destruction of Teldrassil is given new meaning with a Blood Elf related quest, "The Day Hope Died", covering Sylvanas' Last Stand and fall to Arthas, and recycles the flashback from the aforementioned cinematic covering that tragic event, indeed cementing in Sylvanas' mind that the idea of hope is for suckers.
• Ice Queen: She's the Queen of the Forsaken and Warchief of the Horde, and she has a personality that is cold as her undead body.
• Idiot Ball:
  • Her majordomo is from a race of demons known specifically for lying to and betraying mortals, and she is really and truly surprised when it turns out that he lied to and betrayed her. She specifically mentioned keeping Varimathras on a short leash in Warcraft III. It is possible her surprise was due to the fact that he got away with it despite her efforts.
  • The attack on Teldrassil make only tactical, short-term sense. In the short term, she captured the only major holding of the Alliance in Kalimdor and slowed down the smuggling of Azerite on the Alliance's side; if she could kill Malfurion, it would be a major blow to Alliance's morale as well. HOWEVER, she did this while the majority of the Night Elf's army was away with their military's leaders (Tyrande and/or Shandris) and most of the Alliance's forces was concentrated in the Eastern Kingdom. Thus her action in the long-term would only provoke a retribution from the majorly pissed off and fairly intact Alliance's military to the obvious target: the Undercity — her city. The leader she chose to kill — Malfurion — was also the Archdruid whose spirit was tied to the Emerald Dream which guaranteed his spirit's survival, and at the very least Tyrande would've hunted Sylvanas down to avenge Malfurion. He was also stronger than her and would have killed Sylvanas in that fight if it wasn't for Saurfang's intervention.
  • Even the idea that the night elves would be broken by the death of a beloved spiritual leader and the destruction of their world tree was out of touch with reality since the Night Elf has been through this before. Grom Hellscream killed Cenarius who was even more beloved than Malfurion and it only drove the Night Elf into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, not despair. The loss of the first World Tree, Nordrassil resulted in the loss of their immortality and the only home they knew for 10.000 years. They rejoined the World and thrived.
  • The last two strategies mentioned above turn out to be mere excuses she gave to her allies. Sylvanas was never interested in defeating the Alliance, but rather to cause as much death as possible in order to fuel her powers due to her allegiance with the Jailer. Her decisions to attack Teldrassil, kill Malfurion and later burn the World Tree were simply to increase the sheer resentment and hatred between Horde and Alliance to the point they wouldn't stop until either side was gone, which would simply increase the number of souls gathered.
• I Have Your Wife: Takes Crowley's daughter hostage in order to force a ceasefire between her and the Gilneas Liberation Front.
• I Hate Past Me: Sylvanas has become so jaded and hateful that when she's reminded that she was once a good-hearted defender of her people, Sylvanas retorts that she had been a fool.
• Immortals Fear Death: A big part of her motives for her actions from Cataclysm onward, although in her case it's because she did die, but found what awaited her afterward too horrifying and wants to do everything possible to avoid returning to it.
• In the Hood: She's depicted with it in every appearance of hers. Although she had it even before her transformation into a Dark ranger.
• Interspecies Romance: With Nathanos. (This stems from the fact that she's an elf, albeit an undead one, and he a human... and undead too.) This is somewhat something common with her sisters, Alleria and Vereesa, who have fallen in love with humans (The former married to Rhonin with twins, and the latter's relationship with Turalyon that resulted in a son).
• I Surrender, Suckers: Played with. Sylvanas is confronted after the Horde army's defeat in the Battle for Lordaeron. When Anduin orders her to surrender or die, she didn't draw her weapon and walked towards him saying he had won... only to add "nothing!", and fly off while nearly catching Anduin and the others in her trap.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Zigzagged. She actually still is pretty attractive if you can get past her pallid skin and red eyes.

J-Y

• Jerkass: She really turns up the affability when needed (such as when Garrosh pays her a visit), but generally defaults back to ruthless, brusque and dismissive when the occasion passes.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Despite her ruthlessness, the Banshee Queen make some good points. It is her Disproportionate Retribution and Moral Myopia tendencies that tend to undermine or cancel out these points.
  • Regarding her use of the Val'kyr. Yes, she is essentially acting like the Lich King by recruiting them and using them to raise more Forsaken. But as she points out to Garrosh, Forsaken can't reproduce any other way, and a lot of them die in the war against the Scourge and the Alliance. If she didn't use them, her people would die out and the Horde would lose their hold on Lordaeron, and very likely Quel'Thalas. She might be doing something amoral, but there really isn't any better option for her people, especially when Garrosh ordered her to invade Gilneas while the Alliance mount a campaign to retake Andorhal and pushing further into Forsaken's territories, thus the Forsaken is forced into another war.
  • Her forcing Lor'themar's hand for his aid in Northrend against The Lich King, (which is implied to be more about her personal vendetta against Arthas than anything else) at a time when the Sin'dorei are still recovering from civil war and the loss of their prince, (who went insane and betrayed them) publicly humiliating him in front of his court in the process was harsh, but she's not wrong when she points out that the Sin'dorei have received Horde and Forsaken assistance and that those obligations are a two way street. It's not a reasonable thing if the Sin'dorei never intends to assist the Horde and the Forsaken in return after received their aid, nor is it reasonable to sit on the fence when there's a war against the threat like the Lich King and the Scourge.
  • She's also got a solid point when she points out that some people of Azeroth hate her and the other Forsaken simply for being what they are, rather than anything they've actually done, despite the fact that being turned into undead abominations was a fate none of them asked for. Doesn't matter what they do, some people will simply never accept them. This point has been proven to hold merit time and time again with how some 'Living' factions would never wanted to co-exist like the Scarlet Crusade, or how more extremist member of the Argent Crusade would break their neutrality to hunt any Forsaken down, how the Alliance have made an attempt to take Lordaeron multiple times in the past. It is also noteworthy to mention that she made an attempt to reestablish relationship with the Alliance, even before her people joined the Horde, as she sent and emissaries to Stormwind only for them to never return (Presumably killed before they even reach the gate). While some would tolerate and accept her people, many would never stop seeing her people as nothing more than an abomination.
  • She makes a couple small points while arguing with her sister Alleria, such as throwing it back in Alleria's face that she didn't ask for what happened to her while Alleria did have a choice in becoming what she is. She also frankly disabuses Alleria of the notion that she had come up with the plan to assassinate Garrosh and manipulated Vereesa into helping her. It was actually Vereesa's idea to begin with and she was the one who ended up getting cold feet, proceeding to ditch Sylvanas by letter.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Gradually, starting with Cataclysm, really kicking off in Battle of Azeroth and culminating in Shadowlands. Her only purpose in life is fulfilled, her un-life is a living torment, but she cannot just end it all, as her fate in the afterlife turned out to be even more horrifying. Add to that the power of Warchief she gained in Legion, the Azerite power high eroding her sanity in Battle for Azeroth, and, as was revealed in Shadowlands, the influence of the Jailer, and you get a hateful, sadistic monster.
• Karma Houdini: Despite managing to antagonise most of Azeroth from Cataclysm to Battle for Azeroth, the worst punishment she received so far is a small scar from Saurfang (although this actually did manage to disrupt her plans somewhat).
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Shadowlands undoes the Houdini part. Anduin and Tyrande manage to erode her trust in the Jailer enough that when he reveals his true plans, she turns on him. He reunites the sundered part of her soul with her, resulting in an Angst Coma due to the old Ranger General part of herself suddenly being at the same strength as the Banshee Queen. The only reason she even wakes up from it is being helped into accepting what she'd done. Once the Jailer's dead, she is sentenced to help every last soul in the Maw, even the ones who genuinely deserved to be there. As the beginning of her penance.
• Kick the Dog:
  • While killing Liam Greymane could be excused as simply the result of her war against Gilneas, her complaining that she had to waste her poisoned arrow on him instead of using it to kill Genn, to Genn's face, is just needlessly cruel.
  • Sylvanas gets a massive one in the Burning of Teldrassil, which was a war crime akin to Sink the Lifeboats. While attacking Kalimdor could arguably be justified from a political or military standpoint, by that point the Horde controlled all of Kalimdor and the Night Elven forces were either retreating or dead. The (dying) enemy commander, Captain Delaryn, even conceded defeat and told Sylvanas there were only non-combatants in Teldrassil at that point. It didn't even make sense from the point of view of trying to demoralize the Night Elves, since the destruction of Silvermoon didn't stop Sylvanas' own (former) people from returning to retake Quel'thalas from the Scourge and rebuild Silvermoon. Also, when Captain Delaryn points out the parallels between Arthas' ravaging of the High Elves and Sylvanas' ravaging of the Night Elf lands, Sylvanas brushed it off. Sylvanas even forced Delaryn to watch the destruction of Teldrassil, like Arthas forced Sylvanas herself to watch the destruction of Quel'thalas.
  • She gets another one in the Battle for Azeroth expansion when she raises dead heroes of the Alliance into her undead servants including Jaina's brother Derek Proudmoore and the aforementioned Delaryn Summermoon.
  • In Shadows Rising into Shadowlands proper, she completely cuts Nathanos loose, calling him a failure she's tired of after he fails to kill Bwonsamedi in the novel. She leaves the broken Nathanos to the dogs and he's killed by the players in the pre-event shortly after, welcoming his death and seemingly aware Sylvanas likely wouldn't ask the Jailer to retrieve him. This is also a Kick The Dog-by proxy to her loyalists who were still hoping she had some affection for them, because if she'd cast off Nathanos, then cleary loyalist players mean nothing to her.
    • Segues into a Tear Jerker: when Tyrande reveals that she killed Nathanos, Sylvanas’ reaction implies that she would have saved him had she known.
• Kick The Son Of A Bitch: She betrays and kills Garithos after falsely promising to give him full control of Lordaeron. This would otherwise come off as an obviously evil act (as Varimathras points out), except Garithos was a racist and generally unpleasant person who tried to exterminate the Blood Elves.
• Lady and Knight: The Dark Lady to Nathanos' Black Knight.
• The Last Dance: She knew she was going to die when she engaged Arthas, now fast closing in Silvermoon, after all her strategies to stall him had failed.
• Lovable Alpha Bitch: One gets the impression she was like this before becoming undead and evil. While she was described as very vain and feeling the need to be the best at everything, she most certainly did care about her kingdom and in this video she has a flashback about the invasion of Silvermoon where she helps a mother and child get to safety.
• Mage Marksman: Of the bow and arrows variety. Many of her shots come coated in a dark power.
• Master Archer: Being called the best archer in Azeroth speaks a lot.
• Moral Myopia: A recurring problem with Sylvanas:
  • She complained that some people treated the Forsaken differently for what they are yet she kept a concentration camp right in Undercity, ordering her Forsaken to do atrocities that reinforced the image of them as monsters (such as using the Scourge plague and lobotomizing and enslaving/vivisecting Alliance POWS — and this when Thrall was Warchief). Once she was Warchief, she had no qualms sacrificing living soldiers of the Horde for no other reason than they weren't Forsaken.
  • In War Crimes she offered Vereesa, her sister and a loyal member of the Alliance, to join her faction (in secret planning to kill her and then raise her as a Forsaken) so that they could be together. In Before the Storm, when some Forsaken try to defect to the Alliance for the exact same reason, she slaughters them all.
  • Early on, she constantly complained about the fate the Arthas forced upon her. Lately, she has been raising the dead left and right to fight for her without consideration regarding their free will, including Derek Proudmoore and — more disturbingly as it parallels Sylvanas being turned to undeath — Delaryn Silvermoon.
  • Arthas ravaging her homeland was traumatic for her and drive her hatred for him. Yet she burned down Teldrassil after winning (even Arthas only raised Sylvanas while he was still fighting against the High Elves) and forced Captain Summermoon to watch in the exact same manner Arthas once forced her and for the exact same reason.
• Morality Pet: Zig-Zagged. But she seems to have genuine affection for Nathanos and a budging one for Anduin. They are of course not enough to make her a better person, but she seems uncomfortable with them being injured.
• Mortality Phobia: She's already undead, but having witnessed what awaits after her final death, she'll stop at nothing to avoid it.
• Motive Decay: Originally, Sylvanas' efforts with the Forsaken were all for Revenge against Arthas the Lich King for what he did to her homeland and to her personally. With Arthas dead and a new benign Lich King on the throne, Sylvanas committed suicide to end her suffering and reach the beautiful afterlife she glimpsed before Arthas raised her. Instead, she saw only a hellish void where she was subjected to endless suffering. The Val'kyr's deal saved her from that fate, and so she put all her effort into ensuring her immortality to never face that torment again. Eventually, her quest to evade the Maw turned to her aiding its master in exchange for power.
• Mounted Combat: In Cataclysm, where she in Gilneas and the Forsaken leveling zones is shown doing battle atop a skeletal steed.

• Ms. Exposition: In one very early quest for Undead characters, she tells the player her own history and that of the Forsaken, and all you really have to do is listen to complete it. (Exactly why she feels the need to tell her life story this way to someone who is, at the time, just a footsoldier, gives one the impression she just likes talking about herself.)
• Muscles Are Meaningless: In Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands, due to being empowered by the Jailer. She blocks Saurfang's attacks effortlessly despite being about a third his size, and breaks the Helm of Domination with her bare hands.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In an act of Cruel Mercy and a case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, the Jailer restored Sylvanas's soul, sundered since the day she was killed by Arthas with Frostmourne. Instantly regaining her lost compassion and empathy, Sylvanas' mind was nearly destroyed by the sudden rush of immense guilt for her many, many misdeeds, leaving her in a coma and even briefly developing a Split Personality (her Ranger-General persona and her Banshee Queen persona) as a coping mechanism. With Uther's help, Sylvanas acknowledged her crimes, awoke from her coma, and eventually helped to defeat the Jailer. After a brief trial, Sylvanas quietly accepted her punishment to rescue every soul from the Maw so that they may all face proper judgment in death.
• Never Be Hurt Again: With Vereesa turning her back on Sylvanas, after promising to join her in the Undercity, the Banshee Queen is hurt so deep that she vowed to never love again. At some point, she even extended this viewpoint to the Forsaken under her control, and part of the reason why she was so paranoid about the Desolate Council was that undead trying to love the living would only end with their suffering.
• Never My Fault:
  • She blames Saurfang for her burning down Teldrassil, remarking that they needed to strike a moral blow against the Alliance and his failure to kill Malfurion deprived them of that and she had to improvise. She had the chance to finish Malfurion but chose to let Saurfang make the kill and left without making sure he was dead. Even with the excuse that it was a secret test of Saurfang's loyalty, she still could've worked to ensure Malfurion's death afterwards (and maybe Tyrande's as well given her arrival).
  • The soul fragment that was separated upon in her first "death" is horrified by her undead counterpart's murderous actions that she initially refuses to accept the Banshee Queen as anything but a monster wearing her corpse. This denial is so strong that it puts Sylvanas in a permanent coma until Uther helps the traumatized Ranger-General accept the harsh truth that she is that monster and thus bears responsiblity for her actions.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Prior to Battle for Azeroth, Sylvanas' "banshee form" and her new form of dark magic had never been seen. Up to that point her prowess in combat had been limited to masterful archery, and although she was renowned as possibly the best archer in Azeroth, she was only as deadly as an arrow gets. Shadowlands later explained this to be the magic of the Jailer.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: That is essentially her speciality, especially in Battle for Azeroth. She raises unwilling victims that she cannot control directly as the Lich King could: they then abandon or betray her (Zeiling, Godfrey). She takes her time to mock her enemies in an attempt to break their hope, which often results in them getting even angrier and actually managing to foil her plans through sheer spite (Tyrande, Saurfang). Finally, her attempts to protect herself and her power, such as the attempted assassination of Thrall, end up actually raising even more people against her.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • For what Sylvanas has become, she was originally a dutiful Ranger-General of Quel'thalas and a hero who have fought valiantly to protect her homeland from the Scourge until her dying breath. Her reward for this heroic deed? Arthas refuses to give her a clean death, then rip her soul back to the world and thus turning her into a banshee, forced into servitude to watch her homeland be destroyed and forced to murder her fellow countrymen and forcibly turn her into the monster she once hated.
  • Sylvanas despises being undead, seeing it as a curse even when gaining free will. She decides to use her undead state to continue fighting the Scourge until the Lich King himself falls. After he was slain and her long-life goal accomplished, Sylvanas attempts suicide in hopes of rejoining her deceased loved ones in the afterlife. Instead, she is greeted to eternal damnation in darkness, forever tormented along with her murderer, Arthas. Although she is saved by the Val'kyr, her glimpse into her ultimate fate made her more fearful and ruthless than ever before as she bitterly realize that not even avenging her slain kin can give her peace in death. Consequently, she embraces her undead state to the point that her ultimate goal is to turn everyone, including her surviving relatives, into the Forsaken.
  • Sylvanas actually honors her word and frees Lorna Crowley when her father yields to her demands. Lord Godfrey is promptly disgusted with her leniency and guns her down, requiring the sacrifice of three of her precious Val'kyr to resurrect her.
• No MacGuffin, No Winner: After the Battle for Lordaeron, when Sylvanas was confronted by Anduin, Jaina, Genn and Alleria in the throne room, she revealed her master plan: use bombs to blow up the King's Palace and flood Lordaeron with the Forsaken's Blight, a powerful acid that could kill even undead.
• Nominal Hero: From Cataclysm to Battle for Azeroth. She's generally being a nasty person, but she's still formally aligned with the good guys.
• "Not So Different" Remark: In Shadowlands, she comes face to face with the last fragment of Arthas's soul and comments how her quest to kill him made her just like him.
• Nothing Left to Do but Die: After Arthas is finally killed and a benign Lich King had taken his place, Sylvanas felt her vengeance was complete and now she could finally end her sham of a life. After throwing herself from the top of Icecrown Citadel to her death, she discovered she would not go to that peaceful afterlife she first saw, but suffer eternal torment in the Maw. She was able to take a bargain to return to her undead life and plans to never suffer that fate again.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Sylvanas has this look on her face for just a brief moment when she realizes just what Saurfang made her say during their duel.
  • In Warbringers: Sylvanas, this is her reaction to, while fighting in the defence of Silvermoon, coming face to face with Arthas.
  • It's also her reaction to realising Genn Greymane has stolen the Soulcage from her and is about to destroy it.
• Omnicidal Maniac: As of Battle for Azeroth, Sylvanas has decided life itself is her enemy. She escalates the Fourth War further and further to ensure as much death as possible, all to destabilize the balance of life and death and to grow stronger through her deal with the Jailer.
• One-Winged Angel: Her banshee form, first appearing in Battle for Azeroth. She's considerably stronger in that form, able to kill people by simply flying through them, and, what is more important, extremely mobile (which makes it useful for running away).
• The Paranoiac: By Before the Storm, she is especially paranoid about anything that could threaten her rule over the Forsaken. She considered hope a major threat to the continuing obedience of her people. Moreso when her newfound mortality threatens to undo all her work.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Sylvanas holds a Val'kyr as an extremely valuable tool to serve the Forsaken and her interest personally, and she almost has none of the said tool left. Yet, she doesn't hesitate to call her val'kyr to secure injured Horde soldiers during the Battle for the Broken Shore, risk losing her val'kyr for the lives of mere soldiers.
  • In life she helped train Nathanos to be a ranger lord despite the other elves being against it since he was a human.
  • She planned to have her sisters murdered but had a change of heart after Vereesa apologized to her for what happened between them in War Crimes.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Before the Storm reveals that she has a decidedly negative view of other races in the Horde.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Used to be that in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria. She did not support Garrosh's plan of conquest, not out of moral concerns, but because she believed his expansion on Kalimdor would make Lordaeron vulnerable to attack. She still has her pragmatic moments (such as not imprisoning Baine right away when he plots to free Derek Proudmoore, but rather letting him go on with his plan so that she would know all his associates), but that is largely overshadowed by her Azerite-induced insanity.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • In one of the cutscenes in Frozen Throne. "Give my regards to hell, you son of a bitch!"
  • Garrosh pulls one on her in Cataclysm:
    Garrosh Hellscream: Have you given any thought to what this means, Sylvanas? What difference is there between you and the Lich King now?
    Lady Sylvanas Windrunner: Isn't it obvious, Warchief? I serve the Horde.
    [Sylvanas mockingly salutes Garrosh]
    Garrosh Hellscream: Watch your clever mouth, bitch.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: In her Mak'gora, after being injured and listening through Saurfang proclaiming the Horde's strength, she spits back that the Horde is nothing. After realizing what she said out loud, Sylvanas doubles down and bellows out to the crowd, "You. Are all. NOTHING!"
• Really 700 Years Old: At the time of her death. She fought in the Troll Wars alongside her older sister, Alleria. The war happened 2,800 years ago — and obviously, she was an adult and old enough to be in the military. So, she's probably at least 2,900 years old or more (depending on how quickly or slowly elves mature).
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: At the end of Shadowlands the council decides she needs to be punished, but, since she was a Well-Intentioned Extremist and was deceived by Zovaal, they decide not to just toss her in the Maw forever. Instead, they give her a Redemption Quest: if she saves all the people who ended up in the Maw, she will be forgiven. While it will take a long time, she could succede eventually.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Glowing red eyes, as compared to most forsaken having white eyes. When Zovaal gives her back her soul, her eyes become blue.
• Revenge: Her driving motivation after escaping the Scourge was revenge against Arthas for destroying Quel'thalas and enslaving her as a banshee. All of her efforts with founding and managing the Forsaken was to use them as a weapon against the Lich King to take her revenge.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: The Undercity doesn't run itself, as Sylvanas is quick to point out to anyone who bothers her with trivialities. Especially in Cataclysm, where she shows up in at least two zones to give the player character instructions and even aid them in battle.
• Saying Too Much: During her duel with Saurfang, she accidentally lets slip that she doesn't care about the Horde. That essentially ruins her plan at weakening Azeroth through pointless wars and forces her into hiding.
• Servile Snarker: IN SPADES while she is a ghostly banshee under Arthas's control. It often gets her tortured, but she seems to think it's worth it as long as it pisses him off.
• Ship Tease: Between Sylvanas and Nathanos Bligthtcaller; even in life they were unusually close. This is now canon, thanks to the recent short story Dark Mirror and the official preview of the upcoming book Before the Storm. Apart form that, there is a brief hint with Lor'themar. In the Gates of Retribution stage in Siege of Orgrimmar, if Lor'themar brought to zero health in the instance, Sylvanas runs towards him and gleefully comments that she "...can't wait to see the look on his face when (she) reanimate(s) his corpse." This gem in particular.
  Lady Sylvanas Windrunner: Oh, you're still here? I'd kind of hoped you'd perished. You'd make a very attractive corpse.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: When Delaryn Summermoon, who has fallen in battle takes pity on her, reminding her of what she used to be in life, and telling her that hope and life will never die, Sylvanas, having been reminded of the moment she lost both those things the moment Arthas killed her, raised her as a banshee and forced her to raze her own hometown against her will, in order to try making a point that death and despair are inevitable, turns the dying elf's head towards the World Tree and orders her forces to set it on fire.
• Sink the Lifeboats: Sylvanas does this with the Burning of Teldrassil (see Kick the Dog above).
• Soul Fragment: Alleria discovers in a vision that a fragment of Sylvanas's soul was stolen from her by Frostmourne. It was taken to the Maw where it was held by the Jailer until he returned it to her. Given Uther's experience in Bastion, losing this piece of herself likely contributed to her spiral into villainy.
• Soul Jar: Her Val'kyr serves as an undead Type-2.
• Split-Personality Merge: The soul fragment of Sylvanas held by the Jailer is forcibly thrusted into the Banshee Queen, causing Sylvanas to slip into a coma as her noble personality is horrified by her undead counterpart's actions, refusing to accept it as anything but a monster wearing her visage. It isn't until Uther enters her mind with his guidance that the Ranger-General accepts the monster and her actions as her own. When Sylvanas awakens from her coma, it's the original Sylvanas with the guilt and remorse of her Ranger-General personality.
• Straw Nihilist: The only thing she believes in is avoiding The Nothing After Death. In Battle for Azeroth, having reflected on the moment she lost everything, she rebukes a dying Delaryn Summermoon who says hope and life will never die, by having the World Tree burned while the latter is Forced to Watch in her final moments. Her parting words to the Alliance and Horde after killing Saurfang was to tell them to savor the moment they had standing as one because, in her own words, nothing lasts.
• Stripperiffic: Especially when her model was altered to look more like a high elf. Less so in Legion when she starts wearing armor that actually covers her midriff.
• Stupid Evil: Her wartime policies in Battle for Azeroth seemed to be this: wasteful of Horde forces and needlessly antagonising her subjects by civilian killing. As it turned out, she did not need to win, just to throw enough people in the meat grinder to feed her master. Some of her actions are still needlessly risky, but they at least make sense now.
• Sugar-and-Ice Girl:
  • Sylvanas is remarkably cold and callous, and rarely shows many signs of positive emotion. But if the player is fortunate enough to find a pendant owned by her older sister Alleria, you get a moving scene in which Sylvanas initially rejected the necklace angrily, but then picks it up and sings a song mourning her lost life.
  • Riffing off this theme with her sisters, there is another heart-breaking scenario in the novel War Crimes with her younger sister Vereesa: after Vereesa set up the reconciliation between the two, Sylvanas admits that she misses her sister, and invites Vereesa to live with her in Undercity. (What Vereesa doesn't know that is the Forsaken will never accept a living being — the Kor'kron Overseers are the only living Horde members in the Undercity and were imposed on the Forsaken — so Sylvanas was planning to kill Vereesa in her sleep and rise her to rule together forever.) Vereesa accepted, but later backs out because she felt she shouldn't abandon her two sons. Worse, she turned down Sylvanas' offer through a messenger. Sylvanas tells the guy to get out, and the next thing we see, she's on a wild hunt, screaming and killing animals... and vowing to never make the mistake to love again.
• Take This Job and Shove It: After she accidentally reveals how she doesn't believe in the Horde, she decides to own up to her hypocrisy and give a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the Alliance and the Horde while murdering Saurfang out of spite, then abdicating as Warchief and retreating alone.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: With the rest of the Horde, even when they're teaming up against Garrosh, and Lor'thermar in particular.
• Terms of Endangerment: Starting in Battle for Azeroth, she refers to Anduin as "Little Lion"
• Token Evil Teammate: In vanilla World of Warcraft, she is the only faction leader of the Horde that can be considered evil, disbelieving in honor and hope that the other leaders share. She is later accompanied by Gallywix in Cataclysm and Garrosh in Mists of Pandaria in this category.
• Took a Level in Badass: In War Crimes, after one to many insults towards Baine, she's reminded that he could snap her arms like twigs if he wanted. By Battle For Azeroth, her magical and physical capabilities have grown enough that she can dominate Saurfang, a seasoned warrior who is only slightly smaller than Baine, in one on one combat. It's heavily implied that her new growth in power comes from her dealings with the Jailer.
• Tranquil Fury: When Genn destroys her one chance to obtain more Val'kyr, the only visible sign of Sylvanas' anger is her grip tightening on her bow.
• Trauma Button: The moment Arthas murdered, turned her into a banshee, and forced her to burn the homeland she had just failed to defend. So traumatic that when a dying Delaryn indirectly reminds her and tries to proclaim that hope doesn't die, Sylvanas, having experienced the opposite, proceeds to burn the tree Delaryn was trying to protect, all to prove her wrong.
• Trauma Conga Line: Even among Warcraft characters, oh boy.
  • After a period of relative peace after the Second War, an isolated Quel'Thalas is attacked and overwhelmed by the Scourge. With no help coming Sylvanas faces the horrors of the Scourge alone, watching her friends and comrades be slaughtered and raised into undead minions, and then turned against her as she loses ground with every battle.
  • When Arthas finally corners and slays her, he punishes her for the heavy resistance she put up by traumatically raising her into undeath, marching her into Silvermoon and forcing her to watch her country be destroyed and her people be slaughtered.
  • She subsequently spends her time as Arthas' puppet minion, with no recourse and no real control over her actions but to occasionally mildly irritate him.
  • After all of the grief and suffering she goes through, once she finally has her revenge and Arthas is dead, she attempts suicide only to discover that, like Arthas, her soul will be condemned to an eternity of horrifying torture in the afterlife. Which she spends an unspecified amount of time in before being offered a temporary reprieve by the Val'kyr.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: After the attack on the Broken Shore goes bad and Voljin dies, Sylvanas becomes Warchief.
• Übermensch: Her attitude and motivations in Shadowlands seem to imply that she seeks to escape her Fate Worse than Death not by persisting in undeath as she seemed to have implied before, but by literally rewriting the laws of death itself. She gives Anduin a spiel about how nothing in life is fair — that no-one is given a choice of their circumstances, and thus their life is never truly in their own control — but that by breaking the cycle of life and death, people may finally be free to forge their own destiny. What she means by this, how she will do it, and what she plans to do once she's achieved her freedom is yet to be revealed, but her ideas are certainly more grandiose on a cosmic and philosophical scale than previously realised.
• Unexpected Successor: Vol'jin and Sylvanas likely never thought there was a chance in hell he'd ever end up naming her the next Warchief, but the spirits guide Vol'jin to name her his successor as he dies. The spirit in question was Mueh'zala, a loa of death in league with the Jailer who wanted Sylvanas on the throne to start a new war and more widespread death.
• Unwitting Pawn:
  • Sylvanas earnestly believed that she had Varimathras firmly under her heel. Of course, being a Dreadlord, that's what he wanted her to think.
  • She also doesn't realize that, in the end, she's this to The Jailer until it's revealed he intends to warp reality itself after the Sanctum of Domination's climax.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: In the Three Sisters comic there is a panel where the other two Windrunner sisters sadly reminisce about how the three of them danced and played together in the forest as kids. The Sylvanas novel goes into more detail, showing how she was a mischievous prankster, a protective Cool Big Sis to Lerath, and had a surprisingly sweet romance with a young Nathanos.
• Vanity Is Feminine: Sylvanas has a fondness for mirrors. When she was alive, she would make sure she took everyone's breath away with her beauty. While this is no longer the case with her death, she still kept a few mirrors for personal use.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • In Before the Storm, in the aftermath of the gathering, Sylvanas's reasoning for killing Calia Menethil and her accusation to Anduin is logically sound and understandable from the ruler of a nation's perspective. As Calia presence in the gathering has caused sedition, that would likely led into the splinter within the Forsaken society, which could have lead to a civil war and perhaps result in Sylvanas and the Horde lose control of Lordaeron. Meanwhile, Calia herself has openly told other forsaken in the gathering to deny Sylvanas and accept her as their queen. While it may appear as Sylvanas acting petty, paranoid, and tyrannical about the whole ordeal, it is within her full right to stomp out a usurper openly challenging her authority.
  • Played With in regards to her her motives in Battle for Azeroth and specifically during the War of the Thorns. Sylvanas has many good, though ruthless points: the balance of the world was shifted in the Alliance's favor and the Horde was on the backfoot ever since the Siege of Orgrimmar and Azerite could upset the balance even further and give the Alliance total dominance. As such, occupying Teldrassil and killing Malfurion to demoralize the Alliance made tactical sense. The Played With part comes in when it turns out her reasoning for burning Teldrassil is less of a strategic move, and more of a petty motivation, and she herself makes it clear she did so out of spite, while raising Delaryn into undeath afterwards was especially spiteful, even for Sylvanas. That said, she is correct, albeit in a dark, self-serving way that hope doesn't always prevail for some people, as had been her brutal experience at the hands of Arthas and many of the following events.
  • Sylvanas spells out for Saurfang how no matter what improvement the Horde's people make, the Alliance leaders (particularly Tyrande and Greymane) will always have a Holier Than Thou mindset towards them, always wish to seek war with the Horde, and that Anduin has no real power over the Alliance. Cut to the end of the War Campaign in Battle for Azeroth, The Horde Leaders and Anduin making peace, but Tyrande Whisperwind refuses this peace and admits that she won't honor it until she personally kills the Banshee Queen. In the end, Sylvanas was right on the money with who would be the War Hawks and with how little Anduin can command them.
  • The Sylvanas novel makes a fair point towards the harshness of eternity that lead to her siding with the Jailer and seeking to overthrow the cosmic order. There's no empathy shown in an individual's judgement, no concern given towards what the individual would want as opposed to what the Arbiter coldly and logically thinks they "deserve". We can see this multiple times where being sent to different afterlives means splitting apart mates, parents, children and entire family units. Realizing that her beloved father and brother may not be together in eternity and that she very much wouldn't go to the same place as either of them was the moment of her declaration of "Unjust Afterlives" and what Zovaal used to initially get his claws in her. Notably, while Zovaal is foiled, she still sees her own goal succeed with Pelagos' appointment as Arbiter, as he explicitly chooses to be one who acts with empathy in his judgements of where a soul goes.
• Villainous Breakdown: Saurfang does not actually manage to hurt Sylvanas that much in a mak'gora, but what he does manage is anger her enough to inadvertedly antagonise the entire Horde, losing control over it.
  Sylvanas: The Horde… is nothing! You… are all… nothing!
• We Can Rule Together:
  • During War Crimes, while plotting to assassinate Garrosh before the end of his trial, Sylvanas invites her sister Vereesa to join her in the Undercity and rule the Forsaken by her side once the deed is done. She was sincere in her offer and was looking forward to having family at her side again, but Vereesa backs out of the deal at the last minute, unwilling to abandon her twin children. It devastates Sylvanas to the point that she vows to never love or hope again.
  • In Shadowlands she seems to legitimately want Anduin to cooperate with her rather than be compelled, both because she believes he will agree with her ultimate goal and to prove to herself that she was right to take this path.
• We Have Reserves:
  • In the Icecrown Citadel dungeons, Sylvanas seems to hold the soldiers of the Horde in contempt, even calling them weaklings after they give their lives on her order. Before proceeding into the Halls of Reflection, she says she must send back one of her Dark Rangers for more "fodder".
  • She seems to have grown out of this as of Edge of Night, at least where her own Forsaken are concerned, although this is less "They're more important" and her realizing they're a finite resource, one she'll eventually run out of, and she can't afford to throw them away.
  • After becoming Warchief, she take this stance on her living forces, having no issue with sending them to die in combat and reviving them into undeath later. This puts her at odds with Saurfang, who is disgusted with her methods.
  • She was like this in life as well, throwing away elven rangers to delay Arthas's advance. That said, other material depicts her feeling grief and anger over her troop's deaths, so this may have been more of a The Needs of the Many type decision.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Her motives revealed in 9.1; She was under the idea that the current cycle of life and death was extremely unjust and aided in the Jailer because of his plans to rewrite reality to be more fair. When Zovaal reveals he wanted to rewrite reality so that all of existence was subservient to him with no free will, she immediately turns on him.
• Wham Line: "The Horde is nothing! You are ALL NOTHING!!". The first is only an In-Universe case, however, as, all the way back in Vanilla, the Forsaken quests and intro made it clear that they were using the Horde for their own schemes. What the Forsaken didn't know is that is that Sylvanas included them in this as well.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Garrosh of all people delivers one of these to her once he finds out about her decision to use the Val'kyr to raise the fallen enemies on the battlefield as Forsaken to replenish their ranks. He even goes so far as to compare her to the Lich King.
  • She delivers one to her sister Vereesa in Windrunner: Three Sisters comic. After her older sister Alleria accuses her of using Vereesa, Sylvanas reveals that it was the other way around, and it's actually Vereesa who approaches her and ask for assistance before backing out from it, which leads to the fallout of Garrosh's actions thereafter, including the third invasion of the Burning Legion.
  • Saurfang is pissed when she orders the burning of Teldrassil, telling her not only has she acted without honor but she has just started a war that will have all of the Alliance screaming for Horde blood. Its so bad that he almost commits a form of Suicide by Cop.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: At first she had this attitude towards her undeath, and she only keeps going because she wants revenge on Arthas. Once Arthas is killed and she fulfills her vengeance, having apparently nothing to live for, she attempts to commit suicide... Until she sees what's awaiting for her on the other side. She's now actually content with being undead.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: She may be manipulative and borderline tyrannical, but it's hard not to feel bad for her at least a little given her traumatic death, resurrection into undeath and being under thrall to destroy what she sought to protect and having nothing left to hope for but avoiding death. Underneath all her cruelty she is mainly just scared and lonely.
• World's Best Warrior: She has been called the best archer in Azeroth.
• World's Most Beautiful Woman: Aspired to be this while alive, and takes great pains in death to preserve her physical appearance in undeath. All three of the Windrunner sisters were described as being exceedingly beautiful, even by elven standards, and Sylvanas sought to be the most beautiful of the three.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: After Garithos helps her retake Lordaeron, she orders Varimathras to kill him.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Has this reaction to Varimathras's comments on her plan to betray Garithos.
• You Remind Me of X: The Sylvanas novel reveals that she sees a lot of her brother Lirath in Anduin, which is why she develops a soft spot for him.
• Your Worst Memory: The moment she was killed, raised and forced to burn her homeland by Arthas. See also Trauma Button.

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