Arthas, Sylvanas and the nature of self

Credit to ARM3481 on the Scrolls of Lore discord for the following analysis:

Admittedly in-universe it makes sense for the world to continue blaming Arthas, so from that context it's not hard to understand why some people just latch onto that incomplete view of things.  Especially depending upon their experience playing and familiarity with his pre-WoW development.

But really from an informed "reader" PoV, you're correct that while it's Arthas' fault for things getting to the point that he picked up Frostmourne, after that choice he's basically no longer that Arthas any more.  The creature he became at that point was the worst of himself magnified by the influence of Frostmourne, which then became even further removed from his old self once he deliberately extracted whatever lingering vestiges of his humanity remained after his battle with Illidan.

Arguably the Arthas that went to the Maw would be whatever was left by his death at the end of WotLK, which means all of the irredeemable parts that had evicted what was good about him.  So maybe there's some unknown fate to which the "Matthias Lehner" (so to speak) portion of his person went after Tirion destroyed Arthas' heart in WotLK, but the soul sent to the Jailer and then used to re-forge Anduin'd sword would logically be the sum total of what was worst about Arthas to the deliberate exclusion of what was good about him.

Arthas has the stipulations of being controlled beyond a certain point, then ripping out whatever nobility and humanity might have kept him from continuing to do evil as soon as he regained a modicum of real control, so to a degree he's like three different people, with each one being the result of the prior person's completed arc.  Torment and eventual destruction in the Maw was the completion of said arc for Lich King Arthas, the thing we killed on top of Icecrown Citadel.  By that time pre-Frostmourne *and* Death Knight Arthas were each long gone, having completed their respective arcs. 

[...] 

The difference would be that we barely knew pre-Banshee Sylvanas, but to this day her fans stubbornly insist that the undead Sylvanas' misdeeds be weighted against what came before her undeath.  They want to be able to insist that they're the same person when hearkening back to her heroism in life, while insisting that the terrible misdeeds weren't really her.

However like Arthas, there's a cutoff point at which one person became the other person and dragged the first along for the ride against their will until finally expelling them.  Consequently, Shadowlands Sylvanas regaining her soul fragment isn't a case of fixing her; it's a case of subjecting a good person to the horrors of life as a terrible person, because that former Sylvanas hasn't been part of the equation since she died.

So instead of the sort of redemption or just punishment some folks insist her fate was in SL, really it was a case of giving the evil, undead Sylvanas a hostage who didn't do those things and forcing said hostage to share in her punishment.  Sylvanas fans want to vindicate the Sylvanas they've known throughout WoW, but there is no vindicating that.  There's only writing it off and pretending somehow that making a different, better person also share in her punishment amounts to somehow making her legitimately regretful and contrite about what she's done.

It's like if there had been a part about Arthas' soul in SL that went out of its way to clarify Uther had somehow specifically reattached the "Matthias Lehner" portion so Arthas' better self could suffer and perish alongside his worst self.  Except that didn't happen.  So what expired in SL was the aggregate of all the evil Arthas had done, while the good hadn't been part of that equation since WotLK at the latest, and hadn't really been actively able to do anything since Arthas took up Frostmourne.

Preserving this here for posterity.

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