I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Sylvanas Administration

The owner of Blizzard Watch today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. I have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Sylvanas administration whose identity is known to myself and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. I believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.

Warchief Sylvanas is facing a test to her reign unlike any faced by a modern Horde leader.

It’s not just that the attack on Teldrassil looms large. Or that the Azeroth is bitterly divided by Sylvanas’s leadership. Or even that her faction might well lose the Horde to an opposition hellbent on her downfall.

The dilemma — which she does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in her own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of her agenda and her worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the Alliance. We want the reign to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made the Horde safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to the Horde, and the warchief continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our people.

That is why many Sylvanas appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our warrior institutions while thwarting Our Queen’s more misguided impulses until she is out of office.

The root of the problem is the queen’s amorality. Anyone who works with her knows she is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide her decision making.

Although she was selected as a Warchief, the queen shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by the horde: free wood, free markets and free people. At best, she has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, she has attacked them outright.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deforestation, historic tax reform for the Goblins, a more robust military and more.

But these successes have come despite — not because of — the warchief’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

From Orgrimmar to throne room departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the warchief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from her whims.

Meetings with her veer off topic and off the rails, she engages in repetitive rants, and her impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

“There is literally no telling whether she might change her mind from one minute to the next,” a top mage complained to me recently, exasperated by an Zuldazar meeting at which the warchief flip-flopped on a major warfront decision she’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the throne. Some of her aides have been cast as villains by the scryers. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to Orgrimmar, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Azerothians should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Sylvanas Windrunner won’t.

The result is a two-track warchief.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, Lady Sylvanas shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as Prophet Zul of Zuldazar and Northrend’s leader, Kim Jong-lich, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where rivals like the Burning Legion are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep horde. It’s the work of the steady horde.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of challenging her to a lightning battle, which would start a complex process for removing the warchief (see Thrall v Garrosh). But no one wanted to precipitate a crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

The bigger concern is not what Lady Sylvanas has done to the chair of the warchief but rather what we as a horde have allowed her to do to us. We have sunk low with her and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Khadgar put it best in his farewell dialog. All of Azeroth should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Khadgar. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our world dialogue.
Lady Sylvanas may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put Azeroth first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the battlefront and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Azerothians.

The writer is a senior official in the Sylvanas administration, who is absolutely not Nathanos Blightcaller.