*deep breath*
Guys… I think I’m finally ready to talk about Dave Kosak’s Aethas tweet:
“Aethas was caught between loyalties. He decided to ‘look the other way.’”
If that information is unimportant enough to reveal in a tweet, can we assume there’s not going to be a dramatic confrontation scene ending with puddles of Aethas all over the courtroom? We can choose to believe that, right? *_*
this horrible speculation is presented without comment.
Looks like we have a new elf to worry about…
Ahhh, Dave’s actually talking about this publicly! Me and Mike Sacco asked him about it on his facebook back when 5.1 was current, and he said there was supposed to be an extra scene that bugged out and didn’t show up in the actual game. Horde-side, when you were stealing the Bell from Darnassus, Aethas was supposed to find your portal, follow you in and go “what are you doing? You can’t use Kirin Tor resources for the war effort.” and the orc you’re with gets nose to nose with him and says “You’d better decide where you’re loyalties lie, ELF.” And Aethas slinks back through the portal to Dalaran saying he saw nothing.
So yeah, Aethas knew about the bell—but by accident. Fanlyr was acting on his own, and seemed to have no intention of telling him about it.
We never said anything because Dave thought that the rampant speculation re: Aethas’ loyalties was great to watch and asked us to be quiet about it. It wasn’t Blizzard’s intention for that to be a mystery, it just happened that way.
Oh my! This is wonderful to learn of! Poor little Aethas…
HOLD IT
There was already indication of this, even without the bugged event…but on the Isle of Thunder.
When Lorthemar, Jaina, Aethas, and the other elf chick confront each other, things are said.
One of the things, is Lor’themar claiming ‘The Sunreavers had NOTHING to do with blah blah’
The next thing in the scripted event, is Aethas looking rather shifty, in an emote.
So, that likely already put Aethas’ loyalties into question.
Right, and that event on the IoT was supposed to be an obvious reference to what the player would have already known, had the bugged event actually been in the game—i.e. that Aethas HAD found out about the Bell, so he didn’t know “nothing”. It wasn’t supposed to put his loyalties into question; it was supposed to be a reaffirmation of what we already knew—that he had turned a blind eye.
The difference is that Jaina is essentially accusing Aethas of being an active participant in the deception, which he wasn’t. Aethas was, truly, a Kirin Tor loyal. Until he stumbled upon what Fanlyr (and us, the players, lets be honest) were up to. The problem with finding out in such a clumsy way is that, if he had gone straight to Jaina and told her what was going on, Garrosh would have known EXACTLY who spilled the beans, which would have likely put a lot of blood elf lives in immediate danger, because there’s no way Garrosh would have let that go. And if Aethas said nothing? Well, that’s the option he chose and we saw how that panned out.
Aethas basically blundered into a situation in which he could either bring down Garrosh’s wrath on the blood elves, or Jaina’s. He gambled with Jania’s. He, and the blood elves as a whole, would have lost either way.