I like Luhrs version as imo it give the character a good blend of what they had set up. Vraska character was a mess with her originally being the poetic-revenage killer type, her pw bio saying she was a trophy collector and cold blooded assassin and then Vraska vs Jace painting her as a power hungry villain all wanting to be a different version of a gorgon pw. I felt Luhrs version of someone who wanted to be good and was used/abused into someone they didn't wanna be very much worked with how Jace had been used during AoA and for the most part tied the 3 version of her into a somewhat consistent character. After Ixalan though...not a fan of the choices for the character...like any.
Vraska's character was kinda all over the place from the start, true, but I feel it got even worse when they tried to turn her into an anti-hero of sorts. My memory on the details is a bit fuzzy, and I for all intents and purposes walked away from the storyline after
Dominaria, but there was this jarring shift when they suddenly tried to paint her actions as justified, which culminated in the scene when she and Jace confronted Azor on Ixalan. And you could absolutely tell from Alison Luhrs's social media posts that she really and unambiguously thought Vraska was morally in the right and a great person. The problem is, it didn't come across that way in the stories, at least not to me and not with the complete lack of ambiguity it was sold with.
Take Jarad's role as guildmaster and the emergence of the kraul for instance. Granted, I skipped
The Secretist because I don't read e-books, so I don't know if it was ever addressed there, but all the books and stories that I'm aware of actually portrayed Jarad as the most competent and least cruel guildmaster the Golgari ever had (even though there were some hints at the end of the old Ravnica trilogy that becoming a lich might have changed him). I mean, did the kraul really expect to have positions of power in the guild handed to them on a silver platter the moment they came out of hiding after millenia? Vraska stepping in and disposing of Jarad - supposedly on the kraul's behalf - was done because she wanted power for herself, not as a reaction to any real injustice. I bet that's exactly the story the
Sisters of Stone Death told themselves when they wrestled control of the guild from Svogthir... I get that overthrowing the old leader is basically how everyone except Jarad became guildmaster, but I'd at least prefer them - or the authors, for that matter - to not be hypocrites about it.
It was basically the same thing with Azor. Yeah, Vraska was mistreated by the Azorius, but Azor himself had absolutely nothing to do with that. Azor's Guildpact brought 10,000 years of peace to a war-torn plane, I hardly think Vraska (or the kraul, or anyone else really) would have preferred to live on a Ravnica on which Azor had never intervened. Not only that, we are talking about an Oldwalker who gave up his spark and imprisoned himself on Ixalan for 1,000 years (I think?) to try and stop Bolas (all of which is one big plothole anway, but let's not go there). Even if Azor was an arrogant jerk in the story, he had made himself helpless and vulnerable for a good cause, and Vraska and her new boyfriend just rode in on their high horse and did things to him that were worse than anything the Azorius had ever done to Vraska (at least if I remember enough of the details). Besides, Jace was actually the one who was constantly neglecting his duties as the Living Guildpact at the time, so maybe he shouldn't have pointed the finger at Azor either. It just makes me want to yell at her and Jace (and the author, I guess) and tell them to get some perspective. Somehow it seems to me that Vraska is always complaining about the system being violent and unjust, only to then happily take it out on the people who are genuinely trying to make things better for everyone. Sure, I guess she got the actual abusers, too, but she also killed some more people who just happened to have the right names in order to send a cryptic message to Jace, and she's running a group of assassins that are... basically just a terrorist group, I guess?
So, all things considered, I'd argue Vraska worked better as a dark grey and nuanced character in a more villanous role rather than a tragic anti-hero. The shift just didn't feel believable to me and sent some very mixed messages, and I never bought into the forced relationship with Jace either. I might add that a lot of other genral inconsistencies surrounding the settings and stories she was in also detracted from my interest in Vraska, like the plotholes concerning Ixalan I already mentioned, or the way in which crucial bits of the parallels she's supposed to have with Jace hinge on the Origins retcons, or the fact that she has complete control over her stone gaze, when every other gorgon in the canon that I'm aware of does not, and that includes those on Ravnica. Yeah, maybe you could handwave the latter one and just say it's her version of the X-Men superpower most Neowalkers seem to have, but it should at least have been addressed. It also completely changes the existential experience of what being a gorgon would be like on a fundamental level. Details like that can matter a great deal and have to be thought through before authors change them.
I don't necessarily want the beacon to have called a bunch of old walkers, but I want it have effects on the lore. War of the Spark was built up to the level of the mending and I would like to see effects of the War echoing in similar ways the mending did. Either having pw characters who where there (either ones we got card for or ones who might been later revealed to have been there, something more isolated on a separate plane like Ravi getting snapped out her madness, something Bolas had set up and excepted to be around to still deal with, ect
War of the Spark was a disaster in more ways than I care to count, and I'd be more than happy to never hear the name Nicol Bolas ever again. I mean, sure, if we're talking about ramifications for newer characters and new plot threads, I wouldn't care because I've given up on 95% of the storyline anyway. But the only connection to any of the old school 'walkers I want to happen is Dakkon picking up the pieces of the Blackblade and reforging it back into its original shape. Other than that, I just want the old lore I still care about to stay in its safe little playpen where old school characters can interact on Dominaria or another plane among a select few, and nothing gets ruined by being connected to that idiotic new stuff, or to other old stuff that has already been ruined forever, like the Elder Dragons. The fact that I've been posting in this forum again on a regular basis recently has more to do with the Corona-induced void in my real life activities than with any interest in the recent or current story. I mean, I'm mostly discussing Dominaria or
Commander Legends anyway, which are exactly the things in the safe little playpen I mentioned.
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but with a WUBRG colour identity would feel about right. If the ability of 