With almost every multiplayer game, one of the first things that people will always judge it by is the lore behind the game. Overwatch, StarCraft, League of Legends, Hearthstone, and World of Warcraft, just to name a few, all have lore that fans love to dig into. For me personally out of all of these StarCraft’s lore has captivated me the most. Something to note with this is I only started playing StarCraft II which meant I missed out on the lore from the first game, meaning when I first played StarCraft II there were a lot of things I did not know going into it. This was both good and bad since I had no prior prejudices about the characters but at the same time, I did not understand why certain interactions were happening.
One example of this is Sarah Kerrigan, aka Queen of Blades from the Wings of Liberty campaign. With no knowledge of who Sarah Kerrigan is, I just immediately assumed that the Queen of Blades is just plain evil. For the most part, she is, but that is without knowledge of how she became Zerg and the Queen of Blades. Knowing that Kerrigan is forced to become the Queen of Blades through the betrayal of Arcturus Mengsk and furthermore through the interference of Amon controlling the Zerg, you start to realize that the Queen of Blades is separate from Kerrigan. She may have some recollection of her life as Kerrigan but most of it seems to be bad memories.
Just this part of Kerrigan’s character development is really interesting and luckily for us, it does not end there. Moving over to the Heart of the Swarm campaign, Sarah Kerrigan and the Queen of Blades combine to become a perfect amalgamation of the two, something that the Zerg, and especially Abathur, the geneticist of the Zerg hive, are extremely happy with. A combination of the Zerg’s ruthless nature alongside the cunning and compassion of a Terran makes for an incredibly scary leader of the Zerg hive. Her development throughout the Heart of the Swarm expansion builds more and more into how powerful the hybrid of Zerg and Terran can be.
The Heart of the Swarm character development of Kerrigan is a perfect setup for the epilogue of the next StarCraft II expansion, Legacy of the Void. This is where the development of Kerrigan being a hybrid of Zerg and Terran comes to its fruition. Prior to the battle with Amon, Kerrigan ascends to become a Xel’Naga, a pure hybrid of all three races in the StarCraft universe.
Therefore, throughout every expansion in StarCraft II, Kerrigan evolves and gains a part of each race. In Wings of Liberty, Kerrigan is almost purely the Queen of Blades, meaning that her makeup is Zerg with very few remnants of her Terran self. Then after her cleansing at the end of Wings Of Liberty, moving into Heart of the Swarm, Kerrigan and the Queen of Blades morph together to become a Zerg, Terran hybrid, missing just one race, Protoss. While her ascension to Xel’Naga does not really show direct resemblance to Protoss, in order to become Xel’Naga, one must become pure of form alongside pure of essence. The purity of form, in this case, is most associated with the Protoss, while purity of essence is most associated with Zerg. This means that Kerrigan with her Terran blood becomes both purity of form and purity of essence to become a true Xel’Naga and is thus able to defeat Amon, the most powerful Xel’Naga in existence.
Overall going through the different expansions of StarCraft II you get to experience the journey of Sarah Kerrigan through her transformations. This is even on top of the fact that Kerrigan is not the main character of the StarCraft universe in most people’s eyes. It is actually Jim Raynor, but when you look more into Kerrigan’s life, you start to see how important of a character she is, and how her story is interwoven into the overall game.
