Can we talk about Soreel Ja?(Spoilers)

[Iscah]

the way he acts and speaks makes me want to think he could have committed a Jafar after we had made Wuk the next Dawnservant.

Sareel Ja was 100% scheming to be Jafar; he just underestimated the sultan and got backstabbed (literally and figuratively) before he got to do the backstabbing himself.

I don't think it's necessarily a sign of a changed or abandoned plot thread – he just exists to be a red herring in the first half of the plot. Of course the scheming palace official with blatant ulterior motives is going to reveal himself as the true villain of the piece in the second act, right? Right? Wrong.

(It's also rather ironic that when the major characters were introduced and described for the first time in the pre-launch live letter, discussions were pegging Zoraal Ja as "the noble one who was probably going to get killed off for shock value halfway through".)