Alleria Windrunner, bad character, gets way too much of a central role in War Within

Lore Story Forum
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I don’t like that the main protagonist in the storyline in The War Within is Alleria Windrunner and think that the Horde should be equally represented in the protagonist story. As a proud Horde supporter and Orc Shaman. I think that it is rather biased that the only characters playing a central role in The War Within storyline are Anduin, Alleria Windrunner and Faerin Lothar, all of whom are alliance (and or favor Alliance).

Also, Alleria Windrunner is against the Amani Trolls, who are right and should be treated as the good guys because their land was stolen from them. Her track record includes stealing the Amani Trolls land (during the Troll Wars) and then fighting to defend the High Elves stolen land (in the Second War) against the Orcs and Amani Trolls. This is not a protagonist in my eyes. I would honestly rather quest with Xala’tath, who is also not a protagonist (I’ll admit) but more favorable than Alleria.

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Historical reparation

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So this post is mostly uninteresting, and I can’t say I really have too much to say on Alleria. Thus far in her role in TWW, she’s kind of been whatever. I will say I think people tend to exaggerate on character’s roles. We’re just coming off a patch where she was essentially irrelevant. In Undermine Gazlowe was the primary protagonist, which was very nice and refreshing - also handled very well IMO.

But the thing with the Amani Trolls has always been very interesting to me. Because on the one hand, yeah actually, you are correct. The Thalassian Elves were foreign colonizers who walked into land that was already lived in and took it as their own. In any modern, sensible story at the VERY LEAST the natives who were being colonized would be shown in a somewhat sympathetic light. But WoW is not a very modern story, and especially early on it’s handling of themes like this have been very bad.

I don’t think it’s a secret that Trolls are a race which are pretty questionable with it’s influences. They clearly play on the colonial trope of the “jungle savages”, which is made even worse when you consider their relationship with cannibalism and their clearly Caribbean derived accents. These are pretty harmful stereotypes that still affect real people to this day. And yet, if you look at the Trolls - especially the Amani - they’re played totally straight.

Like… the Amani, in almost every instance we deal with them, are genuinely evil cannibal jungle savages. They worship evil gods, do evil rituals, and align themselves with evil forces. Their society has been presented as cruel, and more often than not they’ve just been treated as villains to mindlessly kill. While they SHOULD be sympathetic, they simply aren’t. No effort has been put into MAKING them sympathetic. It’s interesting because it isn’t like Blizzard was unable to make villain groups with more understandable motivations before. But pretty consistently if you look, the groups of antagonists with more “human” motivations have been races which conform better to Western cultural norms.

Unfortunately the Amani are just not easy to sympathize with, despite their plight being obviously rooted in real world injustices done to native people. This is a pretty blatant flaw on the part of early Blizzard especially. I really do hope that with Midnight being set in Quel’thalas, we can get some sort of re-evaluation of the Amani. However, I also know for a fact that even if we do people on this forum will complain that they changed them, despite the fact that they desperately need to be rewritten.

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Arkan evolgos’Sha edos

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You just made the OP’s point for him. The bar shouldn’t be this abysmally low. We shouldn’t look at the protagonist of a massive AAA live service game who’s gonna be with us for 3 expansions as “kind of whatever”.

You have illustrated Blizzard’s mistake perfectly.

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I mean yeah, but I also can’t say I’ve ever found any of the cast of this game to be particularly compelling as well.

When it comes to their major characters, I don’t think Blizzard has ever done a great job. I actually think TWW has done better with its characters than most of the expansions. If anything the “stay a while and listen” conversations have been nice, especially with the voice acting which is pretty solid. Characters like Gazlowe and the Bronzebeards who previously didn’t actually have THAT much character were given quite a lot more to them, which is appreciated.

We have to look at the bar which has been set, and WoW’s strong suit has never been character writing. In fact it’s normally abysmally bad. Fair to say you still want better, I do, but still.

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I hate this excuse. Not only does it not absolve Blizzard from writing good characters in the future, not only does it admit that our current characters are bad (or “whatever” at best), but it also it tarnishes what was once a beloved (if a bit silly and edgy) storyline with a cast of characters that literally millions of people fell in love with. Sure it was the late 90’s and early 2000’s, but games were evolving at that point. We should be expecting BETTER from Blizzard, not worse or more of the same.

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It’s an opinion, not an excuse. Blizzard can obviously do better. But also they have improved, I much prefer the current writing team to that silly, edgy content from the early 2000’s. I can acknowledge improvement while also acknowledging they have a long way to go, those are not contradictory opinions.

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I honestly can’t relate to this at all, but you do you.

Modern Blizzard writing is the laughing stock of the gaming community outside of the WoW bubble. Its at the point where I don’t even admit I’m a WoW fan in public, even when the conversation turns to video games. At the park, my local bar, talking to coworkers, everyone I know in real life (anecdotal I know) looks at WoW’s modern story as a joke. It’s literally used as an example of bad storytelling in video games quite a lot, both irl and on the net.

There’s a reason people gravitated to the old story, the old characters, and the old lore. It’s not like there weren’t objectively “better” gaming stories out there at the time. It’s not like gamers were starved for good stories and Warcraft was all they had. Deus Ex had already come out before WC3. Metal Gear Solid existed. No one is claiming Warcraft was Shakespeare and it didn’t need to be to be good.

Warcraft was good because the story had an edgy yet endearing tone, a silly but endearing world that took itself just seriously enough to create a detailed and believable fantasy universe. It’s because the characters were fun, likable, cool, and each had their own culture and leadership philosophy expressed through their gameplay.

Warcraft was silly, yes, it was cartoony, yes, it was edgy and heavy metal, but that was part of the dichotomy that defined the setting. It’s a world full of cute little fantasy dudes dealing with heavy social and political issues and blowing each other up into gore. It’s the story of a generic fairy tale world becoming a dark fantasy world, where good and evil aren’t easily defined, and where monsters are more than just maniacs. The world had a heart and soul to it that transcended the silly surface level.

Even adjusting my expectations for the relevant time period, going back and playing Warcraft 3 for the first time taught me that they really did have something special, that there was a reason so many men and women obsessed over this world for as long as they did. That world should have evolved and expanded while maintaining its tone and core worldbuilding. Instead Blizzard retconned it all into this soulless husk we have today.

I don’t feel any of that fire from modern Warcraft. I don’t see anything that could enrapture multiple generations the way the old games and early WoW did. If you see it differently then I respect you but I can’t even begin to understand your thought process.

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She comes across as rather dumb and easily manipulated, which I don’t think is the intent behind the character.

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I can’t truthfully comment on Alleria in this patch as I generally walk away when she starts talking.

I assume I’ll be doing a lot of walking away in the next expansion.

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I honestly can’t stand her voice at this point. Not the voice actor’s fault. Must be the voice direction. I get similar soulless cliche vibes from Alexstrasza. It’s like nails on a chalkboard.

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I get this feeling that Alleria is going to do something bad for a good reason, maybe.

The way that Locus Walker and Venari and Xalatath talk about preparing Alleria for what she needs to do - and these people almost killed their world soul to keep a void lord in check.

Perhaps they will get Alleria to think there is no other way on Azeroth, and she does something similar to Quelthalas, to “save” it.

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So I guess to get into it a bit, I think a lot of the content of old Warcraft was extremely variable. Warcraft 3 did a lot of the heavy lifting. Far from a masterpiece of game story writing but for an RTS game from the early 2000’s? It was pretty good. There was some earnest heart put into it, and there is a certain charm that comes from someone essentially taking their D&D campaign and expanding it out into an RTS storyline.

IMO World of Warcraft lost a lot of that Warcraft 3 charm. Early WoW, to me, was confused on what it wanted to be narrative and was trying to be too big. I actually quite enjoy the Azeroth depicted in the Warcraft RPG (not World of Warcraft RPG). I liked the idea of Kalimdor being this vast, unexplored new world that the races from the old world set their eyes on in the aftermath of the Third War.

The Azeroth we see in Vanilla is, to me, fairly bland and uninspired. TBC was full of potential and had some of my favorite questing experiences (Eversong and Terrokar are two of my favorite questing zones to this day). Wrath completely fell flat to me, the conclusion to all of the Warcraft 3 stories didn’t feel like it came even close to the storytelling put forward in WC3.

I think a lot of things were lost from the transition from RTS to MMO, and I started liking the narrative more when they finally got further away from just continuing plotlines set up in WC3. For my money, I think MoP is the best we’ve had in this game narratively. Partially BECAUSE it was so disconnected from that old world and not afraid to just be it’s own thing.

I feel like the current writing, while very imperfect, is closer to that than what we got in old World of Warcraft. It’s an over 20 year old game so naturally everyones gonna be to some degree nostalgic for the old stuff, I give TBC way more credit than it deserves as my personal bias, but I think that despite that we can’t really just stay rooted in the past.

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I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m getting sick of the Windrunner sisters…

I’m sick of those stupid, annoying, arrogant emo characters who are as smart as toast…
Especially Alleria and Veressa in Midnight :frowning:

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What heavy social and political issues has Warcraft ever explored? lol.

I think most of the time it is “Bad leader needs to be replaced by good leader” or “Racism bad”.

Also untrue.

Every villainous force in the RTS and early WoW were just… evil.

The Orcs were evil until the good orcs stopped them from being evil.

The demons are just powerhungry maniacs.
Arthas went crazy and wanted power.

Like, the villains have always been clearly defined.

Earlier everyone was talking about the Amani.
Clearly they’re meant to be portrayed as villains and evil, along with all trolls aside from the ‘good’ ones who are playable.

There is no nuance, they’re just bad.

Same with the Quilboar, the Ogres, the Centaur, the Harpies, the Murlocs, the Gnolls, etc etc.

They are all just evil.
We are never made to grapple with how they feel. We are never meant to empathize with them.

Tauren are good because they all accepted being forced into living in one land, urbanize into a city, and organize themselves in a nation state.

The unqestionably bad Tauren are the black ones who hate everything and are savage.

The good Dwarves live in a nice kingdom, the bad ones are black and have slaves and live under an evil god.

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I mean, if you want the fastest way to “unite the elf tribes” I feel like Alleria making the choice to screw over Quel’thalas/the Sunwell/all Thalassians is a great way to get Rommath and Umbric to join forces against her.

Heck, at that point I bet you could even get the Amani to join in because it’d hurt them too.

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Or you know the “elven tribes” will already unite because the Void is about to end all of creation again and unless they unite everything will end up dead. Heck, we are working with Xal for that simple reason alone.

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You say that like the end of the world has, at any point, mattered when the factions or specific parts of the factions have wanted to murder each other.

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This may apply to some but not to me. I hadn’t played Warcraft 3 until recently, barring some brief confusing moments as a little kid. I have no nostalgia for any of this. Everything I said is from a modern perspective. I also know when not to let my nostalgia get in the way of reality. For example: I also started WoW in TBC and while I acknowledge my nostalgia for it I’ll still always criticize the story elements and view it as one of the first massive story flaws in the franchise.

I just genuinely think old school Warcraft was better at storytelling, and I don’t think this is a rare opinion at all outside of these forums. Again, modern WoW’s story is used as the butt of a joke or a point of comparison for bad storytelling. Nothing about modern WoW can enrapture multiple generations of fantasy nerds like the old stuff did.

And I don’t even like old stuff because its old. I wish Warcraft IMPROVED AND EVOLVED from its early years, and I’m not saying those years were perfect.

But it’s better to evolve and grow than to retcon and re-write.

Could you explain what exactly you like about modern Warcraft writing? Why you think it’s better? Do you think the modern Warcraft universe is as engaging as it was to multiple generations of people beforehand?

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