The Horde is a dictatorship. Races can give their opinions and govern themselves independently on their own time, but when the Horde’s top brass gives orders and takes action they aren’t to be disobeyed or countermanded.
I’m all for Baine leaving the Horde if he opposes that state of affairs or what the Horde sets out to do, but that’s not what he did. Instead he let the Horde fight his battles for him while telling the Tauren not to get involved and finger-wagging as his allies and own people pushed back at an enemy that invaded their lands.
It matters because Baine did take steps to protect the tauren people, he just didn’t want to encourage a war the tauren couldn’t win. As far as everyone in ToW is concerned, there is no war and Taurajo was an isolated event. A mistake that was already avenged.
It matters because this isn’t a case of Baine being an awful leader who doesn’t care about his people. He’s a leader who reflects the tauren culture and honors the ideals that the tauren believe in.
That’s not the question.
The question is what would you do if your soldiers disobeyed your orders?
The problem is that Stormheim wasn’t treated as a declaration of war.
The Horde really is a bit of an odd dictatorship. The basic premise of the Horde is races, banding together, for mutual protection; and thus in the name of that mutual protection they give their consent to a Warchief to act upon that goal. However, the loyalty of individual Horde races (and this is especially pronounced with the Blood Elves) hinges upon that joint protection policy.
Fact of the matter remains a Horde race is well within their rights to leave the Horde should they feel that the social-contract between their race and the Horde (the power they gave to the Warchief) has been violated. If the Horde as an organization is perceived to no longer be protecting a Horde race (or is in fact endangering it, much like the Darkspear under Garrosh) they can leave or rebel.
There is nothing condemning them to remain within the Horde if the Horde itself is only serving to harm their peoples (which, this conflict, Sylvanas investing the Horde into a War that by all accounts they couldn’t win WHILST she deliberately ignore the issue in Silithus) could absolutely constitute a violation of the inherent agreement between individual Horde races and their Warchief.
If a race (for example the Blood Elves in their current precarious position on EK) could ensure the risk of the Alliance is lessened IF they back out of the war; they could leave … and it wouldn’t be considered an act of treason.
But none of what he did protected the Tauren or discouraged any conflict. Both Tauren and the rest of the Horde still fought. What, did he refuse to fight back just so he could have the moral superiority to say “Yeah the rest of the Horde fought you, yeah my own people fought you, but I didn’t approve!”
How does that stop any conflict or protect his people?
Those two things don’t go together. There may not have been ““war”” but there was much more conflict in the Barrens than just Taurajo.
I don’t think he is. Cairne would never have stood for an Alliance incursion right up to his own gates. Baine is a “peace at all costs” caricature of Tauren ideals.
Given I would actually be the one disobeying orders by not participating in a counteroffensive endorsed by my superior, I couldn’t really fault them for finding my leadership to be inept.
Given that characterization of the Horde, how does it make sense for Baine to let the rest of the Horde come to his defense while not participating himself?
Yes, they are. But Baine didn’t leave. He let the Horde bear the burden of defending his people without aiding them. If anything, he should have been kicked out of the Horde for failing to contribute.
As to whether or not that’s the case is a much larger argument.
The rest of the Horde would probably consider such a thing treasonous, even if it was understandable. It would heavily depend on specific circumstances.
And you would be court martialed, dishonorably discharged, and spend several decades in a cell assuming they didn’t just hang you. Baine was phenomenally merciful to those who disobeyed him.
This is where you have to remember that Tides of War makes no sense.
In Tides of War there is no war.
Taurajo was a mistake that was avenged and Hawthorne spared all the civilians. (The quillboar are never mentioned.)
The Great Gate was never attacked (there were groups of “scouts” loitering about that the Baine and Vol’jin’s forces kill. )
If I recall correctly when the soldiers in Northwatch Hold realized the tauren were marching towards them one of the characters reaction was roughly, “That makes no sense! They haven’t bothered us since Hawthorne died! … oh the rest of the Horde is here too… nm”
Tides of War, bro.
That’s an exaggeration.
And usually when Baine makes these decisions in the books it’s while thinking, “What would daddy do?”
Ex. Sparing Magatha after she surrendered when he really just wanted to bash her head in.
Still dodging the question.
I’m going to assume that means that if people under your command disobeyed your direct orders you would punish them somehow.
You just don’t want to admit it, because you agree with their choice.
Yes, he was.
But because posters sympathize with the malcontents more than Baine and like minded tauren they exaggerate how terrible he was.
But if he does something, he will die. This is Sylvanas. And something worse will replace him, and his people will suffer still. It was the same concept with Garrosh. People whine and whine about how he sends alliance intelligence. Mostly to save civilians. We know how Garrosh operates, we know how Sylvanas operates. Seeing as how disgraceful things have become for the horde from Darkshore, Teldrassil, to Brennadam, I don’t blame him for doing these things or acting the way he does. If he dies, while being super upfront and klingon about it, it could subject his people to administrative retaliation of a collection of child-eating undead ghouls. And all the mouth-breathing hot-topic customers that follow said ghouls.
I don’t think he is a traitor. I hope to be able to bust him out soon enough. And I hope the Saurfang line of quests culminates into something nice. Baine is a bro. Tauren may look down on orcs, and in some cases they should, but they generally have an idea on how they want to live their life, and it doesn’t mesh well with the Horde at this point in time. I think Thrall would have loved to see the orcs prosper like the Tauren, I wager.
Anyways, many “traitors” had to do what they did when they realized that their country became a dumpster-fire and the world along with their people was suffering for it. There are some in this case we can actually append the title of traitor to, but here, it is a little bit harder given the current state of the horde. Baine is not a traitor to me, neither is Saurfang. If they needed the alliance to help them in this situation, I would understand. I think Kadghar’s vision of the future is a noble one.
I also think this war the Horde (writers) started was dumb and damaging to lore and peoples characters.
Stormwind occupies an area that is roughly near jungles and maybe near an area where some probably now extinct Lion might have existed. This is where I think the devs failed with alliance. A lot of the people there, probably shouldn’t have been white. Maybe more brown. They could have gone into detail on the human tribes and done things quite a bit more creatively for the humans of the alliance with different regions having physical and cultural differentiation’s due to where they lived. Even ffxiv tried to do that at least a little bit.
WoW just slapped top hats on some people or pirate hats on others and shrugged. Over the many years there could have been many different and interesting cultural difference and quirks like there are here in real life on earth. Heck the humans near Stranglethorn could have had many cultural similarities to Zandalari and other trolls. But they paved them over with one disneyland-esque template that made much of alliance into a grey boring soup compared to the wild differences in many horde races and even orc tribes.
I think this is the point that people overlook the most. Mak’gora against an opponent you won’t beat (because they will cheat) is neither an honorable death, or one with worth. If the opponent isn’t caught cheating you only reinforce their rule, and you very likely condemn your people to some pretty severe consequences (like Cairne’s death did. His decision to Challenge Garrosh allowed an opening for immense hardships to be aimed at his people).
Like, who do people think Baine would be replaced with? Runetotem has a nearly identical temperament to him. The ONLY Tauren that would fit into Sylvie’s style is Magatha Grimtotem, which I’m still not convinced she wont try to install as the Tauren leader with Baine in prison. That lady is certainly hardcore and Anti-Alliance, but she’s also genocidal, responsible for Cairne’s death, AND ordered her Grimtotem to commit massacres throughout TB and Mulgore during her rebellion.
She has more Tauren Blood on her hands than even the Alliance does, but hey, she certainly hates the Alliance (and all other “Inferior Races” on Kalimdor).
Pfft I like how you add (because they will cheat) as if that’s what’s holding Baine back. Sylvanas wouldn’t need to cheat to ice Baine in about 2 seconds, unless he has some sort of death fog defence we don’t know about. Baine would just straight up lose.
So I guess he should just sneak around and work with the Alliance instead. Total warchief material, right there!
Much has been said that ToW is off in it’s own continuity because of how much other lore (both in-game and out) that it ignores, and this we should ignore that the Baine in ToW exiled the Tauren who were agitating to fight back.
That’s where things get really dicey. Normally you could ignore outside media because the author and cdev are separate. Now the author who characterized Baine is a milquetoast wimp with a bizarre fixation on Anduin is in charge of the story though, which represents quite a bit of our concern.
Once upon a time I compared Baine to Jaina. Jaina was loathed by the Alliance playerbase for stopping Varian from killing various Horde characters in Wrath and preaching peace. When Jaina went darkside in Cata/Mists, the Horde playerbase stopped liking her as much and she started picking up Alliance fans again. Baine needs that kind of makeover to be accepted by the Horde playerbase.
Note that I’m not referring to making him a warmonger. I’m referring to a radical shift in personality, one that leaves him in a position of thinking of the Horde before the Alliance.
I just don’t trust the current writing team to pull anything like it off.
This is where you have to remember that Tides of War makes no sense.
Yes, I know it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean that in not making sense it doesn’t make Baine look stupid. Also this is consistent stupidity he’s been demonstrating for years.
That’s irrelevant. Whether or not it was called a war there was still a huge conflict in the Barrens.
It was a mistake in the game too, that doesn’t matter.
Something not being mentioned doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. ToW doesn’t overwrite the game’s events just because it skips things.
If you read that passage, it actually makes no grammatical sense and states that the Tauren army had pressed forward and attacked them before. It also says that they’ve constantly battled both the Orcs and Tauren and have been firing cannons nonstop for months.
But Tides of War doesn’t say that those things didn’t happen. Actually, it reinforces all the questing and conflict in the area, noting all of the Alliance incursion’s bases. It just doesn’t call that “war”. And frankly I don’t care what they call it, because it was still an invasion followed by months of bloody battle.
That’s just the thing though, Cairne would have killed her. Baine completely misinterprets what his father would have wanted.
That’s because the question is wrong. Yes, in a general sense subordinates who go against orders should be punished. But for this scenario to have any bearing on the context of the conversation, it would first be me, the commander, who was at fault for abandoning my superior’s counterattack. My subordinates would be right for going against my commands and advocating that we follow the orders coming down from above me which I would be ignoring. You’re completely skipping over the fact that Baine wasn’t at the top of the chain in this scenario, Garrosh and the warlord he appointed to lead the military effort in the area were.
Don’t ask stupid questions and you won’t have to be faced with answers that fall outside the little box you want to force the conversation into.
If Sylvanas were to cheat or betray the process, the Tauren would immediately revolt, probably followed immediately by the rest of the Horde.
Name a Tauren who would happily follow Sylvanas. The only one you’ll find would be Magatha, and if she were put in charge the Tauren would rebel from her rule.
Everyone would expect Sylvanas to cheat. Frankly if she were even to win in a fair manner, it’s most likely that Baine would become a martyr and people would think Sylvanas cheated somehow anyway. Her rule is already tolerated at best, her administration can’t take the kind of pressure an open challenge like that would put on it.
Nothing wrong with working with potential allies for a better future. You know, as opposed to a future of being scourge. Sometimes I get the feeling the Horde hate the alliance just because. They could be screaming all about the alliance this and the alliance that, while burning down an alliance orphanage, and having started the whole thing in the first place.
Meanwhile someone from their faction calls them out or even works with others, like the alliance authorities investigating said orphanage arson, and suddenly it’s treason season.
So yes. He is Warchief material, and he is a bro-tier individual. It’s just that we have a high amount of mouth-breathing-edgelords that will come to Sylvanas’ defense, no matter how many children she has eaten thus-far.
There’s a bottom line here. I think it can be argued that orcs built the Horde and are its heart and soul. Large swathes of ‘Horde-ness’ are due to the direct influence of orcs. There’s many different cultures and all that business, this is true, but the command structure and all that comes with that is thanks to the orcs.
This is where honor comes in and why it’s so important. BLOOD AND THUNDER. VICTORY OR DEATH! Those are the battlecries, beginning with the orcs and trolls, but a core part of ‘Horde-ness’- Horde identity.
Going by what I’ve seen in BfA so far, neither Baine or Saurfang have acted with Horde honor. They acted with cowardice. Honor doesn’t mean waiting to stack the odds in your favor, or running away, or giving up and turning your back, honor means fighting against the universe for what you believe is right. It was Baine’s and Saurfang’s duty to the Horde to challenge Sylvanas in mak’gora when they (rightly) felt she was no longer fit for the well being of the Horde.
How quickly we forget General Nazgrim. “In the end, I stood by the warchief because it was my duty. And I am glad that it was you who struck me down. May your strength lead the Horde into a new era of prosperity.”
I loved that interaction because it felt Horde. Thats where the tragedy lay, he knew Garrosh was causing the Horde to circle the drain but he himself wasn’t up to the task of stopping it, so he fell back on duty. THAT’S honor. THAT’S For the Horde.
Baine’s excuse for looking out for his own people instead of For the Horde is what makes him awful for the warchief position.
So “Honor” demands you always act impulsively, stupidly, and in the most direct way possible (even if you know it will only amount to a worthless death that only serves to reinforce the authority of Sylvanas)? Man, no wonder we go through characters like nothing, because there is no room for Nuance within that world.
I constantly hear people claiming that Saurfang and Baine are cowards for what they’ve one, but I rarely ever hear alternatives … that just wont result in a meaningless death for them. They CAN NOT win a Mak’gora against Sylvanas. Even Baine, with his absurd physical prowess and youth couldn’t do it; because even if Sylvie believed even for an instant that he could win by pure luck … she’d cheat in a way that would be absurdly difficult to prove to get rid of that chance). They’d both die an equally empty death to Cairne, and sentence their people to similar hardships.
The other option is rebellion, which i constantly hear Horde members loathing the prospect of (in fact, I constantly hear Horde players siding with Sylvanas out of pure spite in opposition to such a prospect). Even IF one or both of them could get the backing they need (which they wont, because TOO many of the Horde races are afraid of what the Alliance would do to them should the Horde weaken itself by turning on eachother) … it would only result in MASSIVE Horde casualties; then more when the Kaldorei came in swinging to finish the job.
Why do you think Saurfang couldn’t figure out an answer right away, and was just tempted to end it all (or decided to wallow away in some jail cell for a time)? Because there are no easy “VICTORY OR DEATH” answers here. Why do you think Baine made more of a “challenge of values” to Sylvanas (questioning her abandonment of even Forsaken core tenants), rather than challenging her outright? Its a move to call attention to the issue (even though Derek probably is still a-go and will backfire), forcing the other Horde leaders to confront an issue they’ve been clearly to willing to ignore (out of survivals sake).
![:woman_shrugging:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/woman_shrugging.png?v=6" ":woman_shrugging:")